Politics

President Donald Trump's administration said on Friday it was formally withdrawing a plan by his predecessor (Biden) to require airlines to pay passengers cash compensation when U.S. flight disruptions are caused by carriers.

Last month, a group of 18 Democratic senators urged the Trump administration not to drop the compensation plan.

Airlines in the U.S. must refund passengers for canceled flights, but are not required to compensate customers for delays. The European Union, Canada, Brazil and Britain all have airline delay compensation rules. No large U.S. airline currently guarantees cash compensation for significant flight disruption.

USDOT also announced in September it was considering rescinding Biden regulations requiring airlines and ticket agents to disclose service fees alongside airfares.

On Friday morning, as the uproar continued, Trump declared that he would instead ask the Department of Justice to investigate Epstein’s ties with Democrats, not Republicans, singling out Bill Clinton, Larry Summers and Reid Hoffman. Trump also paradoxically referred to the “Epstein hoax” and called it a “scam”.

The Trump administration has put heavy pressure on key Republicans to oppose the legislation. CNN reported that top officials summoned Lauren Boebert – one of four Republicans in the House who have signed the petition – to a meeting in the White House Situation Room with the attorney general, Pam Bondi, and FBI director, Kash Patel, to discuss her demand to release the files. Trump had also telephoned her early on Tuesday morning, a day before Grijalva was due to be sworn in and provide the crucial final signature.

Trump also contacted Nancy Mace, another of the Republican caucus in the House who have signed the petition, but the two did not connect. Mace instead reportedly wrote the president a long explanation of her own personal experience as a survivor of sexual abuse and rape, and why it was impossible for her to change her position on the matter. She wrote on X that “the Epstein petition is deeply personal.”

Larry Visoski, who served as Jeffrey Epstein’s personal pilot for decades, appears to have coordinated multiple flights for Epstein with President Donald Trump’s, according to files released this week by the House Oversight Committee.

On March 5, 2017, just over a month since Trump was sworn into office for his first term, Visoski emailed Epstein about an impending flight departure.

“Jeffrey, TSA called me, they inform closing TSA inspection at 3pm, asked if we could depart at 2:30pm? Is 2:30pm okay for departure,” Visoski wrote. “Otherwise it would be after Trump’s departure between 4 and 5pm

The Trump administration is quietly undertaking an effort to expand a Department of Homeland Security (DHS) tool used for citizenship verification to include drivers’ license and passport information—personal data it plans to utilize in its voter fraud crusade.

You’ve probably never heard of the DHS system known as SAVE (or Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements), which the agency has historically used to confirm individuals are citizens and therefore eligible for government assistance. But if the Trump administration gets its way, SAVE will soon know a lot about you.

Since SAVE’s inception in 1987, government agencies have analyzed immigrants’ citizenship status by plugging immigration identification numbers into the system, which then checked the information against other federal databases. In May, Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) added social security numbers as information that SAVE could query. DOGE further boosted SAVE’s capacity by allowing bulk searches, rather than searching individuals one-by-one.

Jonathan Jarvis claimed the agency is now in the hands of a “bunch of ideologues” who would have no issue watching it “go down in flames” – and see parks from Yellowstone to Yosemite as potential “cash cows”, ripe for privatization.

Jarvis, who led the NPS from 2009 to 2017, faced intense scrutiny, a five-hour grilling in Congress and calls for his resignation after closing all 401 national park sites during a previous shutdown, in October 2013.

Democratic lawmakers and advocates are voicing grave warnings after the Trump administration on Thursday unveiled its plan to slash funding for long-term housing programs, cuts that could leave nearly 200,000 people at risk of becoming homeless.

The New York Times reported that the administration’s new proposal for Continuum of Care (CoC) funding “shifts billions to short-term programs that impose work rules, help the police dismantle encampments, and require the homeless to accept treatment for mental illness or addiction.”

October marked the 10th straight month of decline in the number of Canadian travellers to the US. Air travel from Canada to the US dropped nearly 24%, while car travel fell more than 30% when compared to the same period last year, according to data released this week by Canada's statistics office.

Overall, the US has seen a 3.2% drop in international spending in the country, driven primarily by fewer visitors from Canada, according to the US Travel Association, a nonprofit group representing the American travel industry.

As relations between the two countries remain icy, mostly in response to new tariffs Trump has imposed, Canadians are apparently committed to giving their southern neighbours the cold shoulder.

In the past, Canadians have made up about a quarter of all international visitors to the US, spending over $20bn (£15.1bn) a year, according to the US Travel Association.

A longtime prosecutor announced he will take over the Georgia election interference case against President Donald Trump and others, after Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis was removed from the case and no one else wanted the job.

The nonpartisan Prosecuting Attorneys’ Council of Georgia was tasked with replacing Willis after she was disqualified over an “appearance of impropriety” created by a romantic relationship with the special prosecutor she’d chosen to lead the case. The organization’s executive director, Pete Skandalakis, said Friday that he would take the case on himself.

“Several prosecutors were contacted and, while all were respectful and professional, each declined the appointment,” Skandalakis said in an emailed statement.

Legal action against Trump is unlikely to proceed while he is president. However, 14 other defendants still face charges, among them former New York mayor and Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani as well as former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows.

The disgraced financier told her he would spend the day with "eva," likely a reference to his former girlfriend Eva Andersson-Dubin, and Kates mentions Andersson-Dubin’s husband, Glenn Dubin, by name and asks “who else is down there?”

Epstein names Trump, hedge fund founder David Fiszel and someone else he referred to as Hanson.

White House records and contemporaneous media reports show Trump spent Thanksgiving 2017 at Mar-a-Lago, but the White House did not disclose a guest list.

Andersson-Dubin later testified at the 2021 trial of Ghislaine Maxwell, who was convicted for her role as a co-conspirator in Epstein's sex trafficking network after he was found dead in prison while awaiting new charges two years earlier on similar allegations.

WASHINGTON—The House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform released an additional 20,000 pages of documents received from the estate of Jeffrey Epstein. The documents can be found here.

A backup of the documents can be found here.

Starbucks workers at 65 unionised US stores have gone on strike in their latest bid to pressure the coffee chain for better pay and staffing after negotiations stalled.

The union, Starbucks Workers United, is also pushing the company to resolve hundreds of unfair labour practice charges.

Talks for a contract agreement broke down in the spring, and the two sides remain at odds over key economic issues.

Starbucks said the strike on Thursday will affect fewer than 1% of its thousands of shops, adding service will continue as usual at the "vast majority" of stores.

The union, which launched four years ago, said it had won elections at more than 600 stores - roughly 5% of the chain's company-owned US locations.

On the night of the raid, heavily armed federal agents zip-tied Jhonny Manuel Caicedo Fereira’s hands behind his back, marched him out of his Chicago apartment building and put him against a wall to question him.

As a Black Hawk helicopter roared overhead, the slender, 28-year-old immigrant from Venezuela answered softly, his eyes darting to a television crew invited to film the raid. Next to Caicedo, masked Border Patrol agents inspected another man’s tattoos and asked him if he belonged to Tren de Aragua, the Venezuelan gang that the Trump administration has designated a terrorist group.

Until that moment, Caicedo’s only interaction with law enforcement in his two-and-a-half years in the United States had been a traffic stop two weeks earlier for driving without a license or insurance, according to the records we reviewed. Chicago police had run a background check on him and found no prior arrests, no warrants and no evidence that he was in a gang. Caicedo said he had a pending asylum application, a steady job at a taco joint and a girlfriend whose daughter attended elementary school across the street.

None of that mattered. The U.S. government paraded him and his neighbors in front of the cameras and called their arrests a spectacular victory against terrorism. But later, after the cameras had gone, prosecutors didn’t charge Caicedo with a crime. They didn’t accuse him of being a terrorist. And after a brief hearing in immigration court, the government sent him back to the country he had fled nine years earlier.

Diana Santillana Galeano was detained Nov. 5 at the Rayito de Sol Spanish Immersion Early Learning Center on the north side of Chicago. A video showed officers struggling with her as they walked out the front door. Her attorneys said in a statement Thursday that she was released from a detention center in Indiana on Wednesday night.

“We are thrilled that Ms. Santillana was released, and has been able to return home to Chicago where she belongs,” attorney Charlie Wysong said in the statement. “We will continue to pursue her immigration claims to stay in the United States. We are grateful to her community for the outpouring of support over these difficult days, and ask that her privacy be respected while she rests and recovers from this ordeal.”

Her case reflects the Trump administration’s increasingly aggressive enforcement tactics. But her detention at a day care was unusual even under “Operation Midway Blitz,” which has resulted in more than 3,000 immigration arrests in the Chicago area since early September. Agents have rappelled from a Black Hawk helicopter in a middle-of-the-night apartment building raid, appeared with overwhelming force in recreational areas and launched tear gas amid protests.

But other emails tracked Trump’s movements more generally. Epstein received a heads-up on 2 December 2017: “Trump in our neighborhood today. Looks like he is going to 740 Park for a fundraiser.” The sender’s name was redacted in the email release, but it was signed by Richard Kahn, Epstein’s accountant.

One visitor waiting outside Epstein’s home made a joke about Trump while waiting to get inside. “[I’m] at the door but i will wait for my time. . i dont want to come early to find trump in your house,” they wrote, adding two smiling emojis. Their name was redacted in the email.

The cache of filings also indicates Epstein’s associates forwarded numerous news articles related to Trump, including reports that involved controversies surrounding the president. The news coverage included a January 2019 story on Trump ally Roger Stone’s arrest, and an article on Michael Cohen’s discussions with prosecutors.

Email exchanges with friends and associates showed Epstein disparaging Trump. In one December 2018 correspondence, Epstein told former treasury secretary Larry Summers that “trump – borderline insane. dersh, a few feet further from the border but not by much” – apparently referencing his one-time attorney, Alan Dershowitz.

Summers asked: “Will trump crack into insanity?”

The Justice Department intervened as a plaintiff in a November 5 lawsuit by the California Republican Party and 19 registered voters in the state. The case challenges California's ballot initiative Proposition 50, which passed earlier this month.

The measure was a response to Republican-led Texas redrawing its congressional map.

U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi in a post on the social media platform X on Thursday chided California Democratic Governor Gavin Newsom over what she called “his brazen Proposition 50 redistricting power grab.”

As reported by The Hill, the provision allows Republican senators whose data was obtained without their knowledge during former special counsel Jack Smith’s investigation to sue the FBI.

“The provision, which is retroactive to 2022, only applies to members of the Senate and would allow them to sue for $500,000 if data was sought without their being notified, as well as once it was obtained,” noted The Hill.

Raskin (D-Md.) responded by blasting the “million-dollar jackpot provision” in the Senate bill as “one of the most blatantly corrupt provisions for political self-dealing and the plunder of public resources ever proposed.”

Raskin also contrasted Republican senators giving themselves the ability to score a quick $1 million with the economic uncertainty and anxiety facing the American people.

Damning new emails that suggest Donald Trump knew about the conduct of the late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein were released Wednesday, including one in which Epstein said “of course [Trump] knew about the girls” that were procured for his sex-trafficking ring.

The release of the three messages by Democrats on the House oversight committee is likely to add significant pressure on the White House to release the so-called Epstein files.

OP transcribed:

To GMax, from Epstein:

i want you to realize that that dog that hasn't barked is trump...(VICTIM) spent hours at my house with him,, he has never once been mentioned. police chief. etc. im 75% there

To Michael Wolff from Epstein:

(VICTIM) mara lago. (REDACTED) . trump said he asked me to resign, never a member ever. . of course he knew about the girls as he asked ghislaine to stop

Exchange between Epstein and Michael Wolff:

Michael Wolff says:

I think you should let him hang himself. If he says he hasn't been on the plane or to the house, then that gives you a valuable PR and political currency. You can hang in a way that potentially generates a positive benefit for you, or, if it really looks like he could win, you could save him, generating a debt. Of course, it is possible that, when asked, he'll say Jeffrey is a great guy and has gotten a raw deal and is a victim of political correctness, which is to be outlawed in a Trump regime.

Epstein says:

if we were able to craft an answer for him, what do you think it should be?

Michael Wollf says:

I hear CNN planning to ask Trump tonight about his relationship with you --either on air or in scrum afterwards.

Beatings. Sexual assault. Psychological abuse. These are some of the horrors endured by the more than 250 men the United States sent to El Salvador on flimsy evidence of gang membership, according to a new comprehensive report released on Wednesday by Human Rights Watch and Cristosal, a human rights group focused on Central America.

In early 2025, the Trump administration flew Venezuelan migrants to Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele’s notorious Terrorism Confinement Center, where they were held for four months without communication with their families and lawyers. The US government had accused the men of being members of the transnational gang Tren de Aragua and removed most of them from the United States under the Alien Enemies Act—an 18th-century law that President Donald Trump has invoked for only the fourth time in US history.

As Mother Jones and other outlets have reported extensively, most of the men had no serious criminal history in the United States or elsewhere in the world. What they often had instead were tattoos that bore no relation to the gang.

The new report offers even more evidence of the inhumane treatment the Venezuelan migrants endured in El Salvador. Based on the testimonies of 40 men who were detained at CECOT, as well as interviews with 150 other people—including lawyers and relatives in Venezuela, Colombia, and the United States—it paints a damning picture of the abuses inflicted at CECOT.

On Monday afternoon, the Trump administration and lawyers for the state of Illinois and the city of Chicago filed additional briefs in response to a Supreme Court order for them to discuss whether, for purposes of the federal law on which President Donald Trump relied to call up the National Guard – which allows him to do so when (among other things) he cannot “with the regular forces … execute the laws of the United States” – “the term ‘regular forces’ refers to the regular forces of the United States military, and, if so, how that interpretation affects the operation” of the law.

The Trump administration told the Supreme Court that the law at issue refers to civilian law-enforcement officers, rather than the U.S. military. And although “the standing military was undoubtedly an available option to quash the violent resistance to federal immigration enforcement,” U.S. Solicitor General D. John Sauer argued, courts should at the very least give “extraordinary deference” to the president’s determination to send the National Guard to Chicago.

Lawyers for the state of Illinois and the city of Chicago countered that the phrase “regular forces” “refers to the full-time, professional military.” And they urged the justices to leave in place an order by a federal judge that bars the president from deploying the National Guard to Chicago, telling the court that the Trump administration had not tried to show, and cannot show, that he could not execute federal law in Chicago with the U.S. military and therefore cannot send the National Guard instead.

The bill — which still needs to formally pass the Senate and House — would fund the government until late January, ending the longest shutdown in modern history, and it would roll back federal layoffs imposed during the shutdown and advance a handful of bills to fund parts of the government for the rest of the fiscal year, which ends on Sept. 30, 2026.

In exchange, Republicans have promised to hold a vote by next month on extending a set of enhanced health insurance tax credits that were passed during the Biden administration and are set to expire this year. Without an extension, many Americans who buy insurance on Affordable Care Act exchanges could face significantly higher premiums.

Sanders, a Vermont independent who caucuses with Democrats, called the deal a "disaster" since there's no guarantee that the expiring health insurance subsidies will be extended. The senator was unimpressed by the promise to hold a vote.

A new directive by President Donald Trump’s administration could make it more difficult for foreigners to visit or live in the United States if they have certain medical conditions such as diabetes or obesity or lack the economic resources and assets to support themselves.

The guidance, issued last week in a cable from the State Department and obtained by The Associated Press, directs embassy and consular officials to comprehensively and thoroughly vet visa applicants to demonstrate that they will not need to rely on public benefits from the government any time after their admission in the U.S. Experts say it could further limit who gets to enter the country at a time when the Republican administration is already tightening those rules.

Abrego Garcia’s mistaken deportation to his home country of El Salvador earlier this year has helped galvanize opposition to President Donald Trump’s immigration policies. His attorneys claim the administration is now manipulating the immigration system in order to punish him for successfully challenging that deportation.

A motion from the government filed in U.S. District Court in Maryland late on Friday says officials have received assurances from Liberia that Abrego Garcia would not face persecution or torture there. Further, it says an immigration officer heard Abrego Garcia’s claims that he feared deportation to the West African nation, but ruled against him.

His attorneys argue in a separate Friday filing that Abrego Garcia has already designated Costa Rica as a country where he is willing to be deported. They claim the government now must send him there. The fact that officials continue to pursue deportation to other countries is evidence that the process is retaliatory and violates due process protections, they argue.

An Illinois man said his US citizen family – including his one-year-old daughter – were pepper-sprayed in their car by federal immigration agents during a shopping trip in a Chicago suburb.

Video of the encounter outside a Sam’s Club in Cicero shows Rafael Veraza clutching at his face after he was allegedly sprayed through his open window by a cloudy substance fired by a masked agent from a pick-up truck traveling in the opposite direction.

Veraza, 25, told reporters his wife told him to stop their car because she, their daughter, and sister were also hit. The images show the aftermath of the episode with the girl in distress in her mother’s arms with her eyes streaming.

“My daughter was trying to open her eyes. She was struggling to breathe,” Veraza told reporters at a press conference Sunday, a day after an operation by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) at the store.

Millions of Americans hoping for legislative action to prevent their health insurance premiums from skyrocketing will find no reprieve in the all-but-finalized deal to end the federal government shutdown.

The agreement, supported by eight Democratic senators with the tacit approval of Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY), includes nothing concrete regarding the enhanced Affordable Care Act tax credits that help more than 20 million Americans afford health insurance.