White House says Trump is ‘open' to talks with Putin and Zelenskyy
In remarks on Wednesday, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said that Russian officials had expressed interest in meeting with Trump. Leavitt did not say when or where such a meeting could take place, but AP quoted an anonymous White House official saying the meeting could happen within a week.
'The Russians expressed their desire to meet with President Trump, and the president is open to meeting with both President Putin and President Zelenskyy,' Leavitt told members of the press following reports in the New York Times that Trump could meet with Putin in Russia as soon as next week.
The US president has said that he is committed to helping bring the war in Ukraine to an end. He initially promised to stop the conflict on 'day one' of his presidency, but has struggled to make progress. The statement comes after US envoy Steve Witkoff visited Moscow to speak with Russian officials earlier today.
In a social media post, Trump said Witkoff held a 'highly productive' meeting with Putin and that 'great progress was made!'
'Afterwards, I updated some of our European Allies. Everyone agrees this War must come to a close, and we will work towards that in the days and weeks to come,' he added.
The New York Times reported that Trump intends to meet first with Putin before later setting up a meeting that would also include Zelenskyy.
The news agency AFP reported that Trump also discussed the possibility of such a meeting during a phone call with Zelenskyy, citing an anonymous Ukrainian source. That call is also said to have included NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte and the leaders of Britain, Germany and Finland.
Trump has recently mulled steps to further increase pressure on Russia, which he has accused of not being sincerely interested in ending the war. Such steps could include heightened US sanctions.
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Al Jazeera
an hour ago
- Al Jazeera
Who counts in America? Trump wants to decide
Do undocumented immigrants count as people?Anyone watching as Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents increasingly bypass due process to detain and deport unauthorised immigrants might assume the Trump administration's answer is a resounding 'no'. Now, regardless of deportation policies, the approximately 11 million unauthorised immigrants in the United States could soon disappear, statistically at least, if Republicans have their way. President Trump recently instructed the US Department of Commerce to prepare for a new census that excludes undocumented immigrants. This marks the latest and boldest attempt by Trump and his congressional allies to alter how the census accounts for unauthorised immigrants. Although not explicitly stated, Trump may be trying to push this off-cycle census through ahead of the 2028 presidential election or even before next year's midterms, which he appears intent on influencing. Assuming Trump was being literal in his social media declaration that 'People who are in our Country illegally WILL NOT BE COUNTED IN THE CENSUS,' millions could effectively vanish from the official population count. If this incomplete census were used for congressional apportionment, it would reduce representation in Congress and the Electoral College for states with large numbers of unauthorised immigrants. The immediate partisan impact is unclear. According to the Pew Research Center, if non-citizens had been excluded before the 2020 election, California, Florida and Texas would each have lost one congressional seat and Electoral College vote, while Alabama, Minnesota and Ohio would each have gained one. Political gerrymandering would likely shape who benefits from redistricting. Republicans are already aggressively redrawing maps in states like Texas, with possible retaliatory moves in California and other Democrat-led states. Beyond electoral shifts, the broader goal appears to be marginalising undocumented people and punishing 'sanctuary' jurisdictions. This reinforces the Republican narrative that Democrats deliberately tolerate illegal immigration for political gain. Legally, how to count unauthorised immigrants depends on interpreting the Constitution, the framers' intent and the scope of executive authority in conducting the census. Non-citizens have historically been included in the count, and the Supreme Court has never ruled directly on excluding them. However, with a conservative supermajority on the court, there is a real chance the justices could allow it – either by reinterpreting the Constitution's language or deferring to the executive branch. Even if Trump fails to push through a new census, his administration could still suppress the count by other means. During his first term, he tried to add a citizenship question to the 2020 census. The Census Bureau stopped collecting this data from all respondents in 1950 and removed the question entirely by 2000, instead gathering it through separate surveys such as the American Community Survey. Many feared its return would deter participation from undocumented, and even legal, immigrants, leading to an undercount. The Supreme Court blocked the effort in 2019, citing insufficient justification. But it left the door open to future attempts with more credible rationales. Socially, the question of how to count non-citizens recalls earlier and sometimes shameful practices in the United States. For much of its early history, significant groups were denied full recognition in the political system despite living in the country. The Constitution's original enumeration formula stated that state populations would be calculated 'by adding to the whole Number of free Persons, including those bound to Service for a Term of Years, and excluding Indians not taxed, three-fifths of all other Persons.' Slave and free states struck the infamous 'three-fifths' compromise, counting enslaved people as three-fifths of a person for congressional and Electoral College apportionment. Meanwhile, 'Indians not taxed' were excluded altogether, as most Native Americans were not considered US citizens despite residing within the country's borders. They were instead seen as members of sovereign nations – such as the Cherokee, Creek or Iroquois – even as their land, rights and dignity were stripped away. Only with the Indian Citizenship Act of 1924 were Native Americans granted birthright citizenship and formally included in the population count. These examples show two marginalised non-citizen groups, enslaved Black people and Indigenous Americans, treated in opposite ways: one partially counted, the other excluded. With history offering no clear precedent, today's debate raises valid questions about how non-citizens, including the undocumented, should be represented. One view holds that because only citizens vote, non-citizens should not affect apportionment. The opposing view argues that excluding undocumented immigrants worsens their vulnerability and denies their very existence, even as government policies directly affect their lives. Unauthorised immigrants both use and support public systems. While they are barred from most federal benefits such as Social Security and Medicare, they still access emergency healthcare, school meal programmes and limited housing support. They also factor into education and policing budgets in the communities where they live. At the federal level, immigration policy disproportionately affects states where undocumented residents make up a larger share of the population. At the state level, policies must be shaped with their presence in mind. For example, California now offers food assistance to all elderly residents regardless of immigration status. Undocumented immigrants also contribute to public finances, paying nearly $100bn annually in federal, state and local taxes. This includes more than $30bn for programmes they largely cannot use, such as Social Security, Medicare and unemployment insurance. In 40 of 50 states, they pay higher state and local tax rates than the wealthiest 1 percent. States' economic contributions to the federal budget are directly influenced by these residents. It makes sense, therefore, to acknowledge them through accurate enumeration. The Trump administration is instead enforcing a skewed, incomplete and politically motivated interpretation of its constitutional duties regarding census-taking and apportionment. This approach could also affect other debates with far-reaching implications. The Department of Justice is urging the Supreme Court to fast-track a ruling on Trump's challenge to birthright citizenship. This is another area where the Constitution appears clear. The 14th Amendment affirms that anyone born in the US is a citizen, with few exceptions, such as the children of diplomats. Trump is also seeking to expand the grounds for revoking naturalised citizenship, a penalty currently applied only in rare cases that usually involve fraud. A narrower definition of who 'counts' in the census could fuel arguments for a narrower definition of who counts as a citizen. Similarly, a policy of excluding non-citizens could encourage efforts to strip citizenship from naturalised or US-born residents in order to exclude them as well. The presence of millions of undocumented immigrants reflects an immigration system that has failed under both Democratic and Republican administrations. Until meaningful reform is enacted, pretending these individuals do not exist is a misguided, politicised and harmful response to the reality of their lives within US borders, regardless of how they arrived. The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera's editorial stance.
Al Jazeera
an hour ago
- Al Jazeera
Trump and the global rise of fascist anti-psychiatry
Despite spending more on psychiatric services and prescribing psychiatric medications at a higher rate than almost any other nation, mental health in the United States over the last two decades has only been getting worse. Rates of depression, anxiety, suicide, overdose, chronic disability due to mental health conditions, and loneliness have all been rapidly increasing. No quantity of psychiatric drugs or hospitalisations appears adequate to reverse these trends. Despite this, the US medical and psychiatric establishment has persistently refused to use its substantial political power to demand the transformation of care by expanding non-medical support systems to address the root social causes of mental illness, such as poverty, childhood trauma and incarceration, rather than focusing on reactive treatment via lucrative medication-centric norms. This failing status quo has created an opening for President Donald Trump and Secretary of Health Robert F Kennedy Jr's emerging plans to remake the nation's approach to mental health, with disastrous consequences now coming into focus. Trump and Kennedy have hijacked legitimate anger at a broken system to justify destroying public care infrastructure, including Medicaid, food and housing assistance, harm-reduction and overdose prevention programmes, and suicide-prevention hotlines for LGBTQ youth, while promoting wellness scams and expanding the police state. They focus on the 'threat' supposedly posed by psychiatric medications and call to reopen the asylums that once confined approximately 560,000 people, or one in 295 US residents, in horrific conditions, until protests against their cruelty led to their closure beginning in the 1950s. Trump invokes false claims about mental illness to demonise immigrants, whom he is now hunting via a mass arrest and incarceration campaign. Last month, he signed an executive order that allows police to arrest and forcibly institutionalise poor Americans who are unhoused, deemed mentally ill, or struggling with addiction, effectively incarcerating them for indefinite periods. Trump's order, which also defunds housing-first programmes and harm-reduction services, while criminalising homelessness and encampments, contains no provisions to protect people from abuse or from the political misuse of psychiatric labels and institutionalisation to target his opponents. This raises concerns about risks to LGBTQ youth and other vulnerable groups. It also threatens groups upon which the administration has shown a eugenicist fixation: transgender people, people with autism, and others with disabilities that RFK Jr and Trump have characterised as a threat or burden on society. The order appears to grant the government the power to deem anyone mentally ill or abusing substances, and to confine them indefinitely in any designated treatment facility, without due process. In a context where there is already a profound shortage of psychiatric beds even for short-term treatment, there are no provisions for new funding or regulatory systems to ensure that facilities are therapeutic or humane, rather than violent, coercive warehouses like American asylums of decades past. Trump's allies, including some medical professionals aligned with ideologies of social control and state coercion, may dismiss this as overly pessimistic. But that requires ignoring the fact that Trump's executive order follows Kennedy's proposal for federally funded 'wellness farms', where people, particularly Black youth taking SSRIs (selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors primarily used to treat anxiety and depression) and stimulants, would be subjected to forced labour and 're‑parenting' to overcome supposed drug dependence. These proposals revive the legacy of coercive institutions built on forced labour and racialised interventions. Kennedy has also promoted the conspiracy theory that anti-depressants like SSRIs cause school shootings, comparing their risks with heroin, despite a total lack of scientific support for such claims. In his early tenure as health and human services secretary, he has already gutted key federal mental health research and services, including at the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA), Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Given this, it is unclear what kind of 'treatment', other than confinement and cruelty, Trump and RFK Jr plan to deliver in their new asylums. Trump and Kennedy's lies about mental health, cuts to public care and vision for expanding the incarceration of immigrants, homeless people, and anyone they label as mentally ill, worsen mental health while creating more opportunities to profit from preventable suffering, disability and death. These tactics are not new, and their harmful consequences and political motivations are well established. From Hungary to the Philippines, right-wing politicians have deployed similar rhetoric for comparable purposes. In a precedent that likely informs Trump's plan, Brazil's former president, Jair Bolsonaro, attacked psychiatric reformsas leftist indoctrination and defunded successful community mental health services, replacing them with coercive asylum and profit-based models, while advocating pseudoscience linked to evangelical movements. Bolsonaro claimed to defend family values and national identity against globalist medical ideologies, while sacrificing countless Brazilian lives via policies later characterised by the Senate as crimes against humanity. Bolsonaro's record is instructive for anticipating Trump's plans. Trump has made no secret of his admiration for Brazil's disgraced former president and their shared political ideologies. Bolsonaro's reversal of Brazil's internationally recognised psychiatric reform movement, which emphasised deinstitutionalisation, community-based psychosocial care and autonomy, inflicted profound harm. Under his rule, institutionalisation in coercive 'therapeutic communities', often operated by evangelical organisations, with little oversight, and similar to RFK Jr's proposed 'wellness farms', skyrocketed. Investigations revealed widespread abuses in these communities, including forced confinement, unpaid labour, religious indoctrination, denial of medication, and physical and psychological violence. Bolsonaro's government poured large sums into expanding these dystopian asylums while defunding community mental health centres, leaving people with severe mental illness and substance use disorders abandoned to punitive care or the streets. This needless suffering pushed more people into Brazil's overcrowded prisons, where psychiatric care is absent, abuse rampant and systemic racism overwhelming, with Black people accounting for more than 68 percent of the incarcerated population. Bolsonaro's psychiatric agenda enhanced carceral control under the guise of care, reproducing racist and eugenicist hierarchies of social worth under an anti-psychiatry banner of neo-fascist nationalism. Trump and Bolsonaro's reactionary approaches underline a crucial truth: Both psychiatry and critiques of it can serve very different ends, depending on the politics to which they are attached. Far-right politicians often use anti-psychiatry to justify privatisation, eugenics and incarceration. They draw on ideas from the libertarian psychiatrist Thomas Szasz, who argued in the 1960s that mental illness was a 'myth', and called for the abolition of psychiatric institutions. In the US today, these political actors distort Szasz's ideas, ignoring his opposition to coercion, by gutting public mental health services under the guise of 'healthcare freedom'. This leaves vulnerable populations to suffer in isolation, at the hands of police or fellow citizens who feel increasingly empowered to publicly abuse, or even, as seen in the killing of Jordan Neely in New York City, execute them on subways, in prisons, or on the streets. By contrast, critics of psychiatry on the left demand rights to non-medical care, economic security and democratic participation. Thinkers such as Michel Foucault, Frantz Fanon, RD Laing and Ivan Illich advocated for deinstitutionalisation not to abandon people, but to replace coercion with community-led social care that supports rights to individual difference. Their critiques targeted not psychiatry itself, but its use by exploitative, homogenising political systems. To oppose reactionary anti-psychiatry, mental health professionals and politicians cannot simply defend the status quo of over-medicalisation, profit-driven care and the pathologisation of poverty. Millions justifiably feel betrayed by current psychiatric norms that offer little more than labels and pills while ignoring the political causes of their suffering. If the left does not harness this anger towards constructive change, the right will continue to exploit it. The solution is not to shield America's mental health systems from critique, but to insist on an expansive political vision of care that affirms the need for psychiatric support while refusing to treat it as a substitute for the political struggle for social services. This means investing in public housing, guaranteed income, peer-led community care worker programmes, non-police crisis teams and strong social safety nets that address the root causes of distress, addiction and disease. Mental health is fundamentally a political issue. It cannot be resolved with medications alone, nor, as Trump and RFK Jr are doing, by dismantling psychiatric services and replacing them with psychiatric coercion. The fight over mental health policy is a fight over the meaning of society and the survival of democratic ideals in an era where oligarchic power and fascist regimes are attempting to strangle them. Will we respond to suffering with solidarity, or with abandonment and punishment? Will we recognise the collective causes of distress and invest in systems of care, or allow political opportunists to exploit public disillusionment for authoritarian ends? These are the questions at stake, not just in the United States, but globally. If the psychiatric establishment refuses to support progressive transformation of mental health systems, we may soon lose them altogether as thinly disguised prisons rise in their place. If you or someone you know is at risk of suicide, these organisations may be able to help. The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera's editorial stance.
Al Jazeera
2 hours ago
- Al Jazeera
Have sections of the US Constitution gone missing from government website?
It didn't take long for internet sleuths to notice that something was missing on the Library of Congress website that annotates the United States Constitution. Reddit users pointed out on Wednesday that the website omitted text from some sections of Article 1, which include provisions about the right of habeas corpus as well as limits on congressional and state power. Using the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine, people found that the full text appeared on the Library of Congress website on July 17 but was missing in snapshots after that date. Some people mistakenly said President Donald Trump's administration removed these provisions from the constitution entirely without Congress's input. 'BREAKING: The official US government website has quietly removed Sections 9 and 10 of Article I from the Constitution,' one Threads post said on Wednesday. 'Let me say that again: They didn't amend the Constitution. They didn't debate it in Congress. They just erased two of the most protective sections; the ones that deal with habeas corpus, limits on federal power, and Congress's sole authority to set tariffs.' Altering the text on a website would not remove or erase sections of the constitution. It can be changed only through a formal amendment process, which begins in the US Congress, which can modify or replace existing provisions. The constitution's full text is also available on the websites for the National Archives and the nonprofit National Constitution Center. The amendment process outlined in Article 5 is the only way to alter the constitution. Any proposed amendment must first be approved by a two-thirds vote in both the US House of Representatives and the US Senate. Then it must be ratified by three-quarters of the state legislatures or via state ratifying conventions. Government website omits constitution sections On Wednesday about 11am in Washington, DC (15:00 GMT), the Library of Congress posted on X that the missing sections were 'due to a coding error'. 'We have been working to correct this and expect it to be resolved soon,' the post read. The website on Wednesday also displayed a banner that said: 'The Constitution Annotated website is currently experiencing data issues. We are working to resolve this issue and regret the inconvenience.' The institution issued an update on X a few hours later that the website was fixed. 'Missing sections of the Constitution Annotated website have been restored,' it said. 'Upkeep of Constitution Annotated and other digital resources is a critical part of the Library's mission, and we appreciate the feedback that alerted us to the error and allowed us to fix it.' Article 1 establishes the federal government's legislative branch. Its missing sections included portions of Section 8 and all of Sections 9 and 10, which largely focus on limits on congressional and state power. Before being restored, the text of Article 1 ended in Section 8, just before a line that lists Congress's ability to provide and maintain a navy. Section 9, which was temporarily deleted, details limits on congressional power. It addresses habeas corpus, the legal procedure that grants people in government custody the right to challenge their detention in court. The section says Congress may not suspend habeas corpus 'unless when in Cases of Rebellion or Invasion the public Safety may require it'. Habeas corpus has been in the headlines during the second Trump administration. White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller told reporters in May that the administration was looking into suspending habeas corpus. Later that month, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem wrongly said habeas corpus is a right the president has to remove people from the US. Section 10, which was also temporarily removed, covers restrictions on US states, including regulating tariffs without Congress's consent. Our ruling A Threads post said an official US government website 'quietly removed Sections 9 and 10 of Article I from the Constitution' without input from Congress. On Wednesday, the Library of Congress's annotated website of the US Constitution was missing sections of Article 1. The library said the issue was related to a coding error, and it was corrected shortly afterwards. Website alterations do not affect US law or the constitution. The document can be changed only through a formal amendment process initiated by Congress. We rate this post false.
