Latest news with #Vance
The Hill
33 minutes ago
- Politics
- The Hill
Vance travels to Los Angeles to meet Marines, visit federal command center
Vice President Vance is set to travel to Los Angeles on Friday, a day after a federal appeals ruled President Trump could retain control of the California National Guard in response to the protests over his immigration raids. Vance 'will tour a multi-agency Federal Joint Operations Center, a Federal Mobile Command Center, meet with leadership and Marines, and deliver brief remarks,' according to his office. The vice president's office did not provide further details about the visit. Around 200 Marines armed with rifles, riot control equipment and gas masks have been deployed to the streets of Los Angeles and more than 2,000 California National Guard troops are also on the ground. Trump on Friday morning touted the 'big win' in the courts and bashed California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D), whom he has been sparring with since he first called in the National Guard to Los Angeles. 'The Judges obviously realized that Gavin Newscum is incompetent and ill prepared, but this is much bigger than Gavin, because all over the United States, if our Cities, and our people, need protection, we are the ones to give it to them should State and Local Police be unable, for whatever reason, to get the job done,' Trump said. Newsom argued Trump's decision to federalize soldiers without consulting him was illegal and asked the courts for an emergency order to block the move. U.S. District Judge Charles Breyer, a Clinton appointee, initially ruled in California's favor, but the emergency injunction was overturned by the Ninth Circuit on June 13. The three-judge panel then unanimously extended its pause in an unsigned, 38-page decision released Thursday night. Newsom and Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass (D), as well as other Democrats, have bashed the president for using the National Guard and Marines to quell the protests and argued last week that the federal enforcement stoked chaos on the ground.
NBC News
an hour ago
- Politics
- NBC News
Vance to travel to Los Angeles
Vice President JD Vance will travel to Los Angeles on Friday for a visit to a city where clashes between protesters and law enforcement officials have become a focal point of the opposition to the Trump administration's immigration agenda. While in Los Angeles, Vance is expected to deliver remarks as well as tour federal facilities, including a mobile command center and meet with Marines. Vance's visit to the city is the latest in the battle between Democrats and the Trump administration over its hardline deportation policies after an appeals court ruled in the president's favor Thursday. The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that it's "likely that the President lawfully exercised his statutory authority" in deploying California National Guard troops to respond to protests in L.A. The decision stemmed from the lawsuit California Attorney General Rob Bonta brought against the Trump administration after Trump sent the troops to the city without the approval of Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom. On Wednesday, U.S. Northern Command said that it was activating 2,000 additional National Guard troops in L.A. to 'support the protection of federal functions, personnel, and property in the greater Los Angeles area.' That brings the total number of National Guard troops deployed to the city to more than 4,000 since the protests erupted there earlier this month. The president also deployed U.S. Marines to assist law enforcement in the response to demonstrations. The president's and administration's immigration actions have sparked outrage among Democratic lawmakers, including California Sen. Alex Padilla, who was forcibly removed and handcuffed after he tried to question Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem in a briefing last week. The protests formed after ICE agents raided three places in central L.A. in early June, triggering a domino effect of similar demonstrations nationwide. While they've dissipated in recent weeks, one began on Thursday when federal agents working with ICE came to Dodgers Stadium 'requested permission to access the parking lots.' The Major League Baseball team, however, said that it blocked immigration agents from entering the ballpark.
The Hill
6 hours ago
- Politics
- The Hill
Justice Thomas delights conservatives in shunning gender-affirming care ‘experts'
Justice Clarence Thomas's shunning of 'experts' defending gender-affirming care is delighting conservatives in their assault on liberal influence in academics and medicine, a mission now reaching the courts. The conservative justice argued in a solo opinion concurring with the court's 6-3 decision to uphold Tennessee's transgender youth care ban that so-called experts have jumped on the bandwagon to embrace such treatment while evidence to the contrary mounts. 'This case carries a simple lesson: In politically contentious debates over matters shrouded in scientific uncertainty, courts should not assume that self-described experts are correct,' Thomas wrote. Thomas's opinion quickly garnered the attention of prominent Republicans, including Vice President Vance, who made his debut on liberal social media platform Bluesky by complimenting the opinion as 'quite illuminating.' 'I might add that many of those scientists are receiving substantial resources from big pharma to push these medicines on kids. What do you think?' Vance wrote Thursday, quickly sparking thousands of replies dripping with snark. Since Trump has taken office, his administration has abandoned President Biden's defense of gender-affirming care. Trump's Justice Department dropped the legal challenge to Tennessee's ban, and in May, his Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) declared there is a 'lack of robust evidence' for the treatments. In a New York Times opinion piece following the Supreme Court ruling, the mother of the transgender teen who challenged Tennessee's law mourned the decision to block care for her daughter. 'I am deeply afraid for what this decision will unleash — politically and socially,' Samantha Williams wrote. 'Now that the Supreme Court has denied the rights of young people like my daughter and families like ours, what's next?' Major American medical groups have said gender-affirming care for transgender youth and adults is medically necessary. But Thomas in his opinion wrote that it's legally irrelevant, saying trusting those groups would otherwise allow 'elite sentiment' to 'distort and stifle democratic debate.' 'There are particularly good reasons to question the expert class here, as recent revelations suggest that leading voices in this area have relied on questionable evidence, and have allowed ideology to influence their medical guidance,' Thomas wrote. The Supreme Court's decision instead looks to Europe, citing health authorities in Finland, Norway, Sweden and the United Kingdom. The justices particularly emphasized the Cass Review, an influential 2024 report from England questioning the treatments. 'Health authorities in a number of European countries have raised significant concerns regarding the potential harms associated with using puberty blockers and hormones to treat transgender minors,' Chief Justice John Roberts wrote for the majority. The increased prominence of conservatives' attacks come as public trust in health officials and agencies continues to plummet more broadly, a decline that began during the COVID-19 pandemic. Trust in state and local public health officials dropped by 10 percentage points to 54 percent, while the share of those who say they trust the U.S. Centers for Disease Control (CDC) has also slipped five percentage points, according to January polling from KFF, formerly known as the Kaiser Family Foundation. 'Justice Thomas soundly put to rest the persistent sham that we should quiet down and 'trust the science' when it comes to life-altering experimentation on minors,' Katherine Green Robertson, chief counsel of Alabama's attorney general's office, said in a statement following the decision. The state filed a friend-of-the-court brief in the case that urged the justices not to decide it on 'euphemisms about 'affirming care' and unsupported appeals to 'expert' organizations.' 'Alabama is proud to have armed the Court with a full rundown of the medical community's shameless political collusion on this matter, which should permanently discredit every organization involved,' she said. The justices' reliance on outside research has come into question before. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson caught heat after a study she cited in her 2023 dissent in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, which sharply limited the use of race as a factor in college admissions, was disputed. In an impassioned dissent expounding on the benefits of diversity in education, Jackson pointed to a friend-of-the-court brief by the Association of American Medical Colleges, which referenced the 2020 study. 'It saves lives,' she wrote, pointing to the research which showed that having a Black physician more than doubles the likelihood that a high-risk Black baby will live. In the following months, critics began to debunk the claim, suggesting at first that the justice misrepresented the statistic, and later, that the research itself was inaccurate. 'Even Supreme Court justices are known to be gullible,' lawyer Ted Frank wrote in a Wall Street Journal op-ed at the time. It's not just studies that support left-leaning views that have come under scrutiny, either. A month before the Supreme Court weighed a challenge to mifepristone access, one of the two common drugs used in medication abortion, a medical journal retracted two studies claiming to show the harms of the pill. The studies, published in the Sage journal Health Services Research and Managerial Epidemiology and backed by an anti-abortion group, were retracted after a reader raised concerns about the study's accuracy and a review found the conclusions 'invalidated in whole or in part.' U.S. District Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk had pointed to the studies in his decision siding with the conservative medical group Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine, which invalidated the Federal Drug Administration's (FDA) approval of mifepristone because it overlooked safety concerns. The justices ultimately ruled unanimously last year that the anti-abortion doctors did not have standing to challenge access to mifepristone, declining to address the underlying regulatory or safety issues. In the gender-affirming care case, the Supreme Court's decision aligned with the conservative voices that have called on the court to give credence to political forces over educational ones — and the shift did not go unnoticed. 'The vibe shift is real,' Roger Severino, a vice president at the Heritage Foundation who ran HHS's civil rights office during Trump's first term, told supporters after the decision. 'Not only was it political in the last election, President Trump's closing argument is that 'she is for they/them, and he is for you,'' he continued. 'And here, the court — not that they're political animals — at least they're consistent with where the American people are.'
Business Insider
7 hours ago
- Business
- Business Insider
Not just $Trump: Several top administration officials have put their money into crypto
There's something that several top Trump administration officials have in common: They've poured thousands of dollars into cryptocurrency. While much has been made of President Donald Trump's own involvement with crypto, financial disclosures show that several of his top advisors and Cabinet officials also have substantial cryptocurrency investments. That includes Vice President JD Vance, who owns bitcoin worth between $250,000 and $500,000. Officials are generally only required to disclose the range of the value of their assets, so we don't know the exact amount. At the Bitcoin 2025 Conference in Las Vegas last month, Vance described himself as "one only people running for office who actually owned bitcoin" when he ran for Senate in Ohio in 2022. "I still own a fair amount of bitcoin today," he said. Among Cabinet officials, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. may be the largest holder of Bitcoin: he reported owning between $1 million and $5 million in the cryptocurrency in his December disclosure. Others hold at least hundreds of thousands of dollars in crypto. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy reported owning between $502,000 and $1.3 million in various cryptocurrencies, while Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services Administrator Mehmet Oz reported holding between $500,000 and $1 million in bitcoin. Todd Blanche, a former personal defense attorney for Trump who now serves as Deputy US Attorney General, reported owning between $158,000 and $470,000 in various cryptocurrencies, primarily bitcoin. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth also owns between $15,000 and $50,000 in bitcoin. Some Cabinet officials are invested in Bitcoin funds, which track the performance of Bitcoin without involving direct ownership. Among them is Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, who disclosed having between $250,000 and $500,000 in such a fund. Oz and Duffy also invested in bitcoin funds in addition to their direct crypto holdings. Other top officials used to own cryptocurrencies but agreed to sell them off. That includes Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, who reported owning between $33,000 and $145,000 in various cryptocurrencies, primarily bitcoin, which she sold off on May 13. Office of Management and Budget Director Russ Vought agreed to divest his holdings of up to $15,000 in bitcoin, while FBI Director Kash Patel agreed to sell off his investments in bitcoin ETFs, which were worth between $51,000 and $115,000. "President Trump, Vice President Vance, and senior White House staff have completed required ethics briefings and financial reporting obligations," White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said in a statement for this story. "The Trump Administration is committed to transparency and accessibility for the American people." Ultimately, Trump remains the biggest cryptocurrency investor in his administration. His most recent financial disclosure shows he made more than $53 million from cryptocurrency sales last year in connection with World Liberty Financial, a crypto firm that's majority-owned by Trump and his family. Trump launched a meme-coin, $Trump, in the days before his second inauguration in January.
Irish Independent
14 hours ago
- Politics
- Irish Independent
Letters: Some of the most profound aspects of Irishness are found far away from home
I've lived and worked in many places, and nowhere has that belief been more strongly confirmed than among the diaspora. In California, I met Irish-Americans with a better command of the Irish language than I ever had, who could dance reels and jigs as if born to it and were much better at Gaelic football than me. In Hawaii it was the same – people fiercely proud of their roots, even if their connection was two or three generations removed. While teaching in a Catholic school in London, I was struck by how much more connected to this heritage my pupils were than I felt myself. They knew their family townlands, said grace instinctively and sang rebel songs their parents had passed down. My London-Irish wife, whom I met in San Francisco, once shocked me by berating a woman on the Tube who had muttered something about 'drunken Irish on the train'. She showed more courage in that moment than I had ever displayed. And I'll never forget sitting on a boulevard in Buenos Aires wearing an Irish jersey, waiting for my wife to return from a salsa class. A woman walked past, saw the shirt, smiled and blew me a kiss. Mary Kenny is right: Irishness isn't a passport stamp. It's a cultural imprint, sometimes stronger abroad than at home. We may be a small nation, but wherever we go, we leave a presence – proud, persistent and unmistakably our own. Enda Cullen, Tullysaran Road, Armagh Explain all the arrests if Trump, Vance and Rubio are free-speech absolutists Ian O'Doherty ('Mam and Dad are arguing again, and we are the fearful child torn between the two', June 18) explores the different interpretations of 'free speech' in the EU and US and the possible economic implications for Ireland. He portrays Ireland and the EU as stuffy nanny states, duty-bound and hell-bent on protecting citizens from harmful or hateful speech. ADVERTISEMENT Meanwhile, the US is depicted as some divine, freedom-loving cowboy who doesn't mince his words and loves to shoot from the hip. Indeed, O'Doherty brands Trump loyalists Marco Rubio and JD Vance as 'free-speech absolutists'. Lest we forget, Rubio once dubbed Trump a 'con-artist' while Vance compared Trump with Hitler. Both men recently supported the arrest and detention of Columbia University students protesting against the indiscriminate Israeli campaign carried out across Gaza in response to the horrific Hamas attack of October 7. These guys are free-speech absolutists all right – especially when they are talking out of both sides of their mouths. Paddy Sharkey, Hollywood, Co Wicklow Israel-US food aid centres are death traps for the civilians of Palestine The Israel-US Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) was first registered last February, and its few food aid centres set up on May 26 in Gaza are described as death traps overseen by Israel's military and armed contractors. Last week, Jens Laerke, the UN spokesperson for the Co-ordination of Humanitarian Affairs, said the GHF 'is not delivering supplies safely to those in need' and the GHF was a 'failure' from a humanitarian point of view. Exhausted Palestinians who walk off the correct route to the GHF aid centres or linger too long in despair after aid runs out are shot at and killed daily. Tanks are also used to fire at civilians. These are supposed to be warning shots. The banning of international media from Gaza by Israel since the war began in October 2023 is a key factor as to why the war is so extreme. If, for example, the UK's Channel 4 News or US CBS News were in Gaza reporting on the war, it would have had a quicker impact on governments calling on Israel to end the targeting of civilians in the most miserable war of the 21st century. Experienced aid agencies run by the UN, UK and others have been more restricted in Gaza since last March. There are requests for the UN to be allowed fully back in to deliver aid safely. Israel has as much a right as any country to ensure its security, but daily, casual killings by the IDF of civilians in Gaza is truly reprehensible. I hope Hamas will release the remaining hostages they took into Gaza in October 2023. They, too, endure terrible conditions. Mary Sullivan, College Road, Co Cork If Kneecap member can be charged, why not those flying the UVF's flag? Hezbollah is a proscribed organisation, and Mo Chara of Kneecap was recently before Westminster Magistrates' Court charged with displaying a Hezbollah flag. The UVF is also an illegal organisation, but for years I have witnessed UVF flags in Armagh, fluttering on poles. UK law extends to the North of Ireland, and surely there is a contradiction in the application of the rules. Sheila Ward, Carrickmacross, Co Monaghan Vandalism unacceptable, but Micheál Martin's point simply does not hold water Taoiseach Micheál Martin has referred to the smearing of his constituency office with red paint as 'undemocratic'. Wilful damage to any property is unacceptable. Those who carry out such acts of vandalism should remember repair costs will eventually be borne by the taxpayer. However, many might say the Taoiseach is not following the wishes of the people by until now failing/refusing to enact the Occupied Territories Bill as approved by the Oireachtas. Michael Moriarty, Rochestown, Co Cork A strike on Iran's nuclear facility would be a disaster for everyone in the region US president Donald Trump may or may not join the Israeli military action in Iran by sending a 30,000- pound bomb to destroy Iran's nuclear facility under a mountain. Have any of the 'leaders' of the US or Israel considered the deadly effects of a strike on the uranium stocks in Iran, including the US assets, and the millions of innocent people in the Middle East? James J Ryan, Co Limerick
