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Speaking to reporters on his way to give a rally speech in North Carolina, Donald Trump denied that his hand-picked Federal Reserve chair, Kevin Warsh, had defied him by voting to raise interest rates, claiming that he had advised Warsh to vote as he did.
Asked if he still has confidence in Warsh, despite the rate hike Trump deplored, the president said:
“We should be paying the lowest interest rate anywhere in the world because we have the strongest credit,” he added. “If we wanted to get rid of deficits, which we could do with the swipe of the pen with every country, we’d make a trillion and a half dollars a year. We’d pay off our debt. We’d do all sorts of things. But we haven’t chosen to do that. But at some point, we will. Interest rates are too high.”
Later, asked again about Warsh, Trump said: “It doesn’t matter because he doesn’t have the votes… No matter how good a job, he’s got a hostile board… They’re raising that only for political reasons, and that’s a raise against Trump.”
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Donald Trump responded to the Federal Reserve’s unanimous decision on Wednesday to raise its benchmark interest rate by a quarter-percentage point, to a range of 3.75% to 4%, by demanding a massive cut in rates.
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The US Congress has passed a sweeping bill allowing Trump to raise tariffs on top buyers of Russian energy and issue other punishing sanctions against the Kremlin following a pitched battle between lawmakers backing Ukraine and sceptics worried the bill gives the president too much power.
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Congresswoman Joyce Beatty, a Democrat and Kennedy Center trustee, has filed a motion for an emergency hearing on the performing arts venue’s apparent closure.
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Asked why it is so important to him to have his name inscribed on the Kennedy Center, a memorial to another president, Trump said he deserves “recognition” for saving the venue. If not, Trump said, “It’ll end up being ripped down.
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Mitch McConnell, the former Republican Senate majority leader who returned to work this week after a months‑long absence, had to be prompted by colleagues as to how to vote near the start of a televised meeting of the Senate agriculture committee on Wednesday.
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The House speaker, Mike Johnson, cancelled votes currently scheduled for Thursday, meaning that lower chamber lawmakers will now head back to their districts for the midterm recess a day early. The change to schedule means that the House will avoid voting on Republican congressman Thomas Massie’s resolution to impeach the defense secretary, Pete Hegseth.
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Speaking in North Carolina, Trump explicitly compared his effort to blame Democrat Roy Cooper, the former governor and Senate candidate, for the brutal killing of a young Ukrainian refugee, Iryna Zarutska, last year, by using false information, on the infamous 1988 Willie Horton ad.
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Speaking in North Carolina on Wednesday, Donald Trump repeated his false claim that it is the war in Ukraine he’s failed to stop, not the one in Iran he started, that has caused a spike in diesel prices in the United States.
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After repeating his false claim to have ended eight wars, Trump said, “we’re working very hard to get Russia-Ukraine” settled. “The one that’s the toughest is Russia-Ukraine. They hate each other. The two leaders hate each other so much,” he continued, falsely suggesting, as he has before, that Volodymyr Zelenskyy is to blame for hating Vladimir Putin, the dictator who ordered the bloody invasion of his country.
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“You know, hatred is very interesting. War is very interesting, but it’s too bad,” Trump went on. “And that’s what’s driving actually, that’s the war that’s driving up the diesel prices.”
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Meanwhile, in Washington, Republican senators who are more clear on who is to blame for the war in Ukraine celebrated the passage of a bill that will give the president the power to impose sanctions on Russia, and tariffs on other countries that buy its oil, even though doing so would likely drive fuel prices even higher.
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“I applaud the House’s passage of the Lindsey O. Graham Sanctioning Russia and Iran Act—it’s long past time we cut off the funding for Russia’s war machine at its source,” senator Tom Cotton, an Arkansas Republican, posted. “This legislation will tighten the screws on Putin and impose real costs on those financing his war.”
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“We are now one step closer to arming President Trump with the tools he needs to deplete Russia of the little economic power it has left and bring much-needed peace to the region,” senator Katie Britt, an Alabama Republican, wrote.
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Congressman Joe Wilson, a South Carolina Republican, has written a letter to the National Hockey League’s commissioner to protest the appearance of Washington Capitals star Alex Ovechkin in a campaign ad for Vladimir Putin’s party, United Russia.
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In the letter, posted on social media by the congressman on Wednesday, Wilson expressed “serious concern” over Ovechkin lending his celebrity to support “the dictatorial political party of Russian war criminal Vladimir Putin, who actively works to oppress the people of Russia by outlawing freedom of speech and fair elections.”
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Wilson notes that, as the Guardian reported on Monday, images from the ad campaign published by a leading Russian newspaper showed that Ovechkin appeared alongside a series of key figures in Putin’s government:
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Mr. Ovechkin shamefully appeared in a campaign video alongside senior figures of the Putin regime, including Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and Margarita Simonyan, editor-in-chief of the Kremlin propaganda outlet RT. The advertisement comes ahead of Russia’s September parliamentary “elections” and represents an alarming instance of one of the National Hockey League’s most prominent players lending his image and international celebrity to a political organization that has enabled Putin’s brutal rule and his ongoing war of aggression against Ukraine. Even more disturbing, this United Russia campaign includes Maria Lvova-Belova, who is wanted by the International Criminal Court for her role in the unlawful deportation and transfer of Ukrainian children from Russian-occupied territory.
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“An NHL superstar appearing in campaign propaganda for Putin’s political party cannot simply be dismissed as an activity wholly disconnected from the League,” Wilson added.
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“I therefore respectfully request that the NHL review this matter and clarify what policies, if any, govern the participation of active players in political advertisements or propaganda on behalf of dictatorial political parties and foreign political regimes,” the congressman wrote. “I further request that the League and the Capitals organization clarify any endorsement of Putin’s party is not a official position of the NHL or the Washington Capitals.”
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The letter was also sent to Ted Leonsis, the owner of the Washington Capitals.
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Beneath his signature, in blue marker, Wilson added an impassioned, if imprecise, handwritten note: “Putin is a convicted war criminal!”
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Putin, the Russian president, has been indicted by the International Criminal Court, along with Maria Lvova-Belova, for the forceable transfer of Ukrainian children to Russia, but neither has yet been tried or convicted.
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Wilson, a strong supporter of Ukraine, is perhaps best known for disrupting then president Barack Obama’s address to Congress in 2009, by shouting “You lie!” in what was then considered “an extraordinary breach of congressional decorum”.
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In his address to supporters in Gastonia, North Carolina, now in progress, Donald Trump tried to blame the state’s former governor, Roy Cooper, who is now the Democratic nominee for the Senate, for the brutal killing of Iryna Zarutska, a Ukrainian woman who was killed on a train in Charlotte, North Carolina last year.
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Trump began by describing Cooper as a “murderer protector” before repeatedly making the false claim that DeCarlos Brown Jr, the man arrested and charged with killing Zarutska, had been released from prison by Cooper.
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“He was released by Cooper,” Trump said, incorrectly, after describing in gruesome detail the video of the killing.
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While Republicans have tried to blame the fact that Brown was not in jail in 2025 on a 2021 COVID-era prison settlement as he result of a lawsuit over prison conditions during Cooper’s term as governor, in fact Brown had been released from prison on 20 September 2020 after completing a sentence for a previous crime.
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Despite that fact, Michael Whatley, the Republican Senate candidate Trump is in North Carolina to campaign for, claimed in a social media post in September, which featured video of the killing of Zarutska: “Cooper bears direct responsibility for this heinous act and must answer to the public about why he prioritizes criminals over public safety.”
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Earlier on Wednesday, Whatly repeated the false claim in another post, writing: “Iryna Zarutska would still be alive today if Roy Cooper’s soft on crime policies didn’t put her killer Decarlos Brown Jr back on the streets of Charlotte.”
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“This is a lie,” a Cooper campaign spokesperson told Fox News in February. “Decarlos Brown was not released from prison as a result of a court-ordered settlement but in fact served his full sentence and was not released early.”
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During his speech, Trump paused to show the crowd 80 mug shots on a giant video screen. The fact that nearly all the faces of the suspects were Black revealed the lack of subtly in the president’s appeal to his mainly white audience.
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During his State of the Union address in February, Trump introduced Iryna Zarutska’s mother in the gallery and made a different false claim about her alleged killer, wringly claiming that the man who stabbed Zarutska was an undocumented immigrant, calling him, “a hardened criminal set free to kill in America came in through open borders”.
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Trump’s attempt to frame Cooper, by falsely claiming that he had let the Black man who killed Zarutska free, echoed the 1988 attack ad run against the Democratic presidential candidate Michael Dukakis, which blamed the former Massachusetts governor for crimes committed by Willie Horton, a Black prisoner released on a furlough program, who raped a white Maryland woman and bound and stabbed her boyfriend.
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“By the time we’re finished,” Lee Atwater, the campaign strategist for Dukakis’s Republican opponent, George HW Bush, said at the time, “they’re going to wonder whether Willie Horton is Dukakis’s running mate.”
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The Willie Horton ad was produced and distributed by a former employee of Bush’s media adviser, Roger Ailes, who went on to create Fox News.
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As he so often does, Trump spoke the subtext out loud, telling the audience that his attack on Cooper was inspired by the Willie Horton ad.
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“Years ago in Massachusetts, there was a governor named Dukakis, Michael Dukakis, you remember, who had a very substantial lead for president,” Trump said. “He was going to win easily, but he allowed a man named Willie Horton out of jail. Willie Horton was a bad guy, really bad guy. Same thing as this. Same as- same exact thing.”
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Trump went on to exaggerate the scope of Horton’s brutal crimes, falsely claiming that “he raped and murdered, raped and murdered again and again. And he ended up killing three women.”
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“Overnight, Dukakis took a rousing lead of 15 points and lost the election in a landslide. Because of that one advertisement,” Trump said. “They put it on just like we’re putting this on, because we have to make sure that Michael Whatley gets into office”.
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Asked by a reporter in North Carolina why it is so important to him to have his name inscribed on the Kennedy Center, a memorial to another president, Donald Trump said he deserves “recognition” for saving the center no one else seemed to think was in dire condition until he took office.
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“It’s a mess,” Trump said. “The Kennedy Center for many years has lost tens of millions of dollars, even hundreds of millions of dollars … For me to go and fix it – I’m quite capable of fixing it – and then have to subsidize it for years to come, because you will lose with the Kennedy Center – they were losing hundreds of millions of dollars and sometimes hundreds of billions – this is before I got involved. So, for the Trump administration, for me, to get involved and to take that on long term and to carry it or to raise money to carry it, I think that the Trump administration should certainly have recognition because, frankly, if we don’t do that, it’s going to close.
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“It’ll end up being ripped down. It’s in very, very bad shape, very dangerous shape. You see steel falling down. You see plaster falling off ceilings. You see a lot of dangers. It’s been very badly maintained for 25 years,” he continued.
n “I’d like to be able to save it, but it’s going to take a lot of subsidy into the future. And for us as an administration to want to do that, I think the Trump administration should be recognized.”
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Speaking to reporters at the airport in Charlotte, North Carolina, on Wednesday, Donald Trump scoffed at the idea of Canada being driven to join the European Union as a result of the trade war he launched against the North American country.
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“I think it’s laughable,” Trump said in remarks clipped and posted on social media by the White House. “The whole thing with Canada, Canada’s been a terrible trade partner. No, I don’t see that. If they do that, if I think it’s at all a hostile act, I will put very serious tariffs or stop trading with Europe on many things. So, if they do that, if Europe does that, with a bad intention – if it’s a good intention, that’s fine – if it’s bad intention we’ll put very heavy tariffs on Europe, which is a possibility.”
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Speaking to reporters on his way to give a rally speech in North Carolina, Donald Trump denied that his hand-picked Federal Reserve chair, Kevin Warsh, had defied him by voting to raise interest rates, claiming that he had advised Warsh to vote as he did.
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Asked if he still has confidence in Warsh, despite the rate hike Trump deplored, the president said:
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“I do. I mean, I’m relying on Kevin, but he’s got a very tough board. He’s got a board that was put there by a lot of other people. And the interest rates are too high. They’re not appropriate,” Trump replied. “I told Kevin, I said, ‘You might as well vote with the board because it’s just not going to matter.’ The board is very hostile. They’re very political. They’re doing the wrong thing. They’re a bunch of politicians. They are people put on by politicians.”
n “We should be paying the lowest interest rate anywhere in the world because we have the strongest credit,” he added. “If we wanted to get rid of deficits, which we could do with the swipe of the pen with every country, we’d make a trillion and a half dollars a year. We’d pay off our debt. We’d do all sorts of things. But we haven’t chosen to do that. But at some point, we will. Interest rates are too high.”
n Later, asked again about Warsh, Trump said: “It doesn’t matter because he doesn’t have the votes… No matter how good a job, he’s got a hostile board… They’re raising that only for political reasons, and that’s a raise against Trump.”
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As fans of Donald Trump wait for the start of his remarks in North Carolina, a live feed showed they were just treated to Sinéad O’Connor’s rendition of Prince’s Nothing Compares 2 U.
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It was not clear what the Republicans in attendance made of the tune, given that the late Irish singer was for a time a hate figure for American conservatives, after she tore up a photograph of Pope John Paul II during an appearance on Saturday Night Live in 1992, and said: “Fight the real enemy.”
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The US Congress has passed a sweeping bill allowing Donald Trump to raise tariffs on top buyers of Russian energy and issue other punishing sanctions against the Kremlin following a pitched battle between lawmakers backing Ukraine and sceptics worried the bill gives the president too much power.
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The Lindsey O Graham Sanctioning Russia and Iran Act of 2026 passed in a 262-159 vote on the last day before Congress goes on recess ahead of the midterm elections. Graham, who died earlier this year, co-authored and submitted the bill more than a year and a half ago.
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The long delay in the vote was widely considered to be scepticism from the Trump administration, which had opposed additional sanctions and then recently changed its stance to support submitting the bill as efforts to negotiate with the Kremlin to end the war have yielded few results.
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However the bill faced last-minute hurdles in Congress as members of the Republican party’s isolationist wing were joined by Democrats who warned that Trump could use the bill’s new tariffs authority against allies instead.
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The bill would mandate new sanctions on Russian political and military officials, and foreign networks helping to supply Russia’s war machine and evade existing sanctions. It would also target Russia’s so-called fleet of “shadow tankers”, which have allowed the country to continue to ship crude around the world despite sanctions on its energy exports.
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It would also allow Trump to impose tariffs of up to 100% on the top purchasers of Russian energy, including China, as well as other countries helping the Kremlin evade sanctions.
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Senior Democrats voiced opposition to the bill during a heated floor debate. “Why in the world would this Congress give this president additional authority to visit that kind of economic harm on the American people?” said Hakeem Jeffries, the leading Democrat in the House, during a speech on Wednesday, adding he would vote against the bill.
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The US Department of Defense’s chief technology officer, Emil Michael, dismissed safety concerns raised by the leaders of artificial intelligence companies in an interview with CNBC on Wednesday.
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Michael, a former Uber executive, previously led the Pentagon’s efforts to press Anthropic to allow the defense department to use its Claude AI model for fully autonomous lethal weapons or domestic mass surveillance.
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Michael repeatedly said he opposes increased government regulatory oversight of AI companies and claimed that the alarms raised by leading AI firms were part of a “coordinated campaign to scare people to make irrational decisions that benefit” those firms.
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He also suggested, as he had in a Fox News interview on Monday, that “the fear-mongering” is driven by an ideology called effective altruism.
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“The amount of dollars being spent in DC now, directly and indirectly by this effective altruist movement,” Michael said, “I don’t think the country has ever seen.
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“I think in the next few years, you’re going to see more dollars poured into this sort of industry from a lobbying standpoint, and to specific congresspeople and senators, than we’ve ever seen before,” he added. “And the promoters of some of these extinction death-cult-like philosophies are part of that effort.”
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When Michael was asked if he favored the Trump administration seeking to nationalize or take partial government stakes in AI firms, he replied: “I hope not.”
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He pointed out that the AI giants could become some of the biggest companies “in the history of the world. In America, that’s a good thing. We want others to come up alongside them. We don’t want government to get in the middle. That doesn’t really go well, in terms of nationalization.”
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In apparent violation of a federal court order, the Kennedy Center was closed to the public on Wednesday and fencing was installed as construction looked set to begin, according to the testimony of a legal assistant working for the firm that represents the congresswoman Joyce Beatty, the Ohio Democrat and Kennedy Center trustee who sued to stop Donald Trump from closing the performing arts venue and adding his name to its facade.
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The sworn statement was submitted to the District of Columbia court overseeing the lawsuit by Bridget Kennedy-Bailey of the Washington Litigation Group, in support of Beatty’s motion for an emergency hearing on the performing arts venue’s apparent closure.
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Judge Christopher Cooper, who is overseeing Beatty’s suit, had ordered that the institution could not close to the public without his approval.
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According to Kennedy-Bailey, when she visited the venue on Wednesday morning, she found the doors locked and was told by Kennedy Center employees that the facility was closed.
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She also saw crews installing black metal gates outside the center, blocking all access, and white and orange barriers that “looked like those used on construction sites”.
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Just before noon, someone who works in security for the center told the legal assistant “that the gates are for ‘public safety’ because they are doing construction inside the building”.
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Kennedy-Bailey also testified that someone who said he works in public relations for the Kennedy Center told her that the building is closed for “repairs, and that staff are not allowed in without a hard hat”.
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“I asked him if the construction was occurring today,” Kennedy-Bailey said, “and he stated that he was not sure but that it ‘seems like it’”
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At the end of her sworn statement, Kennedy-Bailey said: “I saw a forklift carrying what appeared to be a more permanent form of fencing drive over to the north side of the building. I saw the forklift run into and hit the pillars on the building several times.”
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Donald Trump responded to the Federal Reserve’s unanimous decision on Wednesday to raise its benchmark interest rate by a quarter-percentage point, to a range of 3.75% to 4%, by demanding a massive cut in rates.
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Writing on his social media platform, the president also offered a bizarre argument that the United States economy would benefit “if we stopped Trading with every country that we have a Deficit with, which is most of them”.
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Here is the president’s complete statement on the interest rate hike, taken to combat inflation driven at least in part by the rise in oil prices caused by the war on Iran he started and has not been able to end.
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n
Interest Rates in the United States should be 1%, or less, because we are the Best Credit in the World – BY FAR. Our Country is BOOMING with new Investment! If we stopped Trading with every country that we have a Deficit with, which is most of them, we would make, at least, 1.5 Trillion Dollars a year. The word ‘Deficit’ is nothing more than a fancy word for LOSS. We are ‘carrying’ almost every country in the World, and that cannot go on any longer. LOWER THE INTEREST RATES FOR THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, AND FAST!
n
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The central bank’s move is the first time the Fed has raised rates since July 2023 and clearly set Kevin Warsh, Trump’s pick to be the new Fed chair, on a collision course with the president.
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“The plain fact is that inflation is too high and has been for too long,” Warsh said on Wednesday. “This summer’s inflation readings do not tell me that underlying trends have meaningfully improved.”
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Mitch McConnell, the former Republican Senate majority leader who returned to work this week after a months‑long absence, had to be prompted by colleagues as to how to vote near the start of a televised meeting of the Senate agriculture committee on Wednesday.
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Video of the moment shows that when McConnell’s name was called by the clerk, in a procedural vote on the farm bill, he initially did not respond.
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As colleagues and aides scrambled to help the 84-year-old, the senior Democrat on the panel, Amy Klobuchar, could be seen mouthing the word “aye” in McConnell’s direction. A moment later, as the clerk called his name again, the Republican committee chair, John Boozman, leaned in McConnell’s direction and audibly prompted him to say “aye”.
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“Aye,” McConnell said in a raspy voice from his wheelchair.
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The House speaker, Mike Johnson, has cancelled votes currently scheduled for Thursday, meaning that lower chamber lawmakers will now head back to their districts for the midterm recess a day early. The change to schedule means that the House will avoid voting on Republican congressman Thomas Massie’s resolution to impeach the defense secretary, Pete Hegseth.
n
The move comes as dozens of Democratic lawmakers have asked Johnson to postpone the pre-election recess to address the deluge of calls for Congress to regulate the development of artificial intelligence. Lawmakers from both parties slammed the decision to cancel votes. Many Democrats said the “only one explanation” was to avoid the Hegseth impeachment vote. And some Republicans, including Massie, insisted: “When other people want to go home, I’m here to work”.
n
Johnson, however, insisted that “it’s time for our members to go home to their districts and make their case to the American people”. Outside his office, the speaker told reporters that the lower chamber “has done its work”. Johnson also addressed Massie’s impeachment resolution, calling it “a publicity stunt by someone who wants attention”.
n
The Federal Reserve decided to raise the interest rate today by a quarter of a percentage point, to a range of 3.75-4%. The decision was unanimous, with all 12 members of the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) agreeing with the increase. The vote potentially sets Kevin Warsh, the current chair, on a collision course with Trump – who nominated Warsh under the expectation that he would cut rates. However, the chair has said the central bank will maintain the central bank’s independence from the White House. More here
n
Congresswoman Joyce Beatty, a Democrat and Kennedy Center trustee, has filed a motion for an emergency hearing on the performing arts venue’s apparent closure. This comes after a federal judge blocked the Kennedy Center from both shutting down and for Trump to have his name emblazoned on the front of the building. On Tuesday, Donald Trump’s handpicked board voted again to close the institution’s performing arts building in Washington, citing safety and financial concerns. However, Judge Christopher Cooper had previously ruled that the center’s name cannot change, shy of congressional approval, and said that the institution could also not close to the public.
n
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Congresswoman Joyce Beatty, a Democrat and Kennedy Center trustee, has filed a motion for an emergency hearing on the performing arts venue’s apparent closure. This comes after a federal judge blocked the Kennedy Center from both shutting down and for Trump to have his name emblazoned on the front of the building.
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On Tuesday, the handpicked board voted again to close the institution’s performing arts building in Washington, citing safety and financial concerns. However, Judge Christopher Cooper had previously ruled that the center’s name cannot change, shy of congressional approval, and said that the institution could also not close to the public.
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In her court filing, Beatty said that she had received reports that an announcement had been made over the loudspeakers at the Kennedy Center that it had been closed. This comes after Trump said on Tuesday that the venue would close “immediately” and threatened to cancel a planned renovation of the institution until the federal circuit court approves the formal name change. According to the administration’s lawyers this was reportedly an accident after “someone improperly triggered the fire alarm”. However, on Wednesday a staff member of the law firm representing Beatty said they sought to enter the center’s main building, but was “prevented from doing so and was informed by severals ecurity staff members that the building is currently closed to the public”.
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“Given the unexplained and unlawful closure,” Beatty argues in her motion, it is possible that the Trump administration intends to “undertake immediate steps in order to make public access practically impossible for the foreseeable future, including by demolishing public avenues of access to the building, and thereby evade the Court’s order by fait accompli”.
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Representative Gregory Meeks, the top Democrat on the House foreign affairs committee, announced today he will not clear the Trump administration’s proposed $2.8bn sale of 2,000lb bombs to Israel, citing concerns that the arms would not be used in accordance with US and international law.
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“I remain firmly committed to Israel’s security and its ability to defend itself against serious regional threats,” Meeks said in a statement, noting that the sale of 40,000 bombs “raises grave, unresolved concerns about how these munitions could be used in densely populated areas of Gaza and Lebanon”.
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According to the Associated Press, Congress has been informally notified about the pending deal, most of which is to be paid for with foreign military financing – in which US taxpayer dollars are given to Israel to turn around and buy the weapons from the US.
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Meeks added: “This decision does not diminish congressional support for Israel’s legitimate defense needs; it reflects Congress’s responsibility to ensure that US-funded weapons are used lawfully, responsibly and with meaningful safeguards for human life.”
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As expected, the Federal Reserve decided to raise the interest rate today by a quarter of a percentage point, to a range of 3.75-4%.
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The decision was unanimous, with all 12 members of the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) agreeing with the increase.
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My colleagues are covering the latest developments at our dedicated live blog.
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Many Democrats are slamming the decision by Mike Johnson, the Republican House speaker, to send lower chamber lawmakers home a day early for the pre-election recess. The move means that votes scheduled for Thursday, including on a proposal to impeach Pete Hegseth, the defense secretary, have been canceled.
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In a straight-to-camera video posted on X, Melanie Stansbury, a Democratic congresswoman from New Mexico, said the impeachment vote was the “only one explanation” to cancel the House’s legislative agenda on Thursday.
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“The speaker obviously, and obviously the president does not want that, and so instead they’re just gonna send us home,” Stansbury said. “They don’t want to hold Hegseth accountable for his blatantly illegal war in the Middle East that is harming Americans, that has killed service members, that has killed thousands of civilians, that has dragged our country into an economic spiral and is literally harming every single American.”
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Some Republicans also expressed frustration with the speaker’s decision.
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“Canceling yet another day of votes is unacceptable,” said Ralph Norman, a GOP representative from South Carolina. “The House has now canceled at least 63 scheduled voting days this Congress, including nine days this month alone, and now we’re leaving Washington until after the election.”
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As we noted yesterday, the Kennedy Center board, handpicked by Donald Trump, voted again to close the institution’s performing arts building in Washington, citing safety and financial concerns.
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It’s worth noting that a federal judge previously blocked the center from closing its main building. But now, we’re getting pictures of the fencing around the institution as it prepares for the two-year renovation project. Trump has threatened to call off the improvements, but keep the institution shut, if federal courts did not allow his name to be placed on the front of the building.
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Anthropic’s head of public policy, Sarah Heck, said the US “needs to stay in the lead” on AI, asserting: “You can’t do safety from second place.”
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She told the Politico Decoded summit that in order for the US to hold its edge, the country must keep its restrictions on sales to China of the most advanced AI chips.
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Safety concerns have been “at the core” for Anthropic, she said, adding that the company is focused on working with lawmakers to pass new regulations for AI.
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n
We do think it’s existential to do this. We do think we have to balance the risk now. The capabilities are only increasing and increasing at a pace that is accelerating.
n
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Heck also argued that leaving it to AI companies to self-regulate – as Republican congressional leaders continue to argue – is not sufficient to address the risks.
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n
I don’t think that there’s a world where you do safety and people are accepting of AI companies just doing it on honor code. We can’t be checking our own homework.
n
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The House speaker, Mike Johnson, has cancelled votes currently scheduled for tomorrow (Thursday). This means that lower chamber lawmakers will now head back to their districts for the midterm recess a day early.
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The change to schedule means that the House will avoid voting on Republican congressman Thomas Massie’s resolution to impeach the defense secretary, Pete Hegseth.
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Dr Nicole Saphier, the president’s pick to serve as US surgeon general, avoided mentioning vaccines directly in her opening remarks. Instead she expressed her Make America Healthy Again bona fides.
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“I have long believed that we spend too much time and resources treating chronic disease after it takes hold, and not enough time helping Americans reduce their risk before illness begins. And unfortunately, we’re seeing the consequences of that imbalance right now: rising cancer rates in people under 50, cardiovascular disease that remains the number one killer, but also is largely preventable in lots of cases,” Saphier said.
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Later, the Senate health committee’s Republican chair, Bill Cassidy, pushed Saphier about whether she would tell parents concerned about the measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccine that it does not cause autism. A reminder that there is no reputable evidence that proves a link between the two.
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“I’m so sensitive to this because I’ve had wriggle room from people sitting there … who later use that wriggle room to do things which are quite contrary?” Cassidy said, referring to the various promises that Robert F Kennedy Jr made to the top Republican in his confirmation hearing, only for the health secretary to renege on several occasions.
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“Would you feel comfortable communicating with clarity … Is the MMR vaccine extremely lethal, as the president said?” Cassidy asked Saphier today.
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The nominee for surgeon general said that she “cannot speak to what the president has said” but went on to say: “I do not believe the MMR vaccine to be lethal. I believe the MMR vaccine is our greatest tool for combating measles.”
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Saphier, who is a practising radiologist and Fox News contributor, added: “The best tool we have to combat these infections to save the most lives and to also create population herd immunity is vaccination against the MMR. I appreciate the president is trying to reach vaccine-hesitant people who are wanting more answers or who are concerned that there are too many doses.”
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Cassidy, however, remained unconvinced by the president’s public health strategy. “I’m not sure that you reach people who are vaccine hesitant by feeding into untruths,” the chair said.
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On Capitol Hill today, Dr Nicole Saphier, Donald Trump’s third pick to be the US surgeon general will face lawmakers on the Senate health, education, labor and pensions committee for a confirmation hearing at 10am ET.
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A reminder that the president withdrew his last two nominations for the top doctor position – Casey Means and Dr Janette Nesheiwat. While Means’ nomination fell apart after she was grilled by senators in February, Trump withdrew his support for Nesheiwat after questions circled around her academic credentials.
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Saphier, a radiologist, will appear alongside Chris Klomp – Trump’s nominee to be the deputy health secretary who previously served as the director of the Center for Medicare. At an earlier confirmation hearing with the Senate finance committee this week, Klomp was resolute that the MMR vaccine is the “single most effective public health tool that we have against measles”. A notable contrast to Robert F Kennedy Jr’s anti-vaccine stance while leading the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS).
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Also this week, the Guardian reported that Saphier received more than $200,000 in business income from a company she owns that sells dietary supplements, according to her financial disclosure and ethics’s agreement she filed last week.
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The US has announced visa restrictions on some South Africans as Donald Trump’s administration continues to claim that South Africa’s government racially discriminates against white minority Afrikaners.
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The announcement did not specify individuals who were barred from the US. Trump has spent his second term falsely claiming there is a “white genocide” in South Africa and railing against its affirmative action policies.
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Since the start of last year, the US has cut aid to South Africa, barred it from this year’s G20 summit in Miami and set up a refugee programme for Afrikaners and other South African racial minorities. Meanwhile, the Trump administration has been dismantling refugee and asylum programmes for people fleeing war and persecution.
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“The South African people are being failed by a government that is destroying its economy through an obsessive pursuit of racial grievance against the Afrikaner minority,” the US secretary of state, Marco Rubio, said in a post on X.
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“The South African government has consistently failed to adequately address rural crime, violent and dehumanising rhetoric, and race-based discriminatory policies against Afrikaners and other minority populations.”
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The US visa restrictions would target “foreign nationals who enact or enable policies that promote race-based discrimination, incite violence, or enable land confiscation without compensation in South Africa”, Rubio added.
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Hello and welcome to the US politics live blog.
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For a third time, the US House has voted to end the war in Iran, approving a war powers resolution that would halt Donald Trump’s ability to continue military action without congressional approval.
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The roll call late on Tuesday, 220-204, was similar to earlier efforts this summer, with a few more Republicans joining all Democrats voting to bring an end to the conflict.
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None of the resolutions have made it to the president’s desk, where Trump would almost certainly veto the measure, the Associated Press reported.
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“Remember when Donald Trump said that this war would last just a few weeks?” said Democratic representative Seth Moulton, who served as a marine during the Iraq war and pushed the resolution forward.
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He said it’s time for Congress to “actually ask tough questions, as the constitution directs us to do, rather than be subservient to another warmongering administration”.
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Republican Brian Mast of Florida, the chair of the House foreign affairs committee, questioned which military resources Democrats would want to remove from the region where he said Iran remains a threat.
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Mast said Trump is against “forever wars, and that is what he is ending” – the decades of hostilities from Iran. “They are a continuous ongoing threat to the United States,” Mast said. “Enough is enough.”
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The action is likely the last House vote on the Iran war before the midterm elections, in which the conflict overseas is playing a substantial role in the political campaigns.
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In other developments:
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As part of a $2.8bn package of military aid, the Trump administration plans to send Israel a type of one-ton bomb that was withheld by the Biden administration over concerns that they were being used to kill Palestinian civilians in Gaza.
n
Donald Trump “threw a tantrum” when he heard that Democratic congresswoman Joyce Beatty, a trustee of the Kennedy Center whose lawsuit forced Trump’s name to be removed from the facade of the memorial, had again prevailed in court.
n
A televised Michigan Senate debate in Detroit on Tuesday was distinctly one-sided, because the Democratic nominee, Dr Abdul El-Sayed, turned up, while his Republican rival, Mike Rogers, chose not to attend.
n
Todd Blanche, the US attorney general, alerted reporters at the White House to stand by for what he called “a big development” in the federal crackdown on voting by non-citizens to be announced by Ryan Raybould, the US attorney for the northern district of Texas. When it came, however, Raybould’s announcement, that his office had charged six lawful permanent residents and one undocumented immigrant for voting in federal elections over the past eight years, hardly lived up to the billing.
n
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Key events
This brings our live coverage of the second Trump administration to a close, but just for the day. We will be back on Thursday with more. Here are the latest developments:
Donald Trump responded to the Federal Reserve’s unanimous decision on Wednesday to raise its benchmark interest rate by a quarter-percentage point, to a range of 3.75% to 4%, by demanding a massive cut in rates.
The US Congress has passed a sweeping bill allowing Trump to raise tariffs on top buyers of Russian energy and issue other punishing sanctions against the Kremlin following a pitched battle between lawmakers backing Ukraine and sceptics worried the bill gives the president too much power.
Congresswoman Joyce Beatty, a Democrat and Kennedy Center trustee, has filed a motion for an emergency hearing on the performing arts venue’s apparent closure.
Asked why it is so important to him to have his name inscribed on the Kennedy Center, a memorial to another president, Trump said he deserves “recognition” for saving the venue. If not, Trump said, “It’ll end up being ripped down.
Mitch McConnell, the former Republican Senate majority leader who returned to work this week after a months‑long absence, had to be prompted by colleagues as to how to vote near the start of a televised meeting of the Senate agriculture committee on Wednesday.
The House speaker, Mike Johnson, cancelled votes currently scheduled for Thursday, meaning that lower chamber lawmakers will now head back to their districts for the midterm recess a day early. The change to schedule means that the House will avoid voting on Republican congressman Thomas Massie’s resolution to impeach the defense secretary, Pete Hegseth.
Speaking in North Carolina, Trump explicitly compared his effort to blame Democrat Roy Cooper, the former governor and Senate candidate, for the brutal killing of a young Ukrainian refugee, Iryna Zarutska, last year, by using false information, on the infamous 1988 Willie Horton ad.
Speaking in North Carolina on Wednesday, Donald Trump repeated his false claim that it is the war in Ukraine he’s failed to stop, not the one in Iran he started, that has caused a spike in diesel prices in the United States.
After repeating his false claim to have ended eight wars, Trump said, “we’re working very hard to get Russia-Ukraine” settled. “The one that’s the toughest is Russia-Ukraine. They hate each other. The two leaders hate each other so much,” he continued, falsely suggesting, as he has before, that Volodymyr Zelenskyy is to blame for hating Vladimir Putin, the dictator who ordered the bloody invasion of his country.
“You know, hatred is very interesting. War is very interesting, but it’s too bad,” Trump went on. “And that’s what’s driving actually, that’s the war that’s driving up the diesel prices.”
Meanwhile, in Washington, Republican senators who are more clear on who is to blame for the war in Ukraine celebrated the passage of a bill that will give the president the power to impose sanctions on Russia, and tariffs on other countries that buy its oil, even though doing so would likely drive fuel prices even higher.
“I applaud the House’s passage of the Lindsey O. Graham Sanctioning Russia and Iran Act—it’s long past time we cut off the funding for Russia’s war machine at its source,” senator Tom Cotton, an Arkansas Republican, posted. “This legislation will tighten the screws on Putin and impose real costs on those financing his war.”
“We are now one step closer to arming President Trump with the tools he needs to deplete Russia of the little economic power it has left and bring much-needed peace to the region,” senator Katie Britt, an Alabama Republican, wrote.
Congressman Joe Wilson, a South Carolina Republican, has written a letter to the National Hockey League’s commissioner to protest the appearance of Washington Capitals star Alex Ovechkin in a campaign ad for Vladimir Putin’s party, United Russia.
In the letter, posted on social media by the congressman on Wednesday, Wilson expressed “serious concern” over Ovechkin lending his celebrity to support “the dictatorial political party of Russian war criminal Vladimir Putin, who actively works to oppress the people of Russia by outlawing freedom of speech and fair elections.”
Wilson notes that, as the Guardian reported on Monday, images from the ad campaign published by a leading Russian newspaper showed that Ovechkin appeared alongside a series of key figures in Putin’s government:
Mr. Ovechkin shamefully appeared in a campaign video alongside senior figures of the Putin regime, including Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and Margarita Simonyan, editor-in-chief of the Kremlin propaganda outlet RT. The advertisement comes ahead of Russia’s September parliamentary “elections” and represents an alarming instance of one of the National Hockey League’s most prominent players lending his image and international celebrity to a political organization that has enabled Putin’s brutal rule and his ongoing war of aggression against Ukraine. Even more disturbing, this United Russia campaign includes Maria Lvova-Belova, who is wanted by the International Criminal Court for her role in the unlawful deportation and transfer of Ukrainian children from Russian-occupied territory.
“An NHL superstar appearing in campaign propaganda for Putin’s political party cannot simply be dismissed as an activity wholly disconnected from the League,” Wilson added.
“I therefore respectfully request that the NHL review this matter and clarify what policies, if any, govern the participation of active players in political advertisements or propaganda on behalf of dictatorial political parties and foreign political regimes,” the congressman wrote. “I further request that the League and the Capitals organization clarify any endorsement of Putin’s party is not a official position of the NHL or the Washington Capitals.”
The letter was also sent to Ted Leonsis, the owner of the Washington Capitals.
Beneath his signature, in blue marker, Wilson added an impassioned, if imprecise, handwritten note: “Putin is a convicted war criminal!”
Putin, the Russian president, has been indicted by the International Criminal Court, along with Maria Lvova-Belova, for the forceable transfer of Ukrainian children to Russia, but neither has yet been tried or convicted.
Wilson, a strong supporter of Ukraine, is perhaps best known for disrupting then president Barack Obama’s address to Congress in 2009, by shouting “You lie!” in what was then considered “an extraordinary breach of congressional decorum”.
After running through many of his familiar talking points, including a gratuitous attack on his predecessor Joe Biden, Donald Trump wrapped up his speech in North Carolina and departed to the even more familiar strains of YMCA.
In his address to supporters in Gastonia, North Carolina, now in progress, Donald Trump tried to blame the state’s former governor, Roy Cooper, who is now the Democratic nominee for the Senate, for the brutal killing of Iryna Zarutska, a Ukrainian woman who was killed on a train in Charlotte, North Carolina last year.
Trump began by describing Cooper as a “murderer protector” before repeatedly making the false claim that DeCarlos Brown Jr, the man arrested and charged with killing Zarutska, had been released from prison by Cooper.
“He was released by Cooper,” Trump said, incorrectly, after describing in gruesome detail the video of the killing.
While Republicans have tried to blame the fact that Brown was not in jail in 2025 on a 2021 COVID-era prison settlement as he result of a lawsuit over prison conditions during Cooper’s term as governor, in fact Brown had been released from prison on 20 September 2020 after completing a sentence for a previous crime.
Despite that fact, Michael Whatley, the Republican Senate candidate Trump is in North Carolina to campaign for, claimed in a social media post in September, which featured video of the killing of Zarutska: “Cooper bears direct responsibility for this heinous act and must answer to the public about why he prioritizes criminals over public safety.”
Earlier on Wednesday, Whatly repeated the false claim in another post, writing: “Iryna Zarutska would still be alive today if Roy Cooper’s soft on crime policies didn’t put her killer Decarlos Brown Jr back on the streets of Charlotte.”
“This is a lie,” a Cooper campaign spokesperson told Fox News in February. “Decarlos Brown was not released from prison as a result of a court-ordered settlement but in fact served his full sentence and was not released early.”
During his speech, Trump paused to show the crowd 80 mug shots on a giant video screen. The fact that nearly all the faces of the suspects were Black revealed the lack of subtly in the president’s appeal to his mainly white audience.
During his State of the Union address in February, Trump introduced Iryna Zarutska’s mother in the gallery and made a different false claim about her alleged killer, wringly claiming that the man who stabbed Zarutska was an undocumented immigrant, calling him, “a hardened criminal set free to kill in America came in through open borders”.
Trump’s attempt to frame Cooper, by falsely claiming that he had let the Black man who killed Zarutska free, echoed the 1988 attack ad run against the Democratic presidential candidate Michael Dukakis, which blamed the former Massachusetts governor for crimes committed by Willie Horton, a Black prisoner released on a furlough program, who raped a white Maryland woman and bound and stabbed her boyfriend.
“By the time we’re finished,” Lee Atwater, the campaign strategist for Dukakis’s Republican opponent, George HW Bush, said at the time, “they’re going to wonder whether Willie Horton is Dukakis’s running mate.”
The Willie Horton ad was produced and distributed by a former employee of Bush’s media adviser, Roger Ailes, who went on to create Fox News.
As he so often does, Trump spoke the subtext out loud, telling the audience that his attack on Cooper was inspired by the Willie Horton ad.
“Years ago in Massachusetts, there was a governor named Dukakis, Michael Dukakis, you remember, who had a very substantial lead for president,” Trump said. “He was going to win easily, but he allowed a man named Willie Horton out of jail. Willie Horton was a bad guy, really bad guy. Same thing as this. Same as- same exact thing.”
Trump went on to exaggerate the scope of Horton’s brutal crimes, falsely claiming that “he raped and murdered, raped and murdered again and again. And he ended up killing three women.”
“Overnight, Dukakis took a rousing lead of 15 points and lost the election in a landslide. Because of that one advertisement,” Trump said. “They put it on just like we’re putting this on, because we have to make sure that Michael Whatley gets into office”.
Asked by a reporter in North Carolina why it is so important to him to have his name inscribed on the Kennedy Center, a memorial to another president, Donald Trump said he deserves “recognition” for saving the center no one else seemed to think was in dire condition until he took office.
“It’s a mess,” Trump said. “The Kennedy Center for many years has lost tens of millions of dollars, even hundreds of millions of dollars … For me to go and fix it – I’m quite capable of fixing it – and then have to subsidize it for years to come, because you will lose with the Kennedy Center – they were losing hundreds of millions of dollars and sometimes hundreds of billions – this is before I got involved. So, for the Trump administration, for me, to get involved and to take that on long term and to carry it or to raise money to carry it, I think that the Trump administration should certainly have recognition because, frankly, if we don’t do that, it’s going to close.
“It’ll end up being ripped down. It’s in very, very bad shape, very dangerous shape. You see steel falling down. You see plaster falling off ceilings. You see a lot of dangers. It’s been very badly maintained for 25 years,” he continued.
“I’d like to be able to save it, but it’s going to take a lot of subsidy into the future. And for us as an administration to want to do that, I think the Trump administration should be recognized.”
Speaking to reporters at the airport in Charlotte, North Carolina, on Wednesday, Donald Trump scoffed at the idea of Canada being driven to join the European Union as a result of the trade war he launched against the North American country.
“I think it’s laughable,” Trump said in remarks clipped and posted on social media by the White House. “The whole thing with Canada, Canada’s been a terrible trade partner. No, I don’t see that. If they do that, if I think it’s at all a hostile act, I will put very serious tariffs or stop trading with Europe on many things. So, if they do that, if Europe does that, with a bad intention – if it’s a good intention, that’s fine – if it’s bad intention we’ll put very heavy tariffs on Europe, which is a possibility.”
Speaking to reporters on his way to give a rally speech in North Carolina, Donald Trump denied that his hand-picked Federal Reserve chair, Kevin Warsh, had defied him by voting to raise interest rates, claiming that he had advised Warsh to vote as he did.
Asked if he still has confidence in Warsh, despite the rate hike Trump deplored, the president said:
“I do. I mean, I’m relying on Kevin, but he’s got a very tough board. He’s got a board that was put there by a lot of other people. And the interest rates are too high. They’re not appropriate,” Trump replied. “I told Kevin, I said, ‘You might as well vote with the board because it’s just not going to matter.’ The board is very hostile. They’re very political. They’re doing the wrong thing. They’re a bunch of politicians. They are people put on by politicians.”
“We should be paying the lowest interest rate anywhere in the world because we have the strongest credit,” he added. “If we wanted to get rid of deficits, which we could do with the swipe of the pen with every country, we’d make a trillion and a half dollars a year. We’d pay off our debt. We’d do all sorts of things. But we haven’t chosen to do that. But at some point, we will. Interest rates are too high.”
Later, asked again about Warsh, Trump said: “It doesn’t matter because he doesn’t have the votes… No matter how good a job, he’s got a hostile board… They’re raising that only for political reasons, and that’s a raise against Trump.”
As fans of Donald Trump wait for the start of his remarks in North Carolina, a live feed showed they were just treated to Sinéad O’Connor’s rendition of Prince’s Nothing Compares 2 U.
It was not clear what the Republicans in attendance made of the tune, given that the late Irish singer was for a time a hate figure for American conservatives, after she tore up a photograph of Pope John Paul II during an appearance on Saturday Night Live in 1992, and said: “Fight the real enemy.”
Andrew Roth
The US Congress has passed a sweeping bill allowing Donald Trump to raise tariffs on top buyers of Russian energy and issue other punishing sanctions against the Kremlin following a pitched battle between lawmakers backing Ukraine and sceptics worried the bill gives the president too much power.
The Lindsey O Graham Sanctioning Russia and Iran Act of 2026 passed in a 262-159 vote on the last day before Congress goes on recess ahead of the midterm elections. Graham, who died earlier this year, co-authored and submitted the bill more than a year and a half ago.
The long delay in the vote was widely considered to be scepticism from the Trump administration, which had opposed additional sanctions and then recently changed its stance to support submitting the bill as efforts to negotiate with the Kremlin to end the war have yielded few results.
However the bill faced last-minute hurdles in Congress as members of the Republican party’s isolationist wing were joined by Democrats who warned that Trump could use the bill’s new tariffs authority against allies instead.
The bill would mandate new sanctions on Russian political and military officials, and foreign networks helping to supply Russia’s war machine and evade existing sanctions. It would also target Russia’s so-called fleet of “shadow tankers”, which have allowed the country to continue to ship crude around the world despite sanctions on its energy exports.
It would also allow Trump to impose tariffs of up to 100% on the top purchasers of Russian energy, including China, as well as other countries helping the Kremlin evade sanctions.
Senior Democrats voiced opposition to the bill during a heated floor debate. “Why in the world would this Congress give this president additional authority to visit that kind of economic harm on the American people?” said Hakeem Jeffries, the leading Democrat in the House, during a speech on Wednesday, adding he would vote against the bill.
The US Department of Defense’s chief technology officer, Emil Michael, dismissed safety concerns raised by the leaders of artificial intelligence companies in an interview with CNBC on Wednesday.
Michael, a former Uber executive, previously led the Pentagon’s efforts to press Anthropic to allow the defense department to use its Claude AI model for fully autonomous lethal weapons or domestic mass surveillance.
Michael repeatedly said he opposes increased government regulatory oversight of AI companies and claimed that the alarms raised by leading AI firms were part of a “coordinated campaign to scare people to make irrational decisions that benefit” those firms.
He also suggested, as he had in a Fox News interview on Monday, that “the fear-mongering” is driven by an ideology called effective altruism.
“The amount of dollars being spent in DC now, directly and indirectly by this effective altruist movement,” Michael said, “I don’t think the country has ever seen.
“I think in the next few years, you’re going to see more dollars poured into this sort of industry from a lobbying standpoint, and to specific congresspeople and senators, than we’ve ever seen before,” he added. “And the promoters of some of these extinction death-cult-like philosophies are part of that effort.”
When Michael was asked if he favored the Trump administration seeking to nationalize or take partial government stakes in AI firms, he replied: “I hope not.”
He pointed out that the AI giants could become some of the biggest companies “in the history of the world. In America, that’s a good thing. We want others to come up alongside them. We don’t want government to get in the middle. That doesn’t really go well, in terms of nationalization.”
In apparent violation of a federal court order, the Kennedy Center was closed to the public on Wednesday and fencing was installed as construction looked set to begin, according to the testimony of a legal assistant working for the firm that represents the congresswoman Joyce Beatty, the Ohio Democrat and Kennedy Center trustee who sued to stop Donald Trump from closing the performing arts venue and adding his name to its facade.
The sworn statement was submitted to the District of Columbia court overseeing the lawsuit by Bridget Kennedy-Bailey of the Washington Litigation Group, in support of Beatty’s motion for an emergency hearing on the performing arts venue’s apparent closure.
Judge Christopher Cooper, who is overseeing Beatty’s suit, had ordered that the institution could not close to the public without his approval.
According to Kennedy-Bailey, when she visited the venue on Wednesday morning, she found the doors locked and was told by Kennedy Center employees that the facility was closed.
She also saw crews installing black metal gates outside the center, blocking all access, and white and orange barriers that “looked like those used on construction sites”.
Just before noon, someone who works in security for the center told the legal assistant “that the gates are for ‘public safety’ because they are doing construction inside the building”.
Kennedy-Bailey also testified that someone who said he works in public relations for the Kennedy Center told her that the building is closed for “repairs, and that staff are not allowed in without a hard hat”.
“I asked him if the construction was occurring today,” Kennedy-Bailey said, “and he stated that he was not sure but that it ‘seems like it’”
At the end of her sworn statement, Kennedy-Bailey said: “I saw a forklift carrying what appeared to be a more permanent form of fencing drive over to the north side of the building. I saw the forklift run into and hit the pillars on the building several times.”
Donald Trump responded to the Federal Reserve’s unanimous decision on Wednesday to raise its benchmark interest rate by a quarter-percentage point, to a range of 3.75% to 4%, by demanding a massive cut in rates.
Writing on his social media platform, the president also offered a bizarre argument that the United States economy would benefit “if we stopped Trading with every country that we have a Deficit with, which is most of them”.
Here is the president’s complete statement on the interest rate hike, taken to combat inflation driven at least in part by the rise in oil prices caused by the war on Iran he started and has not been able to end.
Interest Rates in the United States should be 1%, or less, because we are the Best Credit in the World – BY FAR. Our Country is BOOMING with new Investment! If we stopped Trading with every country that we have a Deficit with, which is most of them, we would make, at least, 1.5 Trillion Dollars a year. The word ‘Deficit’ is nothing more than a fancy word for LOSS. We are ‘carrying’ almost every country in the World, and that cannot go on any longer. LOWER THE INTEREST RATES FOR THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, AND FAST!
The central bank’s move is the first time the Fed has raised rates since July 2023 and clearly set Kevin Warsh, Trump’s pick to be the new Fed chair, on a collision course with the president.
“The plain fact is that inflation is too high and has been for too long,” Warsh said on Wednesday. “This summer’s inflation readings do not tell me that underlying trends have meaningfully improved.”
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Originally reported by theguardian.com. Adapted for our readers.
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