Jon Ossoff blasts ‘draft-dodging, crook president’ in latest war of words with Trump – US politics live

A federal judge in Texas has ruled that Biden-era restrictions on “ghost guns” are unconstitutional – after guns rights groups asked the court to reconsider the case on different grounds after the US supreme court upheld the restrictions last year.

US District Judge Reed O’Connor, who was appointed ​by former president George W Bush, said the 2022 rule infringes on a person’s right to make or repair personal firearms. “Self-manufacture of firearms in America was common and indeed foundational to establishing our Nation,” O’Connor wrote.

The Biden-era regulation requires manufacturers of firearm parts, including “ghost guns”, to mark products with a serial number and conduct background checks on purchasers. Ghost gun products are typically purchased online and may be quickly assembled at home, without the serial numbers ordinarily used to trace guns or background checks on purchasers required for other firearms.

Here’s more of our coverage from last year, when the conservative-majority supreme court upheld the Biden administration’s regulation on ghost guns:

An Illinois man allegedly impersonated doctors – and evidently referred to himself online as “$hotboy1” – is facing criminal charges that he secured unauthorized prescriptions for Ozempic and Mounjaro pharmaceutical drugs that facilitate weight loss and are taken by some for cosmetic rather than legitimate medical reasons.

Rodney Greer purportedly launched the allege scheme in early 2023, according to court filings from federal prosecutors and a US justice department news release issued on Monday.

In exchange for obtaining the illicit prescriptions for what are known as GLP-1 medications, customers of Greer would pay him money, federal prosecutors in Manhattan contended.

Greer, who allegedly also went by the name Christian Marchand, pleaded not guilty to the four-count indictment that accused him of wire fraud, healthcare fraud and aggravated identity theft. Greer’s attorney did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Here’s Victoria Bekiempis with our full report:

In a social media post, Donald Trump claimed Census Bureau records of non-citizen voting prove he won the 2020 election, despite evidence that non-citizen voting is extremely rare. Trump has repeatedly and falsely claimed that he won the 2020 election and blamed practices such as mail-in voting, which he participates in, for his loss.

“The Census Bureau has begun checking the Voter Records from 2020 against their Citizenship Records. On the first 128,000,000 Voters, the Census Bureau proves that over 24,000 Noncitizens voted illegally! The Census Bureau is going to analyze the next 32,000,000 Voters, and this number will explode. I WON THE ELECTION! We must pass THE SAVE AMERICA ACT,” Trump wrote on his social media platform today.

The Guardian could not independently verify the Census Bureau page Trump cited, which claimed to be “a beginning analysis by the U.S. Census Bureau”. However, 24,000 non-citizen votes represents just 0.01875% of the 128 million votes the bureau has counted so far. Joe Biden won the popular vote in the 2020 election by more than 7 million votes.

“There is no evidence that noncitizen voting has ever been significant enough to impact an election’s outcome,” according to the Bipartisan Policy Center, which published an explainer on non-citizen voting this summer, after Trump said thousands of non-citizens are registered to vote in the United States.

In an article published this summer, Reuters found that “federal prosecutors have charged just 129 people under a federal ‘voting by aliens’ statute created by Congress in 1996.” More than two-thirds of those prosecutions were filed during Trump’s terms in office. “In none of the cases did prosecutors allege a coordinated effort to influence an election. And no defendant was accused of being paid to vote. Instead, many appear to stem from voter confusion, miscommunication with election officials or administrative errors,” Reuters reported.

North Korean state media has reported that the country will continue to exercise its “right to self-defense” and condemned the US and South Korea’s Ulchi Freedom Shield joint exercises.

KCNA, the state news agency, wrote in Korean that “the already tense situation on the Korean Peninsula is once again reaching the ‘imminent threshold’ of war” and called the United States and South Korean militaries “warmongers”.

The Trump administration said on Tuesday it plans to rescind the “roadless rule” that has protected old growth forests in the US for 25 years, potentially opening up almost 45m acres of national forests to road construction, drilling and logging.

Conservationists had feared the announcement was coming since last summer after Brooke Rollins, Trump’s secretary of agriculture, targeted a rule brought in by Bill Clinton’s administration, describing it as “overly restrictive” and an “absurd obstacle” to development.

On Tuesday the US Forest Service, an agency inside the Department of Agriculture, formally announced it had filed the proposal to rescind in its entirety the 2001 Roadless Area Conservation Rule.

Mark Oliver has our full report:

The man accused of attacking a woman and security guard at a New York City synagogue during Shabbat services Friday has been charged with hate crimes in Manhattan federal court, prosecutors said.

Larry Montes, who is already facing state-level hate crime charges, allegedly struck a 63-year-old woman as security was trying to boot him from Central Synagogue. He allegedly spat at, and head-butted, a security team member and damaged synagogue property, authorities said.

Montes is charged federally with two counts of committing hate crimes and one count of damage to religious property resulting in bodily injury, according to Manhattan federal prosecutors.

Victoria Bekiempishas our full report:

Democratic senator Jon Ossoff called Donald Trump a “draft-dodging, crook president” during a campaign appearance today, continuing a feud with the president that escalated this week. Ossoff is currently running for re-election to his Senate seat in Georgia, and his criticism of the president has received viral attention on social media.

Appearing alongside Arizona senator Mark Kelly and former Arizona congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords today, Ossoff added that Trump “has plunged our nation recklessly into a war he knows not how to end or to win, tried to imprison this man, who embodies American heroism”.

On Sunday, during a campaign appearance in Atlanta, Ossoff similarly attacked Trump’s handling of the US-Israel war on Iran.

“While the sailors on the Lincoln fight his war, while he fruitlessly drains our munitions and oil reserves, the president sleeps through his meetings,” Ossoff said. “He golfs and trades stocks. See, he doesn’t want to do the job. He wants to build his ballroom and travel with Natalie on their apparently defenseless flying palace gifted by the amir of Qatar.”

Ossoff appears to have been referring to Natalie Harp, Trump’s executive assistant, who has drawn scrutiny on social media for her closeness to the US president.

The White House quickly criticized Ossoff on Monday, with the president calling him “Pee Wee Herman” and White House communications director Steven Cheung writing on social media that Ossoff is “a radical, extremist Dumocrat”.

My colleague George Chidi has more on Ossoff’s Sunday campaign appearance:

Brendan Carr, head of the Federal Communications Commission, defended the agency’s investigation into the Walt Disney Corporation and ABC during an interview with Reuters today.

“Disney seems to be a little nervous about what the record’s showing,” Carr ‌said, adding ​that he has made no final decisions on whether to ⁠begin the process of ​revoking Disney’s ​ABC licenses.

“We ​haven’t made a ​decision ‌about ​when ​we’re making a decision,” he said.

A Massachusetts woman who told police that she brought homemade firebombs to the US Capitol to kill Scott Bessent, the US treasury secretary, was sentenced on Tuesday to just over six years in prison.

Riley English, a 26-year-old transgender woman, said she was in the grips of a mental health crisis and abusing drugs when she drove to Washington in January 2025 and told Capitol police that she was there to kill Bessent on the day of his Senate confirmation.

“I never wanted to hurt anyone,” she told Rudolph Contreras, a US district judge. “I’m not a political person. I’m not a violent person.”

Contreras, who was nominated to the bench by Barack Obama, sentenced English to six years and one month of imprisonment followed by three years of supervised release. English has remained jailed since her arrest and will get credit for the nearly 20 months that she already has spent in custody.

“You’ve had a very difficult life,” Contreras told English. “Hopefully, the progress you’ve made in jail to this date has set you on the right path.”

Nobody was injured, and Contreras said her plan to harm Bessent had an “exceedingly low or nonexistent” chance of success. Bessent was not at the Capitol when English arrived on 27 January 2025. The molotov cocktails that English brought to the Capitol appeared to be incapable of igniting, the judge noted.

Here’s our full report:

US Senator Adam Schiff has decried the appointment of former Colorado elections clerk Tina Peters as an assistant registrar of voters for a county in Northern California.

Peters was convicted in Colorado on felony election interference charges for her efforts as a Mesa County elections clerk to subvert the 2020 presidential election and sentenced to nine years in prison. She served less than a quarter of that sentence before Colorado governor Jared Polis released her in june under pressure from the Trump Administration.

”Election deniers have no place in California’s elections, especially when they’ve already been convicted of interfering in other elections,” Schiff, a Democrat from California, said of Peters. “That’s why Shasta County already rejected these conspiracies this year by ousting an election denier in their own election — the very one who is now bringing Tina Peters to California. Shasta County should also reject this latest import of election denialism.”

On Monday, US Senator Alex Padilla of California made similar comments.

“This should be stopped immediately,” Padilla wrote on X. “Shasta County Registrar Clint Curtis is trying to hire election-denier Tina Peters to collude with the Trump Administration’s election mischief. In 2024, Peters was convicted on 7 counts of election interference. Americans – and Californians – deserve nothing but safe, secure, and free elections – without political interference and partisan loyalists beholden to Trump.”

The federal Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency has taken increased notice of the Medusa ransomware ring, which has hit public hospitals, schools and state and municipal government agencies across the country over the last five years.

An advisory released Tuesday by CISA, the FBI and the Department of Health and Human Services updates guidance about how organizations can safeguard against the “ransomware-as-a-service” attack.

The Medusa ransomware infects vulnerable computers and encrypts the data, which often paralyzes an organization. It then posts a timer on the ransomware’s dark-web page, threatening to release sensitive data as a download unless paid off in bitcoin.

Though the ransomware gang has had high profile private sector victims like NASCAR and Toyota’s financial arm, the ransomware attackers favor public entities with sensitive information like schools and hospitals.

Ransomware attacks have public policy implications. The hackers operate primarily out of Russia, North Korea or other hostile countries. Attacks consequently escalate from being an IT nuisance to a national security threat. Meanwhile, the US is wrestling with cryptocurrency regulation, even as attackers use the fluidity of digital currency as a mechanism to profit from transnational crime.

In 2023, the attackers hacked Minneapolis School District computers. The school system refused to pay the ransom demand and restored their systems, but not before the Medusa hackers leaked about 100 GB of sensitive data to the public, including names, birthdates, and addresses of children with special needs, psychological intelligence tests, and highly sensitive documentation of student sexual abuse and neglect allegations.

In April, Medusa hit the University of Mississippi Medical Center, the state’s only children’s hospital, Level I trauma center and Level IV neonatal intensive care unit. This attack closed clinics for nine days and forced staff to go pen-and-paper charting until cybersecurity teams could resolve the breach, eradicate the ransomware, and restore operations from secure backups.

The advisory updates the public details on Medusa’s “affiliate model” for its criminal partners and payment systems for “initial access brokers.” It also lists specific vulnerabilities used by the hackers.

E-Rate, a 30-year-old federal program that sends money to local school districts to subsidize Internet connectivity, may be eliminated under a proposed change to federal policy posted Tuesday by the Federal Communications Commission.

The FCC published proposed rule changes to the federal register, seeking public comment. The proposal argues that the ubiquity of broadband access in public schools today calls the necessity of the program into question.

“At what point should policymakers conclude that the program’s core objective has been achieved?” the proposal asks. “We seek comment on whether Congress intended E-Rate to operate indefinitely, regardless of the extent to which schools and libraries have achieved universal connectivity.”

One proposed change would eliminate the program entirely for districts with the lowest National School Lunch Program poverty metrics.. A second, narrower proposal would limit spending to rural school districts or areas served by only a single internet provider.

Additionally, the commission is asking for comment on policy changes that would tie E-Rate funding to screen limits for students and require schools to offer parents a mechanism to opt out of instruction through screens. It also seeks to apply the network-level content filtering requirements of the Children’s Internet Protection Act for any device that connects to the E-Rate-funded network, regardless of who owns it.

The agency is also considering reversing a 2011 determination that classified social networking sites as categorically “harmful to minors” under CIPA.

Advocates note that E-Rate is the only federal technology program for schools and represents the fifth-largest stream of federal funding to schools. It supports connectivity to more than 100,000 schools and 11,000 libraries across the country each year, spending about US$2.6b to do so.

The president of the international criminal court (ICC) has been sanctioned by the United States government for its criminal investigation of Israeli officials for crimes committed during its war on Gaza.

US secretary of state Marco Rubio called the Hague-based ICC a “corrupt and fatally politicized supranational court that has maliciously abused its authority and exceeded its mandate”, in a statement and announced that the US would sanction Tomoko Akane of Japan, the ICC president, and Abdoulaye Seye of Senegal, an ICC senior trial lawyer.

Israeli media have reported that Seye is overseeing the investigation into Israeli funding for illegal settlements and the disbursal of weapons to settlers in the West Bank. Israeli officials warned local media in May that the ICC may seek five more arrest warrants for ministers and senior military officials involved in violence against Palestinians in the West Bank.

Here’s our report: