Tuesday is election day, and, as usual, the pundits are breathless, the predictions are dubious and the consultants are already counting their retainers. But make no mistake: Off-year elections matter. Tuesday’s results will shape the political landscape for 2026 and beyond.
Let’s start in California, where Gov. Gavin Newsom has decided to fight Texas Republican gerrymandering with a little creative cartography of his own.
Proposition 50, which began as the “Election Rigging Response Act,” wouldn’t just help level the playing field by handing Democrats five House seats; it would also boost Newsom’s presidential ambitions. Polls suggest it’ll pass.
When it comes to elections involving actual candidates, the main attractions are in New York, New Jersey and Virginia.
In the New York City mayoral contest, Zohran Mamdani — a 34-year-old democratic socialist who seems like the kind of guy who probably buys albums on vinyl — is leading both former Gov. Andrew Cuomo (running as an independent) and Republican Curtis Sliwa.
One thing is for certain: Mamdani is already a symbol. If he wins, he’ll be evidence for progressives that politics can still be interesting, exciting and revolutionary. To conservatives, he’ll be evidence that Democrats have gone insane.
If you’re paying attention, these arguments are not mutually exclusive.
Across the Hudson, New Jersey Democratic Rep. Mikie Sherrill (whose resume includes having been a naval officer and a federal prosecutor) is a very different kind of politician — the “I’m a competent adult, please clap” variety.
Her gubernatorial opponent, Jack Ciattarelli, is an ex-state legislator who radiates the kind of energy usually found at bowling alleys and diners. He’s the grandson of Italian immigrants, the son of blue-collar workers and the spiritual heir of every guy in a tracksuit yelling at a Jets game.
Ciattarelli came dangerously close to winning the governorship in 2021, which should be cause for concern for Sherrill, who’s sitting on a slim lead.
Trump’s termination of the Gateway Tunnel project didn’t help either. It’s one thing to be loud and populist; it’s another to cancel something that would make voters’ commutes slightly less horrible.
Speaking of commutes, a few hours south, down I-95, Virginia will also elect a new governor. Here, Democrat Abigail Spanberger — former CIA officer, former U.S. representative, professional moderate — is coasting toward victory against Republican Winsome Earle-Sears, the lieutenant governor.
Earle-Sears, a Marine, trailblazer and gadfly, is about to add “failed gubernatorial candidate” to her resume.
Her biggest headline was firing her campaign manager (a pastor who had never run a campaign before), which sounds like a metaphor for today’s GOP. Her best attack on Spanberger involved attempting to tie her to something someone else (the Democratic attorney general nominee) did (sending a violent text about a Republican politician).
Virginia has a history of electing governors from the party that opposes the sitting president, and Trump’s DOGE cuts (not to mention the current government shutdown) have outsize importance in the commonwealth.
Depending on how things shake out in these states, narratives will be set — storylines that (rightly or not) will tell experts and voters which kinds of candidates they should nominate in 2026.
For example, if Mamdani, who represents the progressive wing, wins, but Sherrill and/or Spanberger lose, the narrative will be that cautious centrism is the problem.
If the opposite occurs, the opposite narrative (radicalism is a loser!) will take root.
The postmortems write themselves: “Progressive Resurgence,” “Year of the Woman” and/or “The Return of the Center.” The problem? It’s unwise to draw too many conclusions based on Tuesday’s election results.
First, it’s misguided to assume that what works in New York City could serve as a national model.
Second, even if Sherrill and Spanberger both win, it’s impossible to know if they simply benefited from 2025 being a good year for Democrats.
Still, what happens on Tuesday will have major repercussions. Within a day of the election, everyone with a stake in the midterms and future elections will claim the outcome means what they want it to mean. Within a week, narratives will have congealed, while heroes and scapegoats will have been assigned.
And the rest of us will be right here where we started — anxious, exhausted — and dreading the fact that the 2026 midterm jockeying starts on Wednesday.
A protestor holds up a sign protesting President Trumps new policies towards refugees at the International Arrivals Terminal at Dulles International Airport as the first flight of Afrikaners From South Africa granted refugee status arrive in the United States on May 12, 2025 in Sterling, Virginia. File Photo by Jemal Countess/UPI | License Photo
Oct. 31 (UPI) — The Trump administration will permit a record-low 7,500 refugees into the United States during the 2026 fiscal year, with most spots allocated to White South Africans.
The number, a drastic drop from the 125,000 that the previous Biden administration had set for 2025, is expected to be swiftly challenged by Democrats and human rights and immigration advocates.
The announcement was made Thursday, with the presidential determination being published in the Federal Register.
According to the document, the Trump administration said the number “is justified by humanitarian concerns or is otherwise in the national interest.”
The document specifies that “admissions numbers shall primarily be allocated among Afrikaners,” in line with President Donald Trump‘s February executive order that sought to penalize South Africa over a land expropriation law allowing the government to confiscate land if it was in the public interest and in a few specific cases without compensation.
Trump has claimed, without evidence, that Black-majority South Africa would use the law to take land from White Afrikaners. He has said that they were victims of “racial discrimination” and “large-scale killings.”
South Africa has repeatedly refuted the characterization.
In May, the first 49 Afrikaners granted refugee statues by Trump arrived in the United States.
About two weeks later, tensions flared between South African President Cyril Ramaphosa and Trump at the White House as the American leader said he had heard “thousands of stories” about violence against White South Africans in the country.
The International Refugee Assistance Project criticized the Trump administration for issuing the decision without consultation with Congress, as required by law. It also rebuked the administration for reserving admissions mostly for Afrikaners, at the expense of at-risk refugees.
It said the Trump administration was valuing “politics over protection.”
“Today’s announcement highlights just how far this administration has gone when it comes to abandoning its responsibilities to displaced people around the world,” IRAP President Sharif Aly said in a statement.
The 7,500 is the lowest since Trump set the refugee limit at 15,000 for fiscal year 2021, during his first term.
Beijing is positioning itself as the defender of free trade as Washington’s tariff hikes disrupt the global economy and Trump skips the economic summit.
Chinese President Xi Jinping has called for efforts to promote economic globalisation and multilateralism at an annual economic regional forum pointedly snubbed by United States President Donald Trump.
Xi took centre stage at the two-day Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit that began Friday in the South Korean city of Gyeongju, as Trump left the country a day earlier after reaching deals meant to ease the escalating trade war with China.
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“The more turbulent the times, the more we must work together,” Xi said during the opening session. “The world is undergoing a period of rapid change, with the international situation becoming increasingly complex and volatile.”
The Chinese leader positioned his country as the defender of free trade systems that observers say are being threatened by Trump’s tariff hikes and “America first” policy.
Xi called for maintaining supply chain stability, as opposed to US efforts to decouple its supply chains from China, and expressed hopes to work with other countries to expand cooperation in green industries and clean energy.
Chinese exports of solar panels, electric vehicles and other green tech have been criticised for creating oversupplies and undercutting the domestic industries of countries it exports to.
The US president left the country before the summit, after reaching several deals with Xi meant to ease their escalating trade war. Trump described his meeting with Xi on Thursday as a roaring success, saying Beijing had agreed to allow the export of rare earth elements and to start buying US soya beans in exchange for slashing tariffs.
The US president’s decision to skip APEC, a forum that represents nearly 40 percent of the world’s population and more than half of global goods trade, fits in with his well-known disdain for big, multi-nation forums that have been traditionally used to address huge global problems, with his preference for grand spectacle one-on-one meetings that generate blanket media coverage.
Al Jazeera’s Jack Barton, reporting from Gyeongju, said Xi was “filling the vacuum left by Trump”.
While on his first visit to South Korea in 11 years, Xi is scheduled to meet South Korean President Lee Jae Myung and new Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi separately on Friday. Xi and Lee are scheduled to discuss denuclearisation on the Korean Peninsula on Saturday.
Barton said the meeting with Japan’s Takaichi would be “setting the diplomatic tone for the foreseeable future”. The Japanese prime minister is described by Chinese media as a far-right nationalist who has visited the controversial Yasukuni Shrine.
The site, dedicated to 2.5 million Japanese who died in wars beginning in the 19th century, is a political lightning rod in East Asia. Among those honoured are World War II leaders convicted as “Class A” war criminals, some of whom committed their atrocities under the Imperial Japan flag in China in the 20th century.
“South Korea and China share some of these historical issues with Japan,” Barton said. “They came out essentially saying, we’re going to put legacy issues on one side and diplomacy on another, so there is scope for a positive outcome.”
Xi also met Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney on Friday to discuss trade. “We’re expecting perhaps the biggest substantial economic deal to come out of that meeting,” Barton said.
Leaders and other representatives from 21 Asian and Pacific Rim economies are attending the APEC meeting to discuss how to promote economic cooperation and tackle shared challenges.
The APEC region faces an array of issues, including strategic competition between the US and China, supply chain vulnerabilities, ageing populations and the effect of AI on jobs.
South Korean officials said they have been communicating with other countries to prod all 21 members to adopt a joint statement at the end of the summit, so as not to repeat the failure to issue one in 2018 in Papua New Guinea due to US-China discord over trade.
South Korean Foreign Minister Cho Hyun said last week that issuing a joint statement strongly endorsing free trade would be unlikely because of differing positions among APEC members.
Al Jazeera’s Barton said the result might be a “watered-down version”.
“The question really is, can APEC survive this age of US-China rivalry?” he added.
Tehran rebukes US plans for nuclear tests, citing hypocrisy over peaceful nuclear programme accusations.
Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi has condemned calls by United States President Donald Trump for the Pentagon to resume nuclear weapons testing, calling the move both “regressive” and irresponsible”.
“Having rebranded its ‘Department of Defense’ as the ‘Department of War,’ a nuclear-armed bully is resuming testing of atomic weapons,” Araghchi wrote in a post on X late Thursday.
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“The same bully has been demonising Iran’s peaceful nuclear program and threatening further strikes on our safeguarded nuclear facilities, all in blatant violation of international law,” he said.
Trump made the surprise announcement in a Truth Social post on Thursday shortly before meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping in South Korea on the sidelines of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit.
Trump said he had instructed the Pentagon to immediately resume nuclear weapons testing “on an equal basis” with other countries like Russia and China, whose nuclear weapons arsenal will match the US in “five years”, according to Trump.
Ankit Panda, a nuclear security expert and senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, told Al Jazeera that Trump’s decision was likely a response to recent actions by Russia and China rather than Washington’s ongoing dispute with Iran over its nuclear programme.
Russian President Vladimir Putin announced this week that Moscow had tested its Poseidon nuclear-powered super torpedo, after separately testing new Burevestnik nuclear-powered cruise missiles earlier in the month, according to the Reuters news agency.
China also recently displayed its nuclear prowess at a military parade in September, which featured new and modified nuclear weapons systems like the Dongfeng-5 nuclear-capable intercontinental ballistic missile.
Having rebranded its “Department of Defense” as the “Department of War”, a nuclear-armed bully is resuming testing of atomic weapons. The same bully has been demonizing Iran’s peaceful nuclear program and threatening further strikes on our safeguarded nuclear facilities, all in… pic.twitter.com/ft4ZGWnFiw
Despite these public displays of firepower, neither Russia nor China has carried out a nuclear test – defined as a nuclear explosion above ground, underground, or underwater – in decades, according to the United Nations.
Nuclear testing is banned by the Comprehensive Nuclear Test-Ban-Treaty of 1996. The US, China, and Iran all signed but have not ratified the original treaty, while Russia withdrew its ratification in 2023.
Moscow carried out its last nuclear test in 1990 while still the Soviet Union, and China carried out its last nuclear test in 1996, according to the UN. The last nuclear test by the United Kingdom was in 1991, followed by the US in 1992 and France in 1996. North Korea is the only country that has carried out nuclear tests in the past two decades, with its last test in 2017.
Trevor Findlay, a nuclear security expert and honorary professional fellow at the University of Melbourne, told Al Jazeera that it was unclear what type of testing Trump was referring to in his post.
“My assumption is that he means missile launches of nuclear-capable missiles, as North Korea and Russia have been doing very publicly. These do not carry an actual nuclear warhead [but likely a dummy], nor do they create a nuclear explosion,” he said.
“The US already tests its own missiles periodically, both existing ones and ones in development, often splashing down in the Pacific. It does announce them but tends not to make a big deal of it, like North Korea and Russia,” he said.
Trump, meanwhile, has called for the “total dismantlement” of Iran’s nuclear programme and says he does not want Tehran to obtain a nuclear weapon. In June, the US and Israel also carried out air strikes on Iranian military and nuclear facilities in part to slow its progress.
Tehran has maintained that its nuclear programme is for civilian purposes only, and it has never carried out a nuclear test, according to the Carnegie Endowment’s Panda.
“Iran has never done any nuclear tests. They’ve constantly been saying they are not intending to make a nuclear bomb,” Panda told Al Jazeera. “The only thing that Iran has which might be taken seriously is some highly enriched uranium. That’s it. They have not even tested a nuclear ballistic missile.”
The US president called for Republicans to go for the ‘Nuclear Option’ in order to end the Democratic Senate roadblock.
Published On 31 Oct 202531 Oct 2025
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United States President Donald Trump has called on the Senate to vote to scrap the filibuster custom so that Republicans can end a weeks-long federal government shutdown.
In a post on his Truth Social platform on Thursday, the US leader chastised “Crazed Lunatics” in the Democratic Party.
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“It is now time for the Republicans to play their ‘TRUMP CARD’ and go for what is called the Nuclear Option – Get rid of the Filibuster, and get rid of it, NOW!” Trump wrote.
“WE are in power, and if we did what we should be doing [end the filibuster], it would IMMEDIATELY end this ridiculous, Country destroying ‘SHUT DOWN’,” he added.
The filibuster is a longstanding Senate tactic that delays or blocks votes on legislation by keeping debate open. The Senate requires a supermajority – 60 of the chamber’s 100 members – to overcome a filibuster and pass most legislation.
Senate rules, including the filibuster, can be changed by a simple majority vote at any time. Republicans currently hold a 53-47 Senate majority.
Since October 1, when the new fiscal year began, Senate Democrats have voted against advancing a government bill extending funding to federal agencies.
Democrats have demanded that Republicans reverse planned sweeping cuts to Medicaid, which extends healthcare coverage to tens of millions of low-income Americans, and prevent health insurance premiums from going up.
The deadlock entered its 31st day on Friday. It is set to become the longest deadlock in history if it surpasses the 35-day lapse that took place in 2019 under the first Trump administration.
Federal employees categorised as “essential” continue to work without pay during government shutdowns until they can be reimbursed when it ends.
Most recently, on Tuesday, US air traffic controllers were told they would not receive their paychecks this month, raising concerns that mounting financial stress could take a toll on the already understaffed employees who guide thousands of flights each day.
The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office said on Wednesday that the federal government shutdown could cost the US economy between $7bn and $14bn.
Trump has just returned to the US from his Asia tour, in which he visited Qatar, Malaysia, Japan and South Korea – where he held a major summit with Chinese President Xi Jinping.
In his Truth Social post, the US leader said that while the trip was a success, conversations had caused him to consider the filibuster issue.
“The one question that kept coming up, however, was how did the Democrats SHUT DOWN the United States of America, and why did the powerful Republicans allow them to do it? The fact is, in flying back, I thought a great deal about that question, WHY?” he wrote.
The US leader continued that he believed that should the Democrats come back into power, they would “exercise their rights” and end the filibuster on the “first day they take office”.
Announcing the move, staff at the outlet said ‘authoritarian regimes are already celebrating’ its potential demise.
Radio Free Asia (RFA) will shut down its news operations on Friday, citing the government-funded news outlet’s dire financial situation caused by funding cuts under President Donald Trump’s administration and the ongoing US government shutdown.
Bay Fang, RFA’s president and CEO, said in a statement that “uncertainty about our budgetary future” means that the outlet has been “forced to suspend all remaining news content production”.
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“In an effort to conserve limited resources on hand and preserve the possibility of restarting operations should consistent funding become available, RFA is taking further steps to responsibly shrink its already reduced footprint,” she said on Wednesday.
Fang added that RFA would begin closing its overseas bureaus and would formally lay off and pay severance to furloughed staff. She said many staff members have been on unpaid leave since March, “when the US Agency for Global Media [USAGM] unlawfully terminated RFA’s Congressionally appropriated grant”.
On March 14, Trump signed an executive order effectively eliminating USAGM, an independent US government agency created in the mid-1990s to broadcast news and information to regions with poor press freedom records.
Alongside RFA, USAGM also hosts sister publications Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE) and Voice of America (VOA).
Following March’s executive order, RFA was forced to put three-quarters of its US-based employees on unpaid leave and terminate most of its overseas contractors.
Another round of mass layoffs followed in May, along with the termination of several RFA language services, including Tibetan, Burmese and Uighur.
Mass layoffs also took place at VOA in March when Trump signed another executive order placing nearly all 1,400 staff at the outlet – which he described as a “total left-wing disaster” – on paid leave. It has operated on a limited basis since then.
Trump has said operations like RFA, RFE/Radio Liberty and VOA are a waste of government resources and accused them of being biased against his administration.
Since its founding in 1996, RFA has reported on Asia’s most repressive regimes, providing English- and local-language online and broadcast services to citizens of authoritarian governments across the region.
Its flagship projects include its Uighur service – the world’s only independent Uyghur-language outlet, covering the repressed ethnic group in western China – as well as its North Korea service, which reports on events inside the hermit state.
An announcement penned by RFA executive editor Rosa Hwang, published on the outlet’s website on Wednesday, said, “Make no mistake, authoritarian regimes are already celebrating RFA’s potential demise.”
“Independent journalism is at the core of RFA. For the first time since RFA’s inception almost 30 years ago, that voice is at risk,” Hwang said.
“We still believe in the urgency of that mission – and in the resilience of our extraordinary journalists. Once our funding returns, so will we,” she added.
RFE/Radio Liberty, which went through its own round of furloughs earlier this year, said this week that it received its last round of federal funding in September and its news services are continuing for now.
“We plan to continue reaching our audiences for the foreseeable future,” it said.
It’s not immediately clear why RFA and RFE/Radio Liberty – which share the same governing and funding structure, but are based in the US and Europe, respectively – are taking different approaches.
The United States Department of Justice has reportedly placed two federal prosecutors, Samuel White and Carlos Valdivia, on administrative leave after they referred to the participants in the attack on the Capitol on January 6, 2021, as “a mob of rioters”.
Documents the two prosecutors had filed in advance of a Thursday sentencing hearing were also amended to remove references to the January 6 attack.
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The new filings were made on Wednesday, the same day that the prosecutors received their notices and were locked out of their government devices.
Both were members of the US Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia, according to sources who spoke to Reuters and The Associated Press, on condition of anonymity.
The punishment they faced was the latest instance of the administration of President Donald Trump taking action against federal prosecutors who participated in cases the Republican leader perceives as unfavourable.
Trump has long defended the participants in the January 6 attack, going so far as to pardon more than 1,500 rioters who had pending criminal charges or convictions during the first day of his second term.
Another 14 rioters had their sentences commuted. In a presidential statement, Trump called the prosecutions a “grave national injustice”.
The attack on the Capitol was prompted by Trump’s false claims that his defeat in the 2020 presidential election had been “rigged”. Spurred by the misinformation, thousands of Trump supporters stormed the Capitol on the day that lawmakers inside were certifying the Electoral College votes.
More than 100 police officers were hurt, and multiple deaths were attributed to the attack, including a protester who was shot while trying to enter the Speaker’s Lobby and a police officer who collapsed and suffered multiple strokes, potentially due to the stress of being assaulted.
Some officers were beaten with flag poles, fire extinguishers and hockey sticks.
Security footage at the US Capitol shows Taylor Taranto entering the federal building as part of a crowd of rioters on January 6, 2021 [Department of Justice/AP Photo]
The Justice Department has yet to comment on Wednesday’s suspensions of the two prosecutors.
The lawyers were previously scheduled to appear on Thursday in federal court for the sentencing of Taylor Taranto, a Navy veteran who was among those pardoned by Trump for participating in the January 6 attack.
During that clash, he was observed attempting to breach the Speaker’s Chamber, a restricted area. Taranto had been charged with four misdemeanours for those actions before Trump pardoned his charges.
In May, Taranto was convicted on unrelated charges, including illegally carrying two firearms, the unlawful possession of ammunition, and spreading false information and hoaxes.
Taranto had been arrested on June 29, 2023, near an address in Washington, DC, supposedly linked to former President Barack Obama, one of Trump’s political rivals.
Trump had posted the address on social media, and Taranto proceeded to drive to the area, livestreaming his progress, in an attempt to seek out “tunnels” to enter the residence.
Upon exiting his vehicle and entering a restricted area, he was confronted by Secret Service agents. He allegedly told them, “Gotta get the shot, stop at nothing to get the shot.”
There were reportedly more than 500 rounds of ammunition in his van.
A day earlier, Taranto had also recorded a “hoax” video claiming that a car bomb was headed to the National Institute of Standards and Technology.
Taranto’s defence lawyers have described him as a “journalist” and “comedian”. But prosecutors have sought a sentence of more than two years in prison for Taranto.
That sentencing recommendation was kept in the revised documents submitted on Wednesday.
At Thursday’s hearing, US District Judge Carl Nichols praised the suspended prosecutors, White and Valdivia, saying they did a “commendable and excellent job” and displayed the “highest standards of professionalism” in the case.
Nichols ultimately sentenced Taranto to 21 months in prison. Since Taranto has already been in custody for 22 months, he will not serve any additional time.
Career prosecutors are assigned to criminal cases regardless of the presidential administration in power.
But the Trump White House has repeatedly sought to sideline, if not fire, those who prosecuted cases that run contrary to the Republican president’s interests.
In January, for instance, nearly two dozen employees of the US Attorney’s Office in Washington, DC, were fired, many with links to the January 6 prosecutions carried out under former President Joe Biden.
And in June, another three prosecutors involved in the January 6 cases were reportedly fired.
The Trump administration will limit the number of refugees admitted to the US to 7,500 over the next year, and give priority to white South Africans.
The move, announced in a notice published on Thursday, marks a dramatic cut from the previous limit of 125,000 set by former President Joe Biden and will bring the cap to a record low.
No reason was given for the cut, but the notice said it was “justified by humanitarian concerns or is otherwise in the national interest”.
In January, Trump signed an executive order suspending the US Refugee Admissions Programme, or USRAP, which he said would allow US authorities to prioritise national security and public safety.
The previous lowest refugee admissions cap was set by the first Trump administration in 2020, when it allocated 15,000 spots for fiscal year 2021.
The notice posted to the website of the Federal Register said the 7,500 admissions would “primarily” be allocated to Afrikaner South Africans and “other victims of illegal or unjust discrimination in their respective homelands”.
In February, the US president announced the suspension of critical aid to South Africa and offered to allow members of the Afrikaner community – who are mostly white descendants of early Dutch and French settlers – to settle in the US as refugees.
South Africa’s ambassador to Washington, Ebrahim Rasool, was later expelled after accusing Trump of “mobilising a supremacism” and trying to “project white victimhood as a dog whistle”.
In the Oval Office in May, Trump confronted South Africa’s President Cyril Ramaphosa and claimed white farmers in his nation were being killed and “persecuted”.
The White House also played a video which they said showed burial sites for murdered white farmers. It later emerged that the videos were scenes from a 2020 protest in which the crosses represented farmers killed over multiple years.
The tense meeting came just days after the US granted asylum to 60 Afrikaners.
The South African government has vehemently denied that Afrikaners and other White South Africans are being persecuted.
Watch: ‘Turn the lights down’ – how the Trump-Ramaphosa meeting took an unexpected turn
On his first day in office on 20 January, Trump said the US would suspend USRAP to reflect the US’s lack of “ability to absorb large numbers of migrants, and in particular, refugees, into its communities in a manner that does not compromise the availability of resources for Americans” and “protects their safety and security”.
The US policy of accepting white South Africans has already prompted accusations of unfair treatment from refugee advocacy groups.
Some have argued the US is now effectively shut to other persecuted groups or people facing potential harm in their home country, and even former allies that helped US forces in Afghanistan or the Middle East.
“This decision doesn’t just lower the refugee admissions ceiling,” Global Refuge CEO and president Krish O’Mara Vignarajah said on Thursday. “It lowers our moral standing.”
“At a time of crisis in countries ranging from Afghanistan to Venezuela to Sudan and beyond, concentrating the vast majority of admissions on one group undermines the programme’s purpose as well as its credibility,” she added.
Refugees International also slammed the move, saying it “makes a mockery of refugee protection and of American values”.
“Let us be frank: whatever hardships some Afrikaners may face, this population has no plausible claim on refugee status – they are not fleeing systematic persecution,” Refugees International said in its statement.
The South African government has yet to respond to the latest announcement.
During the Oval Office meeting, President Ramaphosa said only that he hoped that Trump officials would listen to South Africans about the issue, and later said he believed there is “doubt and disbelief about all this in [Trump’s] head”.
Earlier this year, Ramaphosa signed a controversial law allowing the government to seize privately-owned land without compensation in some circumstances.
While the country does not release race-based crime figured, figures published earlier this year showed that 7,000 people were murdered in South African between October and December 2024.
Of these, 12 were killed in farm attacks and only one of the 12 was a farmer. Five others were farm dwellers and four were employees, who are likely to have been black.
A Nov. 4 statewide ballot measure pushed by California Democrats to help the party’s efforts to win control of the U.S. House of Representatives and stifle President Trump’s agenda has a substantial lead in a new poll released on Thursday.
Notable in an off-year special election about the arcane and complicated process of redistricting, 71% of likely voters said they had heard a significant amount of information about the ballot measure, according to the poll.
“That’s extraordinary,” said Mark DiCamillo, director of the IGS poll. “Even though it’s kind of an esoteric topic that doesn’t affect their daily lives, it’s something voters are paying attention to.”
That may be because roughly $158 million has been donated in less than three months to the main campaign committees supporting and opposing the measure, according to campaign fundraising reports filed with the state last week. Voters in the state have been flooded with political ads.
Californians watching Tuesday night’s World Series game between the Los Angeles Dodgers and the Toronto Blue Jays saw that firsthand.
In the first minutes of the game, former President Obama, Newsom, Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren and other prominent Democrats spoke in favor of Proposition 50 in an ad that probably cost at least $250,000 to air, according to a Democratic media buyer who is not associated with the campaign.
According to the survey, the breakdown among voters was highly partisan, with more than 9 out of 10 Democrats supporting Proposition 50 and a similar proportion of Republicans opposing it. Among voters who belong to other parties, or identify as “no party preference,” 57% favored the ballot measure, while 39% opposed it.
Only 2% of the likely voters surveyed said they were undecided, which DiCamillo said was highly unusual.
Historically, undecided voters, particularly independents, often end up opposing ballot measures they are uncertain about, preferring to stick with the status quo, he said.
“Usually there was always a rule — look at the undecideds in late-breaking polls, and assume most would vote no,” he said. “But this poll shows there are very few of them out there. Voters have a bead on this one.”
In the voter-rich urban areas of Los Angeles County and the San Francisco Bay area, Proposition 50 led by wide margins, the poll found. Voters in Orange County, the Inland Empire and the Central Valley were pretty evenly divided.
Redistricting battles are underway in states across the nation, but California’s Proposition 50 has received a major share of national attention and donations. The Newsom committee supporting Proposition 50 has raised far more money than the two main committees opposing it, so much so that the governor this week told supporters to stop sending checks.
The U.S. House of Representatives is controlled by the GOP but is narrowly divided. The party that wins control of Congress in the 2026 midterm elections will determine whether Trump can continue enacting his agenda or whether he is the subject of investigations and possibly another impeachment effort.
California’s 52 congressional districts — the most of any state — currently are drawn by a voter-approved independent commission once every decade following the U.S. census.
But after Trump urged GOP leaders in Texas this summer to redraw their districts to bolster the number of Republicans in Congress, Newsom and other California Democrats decided in August to ask voters to allow a rare mid-decade partisan redrawing of the state’s district boundaries. If passed, Proposition 50 could potentially add five more Democrats to the state’s congressional delegation.
Supporters of Proposition 50 have painted their effort as a proxy fight against Trump and his policies that have overwhelmingly affected Californians, such as immigration raids and the deployment of the National Guard on the streets of Los Angeles.
Opponents of the proposition have focused on the mechanics of redistricting, arguing the ballot measure subverts the will of California voters who enacted the independent redistricting commission more than a decade ago.
“The results suggest that Democrats have succeeded in framing the debate surrounding the proposition around support or opposition to President Trump and national Republicans, rather than about voters’ more general preference for nonpartisan redistricting,” Eric Schickler, co-director of IGS, said in a statement.
Early voting data suggest the pro-Proposition 50 message has been successful.
As of Tuesday, nearly 5 million Californians — about 21% of the state’s 23 million registered voters — had cast ballots, according to trackers run by Democratic and Republican strategists.
Democrats greatly outnumber Republicans among the state’s registered voters, and they have outpaced them in returning ballots, 52% to 27%. Voters who do not have a party preference or who support other political parties have returned 21% of the ballots.
The Berkeley/L.A. Times poll findings mirrored recent surveys by the Public Policy Institute of California, CBS News/YouGov and Emerson College.
Among voters surveyed by the Berkeley/L.A. Times poll, 67% of Californians who had already voted supported Proposition 50, while 33% said they had weighed in against the ballot measure.
The proposition also had an edge among those who planned to vote but had not yet cast their ballots, with 57% saying they planned to support the effort and 40% saying they planned to oppose it.
However, 70% of voters who plan to cast ballots in person on Nov. 4, election day, said they would vote against Proposition 50, according to the poll. Less than 3 in 10 who said they would vote at their local polling place said they would support the rare mid-decade redistricting.
These numbers highlight a recent shift in how Americans vote. Historically, Republicans voted by mail early, while Democrats cast ballots on election day. But this dynamic was upended in recent years after Trump questioned the security of early voting and mail voting, including just recently when he criticized Proposition 50.
“No mail-in or ‘Early’ Voting, Yes to Voter ID! Watch how totally dishonest the California Prop Vote is! Millions of Ballots being ‘shipped,’” Trump wrote on his social media platform, Truth Social. “GET SMART REPUBLICANS, BEFORE IT IS TOO LATE!!!”
GOP leaders across the state have pushed back at such messaging without calling out the president. Urging Republicans to vote early, they argue that waiting to cast ballots only gives Democrats a greater advantage in California elections.
Among the arguments promoted by the campaigns, likely voters agreed with every one posited by the supporters of Proposition 50, notably that the ballot measure would help Democrats win control of the House, while standing up to Trump and his attempts to rig the 2026 election, according to the poll. But they also agreed that the ballot measure would further diminish the power of the GOP in California, and that they didn’t trust partisan state lawmakers to draw congressional districts.
The Berkeley IGS/Times poll surveyed 8,141 California registered voters online in English and Spanish from Oct. 20 to 27. The results are estimated to have a margin of error of 2 percentage points in either direction in the overall sample, and larger numbers for subgroups.
Advocates say new rules let Education Department to politically punish groups working on immigration, transgender care.
The United States Department of Education has finalised new rules that could bar nonprofits deemed to have undertaken work with a “substantial illegal purpose” from a special student loan forgiveness programme.
Those rules, finalised on Thursday, appear to single out certain organisations that do work in areas that President Donald Trump politically opposes, including immigration advocacy and transgender rights.
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Under the new rules, set to take effect in July 2026, the education secretary has the power to exclude groups if they engage in activities like the “chemical castration” of children, using a politically charged term for gender-affirming healthcare, including puberty-delaying medication.
It also allows the education secretary to bar groups accused of supporting undocumented immigration or “terrorist” organisations.
The Trump administration has said its decisions “will not be made based on the political views or policy preferences of the organization”.
But advocates fear the move is the administration’s latest effort to target left-leaning and liberal organisations.
Trump has already threatened to crack down on several liberal nonprofits, which the White House has broadly accused of being part of “domestic terror networks”.
Thursday’s rules concern the Public Service Loan Forgiveness programme, created by an act of Congress in 2007.
In an effort to direct more graduates into public service jobs, the programme promises to cancel federal student loans for government employees and many nonprofit workers after they have made 10 years of payments.
Workers in the public sector, including teachers, medical professionals, firefighters, social service professionals and lawyers, are among those who can benefit.
In a statement, the Trump administration defended the updated rules, calling them a necessary bulwark to protect taxpayer funds.
The programme “was meant to support Americans who dedicate their careers to public service – not to subsidize organizations that violate the law, whether by harboring illegal immigrants or performing prohibited medical procedures that attempt to transition children away from their biological sex”, said Education Undersecretary Nicholas Kent.
Critics, however, have denounced the administration for using false claims of “terrorism” or criminal behaviour to silence opposing views and restrict civil liberties.
Michael Lukens, executive director of the Amica Center for Immigrant Rights, said the new rules weaponised loan forgiveness.
Lukens explained that many of the lawyers, social workers and paralegals who work at his organisation handle cases to stop deportations and other immigration litigation.
They count on public service loan forgiveness to take jobs that pay significantly less than the private sector, he said.
“All of a sudden, that’s going away,” Lukens told The Associated Press news agency. “The younger generation, I hope, will be able to wait this out for the next couple of years to see if it gets better, but if it doesn’t, we’re going to see a lot of people leave the field to go and work in a for-profit space.”
Organisations have raised concerns over the education secretary’s broad power to determine if a group should be barred. Short of a legal finding, the secretary can decide based on a “preponderance of the evidence” whether an employer is in violation.
The National Council of Nonprofits was among the associations criticising the change.
It said the rules would allow future administrations from any political party to change eligibility rules “based on their own priorities or ideology”.
Like a teenager armed with their first smartphone, President Trump’s masked immigration enforcers love nothing more than to mug for friendly cameras.
They gladly invite pseudo-filmmakers — some federal government workers, others conservative influencers or pro-Trump reporters — to embed during raids so they can capture every tamale lady agents slam onto the sidewalk, every protester they pelt with pepper balls, every tear gas canister used to clear away pesky activists. From that mayhem comes slickly produced videos that buttress the Trump administration’s claim that everyone involved in the push to boot illegal immigrants from the U.S. is a hero worthy of cinematic love.
But not everything that Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Border Patrol and its sister agencies do shows up in their approved rivers of reels.
Their propagandists aren’t highlighting the story of Jaime Alanís García, a Mexican farmworker who fell 30 feet to his death in Camarillo this summer while trying to escape one of the largest immigration raids in Southern California in decades.
They’re not making videos about 39-year-old Ismael Ayala-Uribe, an Orange County resident who moved to this country from Mexico as a 4-year-old and died in a Victorville hospital in September after spending weeks in ICE custody complaining about his health.
They’re not addressing how ICE raids led to the deaths of Josué Castro Rivera and Carlos Roberto Montoya, Central American nationals run over and killed by highway traffic in Virginia and Monrovia while fleeing in terror. Or what happened to Silverio Villegas González, shot dead in his car as he tried to speed away from two ICE agents in suburban Chicago.
Those men are just some of the 20-plus people who have died in 2025 while caught up in ICE’s machine — the deadliest year for the agency in two decades, per NPR.
Publicly, the Department of Homeland Security has described those incidents as “tragic” while assigning blame to everything but itself. For instance, a Homeland Security official told the Associated Press that Castro Rivera’s death was “a direct result of every politician, activist and reporter who continue to spread propaganda and misinformation about ICE’s mission and ways to avoid detention” — whatever the hell that means.
An ICE spokesperson asked for more time to respond to my request for comment, said “Thank you Sir” when I extended my deadline, then never got back to me. Whatever the response would’ve been, Trump’s deportation Leviathan looks like it’s about to get deadlier.
As reported by my colleagues Andrea Castillo and Rachel Uranga, his administration plans to get rid of more than half of ICE’s field office directors due to grumblings from the White House that the deportations that have swamped large swaths of the United States all year haven’t happened faster and in larger numbers.
Asked for comment, Tricia McLaughlin, Homeland Security assistant secretary for public affairs, described The Times’ questions as “sensationalism” and added “only the media would describe standard agency personnel changes as a ‘massive shakeup.’”
Agents are becoming more brazen as more of them get hired thanks to billions of dollars in new funds. In Oakland, one fired a chemical round into the face of a Christian pastor from just feet away. In Santa Ana, another pulled a gun from his waistband and pointed it at activists who had been trailing him from a distance in their car. In the Chicago area, a woman claimed a group of them fired pepper balls at her car even though her two young children were inside.
La migra knows they can act with impunity because they have the full-throated backing of the White House. Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller crowed on Fox News recently, “To all ICE officers: You have federal immunity in the conduct of your duties.”
That’s not actually true, but when have facts mattered to this presidency if it gets in the way of its apocalyptic goals?
Greg Bovino, El Centro Border Patrol sector chief, center, walks with federal agents near an ICE detention facility in Broadview, Ill.
(Erin Hooley / Associated Press)
Tasked with turning up the terror dial to 11 is Gregory Bovino, a longtime Border Patrol sector chief based out of El Centro, Calif., who started the year with a raid in Kern County so egregious that a federal judge slammed it as agents “walk[ing] up to people with brown skin and say[ing], ‘Give me your papers.’” A federal judge ordered him to check in with her every day for the foreseeable future after the Border Patrol tear-gassed a neighborhood in a Chicago suburb that was about to host its annual Halloween children’s parade (an appeals court has temporarily blocked the move).
Bovino now reports directly to Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and is expected to pick most of the ICE field office directors from Customs and Border Protection, the arm of the federal government that the Border Patrol belongs to. It logged 180 immigrant deaths under its purview for the 2023 fiscal year, the last year for which stats are publicly available and the third straight year that the number had increased.
To put someone like Bovino in charge of executing Trump’s deportation plans is like gifting a gas refinery to an arsonist.
He’s constantly trying to channel the conquering ethos of Wild West, complete with a strutting posse of agents — some with cowboy hats — following him everywhere, white horses trailed by American flags for photo ops and constant shout-outs to “Ma and Pa America” when speaking to the media. When asked by a CBS News reporter recently when his self-titled “Mean Green Machine” would end its Chicago campaign — one that has seen armed troops march through downtown and man boats on the Chicago River like they were patrolling Baghdad — Bovino replied, “When all the illegal aliens [self-deport] and/or we arrest ‘em all.”
Such scorched-earth jibber-jabber underlines a deportation policy under which the possibility of death for those it pursues is baked into its foundation. ICE plans to hire dozens of healthcare workers — doctors, nurses, psychiatrists — in anticipation of Trump’s plans to build more detention camps, many slated for inhospitable locations like the so-called Alligator Alcatraz camp in the Florida Everglades. That was announced to the world on social media with an AI-generated image of grinning alligators wearing MAGA caps — as if the White House was salivating at the prospect of desperate people trying to escape only to find certain carnage.
In his CBS News interview, Bovino described the force his team has used in Chicago — where someone was shot and killed, a pastors got hit with pepper balls from high above and the sound of windshields broken by immigration agents looking to snatch someone from their cars is now part of the Windy City’s soundtrack — as “exemplary.” The Border Patrol’s peewee Patton added he felt his guys used “the least amount of force necessary to accomplish the mission. If someone strays into a pepper ball, then that’s on them.”
One shudders to think what Bovino thinks is excessive for la migra. With his powers now radically expanded, we’re about to find out.
An entire wing of the White House, a building he calls “the most special, important building on the planet,” was going to be replaced to make way for a ballroom that President Trump wants to add to the building.
But when McLaurin, president of the White House Historical Assn., saw the first images of backhoes tearing into the East Wing, it still came as a bit of a shock.
“When the reality of things happen, they strike us a little bit differently than the theory of things happening, so it was a bit of a jarring moment,” McLaurin told the Associated Press in an interview Tuesday.
McLaurin, who has led the nonprofit, nonpartisan organization for more than a decade, did not take a position on the changes. It’s not his job. “Ours is not to make happen, or to keep from happening — but to document what does happen, what happens in this great home that we call the White House,” he said.
But he said he sees a silver lining from the “jarring” images: They have piqued public interest in White House history.
“What has happened since then is so amazing in that in the past two weeks, more people have been talking about White House history, focused on White House history, learning what is an East Wing, what is the West Wing … what are these spaces in this building that we simply call the White House,” McLaurin said.
Trump demolishes the East Wing
The general public became aware of the demolition work on Oct. 20 after photos of construction equipment ripping into the building began to circulate online, prompting an outcry from Democrats, preservationists and others.
In a matter of days, the entire two-story East Wing — the traditional base of operations for first ladies and their staffs — was gone. The demolition included a covered walkway between the White House, the family movie theater and a garden dedicated to First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy.
Trump had talked about building a ballroom for years and pushed ahead with his vision when he returned to office in January. His proposal calls for a 90,000-square-foot structure, almost twice the size of the 55,000-square-foot White House itself and able to accommodate 1,000 people. The plan also includes building a more modern East Wing, officials said.
The president ordered the demolition despite not yet having sign-off for the ballroom construction from the National Capital Planning Commission, one of several entities with a role in approving additions to federal buildings and property. The White House has yet to submit the ballroom plans for the commission’s review because it is closed during the government shutdown.
Trump appointed loyalists to the planning commission in July. On Tuesday he also fired the six members of the Commission of Fine Arts, a group of architectural experts that advises the federal government on historic preservation and public buildings. A new slate of members who are more aligned with Trump’s policies will be named, a White House official said, speaking on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to comment publicly on personnel decisions. The Washington Post was first to report the firings.
East Wing art and furnishings preserved
It was the job of the White House curator and their staff to carefully remove, catalog and store the art, the official portraits of former first ladies, and furnishings from the East Wing, McLaurin said.
The White House Historical Assn. does not have a decision-making role in the construction. But it has been working with the White House to prepare for the changes.
“We had known since late summer that the staff of the East Wing had moved out. I actually made my last visit on the last day of tours on August the 28th,” McLaurin said.
Working with the curator and chief usher, the association used 3D scanning technology “so that every room, space, nook and cranny of the East Wing, whether it was molding or hinges or door knobs or whatever it was, was captured to the nth degree” to be digitally recreated as an exhibit or to teach the history of that space, McLaurin said.
A photographer also documented the building as it was being taken apart. It will be a while before any images are available, but McLaurin said items were found when flooring was pulled up and when wall coverings were pulled back that “no living person remembered were there. So those will be lessons in history.”
White House has grown over the years
Trump’s aides have responded to criticism of the demolition by arguing that other presidents have made changes to the White House too. Trump said the White House needs a bigger entertaining space.
McLaurin said the building continues to evolve from what it looked like when it was built in 1792.
“There is a need to modernize and to grow,” he said, noting that White House social secretaries for generations chafed at the space limitations for entertaining. “But how it’s done and how it’s accomplished and what results is really the vision of the president who undertakes that project.”
What the White House Historical Assn. does
Jacqueline Kennedy created the historical association in 1961 to help preserve the museum quality of the interior of the White House and educate the public. It receives no government funding and raises money mostly through private donations and sales of retail merchandise.
It is not the mission of the association to take a position on construction, McLaurin said. Its primary mandate is preserving the State Floor and some of the historic bedrooms upstairs in the private living quarters, and teaching the history of the White House, which is an accredited museum. The State Floor is made up of the Green, Blue and Red Rooms, the East Room and State Dining Room, the Cross Hall and Grand Foyer.
“Ours is not to support — or to not support,” McLaurin said. “Ours is to understand, to get the details.”
Since the demolition, McLaurin said he has seen attendance spike at a free educational center the association opened in September 2024 a block from the White House. “The People’s House: A White House Experience” is open seven days a week — including during the shutdown.
The educational center had its busiest days the weekend of Oct. 17-19, with about 1,500 daily visitors, up from a previous average of 900, he said.
In shutdowns past — including during Trump’s first term — presidents normally scaled back their schedules. With staffers deemed “non-essential” sent home, the White House often sought to appear sympathetic to Americans affected by disruptions to healthcare, veterans benefits and other key services.
Nonetheless, it’s been mostly business as usual for Trump over the last 29 days.
“It’s like that country song: ‘Sometimes falling feels like flying for a little while,’” said Paul Begala, a Democratic strategist and former advisor to President Clinton, who presided over two shutdowns between 1995 and 1996. “They seem to be like, ‘So far, so good, man.’ ”
Ballroom, golf and trips
Trump was on a six-day swing through Asia, after a recent, whirlwind Middle East visit. He hosted a White House fundraiser for major donors to his $300-million ballroom that has seen construction crews tear down the East Wing, and held another fundraiser at his Florida estate.
Members of the Cabinet have similarly hit the road. Vice President JD Vance traveled to Israel, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem went to Oregon and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth toured Topgun, the U.S. Navy’s elite fighter weapons school in Nevada.
Only 32% of staff in the Executive Office of the President were set to be furloughed during the current shutdown, according to a White House budget office contingency report. That’s down from 61% during the last shutdown in 2018-19, in Trump’s first term. About half of the Executive Mansion’s team that includes housekeepers, ushers, valets and butlers are currently working. Last time, more than 70% were furloughed.
It’s often been hard to tell a shutdown is happening with so many staffers remaining at their desks.
“I don’t even know if they’re supposed to be working, but they wouldn’t miss a day,” Trump said during an event last week.
It’s a departure from Trump’s first term, when he cut out golf and canceled a planned trip to Florida for Christmas during the 2018 shutdown, which stretched into the new year. He made a surprise visit to troops in Iraq then, but nixed plans to go to the Swiss Alps for the World Economic Forum.
When hosting Clemson University football players celebrating their NCAA football championship, Trump brought in burgers and fries from McDonald’s and Domino’s pizza because of White House staff furloughs.
This time, the president had Republican senators over for a lunch that featured burgers, too. But staff made them. “They do great food at the White House,” Trump said.
‘A smarter approach’
Some say barreling ahead like there’s no shutdown has some political advantages for Trump, allowing him to look presidential while avoiding congressional bickering.
“It’s a much smarter approach,” said Marc Short, chief of staff to former Vice President Mike Pence.
In Trump’s first-term shutdown, he rejected a congressional compromise to force the government to close — an attempt to win funding to wall off the U.S.-Mexico border. Then, he named Pence as lead negotiator to end the shutdown while involving his son-in-law Jared Kushner — creating the visual of them having to go to Capitol Hill.
“The first go-around, he was pretty clear with cameras rolling: He said he wanted the shutdown. He claimed ownership,” Short said. This time? “The White House has been clear about not owning it.”
Back in 1995, Begala recalled talking strategy with Clinton during a sweaty summer run at Fort McNair in Washington, and telling the president that Republican House Speaker Newt Gingrich and his party “think they can roll you,” forcing cuts to Medicare by threatening a shutdown.
Clinton responded: “‘My favorite movie’s ‘High Noon,’ ” Begala recalled, meaning the western in which a marshal stands up to outlaws. ”They do that — then I just have a Gary Cooper, ‘High Noon’ moment. That’s easy.”
When Gingrich later came to the White House to negotiate, Begala said Clinton wouldn’t budge, even though some advisors urged him to cut a deal. Voters ultimately blamed congressional Republicans more than the White House for the government closing, and Clinton was easily reelected in 1996.
“That could have really gone badly for Clinton,” Begala said. “But he did understand that standing strong, and having a Gary Cooper moment, would be really good for him.”
Trump could probably find a way to end the current shutdown if he wanted to prioritize it, said Leon Panetta, who worked to end past government closures as Clinton’s chief of staff. But Trump’s “attention is focused on everything but sitting down and getting both parties together to resolve this issue,” Panetta said.
‘Continuing to work night and day’
During the 16-day government shutdown of 2013, President Obama scrapped a four-country Asia trip and skipped the Congressional Hispanic Caucus gala. His schedule featured events meant to show the shutdown’s effects, including visiting a Maryland construction firm that benefited from the kind of federal loans jeopardized with the government shuttered.
In 2019, as that shutdown dragged on, Trump’s White House officials acknowledged feeling pressure to end it. This time, the administration’s approach has been to blame the Democrats, while signaling that it’s prepared to wait — even warning of coming travel delays during the Thanksgiving holidays.
“President Trump is continuing to work night and day on behalf of American people,” said White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson. “The entire administration, including the president, will continue highlighting the workers and families who are suffering because of the Democrats’ decision to shut down the government.”
Bill Daley, a White House chief of staff to Obama before the 2013 shutdown, said Trump isn’t acting like he’s feeling political heat to reopen the government, even before next Tuesday’s gubernatorial elections in Virginia and New Jersey — both home to sizable federal workforces.
“My guess is, he thinks it helps him,” Daley said, “until — and I don’t know if it will — the bottom falls out.”
Democrats are demanding an extension of expiring tax credits that have helped millions of people afford health insurance, while Republicans say they won’t negotiate until the government is reopened.
Trump has said the shutdown must end, but also used it to cut federal positions and target programs Democrats favor, while redirecting funds to his own priorities — like covering military paychecks. The president has even said of closed museums, “We should probably just open them.”
Americans, meanwhile, are divided on who’s to blame.
Roughly 6 in 10 say Trump and congressional Republicans have “a great deal” or “quite a bit” of responsibility for the shutdown, while 54% say the same about Democrats in Congress, according to a recent poll from the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research.
Mike McCurry, a White House press secretary under Clinton, said Democrats have yet to settle on a clear shutdown message that has resonated. Trump has the presidency to deliver his take, but McCurry noted he has been “mercurial.”
“It is not likely we’re going to have clear winners or losers after this,” McCurry said. “It’s going to be a bit of a muddle.”
WASHINGTON — The Trump administration is restricting the number of refugees it admits into the country to 7,500 and they will mostly be white South Africans, a dramatic drop after the U.S. previously allowed in hundreds of thousands of people fleeing war and persecution from around the world.
The administration published the news Thursday in a notice on the Federal Registry.
No reason was given for the numbers, which are a dramatic decrease from last year’s ceiling set under the Biden administration of 125,000. The Associated Press previously reported that the administration was considering admitting as few as 7,500 refugees and mostly white South Africans.
The memo said only that the admission of the 7,500 refugees during 2026 fiscal year was “justified by humanitarian concerns or is otherwise in the national interest.”
As the presidents of China and the US meet in South Korea, Zongyuan Zoe Liu at the Council on Foreign Relations says China may offer concessions on its rare earth minerals.
As the presidents of China and the US meet in South Korea, Zongyuan Zoe Liu at the Council on Foreign Relations says China may offer concessions on its rare earth minerals.
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DUBAI, United Arab Emirates — President Trump’s comments Thursday suggesting the United States will restart its testing of nuclear weapons upends decades of American policy in regards to the bomb, but come as Washington’s rivals have been expanding and testing their nuclear-capable arsenals.
Nuclear weapons policy, once thought to be a relic of the Cold War, increasingly has come to the fore as Russia has made repeated atomic threats to both the U.S. and Europe during its war on Ukraine. Moscow also acknowledged this week testing a nuclear-powered-and-capable cruise missile called the Burevestnik, code-named Skyfall by NATO, and a nuclear-armed underwater drone.
China is building more ground-based nuclear missile silos. Meanwhile, North Korea just unveiled a new intercontinental ballistic missile it plans to test, part of a nuclear-capable arsenal likely able to reach the continental U.S.
The threat is starting to bleed into popular culture as well, most recently with director Kathryn Bigelow ‘s new film “A House of Dynamite.”
But what does Trump’s announcement mean and how would it affect what’s happening now with nuclear tensions? Here’s what to know.
Trump’s comments came in a post on his Truth Social website just before meeting Chinese leader Xi Jinping. In it, Trump noted other countries testing weapons and wrote: “I have instructed the Department of War to start testing our Nuclear Weapons on an equal basis. That process will begin immediately.”
The president’s post raised immediate questions. America’s nuclear arsenal is maintained by the Energy Department and the National Nuclear Security Administration, a semiautonomous agency within it — not the Defense Department. The Energy Department has overseen testing of nuclear weapons since its creation in 1977. Two other agencies before it — not the Defense Department — conducted tests.
Trump also claimed the U.S. “has more Nuclear Weapons than any other country.” Russia is believed to have 5,580 nuclear warheads, according to the Washington-based Arms Control Association, while the U.S. has 5,225. Those figures include so-called “retired” warheads waiting to be dismantled.
The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute further breaks the warhead total down, with the U.S. having 1,770 deployed warheads with 1,930 in reserve. Russia has 1,718 deployed warheads and 2,591 in reserve.
The two countries account for nearly 90% of the world’s atomic warheads.
U.S. last carried out a nuclear test in 1992
From the time America conducted its “Trinity” nuclear bomb detonation in 1945 to 1992, the U.S. detonated 1,030 atomic bombs in tests — the most of any country. Those figures do not include the two nuclear weapons America used against Japan in Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the end of World War II.
The first American tests were atmospheric, but they were then moved underground to limit nuclear fallout. Scientists have come to refer to such tests as “shots.” The last such “shot,” called Divider as part of Operation Julin, took place Sept. 23, 1992, at the Nevada National Security Sites, a sprawling compound some 65 miles from Las Vegas.
America halted its tests for a couple of reasons. The first was the collapse of the Soviet Union at the end of the Cold War. The U.S. also signed the Comprehensive Nuclear Test-Ban Treaty in 1996. There have been tests since the treaty, however — by India, North Korea and Pakistan, the world’s newest nuclear powers. The United Kingdom and France also have nuclear weapons, while Israel long has been suspected of possessing atomic bombs.
But broadly speaking, the U.S. also had decades of data from tests, allowing it to use computer modeling and other techniques to determine whether a weapon would successfully detonate. Every president since Barack Obama has backed plans to modernize America’s nuclear arsenal, whose maintenance and upgrading will cost nearly $1 trillion over the next decade, according to the Congressional Budget Office.
The U.S. relies on the so-called “nuclear triad” — ground-based silos, aircraft-carried bombs and nuclear-tipped missiles in submarines at sea — to deter others from launching their weapons against America.
Restarting testing raises additional questions
If the U.S. restarted nuclear weapons testing, it isn’t immediately clear what the goal would be. Nonproliferation experts have warned any scientific objective likely would be eclipsed by the backlash to a test — and possibly be a starting gun for other major nuclear powers to begin their own widespread testing.
“Restarting the U.S. nuclear testing program could be one of the most consequential policy actions the Trump administration undertakes — a U.S. test could set off an uncontrolled chain of events, with other countries possibly responding with their own nuclear tests, destabilizing global security, and accelerating a new arms race,” experts warned in a February article in the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists.
“The goal of conducting a fast-tracked nuclear test can only be political, not scientific. … It would give Russia, China and other nuclear powers free rein to restart their own nuclear testing programs, essentially without political and economic fallout.”
Any future U.S. test likely would take place in Nevada at the testing sites, but a lot of work likely would need to go into the sites to prepare them given it’s been over 30 years since the last test. A series of slides made for a presentation at Los Alamos National Laboratories in 2018 laid out the challenges, noting that in the 1960s the city of Mercury, Nevada — at the testing grounds — had been the second-largest city in Nevada.
On average, 20,000 people had been on site to organize and prepare for the tests. That capacity has waned in the decades since.
“One effects shot would require from two to four years to plan and execute,” the presentation reads. “These were massive undertakings.”
ABOARD AIR FORCE ONE — President Trump described his face-to-face with Chinese leader Xi Jinping on Thursday as a roaring success, saying he would cut tariffs on China, while Beijing had agreed to allow the export of rare earth elements and start buying American soybeans.
The president told reporters aboard Air Force One that the U.S. would lower tariffs implemented earlier this year as punishment on China for its selling of chemicals used to make fentanyl from 20% to 10%. That brings the total combined tariff rate on China down from 57% to 47%
“I guess on the scale from 0 to 10, with ten being the best, I would say the meeting was a 12,” Trump said. “I think it was a 12.”
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said China agreed to purchase 25 million metric tons of U.S. soybeans annually for the next three years, starting with 12 million metric tons from now to January. U.S. soybean exports to China, a huge market for them, had come to a standstill in the trade dispute.
“So you know, our great soybean farmers, who the Chinese used as political pawns, that’s off the table, and they should prosper in the years to come,” Bessent told Fox Business Network’s “Mornings with Maria.”
Trump said that he would go to China in April and Xi would come to the U.S. “some time after that.” The president said they also discussed the export of more advanced computer chips to China, saying that Nvidia would be in talks with Chinese officials.
Trump said he could sign a trade deal with China “pretty soon.”
Xi said Washington and Beijing would work to finalize their agreements to provide “peace of mind” to both countries and the rest of the world, according to a report on the meeting distributed by state media.
“Both sides should take the long-term perspective into account, focusing on the benefits of cooperation rather than falling into a vicious cycle of mutual retaliation,” he said.
Sources of tension remain
Despite Trump’s optimism after a 100-minute meeting with Xi in South Korea, there continues to be the potential for major tensions between the world’s two largest economies. Both nations are seeking dominant places in manufacturing, developing emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence, and shaping world affairs like Russia’s war in Ukraine.
Trump’s aggressive use of tariffs since returning to the White House for a second term, combined with China’s retaliatory limits on exports of rare earth elements, gave the meeting newfound urgency. There is a mutual recognition that neither side wants to risk blowing up the world economy in ways that could jeopardize their own country’s fortunes.
When the two were seated at the start of the meeting, Xi read prepared remarks that stressed a willingness to work together despite differences.
“Given our different national conditions, we do not always see eye to eye with each other,” he said through a translator. “It is normal for the two leading economies of the world to have frictions now and then.”
There was a slight difference in translation as China’s Xinhua News Agency reported Xi as telling Trump that having some differences is inevitable.
Finding ways to lower the temperature
The leaders met in Busan, South Korea, a port city about 47 miles south from Gyeongju, the main venue for the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit.
In the days leading up to the meeting, U.S. officials signaled that Trump did not intend to make good on a recent threat to impose an additional 100% import tax on Chinese goods, and China showed signs it was willing to relax its export controls on rare earths and also buy soybeans from America.
Officials from both countries met earlier this week in Kuala Lumpur to lay the groundwork for their leaders. Afterward, China’s top trade negotiator Li Chenggang said they had reached a “preliminary consensus,” a statement affirmed by U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent who said there was “ a very successful framework.”
Shortly before the meeting on Thursday, Trump posted on Truth Social that the meeting would be the “G2,” a recognition of America and China’s status as the world’s biggest economies. The Group of Seven and Group of 20 are other forums of industrialized nations.
But while those summits often happen at luxury spaces, this meeting took place in humbler surroundings: Trump and Xi met in a small gray building with a blue roof on a military base adjacent to Busan’s international airport.
The anticipated detente has given investors and businesses caught between the two nations a sense of relief. The U.S. stock market has climbed on the hopes of a trade framework coming out of the meeting.
Pressure points remain for both U.S. and China
Trump has outward confidence that the grounds for a deal are in place, but previous negotiations with China this year in Geneva, Switzerland and London had a start-stop quality to them. The initial promise of progress has repeatedly given way to both countries seeking a better position against the other.
“The proposed deal on the table fits the pattern we’ve seen all year: short-term stabilization dressed up as strategic progress,” said Craig Singleton, senior director of the China program at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. “Both sides are managing volatility, calibrating just enough cooperation to avert crisis while the deeper rivalry endures.”
The U.S. and China have each shown they believe they have levers to pressure the other, and the past year has demonstrated that tentative steps forward can be short-lived.
For Trump, that pressure comes from tariffs.
China had faced new tariffs this year totaling 30%, of which 20% were tied to its role in fentanyl production. But the tariff rates have been volatile. In April, he announced plans to jack the rate on Chinese goods to 145%, only to abandon those plans as markets recoiled.
Then, on Oct. 10, Trump threatened a 100% import tax because of China’s rare earth restrictions. That figure, including past tariffs, would now be 47% “effective immediately,” Trump told reporters on Thursday.
Xi has his own chokehold on the world economy because China is the top producer and processor of the rare earth minerals needed to make fighter jets, robots, electric vehicles and other high-tech products.
China had tightened export restrictions on Oct. 9, repeating a cycle in which each nation jockeys for an edge only to back down after more trade talks.
What might also matter is what happens directly after their talks. Trump plans to return to Washington, while Xi plans to stay on in South Korea to meet with regional leaders during the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit, which officially begins on Friday.
“Xi sees an opportunity to position China as a reliable partner and bolster bilateral and multilateral relations with countries frustrated by the U.S. administration’s tariff policy,” said Jay Truesdale, a former State Department official who is CEO of TD International, a risk and intelligence advisory firm.
Boak, Megerian and Schiefelbein write for the Associated Press. Boak reported from Tokyo and Megerian reported from Busan, South Korea. Ken Moritsugu in Beijing and Seung Min Kim and Michelle Price in Washington contributed to this report.
1 of 4 | U.S. President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping met in Busan, South Korea, on Thursday for a high-stakes meeting to negotiate their looming trade war. Photo by Yonhap
GYEONGJU, South Korea, Oct. 30 (UPI) — U.S. President Donald Trump departed from South Korea on Thursday after a highly anticipated meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping that lowered the temperature on a simmering trade war with agreements on rare earth minerals, fentanyl, soybeans and tariffs.
The two leaders met for the first time since 2019 at Gimhae Air Base in the southeastern city of Busan, shortly after Xi arrived in the country for a three-day state visit to attend the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit.
Speaking to reporters on his way back to Washington aboard Air Force One, Trump described the outlines of a trade deal that he said would be signed “pretty soon.”
According to the president, China agreed to take steps to stop the flow of precursor chemicals used to make fentanyl into the United States. In response, Trump said he halved the 20% fentanyl-linked tariffs he had imposed earlier this year.
“Based on [Xi’s] statements today, I reduced it by 10%. So, it’s 10% instead of 20%, effective immediately,” Trump said.
The reduction brings the overall tariff rate on goods from China from 57% to 47%, he said.
Beijing also agreed to resume purchases of American soybeans and set a one-year pause on its planned export controls of rare earth minerals. China dominates the production and processing of the metallic elements, which are crucial for manufacturing a vast array of high-tech products from smartphones to missiles.
“We have not too many stumbling blocks now,” Trump said. “We have a deal. We’ll negotiate at the end of a year, but all of the rare earth has been settled.”
No official announcement from either side has been released yet, but the U.S. president declared the meeting a “great success.”
“Overall, on the scale of from zero to 10, with 10 being the best, I would say the meeting was a 12,” Trump said.
One topic the two leaders did not discuss was Taiwan, Trump noted. Some analysts had expected Xi to exert leverage in an attempt to soften U.S. support for the self-governing island of 23 million, which China sees as a breakaway province.
“I’m relieved Taiwan apparently didn’t come up in today’s meeting,” Sean King, senior vice president and East Asia expert at New York-based consulting firm Park Strategies, told UPI.
However, King said that the trade deal does not represent significant progress from when Trump kicked off his global tariff scheme in early April, on what the White House dubbed “Liberation Day.”
“We’re seemingly no further along than where we were on Liberation Day,” King said. “Unlike friendly leaders, Xi gave Trump no golden gifts … Right now, for better or worse, it seems like not too much of major trade substance happened in today’s meeting.”
At the start of the meeting, the two leaders had a brief introductory exchange that was open to the media.
“Given our different national conditions, we do not always see eye to eye with each other and it is normal for the two leading economies of the world to have friction now and then,” Xi said.
Xi called on Trump to join him and “ensure the steady sailing forward of the giant ship of China-U.S. relations.”
“I always believe that China’s development goes hand in hand with your vision to make America great again,” Xi said. “Our two countries are fully able to help each other succeed and prosper together.”
After the meeting, Xi traveled to the nearby city of Gyeongju to take part in the APEC Economic Leaders’ Meeting. Trump attended the APEC summit on Wednesday, where he struck a trade deal with South Korean President Lee Jae Myung and delivered a keynote address at a CEO luncheon.
At the center of the sprawling legal battle over President Trump’s domestic military deployments is a single word: rebellion.
To justify sending the National Guard to Los Angeles and other cities over the outcry of local leaders, the Trump administration has cited an obscure and little-used law empowering presidents to federalize soldiers to “suppress” a rebellion, or the threat of one.
But the statute does not define the word on which it turns. That’s where Bryan A. Garner comes in.
For decades, Garner has defined the words that make up the law. The landmark legal reference book he edits, Black’s Law Dictionary, is as much a fixture of American courts as black robes, rosewood gavels and brass scales of justice.
The dictionary is Garner’s magnum opus, as essential to attorneys as Gray’s Anatomy is to physicians.
Now, Black’s definition of rebellion is at the center of two critical pending decisions in cases from Portland, Ore., and Chicago — one currently being reheard by the 9th Circuit and the other on the emergency docket at the Supreme Court — that could unleash a flood of armed soldiers into American streets.
That a dictionary could influence a court case at all owes in part to Garner’s seminal book on textualism, a conserative legal doctrine that dictates a page-bound interpretation of the law. His co-author was Antonin Scalia, the late Supreme Court justice whose strict originalist readings of the Constitution paved the way for the court’s recent reversal of precedents on abortion, voting rights and gun laws.
On a recent weekday, the country’s leading legal lexicographer was ensconced among the 4,500 some-odd dictionaries that fill his Dallas home, revising the entry for the adjective “calculated” ahead of Black’s 13th Edition.
But, despite his best efforts not to dwell on the stakes of his work, the noun “rebellion” was never far from his mind.
Federal authorities stand guard at an Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility in Portland, Ore., that has been the site of protests against the Trump administration.
(Sean Bascom / Anadolu via Getty Images)
“One of the very first cases citing my book sent a man to his capital punishment,” he explained of an earlier dictionary. “They cited me, the guy was put to death. I was very disturbed by that at first.”
He managed his distress by doubling down on his craft. In its first 100 years, Black’s Law Dictionary was revised and reissued six times. From 1999 to 2024, Garner produced six new editions.
“I work on it virtually every day,” he said.
Most mornings, he rises before dawn, settling behind a desk in one of his three home libraries around 4 a.m. to begin the day’s defining.
That fastidiousness has not stopped the lexical war over his work in recent months, as judges across the country read opposite meanings into “rebellion.”
The Department of Justice and the attorneys general of California, Oregon and Illinois have likewise sparred over the word.
In making their case, virtually all have invoked Black’s definition — one Garner has personally penned for the last 30 years. He began editing the 124-year-old reference book in 1995.
“The word ‘rebellion’ has been stable in its three basic meanings in Black’s since I took over,” he said.
“Ooo! So at some point I added, ‘usually through violence,’” he amended himself.
This change comes from the definition’s first sense: 1. Open, organized, and armed resistance to an established government or ruler; esp., an organized attempt to change the government or leader of a country, usu. through violence.
States have touted this meaning to argue the word rebellion cannot possibly apply to torched Waymos in Los Angeles or naked bicyclists in Portland.
The Trump administration, meanwhile, has leaned on the second and third senses to say the opposite.
The California Department of Justice wrote in its amicus brief to the Supreme Court in the Illinois case that federal authorities argue rebellion means any form of “resistance or opposition to authority or tradition,” including disobeying “a legal command or summons.”
“But it is not remotely plausible to think that Congress intended to adopt that expansive definition,” the state said.
Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth walks onstage to deliver remarks as part of the Marine Corps’ 250th anniversary celebration at Camp Pendleton on Oct. 18.
(Oliver Contreras / AFP via Getty Images)
Although the scope and the stakes of the rebellion fight make it unique, the debate over definitions is nothing new, experts say.
The use of legal dictionaries to solve judicial problems has surged in recent years, with the rise of Scalia-style textualism and the growing sense in certain segments of the public that judges simply make the law up as they go along.
By 2018, the Supreme Court was citing dictionary definitions in half of its opinions, up dramatically from prior years, according to Mark A. Lemley, a professor at Stanford Law School.
Splitting hairs over what makes a rebellion is a new level of absurdity, he said. “This is an unfortunate consequence of the Supreme Court’s obsession with dictionaries.”
“Reducing the meaning of a statute to one (of the many) dictionary definitions is unlikely to give you a useful answer,” he said. “What it gives you is a means of manipulating the definition to achieve the result you want.”
Garner has publicly acknowledged the limits of his work. Ultimately, it’s up to judges to decide cases based on precedents, evidence, and the relevant law. Dictionaries are an adjunct.
Still, he and other textualists see the turn to dictionaries as an important corrective to interpretive excesses of the past.
“The words are law,” Garner said.
Law enforcement officers watch from a ledge of an Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility as a protester stands outside in an inflatable frog costume on Oct. 21 in Portland, Ore.
(Jenny Kane / Associated Press)
Judges who cite dictionaries are “not ceding power to lexicographers,” he argued, but simply giving appropriate heft to the text enacted by Congress.
Others call the dictionary a fig leaf for the interpretive excesses of jurists bent on reading the law to suit a political agenda.
“Judges don’t want to take personal responsibility for saying ‘Yes, there’s a rebellion’ or ‘no, there isn’t,’ so they say ‘the dictionary made me do it.’” said Eric J. Segall, a professor at Georgia State University College of Law. “No, it didn’t.”
Though he agreed with Black’s definition of rebellion, Segall rejected the idea it could shape jurisprudence: “That’s not how our legal system works,” he said.
The great challenge in the troops cases, legal scholars agree, is that they turn on a vague, century-old text with no relevant case law to help define it.
Unlike past presidents, who invoked the Insurrection Act to combat violent crises, Trump deployed an obscure subsection of the U.S. code to wrest command of National Guard troops from state governors and surge military forces into American cities.
Before Trump deployed troops to L.A. in June, the law had been used only once in its 103-year history.
With little interpretation to oppose it, the Justice Department has wielded its novel reading of the statute to justify the use of federalized troops to support immigration arrests and put down demonstrations.
Administration attorneys say the president’s decision to send soldiers to Los Angeles, Portland and Chicago is “unreviewable” by courts, and that troops can remain in federal service in perpetuity once called up, regardless of how conditions change.
Border Patrol official Greg Bovino marches with federal agents to the Edward R. Roybal Federal Building in Los Angeles on Aug. 14.
(Carlin Stiehl / Los Angeles Times)
Judges have so far rejected these claims. But they have split on the thornier issues of whether community efforts to disrupt immigration enforcement leave Trump “unable with the regular forces to execute the laws” — another trigger for the statute — and if sporadic violence at protests adds up to rebellion.
As of this week, appellate courts also remain sharply divided on the evidence.
On Oct 23, Oregon claimed the Department of Justice inflated the number of federal protective personnel it said were detailed to Portland in response to protests to more than triple its actual size — a mistake the department called an “unintended ambiguity.”
The inflated number was repeatedly cited in oral arguments before the 9th Circuit and more than a dozen times in the court’s Oct. 20 decision allowing the federalization of Oregon’s troops — an order the court reversed Tuesday while it is reviewed.
The 7th Circuit noted similar falsehoods, leading that court to block the Chicago deployment.
“The [U.S. District] court found that all three of the federal government’s declarations from those with firsthand knowledge were unreliable to the extent they omitted material information or were undermined by independent, objective evidence,” the panel wrote in its Oct 11 decision.
A Supreme Court decision expected in that case will probably define Trump’s power to deploy troops throughout the Midwest — and potentially across the country.
For Garner, that decision means more work.
In addition to his dictionaries, he is also the author of numerous other works, including a memoir about his friendship with Scalia. In his spare time, he travels the country teaching legal writing.
The editor credits his prodigious output to strict discipline. As an undergrad at the University of Texas, he swore off weekly Longhorns games and eschewed his beloved Dallas Cowboys to concentrate on writing, a practice he has maintained with Calvinist devotion ever since.
“I haven’t seen a game for the last 46 years,” the lexicographer said, though he makes a biannual exception for the second halves of the Super Bowl and college football’s national championship game.
As for the political football with Black’s “rebellion,” he’s waiting to see how the Illinois Guard case plays out.
“I will be looking very closely at what the Supreme Court says,” Garner said. “If it writes anything about the meaning of the word rebellion, that might well affect the next edition of Black’s Law Dictionary.”
The White House claimed, without providing evidence, the vessel was operated by a ‘designated terrorist organisation’.
Published On 30 Oct 202530 Oct 2025
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The White House has said United States forces have bombed another alleged drug smuggling vessel in the eastern Pacific Ocean, killing four men, just days after confirming it killed 14 people in three separate strikes on vessels in the area.
US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth said in a post on X late on Wednesday that the “Department of War”, the new name for the recently rebranded Department of Defense, had “carried out a lethal kinetic strike on yet another narco-trafficking vessel”.
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Hegseth said “four male narco-terrorists” were killed aboard the vessel, which was “operated by a Designated Terrorist Organization”. He did not provide an exact location for the attack, but said it was conducted in international waters in the eastern Pacific Ocean.
“This vessel, like all the others, was known by our intelligence to be involved in illicit narcotics smuggling, was transiting along a known narco-trafficking route, and carrying narcotics,” Hegseth said, posting aerial footage of the strike.
None of the victims of Wednesday’s attack have been identified.
Earlier today, at the direction of President Trump, the Department of War carried out a lethal kinetic strike on yet another narco-trafficking vessel operated by a Designated Terrorist Organization (DTO) in the Eastern Pacific.
The strike occurred at a time when US President Donald Trump was on the last leg of a three-nation trip in Asia. On Thursday, Trump met Chinese President Xi Jinping in South Korea, their first summit since 2019. Trump also visited Malaysia and Japan before South Korea.
Earlier this week, Hegseth said US forces carried out three lethal strikes against boats accused of trafficking illegal narcotics on Monday. The attacks, which also took place in the eastern Pacific Ocean, reportedly killed 14 people and left one survivor.
Following the strikes, Hegseth said that “the Department has spent over TWO DECADES defending other homelands. Now, we’re defending our own”.
Since September 2, the US military has carried out at least 14 strikes targeting some 15 maritime vessels in the Caribbean Sea and the eastern Pacific Ocean.
At least 61 people have now been confirmed killed by the two-month-long campaign, which has also seen the US bolster its military presence in the Caribbean to unusually high levels.
The White House has yet to provide any evidence to the public for any of the strikes to substantiate its allegations of drug trafficking.
The Trump administration has framed the strikes as a national security measure, claiming the alleged drug traffickers are “unlawful combatants” in a “non-international armed conflict”.
Critics have called the unilateral strikes a form of extrajudicial killing and a violation of international law, which largely prohibits countries from using lethal military force against non-combatants outside a conflict zone.
“We continue to emphasise the need for all efforts to counter transnational organised crime to be conducted in accordance with international law,” Miroslav Jenca, the United Nations’ assistant secretary-general for the Americas, told the UN Security Council this month.
