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MINNEAPOLIS — Police reform and civil rights activists joined thousands of other people Sunday to mark the fifth anniversary of George Floyd’s murder at religious services, concerts and vigils nationwide and decry the Trump administration for setting their efforts back decades.

The Rev. Al Sharpton said at a Houston graveside service that Floyd represented all of those “who are defenseless against people who thought they could put their knee on our neck.”

He compared Floyd’s killing to that of Emmett Till, a 14-year-old Black boy who was abducted and lynched in Mississippi in 1955 after being accused of offending a white woman.

“What Emmett Till was in his time, George Floyd has been for this time in history,” Sharpton said.

In a park about 2 miles away from Floyd’s grave site, a memorial service was set to take place, followed by five hours of music, preaching, poetry readings and a balloon release.

Events started Friday in Minneapolis with concerts, a street festival and a “self-care fair,” and were to culminate with a worship service, gospel music concert and candlelight vigil on Sunday.

The remembrances come at a fraught moment for activists, who had hoped the worldwide protests that followed Floyd’s murder by police on May 25, 2020, would lead to lasting police reform across the U.S. and a continued focus on racial justice issues.

Events in Minneapolis center around George Floyd Square, the intersection where Police Officer Derek Chauvin, who is white, used his knee to pin Floyd’s neck to the pavement for about 9½ minutes, even as the 46-year-old Black man’s cried, “I can’t breathe.” Even with Minneapolis officials’ promises to remake the Police Department, some activists contend that the progress has come at a glacial pace.

“We understand that change takes time,” Michelle Gross, president of Communities United Against Police Brutality, said in a statement last week. “However, the progress being claimed by the city is not being felt in the streets.”

The Trump administration moved Wednesday to cancel settlements with Minneapolis and Louisville that called for an overhaul of their police departments following Floyd’s murder and the police killing of Breonna Taylor. Under former President Biden, the U.S. Justice Department had pushed for oversight of local police it had accused of widespread abuses.

President Trump has also declared an end to diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives within the federal government, and his administration is using federal funds as leverage to force local governments, universities and public school districts to do the same. Republican-led states also have accelerated their efforts to stamp out DEI initiatives.

Vancleave and Lafleur write for the Associated Press and reported from Minneapolis and Houston, respectively.

WEST POINT, N.Y. — President Trump used the first military commencement address of his second term Saturday to congratulate West Point cadets on their academic and physical accomplishments while veering sharply into politics, claiming credit for America’s military might while boasting about his election victory last fall.

“In a few moments, you’ll become graduates of the most elite and storied military academy in human history,” Trump said at the ceremony at Michie Stadium. “And you will become officers of the greatest and most powerful army the world has ever known. And I know, because I rebuilt that army, and I rebuilt the military. And we rebuilt it like nobody has ever rebuilt it before in my first term.”

Wearing a red “Make America Great Again” hat, the Republican president told the 1,002 graduating cadets that the U.S. is the “hottest country in the world,” boasted of his administration’s record and underscored an “America first” theme for the U.S. military, which he called “the greatest fighting force in the history of the world.”

“We’re getting rid of distractions and we’re focusing our military on its core mission: crushing America’s adversaries, killing America’s enemies and defending our great American flag like it has never been defended before,” Trump said. He later said that “the job of the U.S. armed forces is not to host drag shows or transform foreign cultures,” a reference to drag shows on military bases that the Biden administration halted after Republican criticism.

Trump said the cadets were graduating at a “defining moment” in the Army’s history, as he criticized past political leaders, whom he said led soldiers into “nation-building crusades to nations that wanted nothing to do with us.” He said he was clearing the military of transgender ideas, “critical race theory” and trainings he called divisive and political.

“They subjected the armed forces to all manner of social projects and political causes while leaving our borders undefended and depleting our arsenals to fight other countries’ wars,” he said of past administrations.

Several points during his address at the football stadium on the military academy’s campus were indistinguishable from a political speech. Trump claimed that when he left the White House in 2021, “we had no wars, we had no problems, we had nothing but success, we had the most incredible economy” — although voters had just rejected his bid for reelection.

Turning to last year’s election, he noted that he won all seven swing states, arguing that those results gave him a “great mandate” and “it gives us the right to do what we want to do,” although he did not win a majority of votes nationwide.

The president also took several moments to acknowledge specific graduates’ achievements. He summoned Chris Verdugo onto the stage, noting that the cadet completed an 18.5-mile march on a freezing night in January in two hours and 30 minutes. Trump had the top-ranking lacrosse team stand to be recognized. He also brought West Point’s football quarterback, Bryson Daily, to the lectern, praising him as having a “steel”-like shoulder. He later used Daily as an example to make a case against transgender women participating in women’s athletics.

In a nod to presidential tradition, Trump also pardoned about half a dozen cadets who had faced disciplinary infractions.

“You could have done anything you wanted, you could have gone anywhere,” Trump told the class, later continuing: “Writing your own ticket to top jobs on Wall Street or Silicon Valley wouldn’t be bad, but I think what you’re doing is better.”

The president also ran through several pieces of advice for the graduating cadets, urging them to do what they love, think big, work hard, hold onto their culture, keep faith in America and take risks.

“This is a time of incredible change and we do not need an officer corps of careerists and yes men,” Trump said, going on to note recent advances in military technology. “We need patriots with guts and vision and backbone.”

Trump closed his speech by calling on the graduating cadets to “never ever give up,” then said he was leaving to deal with matters involving Russia and China.

“We’re going to keep winning, this country’s going to keep winning, and with you, the job is easy,” he said.

Just outside campus, about three dozen protesters gathered before the ceremony, waving miniature American flags. One in the crowd carried a sign that said “Support Our Veterans” and “Stop the Cuts,” while others held up plastic buckets with the message: “Go Army Beat Fascism.”

Trump gave the commencement address at West Point in 2020, during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. He urged the graduating cadets to “never forget” the soldiers who fought a war over slavery during his remarks that day, which came as the nation was reckoning with its history on race after the police murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis.

The ceremony five years ago drew scrutiny because the U.S. Military Academy forced the graduating cadets, who had been home because of COVID-19, to return to an area near a pandemic hot spot.

Trump traveled to Tuscaloosa, Ala., earlier this month to speak to the University of Alabama’s graduating class. His remarks mixed standard commencement fare and advice with political attacks against his Democratic predecessor, President Biden, musings about transgender athletes and lies about the 2020 election.

On Friday, Vice President JD Vance spoke to the graduating class at the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Md. Vance said in his remarks that Trump is working to ensure U.S. soldiers are deployed with clear goals, rather than “undefined missions” and “open-ended conflicts.”

Kim and Swenson write for the Associated Press and reported from West Point and Bridgewater, N.J., respectively.

Spanish newspaper Marca, external reported last weekend that an unnamed Brazilian club had made an offer to Ronaldo.

Botafogo are one of four Brazilian teams to have qualified and their coach Renato Paiva was asked about Ronaldo, external last Sunday.

He laughed before saying: “Christmas is only in December. But if he came, you can’t say no to a star like that.

“I don’t know anything – I’m just answering the question. But, as I said, coaches always want the best. Ronaldo, even at his age, is still a goal-scoring machine. In a team that creates chance after chance, he would be good.”

Botafogo are owned by American businessman John Textor, who also holds a majority stake in Crystal Palace.

Ronaldo won the Champions League four times during nine seasons with Real Madrid before joining Juventus in 2018.

Real and Juve are among the 12 European clubs that have qualified, which includes Premier League teams Chelsea and Manchester City.

Between them either Ronaldo or Messi won the Ballon d’Or from 2008 to 2017, before Messi won it three more times to give the Argentine forward, 37, a record eight wins.

Messi’s Inter Miami are in the same group as Egypt’s Al Ahly, Portuguese side Porto and Brazilian club Palmeiras.

WASHINGTON — In the wake of the Murphy Brown uproar, Vice President Dan Quayle has delivered another double-barreled commotion. First, in the past 10 days, he has made two more fire-breathing speeches on family values, one to a convention of Southern Baptists and the other to a National Right to Life gathering. Second, he has demonstrated he does not know how to spell potato .

My West Coast sources say politically aware people in the entertainment industry have made up their minds about the vice president’s “values” theme: It will not play in Peoria. Quayle’s distasteful traditionalist fervor, in this view, simply does not reflect the ethics or concerns of most Americans. Besides, how can you take a man seriously who doesn’t know the names of his vegetables?

But Quayle’s critics are kidding themselves, trying to suppress the message by deriding the messenger. They may think the vice president’s misspelling marks him as an irredeemable jerk, but many of his fellow citizens are not so sensitive, and some will even sympathize with him. (Pop quiz: Is it potatos or potatoes ?)

The same critics are surely right in seeing considerable daylight between most Americans’ general moral posture and the pungency of some of Quayle’s stronger words. Nonetheless, the “values” card might not only help the Bush-Quayle reelection effort, it may even play a moderating role in the campaign.

In his speeches, Quayle again criticized the “cultural elite” that “flees from the consequences of its self-indulgence.” But he also expanded on the idea of this elite as an alien force in American life. The country is made up, he said, of “the cultural elite, and the rest of us.” The elite “mock us in the newsrooms, sitcom studios and faculty lounges,” but “we Americans” must “stand up for our values, stand up for America.” The American people are “playing David to the Goliath of the dominant cultural elite,” he exhorted, “but remember the final outcome” of that battle: “The Philistines fled.”

This is unattractive stuff. It says only the people on Quayle’s side of the argument can lay legitimate claim to the label “American.” One of our worst national characteristics in politics is the tendency to read our opponents out of the rolls of American citizenship–and parts of the Quayle speeches serve as fair examples of this nasty habit.

But the recent Quayle sorties, despite the rough language, are not the beginning of a crusade–which would fail–to Puritanize American life. Instead, speeches like his accomplish two other things.

First, such talk shores up the Bush Administration’s base among social conservatives. They are not a majority in America, but they constitute a Peoria in which the vice president’s ideas will play to standing-room-only crowds. Solidifying a core constituency is a prudent thing to do for an electorally weak Administration facing a three-way presidential race. In olden times, national politicians could do this type of cheerleading in obscurity, with their most inflammatory words heard only by the special groups they were addressing. But now, because of modern communications, we are constantly eavesdropping on each other’s private political conversations.

Second, Quayle’s theme promises benefits for the Administration’s campaign even among many who do not share his moral fervor but do share a general unease with TV, movies and a popular culture that seems out of control. Often these are the same people now lured, to the Administration’s discomfort, by the siren song of Ross Perot.

Perot, it is becoming clear, is a strange man. He has displayed an authoritarian temperament in his business and public life and in the preemptory ways he proposes to deal with problems ranging from entitlements to the cost of U.S. troops abroad. He is cavalier about constitutionally rooted civil liberties and about institutions with which the Constitution says a President must share power. The different versions he gives of his own life are starting to make Ronald Reagan’s lapses in this area look trivial and benign.

In short, Perot is dangerous. Moreover, his attitudes do not reflect the considered views of the electorate: Americans of all kinds remain massively attached to the basic features of the American system. Yet Perot maintains his political strength because he has succeeded in presenting himself as the ultimate outsider to a citizenry that has been brought to mistrust all insiders.

We know today’s citizens are increasingly alienated from their government and public officials. Many Americans have come to see today’s politics and government as one vast sinkhole of incompetence and corruption. Even with the large problems our nation faces, this despair is out of proportion.

There is more than one reason for this mistrust, which has been building for a quarter-century. But the “cultural elite” cannot deny having had a hand in shaping it. If popular culture has shaken tradition regarding sexual morality, parts of the elite have also mounted a challenge in the arena of conventional politics.

To take the largest example, the national press, since Watergate, has given news consumers an unending stream of political scandal. Yet national politics is, by most measures, far cleaner than it was 25 years ago. But there is no way that newspaper readers and TV viewers absorbing this reportage can escape thinking that today’s politicians are incorrigibly dirty.

The view we get from movies that deal with politics is even darker, ranging from simple corruption to grand conspiracies to steal the presidency from the American people. “The “faculty lounges” that Quayle cited are, like the sitcoms, a mixed bag, but some major university campuses have been seedbeds for critiques of the profound structural racism, sexism and imperialism said to infest our conventional social and political institutions.

Those who have purveyed this radical political disaffection may have hoped it would lead to a more just America. Instead, what they begot was Perot, and they should recognize him as their child.

By pounding away at the theme of the cultural elite vs. America’s traditional values, Quayle is asserting that the Administration should be seen not as a bunch of political insiders but as the champion of all those cultural outsiders who feel denigrated and ignored by the media and popular culture. In other words, he argued that voters should exempt him and President George Bush from the “insider” curse of 1992.

More important, in appealing to traditional values, Quayle took the quickest and most powerful route to generally delegitimizing what have been called the “chattering classes” and casting grave doubt on whatever comes out of their collective mouths. Once people are reminded of how little they trust the “cultural elite,” they can be persuaded to exercise this mistrust in other areas. If members of the elite are insensitive to issues of family values, there is no reason to think them trustworthy on general politics. If they say American politics stinks, they should not be believed any more than they should be trusted on the issue of sex.

But if American politics does not stink in the way Hollywood says it does, then Perot should not get credit for being the outsider who champions the people against the Establishment. To the contrary: Perot can be portrayed as a creature of the cultural elite and its cynical view of American political life. His contempt for other politicians and his insistence on his unique ability to save us are perhaps messages not from the majority of Americans, but from an elitist fringe. Quayle has actually started in on this idea, chiding Perot for not showing sufficient respect for the Constitution.

If this strategy works, the “family values” issue will have tapped into some of the same anti-Establishment voter anger to which Perot appeals and will shake Perot loose from his position as the embodiment of average people’s sentiments. Even for those who do not like some of Quayle’s recent speeches, this is probably a good trade.

A new law, championed by President Nayib Bukele, is seen by advocates as an effort to stifle dissent in El Salvador.

Human rights groups, politicians and experts have sharply criticised a law approved by El Salvador’s Congress as a censorship tool, designed to silence and criminalise dissent by nongovernmental organisations critical of President Nayib Bukele.

The law proposed by Bukele bypassed normal legislative procedures and was passed on Tuesday night by a Congress under the firm control of his New Ideas party.

Bukele first tried to introduce a similar law in 2021, but after strong international backlash, it was never brought for a vote by the full Congress.

Bukele said the law is intended to limit foreign influence and corruption. It comes after the government took a number of steps that have prompted concerns the country may be entering a new wave of crackdowns. Critics warn that it falls in line with measures passed by governments in Nicaragua, Venezuela, Russia, Belarus and China.

Here are more details about the root of the criticism:

What does the law say?

Anyone — individual or organisation, local or foreign — who acts in the interest of a foreign entity or receives foreign funding to operate in El Salvador is required to register under the law.

Every payment, whether in cash, goods or services, made to such groups will be subject to a 30-percent tax. The final law passed does not specify how the money from the tax will be used.

While the United States also has a law that requires individuals working on behalf of foreign entities and governments to register, Bukele’s is far broader in scope and grants him greater powers. It is fairly common in poorer countries in Latin America to depend on international aid dollars, as it is often difficult to raise money in their own countries.

Analysts say a broad definition of a “foreign agent” in the law could cover:

• Human rights organisations
• Community associations
• Independent media outlets
• Foreign-funded startups or businesses
• Religious groups
• International aid agencies

New rules governing NGOs

The law creates a new government body called RAEX, or Registry of Foreign Agents, which will have wide powers, including setting requirements for registration, approving or denying applications, revoking or refusing to renew registrations and demanding documents or information at any time.

Some NGOs can apply for exceptions, but RAEX will decide who can operate in the country. About 8,000 NGOs operate in El Salvador and often depend on foreign donations due to a lack of funds available in the Central American nation.

Some of those groups have long been at odds with Bukele and have criticised some of his actions, including his decision to waive key constitutional rights to crack down on the country’s gangs and seeking re-election despite clear constitutional prohibitions.

The rules NGOs will have to adhere to the following:

• They must register with RAEX and report the source and purpose of all donations.
• They must keep complete accounting records, use the banks for transactions and follow anti-money laundering laws.
• They cannot operate without registering.
• They cannot engage in political activities or actions seen as threatening public order or national security.
• They cannot use foreign donations for undeclared activities or share information on behalf of foreign donors without labelling it as such.

Violations of the rules can lead to fines between $100,000 to $250,000 and possible closure.

Why now?

Critics say Bukele revived the law because he has now consolidated power across all branches of government. His political alliance with US President Donald Trump has also emboldened him.

Bukele announced the law shortly after a protest near his home ended in a violent crackdown by police that saw two people arrested.

In addition, it comes after a number of moves by Bukele that have raised concerns that the self-described “world’s coolest dictator” is cracking down on dissent.

• Just two days before the law passed, the government arrested an anticorruption lawyer with the human rights organisation Cristosal — one of Bukele’s most outspoken critics — on corruption charges.
• The government arrested the heads of bus companies for defying an order from Bukele posted on his social media.
• Journalists with the investigative news organisation El Faro said they had to flee the country after receiving word that the government was preparing orders for their arrest, after they published reports on the president’s links to gangs.

What are critics saying?

• Opposition legislator Claudia Ortiz called the law “an authoritarian tool for censorship“ and said it hands the president excessive levels of control. “It’s obvious that exemptions will only be given to groups that align with the government, while those who expose corruption or abuse will be punished,” she said.
• Lawyer Roxana Cardona of the NGO Justicia Social y Controlaría Ciudadana said: “The Foreign Agents Law seeks to suppress organisations that promote civic participation or support marginalised groups the state ignores.”
• Eduardo Escobar, director of Acción Ciudadana, added: “This is part of the government’s increasing repression. It affects constitutional rights like freedom of expression and freedom of association.”
• Lawyer and analyst Bessy Ríos said: “The goal is to control the funding of civil society, especially organisations critical of the government.”

The Trump brand has been used to hawk cryptocurrencies, Bibles, steaks and guitars. Now the US president’s media company is laying the groundwork to sell investment funds.

Trump Media & Technology Group Corp., which is majority owned by Donald Trump, plans to sell offerings tied to his agenda.

The parent of the Truth Social platform, where the president is also a prominent poster, has announced plans for and trademarked the names of a group of financial products under the Truth.Fi banner—investments that will potentially benefit from the president’s policies with bets on energy, crypto and domestic manufacturing. The proposed products include exchange-traded funds, or portfolios that trade like stocks that can be purchased through most brokers.

Details on the products’ structures and strategies are still scarce. ETFs are subject to approval by regulators, and no public filings are available yet. Yet the brand-building has already begun. So have the arguments. Critics see a sitting US president having a financial stake in the success of funds that are associated with his brand and his politics, built on strategies that he can influence from the White House.

“These transactions fly in the face of government ethics standards,” says Michael Posner, professor of ethics and finance at NYU Stern School of Business. “When you’re president, the assumption is that 100% of your energy is devoted to serving the country—not monetizing your public platform.”

The administration says the president is walled off. “President Trump’s assets are in a trust managed by his children,” Deputy Press Secretary Anna Kelly said in a statement. “There are no conflicts of interest.” Trump Media did not respond to a request for comment.

US presidents aren’t required under federal law to divest assets, but past leaders have done so or used blind trusts to avoid perceived conflicts. Trump, however, has maintained financial exposure through family-controlled structures. Right before taking office again, he transferred about $4 billion worth of Trump Media shares to a trust controlled by his son Donald Trump Jr. But the arrangement is not a blind trust with independent oversight.

The concern among ethics experts isn’t only the ownership. It’s the overlap between policy and potential monetary benefit. The Truth.Fi funds could rise and fall in line with decisions the president makes in office. Protectionist policies aimed at various sectors and countries could help the proposed Truth.Fi Made in America ETF, which is set to bet on reshoring. Deregulatory moves in favor of crypto may boost a Bitcoin-themed ETF. And so on.

The crypto angle is a familiar one. Trump and his family have already profited from the digital-asset boom, hyping up a cryptocurrency bearing his name. Such so-called memecoins have no underlying value as investments, but creators of Trump’s coin recently held a promotion offering top holders a private dinner with the president. A company affiliated with the Trump Organization owns a large chunk of the Trump memecoins. Another Trump family-linked company, World Liberty Financial, has also issued its own cryptocurrencies, including a dollar-linked digital token called a stablecoin. World Liberty recently announced the coin would be used to complete a $2 billion transaction between a state-backed Abu Dhabi company and the overseas crypto exchange Binance. Senators Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and Jeff Merkley of Oregon have said the stablecoin offers “opportunities for unprecedented corruption” because the Trump family can benefit financially from the use of its product.

In its ETF announcement, Trump Media said the proposed products, which include portfolios known as separately managed accounts in addition to ETFs, offer a conservative alternative to “woke” investing. It’s a niche currently occupied by funds including the Point Bridge America First ETF and the God Bless America ETF, among others. Both have gathered only modest assets, as have left-leaning ETFs, thanks in part to a saturated ETF market that’s making life harder for newbie issuers.

There are already about 60 ETFs based on Bitcoin, a tally that’s grown by at least 22 this year. In addition, there are more than 60 funds tied to energy, including coal, and at least three from issuers including Tema and BlackRock Inc.’s iShares based on reshoring and manufacturing, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.

Trump Media “will be depending on its brand recognition to set its ETFs apart among a crowd of competing products,” says Roxanna Islam, head of sector and industry research at ETF shop TMX VettaFi. “A strong political following may help gather initial support, but in the long run, flows will ultimately depend on ETF basics like fees and performance.”

The company has announced plans to seed the funds with as much as $250 million. It’s working with trading platform Crypto.com and investment firm Yorkville Advisors to help run the funds. Still, its biggest unrivaled asset is Trump himself. Even if he’s not an explicit spokesperson, almost everything he does makes him a potential ad for the company. “What a competing fund doesn’t have is a person who’s in the news literally every day who can then talk about these things,” says Philip Nichols, a professor of legal studies and business ethics at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.

Hal Lambert, who runs the MAGA ETF and has raised money for Trump’s presidential runs, dismisses concerns about conflicts. For one, the president’s views on issues such as domestic manufacturing have been publicly known for decades. There are more direct ways to have a seat at the table than buying an ETF, he says; people can give money to campaigns or political action committees, for instance. “I just don’t know that that stuff would work on him,” Lambert says. “Trump does what he wants to do.”

Hajric writes for Bloomberg

Throughout his 2024 campaign for president, Donald Trump strongly and repeatedly denied any connection to Project 2025, the political platform document authored by the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank based in Washington, D.C.

“I have nothing to do with Project 2025,” Trump said during a debate with former Vice President Kamala Harris last September. He said he had not read the document, nor did he intend to.

Yet less than six months into his second stay in the White House, the president and his administration have initiated or completed 42% of Project 2025’s agenda, according to a tracking project that identified more than 300 specific action items in the 922-page document. The Project 2025 Tracker is run by two volunteers who “believe in the importance of transparent, detailed analysis,” according to its website.

Of all the action items, nearly a quarter are related to the environment through agencies such as the Environmental Protection Agency, the U.S. Forest Service, and the departments of the Interior, Commerce, and Energy. Further, it seems the environment is a high priority for the Trump administration, which has initiated or completed about 70% of Project 2025’s environmental agenda — or roughly two-thirds — according to a Times analysis of the tracked items.

That includes Project 2025 action items like rolling back air and water quality regulations; canceling funds for clean energy projects and environmental justice grants; laying off scientists and researchers in related fields; and withdrawing from the Paris Climate Accord, an agreement among nearly 200 countries to reduce greenhouse gas emissions driving global warming.

When asked about this overlap, the administration continued to downplay any connection between the president and Project 2025.

“No one cared about Project 2025 when they elected President Trump in November 2024, and they don’t care now,” White House spokesman Taylor Rogers said in an email. “President Trump is implementing the America First agenda he campaigned on to free up wasteful DEI spending for cutting-edge scientific research, roll back radical climate regulations, and restore America’s energy dominance while ensuring Americans have clean air and clean water.”

Project 2025 refers to climate change as an “alarm industry” used to support a radical left ideology and agenda.

“Mischaracterizing the state of our environment generally and the actual harms reasonably attributable to climate change specifically is a favored tool that the Left uses to scare the American public into accepting their ineffective, liberty-crushing regulations, diminished private property rights, and exorbitant costs,” it says in a chapter about the EPA.

The author of that chapter, Mandy Gunasekara, served as the EPA’s chief of staff during Trump’s first administration. In the document, she recommends that the president undertake a number of actions to reform the EPA, including downsizing the agency, eliminating its Office of Environmental Justice and Civil Rights, and instituting a pause and review of grants — all of which Trump has done.

That same chapter also recommends that the president undermine California’s ability to set strict vehicle emission standards, which Trump vowed to do shortly after taking office; the Senate this week voted to revoke California’s rights to enact policy on the issue.

Gunasekara did not respond to a request for comment.

Matthew Sanders, acting deputy director of the Environmental Law Clinic at Stanford, said these and other Project 2025-mandated moves could have far-reaching ramifications. He noted that 11 other states had chosen to follow California’s emission rules.

“What California does impacts what the rest of the nation does,” Sanders said. “In that sense … decisions about how to effectuate the Clean Air Act mandates are technology-forcing for much of the nation, and isolating California and eliminating its ability to do that will have profound consequences.”

The EPA isn’t the only agency affected by environmental policy changes mirrored in Project 2025.

The Trump administration has also directed the Department of Energy to expand oil and gas leasing in Alaska, eliminate considerations for upstream and downstream greenhouse gas emissions, and expedite the approval of liquefied natural gas projects, all of which were recommendations outlined in the document.

The Interior Department, which oversees U.S. national parks and public lands, has seen rollbacks of at least a dozen of President Biden’s executive orders that prioritized addressing climate change, as well as the termination of a Biden-era policy to protect 30% of U.S. land and water by 2030, also known as the 30×30 plan.

In April, Trump issued an executive order opening up 112.5 million acres of national forestland to industrial logging, as outlined on page 308 of Project 2025. The president said the move — which will touch all 18 of California’s national forests — is intended to increase domestic timber supplies, reduce wildfire risk and create jobs.

Sanders said actions on public lands are particularly consequential, not only for the extraction of resources but also for protected species and their habitats. The president has already taken Project 2025-mandated steps to lessen protections for marine life and birds, and has called for narrowing protections afforded by the Endangered Species Act.

He also expressed concern about Trump’s Jan. 20 proposal to revise or rescind National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) regulations that require federal agencies to consider the environmental impacts of their actions — a step recommended on page 60 of Project 2025.

While the president described NEPA and other rules as “burdensome and ideologically motivated regulations” that limit American jobs and stymie economic growth, Sanders said such framing is an oversimplification that can make the environment a scapegoat for other administrative goals.

“When we make these decisions in a thoughtful, careful, deliberate way, we actually can have jobs and economic development and environmental protection,” he said. “ I don’t think that those things are inherently opposed, but the administration, I think, gets some mileage out of suggesting that they are.”

Indeed, the Commerce Department, which houses the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, National Weather Service and other climate-related entities, has also seen changes that follow Project 2025’s playbook. The document describes the agency as “one of the main drivers of the climate change alarm industry and, as such, is harmful to future U.S. prosperity.”

In recent months, the president has made moves to “break up” NOAA — a directive also found on page 674 of the Project 2025 document — including laying off hundreds of staffers, closing several offices and proposing significant cuts to its research arm.

The administration has similarly taken Project 2025-recommended steps to shift disaster relief responsibilities away from the federal government and onto the states; loosen energy efficiency standards for appliances; and rescind USAID policies that address climate change and help countries transition away from fossil fuels, among others.

These are some of nearly 70 environmental action items identified in the Project 2025 Tracker, of which 47 are already completed or in progress less than 150 days into President Trump’s second term.

Tracking the administration’s progress is a somewhat subjective process, in part because many of the directives have come through executive orders or require multiple steps to complete. Additionally, many goals outlined in Project 2025 are indirect or implied and therefore not included in the tracker, according to Adrienne Cobb, one of its creators.

Cobb told The Times she read through the entire document and extracted only “explicit calls to action, or recommendations where the authors clearly state that something should be done.”

“My goal was for the tracker to reflect the authors’ intentions using their own words wherever possible,” she said. “By focusing on direct language and actionable items, I tried to create a list that’s accurate and accountable to the source material.”

Though the Trump administration continues to deny any connection to Project 2025, the creators of the massive tome were always clear about their presidential intentions.

“This volume — the Conservative Promise — is the opening salvo of the 2025 Presidential Transition Project,” Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts wrote in its forward. “Its 30 chapters lay out hundreds of clear and concrete policy recommendations for White House offices, Cabinet departments, Congress, and agencies, commissions, and boards.”

For weeks now, Americans — left, right and terminally online — have been obsessed with Joe Biden’s fitness as president. The whispers about cognitive decline, once the province of Fox News pundits and dinner table cranks, have gone mainstream. And now, with the release of a couple of high-profile books and a report confirming that Biden has been diagnosed with prostate cancer, the narrative has curdled into something that feels downright scandalous — maybe even conspiratorial. A full-blown cover-up.

Is that an understandable, if predictable, reaction? Sure. But let’s not pretend this was some shocking plot twist. Biden has been aging in public like a banana on a dashboard for a decade — a fact that became undeniable after his infamous June 2024 debate with Donald Trump.

So who’s to blame? Let’s start with Biden’s inner circle. The underlying charge is that Biden was asleep at the wheel, with someone else driving the presidential bus. We’ve seen this narrative before: The figurehead nods, the handlers handle and the country rolls on, more or less. With various degrees of verisimilitude, similar charges have been leveled at the administrations of Woodrow Wilson (hi, Edith) and Ronald Reagan (hi, Nancy).

My take on Biden is pretty much the same as it was with Reagan. Whoever was running the country wasn’t half bad. Sure, maybe, toward the end, Uncle Joe wasn’t gripping the wheel as tightly as he used to. But at least the bus stayed between the lines.

Whether it was Jill Biden, “The Politburo” (a cabal of top aides accused of running the show) or a sentient Microsoft Excel spreadsheet — the government mostly worked. Ukraine got funded, the stock market didn’t implode, and your odds of being sent to prison in El Salvador were virtually nil.

Yes, mistakes were made during Biden’s presidency. Plenty. The Afghanistan withdrawal was a disaster. Illegal border crossings soared. Biden’s COVID relief probably juiced inflation. But these weren’t deranged or asleep-at-the-wheel decisions: They were predictable policy fumbles, consistent with Biden’s worldview (sort of like an NFL coach opting to run a prevent defense in the third quarter — wrongheaded, but understandable).

The more obvious problem was Biden’s inability to communicate. Biden couldn’t explain where he wanted to drive the bus, let alone inspire confidence in his ability to get us there. And that’s not just bad political optics. It’s a real governance issue. If FDR had mumbled through the fireside chats, we might all be speaking German.

Biden insiders squinted and pretended everything was fine. Not because they’re villains, but because even proximity to power is addictive.

Other Biden enablers had more noble reasons to convince themselves the ends justified the means. If Trump is an existential threat to democracy, then keeping Grandpa Joe upright — literally, metaphorically, pharmaceutically — was a moral imperative.

Again, understandable: Trump’s lies about the 2020 election led to an armed mob chanting about hanging the vice president. The exaggerations about Biden’s fitness mostly led to awkward silences and gentle nudges offstage.

But this isn’t just about Biden’s inner circle deluding themselves. The media was complicit, too. Their main contribution wasn’t lying or even spinning (although there are examples of both). The dirty secret of modern media is this: Yes, the news industry leans liberal. But more than that, it leans toward drama, car chases and celebrity trials.

Biden, bless his heart, is boring. And thanks to Trump’s penchant for being the bride at every wedding and the corpse at every funeral, guess who got the attention?

Think I’m making excuses or exaggerating? A mere two days after the report came out in which special counsel Robert Hur described Biden as a “well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory,” Trump went out of his way to change the subject by: 1) attacking Nikki Haley’s husband (who was on a military deployment) and 2) telling NATO allies he wouldn’t honor our treaty and defend them from Russia if they don’t pay their bills.

An old maxim says you should never interfere with your opponent when he’s committing suicide. Well, Biden was in the process of drowning, and Trump threw him a life preserver.

Again, the “media” didn’t ignore Biden’s age. Respected veteran Washington Post columnist David Ignatius wrote a sober plea for him to step aside. David Axelrod — Barack Obama’s own Jedi — sounded the alarm all over mainstream media. Heck, I piled on, too.

The coverage existed. But media bias isn’t just about what gets reported. It’s about what gets repeated. Loudly. Over and over. So, yes, Biden’s decline was reported and discussed. It just wasn’t amplified.

Now, we can pretend this is some devious plot. Or we can admit that real life isn’t “House of Cards” or even “Veep.” It was something much more banal: collective inertia.

In the end, the scandal isn’t that the media and Democratic partisans conspired to keep us in the dark about Joe Biden’s fitness for office. The scandal is that the truth was hidden in plain sight (the American public knew Biden was unfit), yet a lot of elites chose not to see it.

Not because they’re evil, but because of loyalty, proximity to power, exhaustion and yes, desperation. Because they’re human.

And maybe, just maybe, because they were terrified of what (or who) would come next, when the old man finally shuffled offstage.

Matt K. Lewis is the author of “Filthy Rich Politicians” and “Too Dumb to Fail.”

WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court on Thursday upheld, for now, President Trump’s decision to fire two agency officials who had fixed terms that were set by Congress.

By a 6-3 vote, the justices set aside rulings that would have reinstated Gwynne Wilcox to the National Labor Relations Board and Cathy Harris to the Merit Systems Protection Board. Both were appointees of President Biden.

The decision is the latest in which the court’s conservative majority sided with the president’s power to fire agency officials in violation of long-standing laws.

“Because the Constitution vests the executive power in the President, he may remove without cause executive officers who exercise that power on his behalf,” the court said in an unsigned order.

But the justices were quick to add the Federal Reserve Board is not affected by this decision.

“The Federal Reserve is a uniquely structured, quasi-private entity that follows in the distinct historical tradition of the First and Second Banks of the United States,” the court said.

President Trump has threatened to fire Fed Chair Jerome Powell, whose term extends to next year.

At issue is a fundamental dispute over whether the Constitution gave the president or Congress the power to set the structure of the federal government.

In 1935, the court ruled unanimously that Congress can create independent and “nonpartisan” boards and commissions whose members are appointed by the president for a fixed term. The court then drew a distinction between “purely executive officers” who were under the president’s control and members of boards whose duties were more judicial or legislative.

But in recent years, conservatives have questioned that precedent and argued that the president has the executive power to hire and fire all officials of the government.

Shortly after taking office, Trump fired Wilcox and Harris even though their terms had not expired. They sued contending the firings were illegal and violated the law.

They won before a federal judge and the U.S. court of appeals.

Those judges cited the Supreme Court’s 1935 decision that upheld Congress’ authority to create independent boards whose members are appointed by the president to serve a fixed-term.

Trump’s lawyers say the Constitution gives the president full executive power, including control of agencies. And that in turns gives him the authority to fire officials who were appointed to a fixed term by another president, they said in Trump vs. Wilcox.

Justice Elena Kagan filed an eight-page dissent joined by Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson.

“Today’s order favors the President over our precedent; and it does so unrestrained by the rules of briefing and argument—and the passage of time— needed to discipline our decision-making,” Kagan wrote. “I would deny the President’s application. I would do so based on the will of Congress, this Court’s seminal decision approving independent agencies’ for-cause protections, and the ensuing 90 years of this Nation’s history.”

The court said its decision was not final.

The NLRB was created by Congress in 1935 as a semi-independent agency tasked with enforcing the labor laws. Its general counsel serves as a prosecutor while the board‘s five members act as judges who review administrative decisions arising from unfair-labor claims brought by unions.

Under the law, the president appoints the general counsel who can be fired but board members have five-year terms. They may be fired for “neglect of duty or malfeasance in office,” but not simply because of political disagreements.

Trump could have controlled the board by appointing members to fill two vacancies. He chose instead to fire Wilcox, leaving the board without a quorum of three members.

Wilcox argued there was no reason to rush to change the law.

“Over the past two centuries, Congress has embedded modest for-cause removal restrictions in the structure of numerous multi-member agencies,” she said in response to the administration’s appeal. She noted that all past presidents — Republicans and Democrats — did not challenge those limits.

The Merit System Protections Board was created by Congress in 1978 as a part of a civil service reform law. Its three board members have seven-year terms, and they review complaints from federal civil servants who allege they were fired for partisan or other inappropriate reasons.

Trump’s decision to fire Harris also left the board without a quorum.

May 21 (UPI) — South African President Cyril Ramaphosa will meet with President Donald Trump Wednesday to talk about relations, both trade and diplomatic.

“The trade relations between South Africa and the United States will be the focus of my working visit,” wrote South African President Cyril Ramaphosa to his X account Tuesday, “We aim to strengthen and consolidate relations between our two countries.”

South African Minister of Agriculture John Steenhuisen said via social media Tuesday that he had a “constructive meeting” with U.S. Trade Representative Ambassador Greer in Washington.

“Trade is essential between our two countries and we are determined to ensure that access for agricultural products remains open in a mutually beneficial way. Trade means jobs and a growing economy,” Steenhuisen said.

However, it is also likely that the two will discuss the relationship between the two nations in general, as the Trump administration has cut off aid to South Africa and publicly leveled accusations that the South African government has backed violence against the Afrikaners, the White South Africans, whom the United States has begun to accept as refugees, despite the fact that Trump suspended the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program on the first day of his second term.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio said earlier in May that Afrikaners fleeing persecution are welcome in the United States.

“The South African government has treated these people terribly — threatening to steal their private land and subjected them to vile racial discrimination. The Trump Administration is proud to offer them refuge in our great country.”

“We all know as South Africans both Black and White is that there is no genocide here,” Ramaphosa said Friday. “We are not genociders. We are not committing any act of hatred, act of retribution or violence against anyone,” Ramaphosa said.

White South Africans maintain control of a majority of the land and much of the county’s wealth after apartheid ended in 1994.

“The false narratives about a genocide are not a reflection of who we are as a nation,” Ramaphosa further stated Friday, “and during our working visit to the U.S. we will be advancing a proudly South African message.”

Suddenly, it’s 2024 all over again.

Once more we’re litigating Joe Biden’s catatonic debate performance, his lumbering gait, his moth-eaten memory and his selfish delusion he deserved a second term in the White House while shuffling through his ninth decade on earth.

Biden’s abrupt announcement he faces an advanced form of prostate cancer has only served to increase speculation over what the president’s inner circle knew, and when they knew it.

“Original Sin,” a book by journalists Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson, published this week, is chock-full of anecdotes illustrating the lengths to which Biden’s family and palace guard worked to shield his mental and physical lapses from voters.

John Robert Greene is not at all surprised.

“It’s old news, hiding presidential illness,” said Greene, who’s written a shelf full of books on presidents and the presidency. “I can’t think of too many … who’ve been the picture of health.”

Before we go further, let’s state for the record this in no way condones the actions of Biden and his political enablers. To be clear, let’s repeat it in capital letters: WHAT BIDEN AND HIS HANDLERS DID WAS WRONG.

But, as Greene states, it was not unprecedented or terribly unusual. History abounds with examples of presidential maladies being minimized, or kept secret.

Grover Cleveland underwent surgery for oral cancer on a yacht in New York Harbor to keep his condition from being widely known. Woodrow Wilson suffered a debilitating stroke, a fact covered up by his wife and confidants, who exercised extraordinary power in his stead.

Franklin D. Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy both suffered serious, chronic ailments that were kept well away from the public eye.

Those surrounding Ronald Reagan downplayed his injuries after a 1981 assassination attempt, and the Trump administration misled the public about the seriousness of the president’s condition after he was diagnosed with COVID-19 a month before the 2020 election.

The capacity to misdirect, in Biden’s case, or mislead, as happened under Trump, illustrates one of the magical features of the White House: the ability of a president to conceal himself in plain sight.

“When you’re in the presidency, there is nothing that you can’t hide for awhile,” Greene, an emeritus history professor at Cazenovia College, said from his home in upstate New York. “You’ve got everything at your disposal to live a completely hidden double life, if you want. Everything from the Secret Service to the bubble of the White House.”

Greene likened the Neoclassical mansion at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. to a giant fish bowl — one that is painted from the inside. It’s highly visible, but you can’t really see what’s happening in the interior.

That deflates the notion there was some grand media conspiracy to prop Biden up. (Sorry, haters.)

Yes, detractors will say it was plain as the dawning day that Biden was demented, diminished and obviously not up to the job of the presidency. Today, Trump’s critics say the same sort of thing about him; from their armchairs, they even deliver quite specific diagnoses: He suffers dementia, or Alzheimer’s or Parkinson’s disease.

That doesn’t make it so.

“It’s a very politicized process. People see what they want to see,” said Jacob Appel, a professor of psychiatry and medical education at the Icahn School of Medicine in New York City, who’s writing a book on presidential health.

“You can watch videotapes of Ronald Reagan in 1987,” Appel said, “and, depending on your view of him. you can see him as sharp and funny as ever, or being on the cusp of dementia.” (Five years after leaving the White House, Reagan — then 83 — announced he was in the early stages of Alzheimer’s disease.)

To an uncomfortable degree, those covering the White House — and, by extension, the public they serve — are forced to rely on whatever the White House chooses to reveal.

“I don’t have subpoena power,” Tapper told The Times’ Stephen Battaglio, saying he would have eagerly published the details contained in his new book had sources been willing to come forth while Biden was still in power. “We were just lied to over and over again.”

It hasn’t always been that way.

In September 1955, during his first term, President Dwight D. Eisenhower suffered a heart attack while on a golf vacation in Denver. “”It was sudden,” said Jim Newton, an Eisenhower biographer. “One minute he’s fine and the next minute he was flat on his back, quite literally.”

The details surrounding Eisenhower’s immediate treatment remain a mystery, though Newton suggests that may have had more do with protecting his personal physician, who misdiagnosed the heart attack as a bout of indigestion, than a purposeful attempt to mislead the public.

From then on, the White House was forthcoming — offering daily reports on what Eisenhower ate, his blood pressure, the results of various tests — to a point that it embarrassed the president. (Among the information released was an accounting of Ike’s bowel movements.)

“They were self-consciously transparent,” Newton said. “The White House looked to the Wilson example as something not to emulate.”

Less than 14 months later, Eisenhower had sufficiently recovered — and voters had enough faith in his well-being — that he won his second term in a landslide.

But that 70-year-old example is a notable exception.

As long as there are White House staffers, campaign advisers, political strategists and family members, presidents will be surrounded by people with an incentive to downplay, minimize or obfuscate any physical or mental maladies they face while in office.

All we can do is wait — years, decades — for the truth to come out. And, in the meantime, hope for the best.

Students at a Columbia University graduation ceremony booed the school’s acting president, Claire Shipman, for her role in cracking down on pro-Palestinian protests. Earlier this month she allowed New York City police to arrest 78 protesters in the school’s library.

WASHINGTON — For generations, official American documents have been meticulously preserved and protected — from the era of quills and parchment to boxes of paper to the cloud, safeguarding snapshots of the government and the nation for posterity.

Now, the Trump administration has sought to expand the executive branch’s power to shield from public view key administration initiatives. Officials have used apps like Signal that can auto-delete messages containing sensitive information rather than retaining them for record-keeping. And they have shaken up the National Archives leadership.

To historians and archivists, it points to the possibility that President Trump will leave less for the nation’s historical record than nearly any president before him.

Such an eventuality creates a conundrum: How will experts — and even ordinary Americans — piece together what occurred when those charged with setting aside the artifacts properly documenting history refuse to do so?

How to preserve history?

The Trump administration says it’s the “most transparent in history,” citing the president’s fondness for taking questions from reporters nearly every day. But flooding the airwaves, media outlets and the internet with all things Trump isn’t the same as keeping records that document the inner workings of an administration, historians caution.

“He thinks he controls history,” says Timothy Naftali, a presidential historian who served as founding director of the Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum in Yorba Linda. “He wants to control what Americans ultimately find out about the truth of his administration, and that’s dangerous.”

Trump long refused to release his tax returns despite every other major White House candidate and president having done so since Jimmy Carter. And, today, White House stenographers still record every word Trump utters, but many of their transcriptions are languishing in the White House press office without authorization for release — meaning there’s no official record of what the president says for weeks, if at all.

“You want to have a record because that’s how you ensure accountability,” said Lindsay Chervinsky, executive director of the George Washington Presidential Library in Mount Vernon, Va.

The law mandates maintaining records

The Presidential Records Act of 1978 mandates the preservation, forever, of White House and vice presidential documents and communications. It deems them the property of the U.S. government and directs the National Archives and Records Administration to administer them after a president’s term.

After his first term, rather than turn classified documents over the National Archives, Trump hauled boxes of potentially sensitive documents to his Florida estate, Mar-a-Lago, where they ended up piled in his bedroom, a ballroom and even a bathroom and shower. The FBI raided the property to recover them. The case was later scrapped.

Trudy Huskamp Peterson, who served as acting archivist of the United States from 1993 to 1995, said keeping such records for the public is important because “decision-making always involves conflicting views, and it’s really important to get that internal documentation to see what the arguments were.”

Presidential clashes with archivists predate Trump

President George H.W. Bush’s administration destroyed some informal notes, visitor logs and emails. After President Clinton left office, his former national security advisor, Sandy Berger, pleaded guilty to taking copies of a document about terrorist threats from the National Archives.

President George W. Bush’s administration disabled automatic archiving for some official emails, encouraged some staffers to use private email accounts outside their work addresses and lost 22 million emails that were supposed to have been archived, though they were eventually uncovered in 2009.

Congress updated the Presidential Records Act in 2014 to encompass electronic messaging — including commercial email services known to be used by government employees to conduct official business.

But back then, use of auto-delete apps like Signal was far less common.

“It’s far easier to copy — or forward — a commercial email to a dot-gov address to be preserved, than it is to screenshot a series of messages on an app like Signal,” said Jason R. Baron, a professor at the University of Maryland and former director of litigation at the National Archives.

Relying on ’an honor system’

There were efforts during the first Trump administration to safeguard transparency, including a memo issued through the office of White House counsel Don McGahn in February 2017 that reminded White House personnel of the necessity to preserve and maintain presidential records.

The White House now points to having recently ordered the declassification of bevies of historical files, including records related to the assassinations of Kennedy, his brother Robert and Martin Luther King Jr.

The Trump administration says it also ended a Biden policy that allowed staffers to use Microsoft Teams, where chats weren’t captured by White House systems. The Biden administration had over 800 users on Teams, meaning an unknown number of presidential records might have been lost, the Trump administration now says.

But the White House did not answer questions about the possibly of drafting a new memo on record retention like McGahn’s from 2017.

Chervinsky, author of “The Cabinet: George Washington and the Creation of an American Institution,” said Congress, the courts and even the public often don’t have the bandwidth to ensure records retention laws are enforced, meaning, “a lot of it is still, I think, an honor system.”

“There aren’t that many people who are practicing oversight,” she said. “So, a lot of it does require people acting in good faith and using the operating systems that they’re supposed to use, and using the filing systems they’re supposed to use.”

Angered by the role the National Archives played in his documents case, meanwhile, Trump fired the ostensibly independent agency’s head, Archivist of the United States Colleen Shogan, and named Secretary of State Marco Rubio as her acting replacement.

Peterson, the former acting national archivist, said she still believes key information about the Trump administration will eventually emerge, but “I don’t know how soon.”

“Ultimately things come out,” she said. “That’s just the way the world works.”

Weissert writes for the Associated Press.

Federal prosecutors alleged Democratic Rep. LaMonica McIver of New Jersey pushed and grabbed officers while attempting to block the arrest of the Newark, N.J., mayor outside an immigration detention facility, according to charges in court papers unsealed on Tuesday.

In an eight-page complaint, interim U.S. Atty. Alina Habba’s office said McIver was protesting the removal of Newark Mayor Ras Baraka from a congressional tour of the Delaney Hall detention center in Newark on May 9.

The complaint says she attempted to stop the arrest of the mayor and pushed into agents for Homeland Security Investigations and Immigration and Customs Enforcement. She faces two counts of assaulting, resisting and impeding an officer.

McIver has denied any wrongdoing and has accused federal agents of escalating the situation by arresting the mayor. She denounced the charge as “purely political” and said prosecutors are distorting her actions in an effort to deter legislative oversight.

Habba had charged Baraka with trespassing after his arrest but dismissed the allegation on Monday when she said in a social media post that she instead was charging the congresswoman.

Prosecuting McIver is a rare federal criminal case against a sitting member of Congress for allegations other than fraud or corruption.

The case instantly taps into a broader and more consequential struggle between a Trump administration engaged in overhauling immigration policy and a Democratic Party scrambling to respond.

Within minutes of Habba’s announcement, McIver’s Democratic colleagues cast the prosecution as an infringement on lawmakers’ official duties to serve their constituents and an effort to silence their opposition to an immigration policy that helped propel the president back into power but now has emerged as a divisive fault line in American political discourse.

Members of Congress are authorized by law to go into federal immigration facilities as part of their oversight powers, even without advance notice. Congress passed a 2019 appropriations bill that spelled out the authority.

A nearly two-minute clip released by the Homeland Security Department shows McIver on the facility side of a chain-link fence just before the arrest of the mayor on the street side of the fence. She and uniformed officials go through the gate and she joins others shouting they should circle the mayor. The video shows McIver in a tightly packed group of people and officers. At one point, her left elbow and then her right elbow push into an officer wearing a dark face covering and an olive green uniform emblazoned with the word “Police” on it.

It isn’t clear from body camera video whether that contact was intentional, incidental or a result of jostling in the chaotic scene.

The complaint says she “slammed” her forearm into an agent and then tried to restrain the agent by grabbing him.

Tom Homan, President Trump’s top border advisor, said during an interview on Fox News on Tuesday that “she broke the law and we’re going to hold her accountable.”

“You can’t put hands on an ICE employee,” he said. “We’re not going to tolerate it.”

McIver, 38, first came to Congress in September in a special election after the death of Rep. Donald Payne Jr. left a vacancy in the 10th District. She was then elected to a full term in November. A Newark native, she served as the president of the Newark City Council from 2022 to 2024 and worked in the city’s public schools before that.

House Democratic leaders decried the criminal case against their colleague in a lengthy statement in which they called the charge “extreme, morally bankrupt” and lacking “any basis in law or fact.”

Catalini, Richer and Tucker write for the Associated Press.

Eleven minutes into the June 27 presidential debate, CNN anchor Dana Bash slipped a note to her colleague Jake Tapper after President Biden gave a rambling, incoherent answer.

“He just lost the election,” she wrote.

The event at the network’s Atlanta studios — recounted in Tapper’s and Axios correspondent Alex Thompson’s new book, “Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again” — turned out to be the most consequential presidential debate in history.

Negative reaction to Biden’s alarmingly disastrous performance led him to abandon his campaign three weeks later and Vice President Kamala Harris to take his place on the 2024 Democratic ticket. The election against President Trump was less than four months away.

Biden’s mental and physical decline had long been the subject of speculation at that point. The unraveling of the then-81-year-old incumbent president in front of an audience of 51 million TV viewers made his diminished capacity undeniable.

“It was just the painful realization that the White House had been lying to everyone, including likely, in many ways, to themselves,” Tapper said in a recent Zoom conversation from his home in Washington, D.C. “As bad as it was on TV, it was worse in person.”

CNN’s Jake Tapper and Dana Bash at the first 2024 presidential debate in Atlanta on June 27.

(Austin Steele / CNN)

The debate meltdown and its aftermath prompted Tapper to join forces with Thompson for an investigative deep dive into Biden’s deteriorating condition and how family and staff protected him from scrutiny until it was no longer possible to hide.

“Original Sin” is rife with examples of Biden forgetting the names of friends and associates he’s known for years, most notably actor George Clooney at a Hollywood fundraiser. At the same event, former President Obama led a dazed-looking Biden offstage.

Tapper and Thompson give a detailed account of Biden’s October 2023 interview with special counsel Robert Hur, who investigated whether the former president was in illegal possession of classified material.

Biden frequently wandered off topic during his testimony and failed to recall dates of key moments of his life, such as the year his son Beau died. Hur declined to prosecute Biden, calling him a “well-meaning elderly man with a poor memory” in his report. Hur was hammered by Democratic critics who called him cruel and ageist.

There were private discussions among aides about Biden using a wheelchair if he were elected to a second term. The staff went through machinations to minimize the appearance of Biden’s physical challenges, even enlisting director Steven Spielberg to coach Biden for his 2024 State of the Union address.

Tapper and Thompson tie the stories together in a way that reads like a horror movie script — you know what’s coming and there’s nothing you can do about it.

“We were just lied to over and over again,” Tapper said.

Their book has already generated a national debate about whether the White House deceived the public about the president’s condition and how Biden’s late exit from the race undermined the Democratic Party’s chances of stopping a second term for President Trump.

The discussion intensified after Sunday’s announcement that Biden was diagnosed with an aggressive form of prostate cancer.

The immediate response of right-wing commentators to the book’s revelations has been “we told you so,” along with accusations that the mainstream media was complicit in a White House cover-up of the president’s health issues.

Tapper anticipated the reaction. He said 99% of what is reported in the book was discovered after the election.

“If I learned about any of these stories in 2022, 2023 or 2024, I would have reported them in a second,” he said. “But I don’t have subpoena power.”

Tapper believes conservatives were proven correct in their harsh and at times tactless assessments of Biden’s condition, which clearly worsened in 2023 after his son Hunter faced the possibility of a prison sentence when a plea deal on tax and gun charges fell apart.

“They were right and that should be acknowledged,” Tapper said. “At the same time, saying that the president’s brain has turned to applesauce is not journalism. It’s punditry.”

Although there is plenty of footage showing Biden’s memory lapses and senior moments, Tapper noted there were few deeply reported stories on the extent of the president’s condition. Biden was surrounded by family members and longtime loyalists who were effective at deflecting and dismissing the inquiries as partisan attacks.

Fox News White House correspondent Peter Doocy was persistent in raising the issue of Biden’s health in the White House briefing room and former Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre was persistent in shutting him down, suggesting he was spreading disinformation.

“They weren’t only lying to journalists, they were lying to everybody,” Tapper said. “People would do reporting and all the great Democratic sources that you could rely on for candor would say, ‘No, we’re told that he’s fine.’ And I think that they all either believed it or had no other facts.”

Along with Thompson’s work for Axios, the most detailed report on Biden’s frailty and memory lapses came in June 2024 from Wall Street Journal reporters Siobhan Hughes and Annie Linskey. The highly respected Washington journalists were roundly criticized by progressive commentators for depending on unnamed sources in the report, titled “Behind Closed Doors, Biden Shows Signs of Slipping.” CNN’s own Reliable Sources newsletter dismissed the piece, saying, “The Wall Street Journal owes its readers — and the public — better.”

Tapper said Hughes and Linskey “should be heralded as heroes” and agreed that the Washington press corps failed to aggressively pursue the Biden health story. But it didn’t help that loyalty to Biden kept potential whistleblowers in line.

“I do primarily think that the people who were lying, or the people who knew the truth but were fearful, are the ones that could’ve prevented this disaster much more so than those of us in the news media,” Tapper said. “We’re only as good as our sources.”

Tapper and Thompson rely largely on unnamed sources in “Original Sin.” Among the 200 people they talked to are Democratic Party insiders and four cabinet secretaries. While many Democrats are still reluctant to go on the record about what they knew about Biden and when they knew it, the floodgate of anecdotes opened after the election.

“I have never experienced the ability to get behind the scenes in so many different rooms as for these recountings as I was for this book,” Tapper said. “I felt like people needed to get this off their chest. It was almost like they were unburdening themselves.”

Many of the sources expressed regret that they did not speak up sooner. Tapper said he and his co-author maintained a high bar for what they used.

“If there was stuff that we were not 100% sure about, we didn’t put it in the book,” he said. “There are stories, really good ones, that had one source and we said, ‘It’s not good enough.’”

In its only response to the book thus far, the Biden camp has asserted that the former president’s condition did not impair his ability to execute his duties in the White House.

“We continue to await anything that shows where Joe Biden had to make a presidential decision or where national security was threatened or where he was unable to do his job. In fact, the evidence points to the opposite — he was a very effective president.”

Tapper and Thompson say in the book that they found no instances where Biden was unable to discharge his duties as president. They write that even most of his critics interviewed for the book “attest to his ability to make sound decisions, if on his own schedule.”

Tapper believes that the effort of family and his longtime staff members to hide Biden’s condition deprived the Democratic Party of the chance to determine if its chances were better with another candidate, who would have benefited from more time to mount a campaign against Trump.

“President Biden knows what he was going through,” Tapper said. “Jill Biden knows what he’s going through. They hid this. It’s still amazing to me that they were actually arguing that he could do this job for four more years.

“I’m proud of the book that Alex and I wrote,” Tapper added. “I’m proud of the reporting. But I’d rather that this hadn’t happened.”

Asked if the Biden’s actions amounted to a medical Watergate, Tapper said it did “in the fact that there was a horrible cover-up of something that wasn’t technically a crime, but you could argue morally it was.”

More than 80 witnesses are expected to testify via videoconference over the next two weeks.

The trial of former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro has begun, with charges that he plotted a coup d’etat and led a “criminal organisation” to overturn the result of the October 2022 election, in which he was narrowly defeated by current President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva.

The country’s Supreme Court is hearing testimony from high-ranking military and political figures from Monday over the next two weeks.

The 70-year-old far-right leader, a former army captain, who governed Brazil from 2019 to 2022, could face up to 40 years in prison if convicted.

Bolsonaro denies the allegations, claiming he is a victim of “political persecution”.

More than 80 witnesses are set to testify via videoconference, including Generals Marco Antonio Freire Gomes and Carlos de Almeida Baptista Junior, who served as commanders of the army and air force under Bolsonaro.

In previous statements to federal police, both men said Bolsonaro had “raised the hypothetical possibility” of using legal means to annul the 2022 election and justify a military intervention.

According to prosecutors, the alleged plot included plans to declare a state of emergency, hold new elections and assassinate President Lula.

A 900-page federal police report details the scheme, which prosecutors say ultimately collapsed due to a lack of support within the military.

The charges also encompass the January 8, 2023 riots in Brasília, when thousands of Bolsonaro supporters stormed Congress, the Supreme Court, and the presidential palace one week after Lula’s inauguration.

Though Bolsonaro, a close ally of United States President Donald Trump when they were both in power, was in the US at the time, prosecutors argue he backed the violence, calling it the “last hope” of those seeking to overturn the election.

Seven of Bolsonaro’s former aides are being tried alongside him, including four former ministers, a former navy commander, and the head of Brazil’s intelligence services during his presidency.

This marks the first time a Brazilian president has faced coup charges since the end of the military dictatorship in 1985.

Bolsonaro, who has often expressed admiration for that era, is already banned from holding public office until 2030 after making claims about Brazil’s electronic voting system.

Despite the ban, Bolsonaro has indicated a desire to return to politics. But speaking to UOL last week, he likened the charges to a “telenovela scenario” and warned that a conviction would be a “death penalty, political and physical”.

Bolsonaro was heavily criticised when he was Brazil’s leader during the COVID-19 pandemic and when his policies and spread of misinformation contributed to the nation having the highest overall death toll in Latin America, and the second highest in the world after the US, from the coronavirus.

Earlier this month, he was recently discharged from hospital after undergoing major abdominal surgery, the latest in a series of procedures stemming from a stabbing attack in 2018.

WASHINGTON — The revelation that former President Biden has advanced prostate cancer generated more questions than answers on Monday, prompting debate among experts in the oncology community over the likely progression of his disease and resurfacing concerns in Washington over his decision last year to run for reelection.

Biden’s private office said Sunday afternoon that he had been diagnosed earlier in the week with an “aggressive form” of the cancer that had already spread to his bones, after urinary symptoms led to the discovery of a nodule on his prostate.

But it was not made clear whether Biden, 82, had been testing his prostate-specific antigens, known as PSA levels, during his presidency — and if so whether those results had indicated an elevated risk of cancer while he was still in office or during his campaign for reelection.

Biden’s diagnosis comes at a difficult time for the former president, as scrutiny grows over his decision to run for a second term last year — and whether it cost the Democrats the White House. Biden ultimately dropped out of the race after a devastating debate performance with Donald Trump laid bare widespread concerns over his age and health, leaving his successor on the Democratic ticket — Vice President Kamala Harris — little time to run her own campaign.

A book set to publish this week titled “Original Sin,” by journalists Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson, details efforts by Biden’s aides to shield the effects of his aging from the public and the press. The cancer diagnosis only intensified scrutiny over Biden’s health and questions as to whether he and his team were honest about it with the public.

“I think those conversations are going to happen,” said David Axelrod, a former senior advisor to President Obama.

President Trump, asked about Biden’s diagnosis during an Oval Office event Monday, said it was “a very, very sad situation” and that he felt “badly about it.”

But he also questioned why the cancer wasn’t caught earlier, and why the public wasn’t notified earlier, tying the situation to questions he has long raised about Biden’s mental fitness to serve as president.

PSA tests are not typically recommended for men over 70 due to the risk of false positive results or of associated treatments causing more harm than good to older patients, who are more likely to die of other causes first.

But annual physicals for sitting presidents — especially of Biden’s age — are more comprehensive than those for private citizens. And a failure to test for elevated PSA levels could have missed the progression of the disease.

A letter from Biden’s White House physician from February of last year made no mention of PSA testing, unlike the most recent letter detailing the results of Trump’s latest physical, which references a normal measurement. Biden’s current aides did not respond to requests for comment on whether his office would further detail his diagnostic testing history.

Even if his doctors had tested for PSA levels at the time, results may not have picked up an aggressive form of the cancer, experts said.

Some specialists in the field said it was possible, if rare, for Biden’s cancer to emerge and spread since his last physical in the White House. Roughly 10% of patients who are newly diagnosed with prostate cancer are found with an advanced form of the disease that has metastasized to other parts of the body.

Dr. Mark Litwin, the chair of UCLA Urology, said it is in the nature of aggressive prostate cancers to grow quickly. “So it is likely that this tumor began more recently,” he said.

Litwin said he does not doubt that Biden would have been screened for elevated PSA levels. But, he said, he could be among those patients whose cancers do not produce elevated PSA levels or whose more aggressive cancers rapidly grow and metastasize within a matter of months.

“The fact that he has metastatic disease at diagnosis, to me, as an expert in the area and as a clinician taking care of guys with prostate cancer all the time, just says that he is unfortunate,” Litwin said.

Litwin and other experts in prostate cancer from USC, Stanford, Johns Hopkins, Cedars-Sinai and the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute all told The Times that Biden’s diagnosis — at least based on publicly available information — was not incredibly unusual, and similar to diagnoses received by older American men all the time.

They said he and his doctors absolutely would have discussed testing his PSA levels, given his high level of care as president. But they also said it would have been well within medical best practices for him to decide with those doctors to stop getting tested given his age.

Dr. Howard Sandler, chair of the Department of Radiation Oncology at Cedars-Sinai, said he sees three potential explanations for Biden’s diagnosis.

One is that Biden and his doctors made a decision “to not screen any longer, which would be well within the standard of care” given Biden’s age, he said.

A second is that Biden’s was tested, and his PSA level “was elevated, maybe not dramatically but a little bit elevated, but they said, ‘Well, we’re not gonna really investigate it,’” again because of Biden’s age, Sandler said.

The third, which Sandler said was “less likely,” is that Biden’s PSA was checked “and was fine, but he ended up with an aggressive prostate cancer that doesn’t produce much PSA” and so wasn’t captured.

Zeke Emanuel, an oncologist serving as vice provost for global initiatives at the University of Pennsylvania and a former health policy official in the Biden administration, told MSNBC that Biden has likely had cancer for “more than several years.”

“He did not develop it in the last 100, 200 days. He had it while he was president. He probably had it at the start of his presidency, in 2021,” Emanuel said.

But Litwin, who said he is a friend of Emanuel’s, said most men in their 70s or 80s have some kind of prostate cancer, even if it is just “smoldering along” — there but not particularly aggressive or quickly spreading — and unlikely to be the cause of their death.

He said Biden may well have had some similar form of cancer in his prostate for a long time, but that he did not believe that the aggressive form that has metastasized would have been around for as long as Emanuel seemed to suggest.

Departing Rome aboard Air Force Two, Vice President JD Vance told reporters he was sending his best wishes to the former president, but expressed concern that his recent diagnosis underscored concerns over Biden’s condition that dogged his presidency.

“Whether the right time to have this conversation is now or in the future, we really do need to be honest about whether the former president was capable of doing the job,” Vance said. “I don’t think that he was in good enough health. In some ways, I blame him less than I blame the people around him.”

Trump’s medical team has also faced questions of transparency.

When Trump was diagnosed with COVID-19 during his first term, at the height of the pandemic, he was closer to death than his White House acknowledged at the time. And his doctors and aides regularly use superlatives to describe the health of the 78-year-old president, with Karoline Leavitt, his White House press secretary, referring to him as “perfect” on Monday.

“Cancer touches us all,” Biden posted on social media alongside a photo with his wife, Jill Biden, in his first remarks on his diagnosis.

“Like so many of you, Jill and I have learned that we are strongest in the broken places,” he added. “Thank you for lifting us up with love and support.”

WASHINGTON — President Trump, alongside his wife, Melania, on Monday signed the Take It Down Act, a measure the first lady helped usher through Congress to set stricter penalties for the distribution of non-consensual intimate imagery online, or “revenge porn.”

In March, Melania Trump used her first public appearance since resuming the role of first lady to travel to Capitol Hill to lobby House members to pass the bill following its approval by the Senate.

White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters earlier Monday that the first lady was “instrumental in getting this important legislation passed.”

The bill makes it a federal crime to “knowingly publish” or threaten to publish intimate images without a person’s consent, including AI-created “deepfakes.” Websites and social media companies will be required to remove such material within 48 hours after a victim requests it. The platforms must also take steps to delete duplicate content.

Many states have already banned the dissemination of sexually explicit deepfakes or revenge porn, but the Take It Down Act is a rare example of federal regulators imposing on internet companies.

The bill, sponsored by Sens. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.), received overwhelming bipartisan support in Congress, passing the House in April by a 409-2 vote and clearing the Senate by unanimous consent.

But the measure isn’t without critics. Free speech advocates and digital rights groups say the bill is too broad and could lead to censorship of legitimate images, including legal pornography and LGBTQ+ content. Others say it could allow the government to monitor private communications and undermine due process.

The first lady appeared at a Capitol Hill roundtable with lawmakers and young women who had explicit images of them put online, saying it was “heartbreaking” to see what teenagers and especially girls go through after this happens to them. She also included a victim among her guests for the president’s address to a joint session of Congress the day after that meeting.

After the House passed the bill, Melania Trump called the bipartisan vote a “powerful statement that we stand united in protecting the dignity, privacy and safety of our children.”

Her advocacy for the bill is a continuation of the Be Best campaign she started in the president’s first term, focusing on children’s well-being, social media use and opioid abuse.

In his speech to Congress in March, the president said the publication of such imagery online is “just terrible” and that he looked forward to signing the bill into law.

“And I’m going to use that bill for myself, too, if you don’t mind,” he said. There’s nobody who “gets treated worse than I do online. Nobody.”

Superville writes for the Associated Press.

EPA-EFE/Shutterstock

A vote for change

‘Romania first’ rhetoric fell short

Costly mistakes

Defiance of Russia

European choice

Last chance

Wendy McMahon is stepping down as from her role as president of CBS News and Stations, indicating her disagreement with the parent company’s handling of President Trump’s lawsuit against “60 Minutes.”

“It’s become clear that the company and I do not agree on the path forward,” McMahon said in a note sent to CBS News staff Monday. “It’s time for me to move on and for this organization to move forward with new leadership.”

McMahon has been firm in her position that CBS News parent Paramount Global should not settle the $20-billion suit from Trump, which claims an October interview with his 2024 opponent Vice President Kamala Harris was deceptively edited to help her presidential campaign.

The lawsuit is an obstacle to Paramount Global’s proposed $8-billion sale to Skydance Media. The case has gone to a mediator.

McMahon’s departure is a sign that a settlement may be close.

With McMahon’s exit, CBS News President Tom Cibrowski and CBS Stations President Jennifer Mitchell will each report directly to CBS Chief Executive George Cheeks.

McMahon joined CBS in 2021. She oversaw the company’s syndication division and TV stations as well as CBS News.

Cheeks brought McMahon to the company from Walt Disney Co., where she led the ABC station group. At the time, Cheeks was trying to clean up its stations division, which was plagued by management issues and the firing of its former head, Peter Dunn.

Since then, McMahon rose to be one of Cheeks’ most trusted lieutenants, taking over CBS News. But she irked Paramount’s controlling shareholder, Shari Redstone, over CBS News coverage of the Israel-Hamas war.

Times staff writer Meg James contributed to this report.