Closing summary
This concludes our live coverage of the day in US politics. Here are the latest developments:
The US supreme court’s conservative majority struck down a major element of the Voting Rights Act which protects against racial discrimination in redistricting, in a ruling that paves the way for aggressive gerrymandering in states across the nation that could affect elections for years to come.
“Today, six Supreme Court justices closed their eyes to the continuing realities of racial discrimination, racial injustice, and inequity,” voting rights activist Bishop William Barber said. “In 2020, after Biden was elected President, with majorities in the House and Senate, many of us argued that COVID-19 relief to corporations shouldn’t pass without a renewal of the Voting Rights Act and a commitment to living wages. This did not happen, so here we are.”
The Florida Legislature approved a new congressional map intended to maximize Republicans’ advantage in the state as part of the national redistricting battle that Republicans launched ahead of this year’s midterms.
Outgoing Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell said he will stay on as a central bank governor when his leadership term ends in just over two weeks.
The Department of Justice announced on Wednesday that three anti-ICE protesters have been charged with allegedly assaulting Savannah Hernandez, a rightwing video journalist who was shoved to the ground during a skirmish with three members of a family outside an immigration detention facility in St Paul Minnesota this month.
Trump threatens to withdraw US troops from Germany after chancellor's Iran war criticism
Two days after Germany’s chancellor said that the US “is being humiliated” by Iran’s “very skilled” negotiators, Donald Trump suggested on Wednesday that the US could withdraw some troops from that country.
“The United States is studying and reviewing the possible reduction of Troops in Germany, with a determination to be made over the next short period of time,” the president wrote on his social media platform.
“The Americans clearly have no strategy,” Germany’s chancellor, Friedrich Merz, told students on Monday. “The problem with conflicts like this is always that you don’t just have to go in; you also have to get out again. We saw that all too painfully in Afghanistan, for 20 years. We saw it in Iraq. So this whole affair is, as I said, ill-considered, to say the least.
Merz also suggested that Trump’s self-described genius for deal-making was nowhere to be seen in talks with Iran.
“The Iranians are obviously very skilled at negotiating, or rather, very skilful at not negotiating, letting the Americans travel to Islamabad and then leave again without any result,” Merz said. “An entire nation is being humiliated by the Iranian leadership”.
Trump’s first response to Merz, in a social media post on Tuesday, was to repeat the same lie about the German chancellor he told recently about Pope Leo.
“The Chancellor of Germany, Friedrich Merz, thinks it’s OK for Iran to have a Nuclear Weapon,” Trump wrote, despite the fact that the German leader was repeatedly said Iran should never be allowed to have a nuclear weapon.
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