The US Department of Justice has charged 28 green card holders in California, accusing them of fraudulently registering to vote and casting illegal ballots. The arrests – 11 people are in custody – mark the latest escalation in federal efforts against alleged noncitizen voting. The crackdown comes days after the DOJ sued California to block the state from tabulating certain ballots in November’s midterms.
California’s secretary of state, Shirley Weber, called the demands “outrageous”, pointing out that federal officials have spent months making “vague and unsubstantiated allegations”. Democrats and voting rights groups say the administration is laying the groundwork to sow doubt over November’s election results. How are Congress members being targeted before the midterms?
More than three dozen members of US Congress have had their offices targeted with envelopes containing white powder, less than three weeks before the election, as federal agents try to identify who is behind the campaign. Partial curfews have been issued for a number of French cities, including parts of Paris, after the government admitted police had “lost control” during violent weekend protests. The interior minister, Laurent Nuñez, said intelligence had suggested there would be 200,000 demonstrators around France.
In the event, there were more than 500,000. The protests follow weeks of demonstrations by high school students. Public buildings including a town hall were attacked and set ablaze and an estimated 2,000 shops were ransacked and looted, authorities have said.
What has Donald Trump said about the French protests? At a rally in Kansas Trump described France as a once-great nation that had been “conquered, looted, and burned to the ground by migrants, jihadists, and communists”. Earlier in the day, Trump repeated his baseless claim that migrants had “taken over” France, and also claimed that “Paris is going to be a Muslim city very soon”.
Muslims make up 10-15% of the population of the capital. Volodymyr Zelenskyy has said the US is deliberately delaying deliveries of interceptor missiles to Ukraine, deepening a public spat with Trump. Speaking to US senators on Monday, the Ukrainian president claimed that “the Pentagon is delaying the delivery of missiles” already paid for by European countries, with the shipment awaiting the signature of the US secretary of defense, Pete Hegseth.
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