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President Trump and President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who have had a rocky relationship, met for talks on trade and other issues. But they skipped a planned joint appearance.
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The exchange was the latest twist in a week of mixed signals in the region and tensions over the Strait of Hormuz, as President Trump searches for an off-ramp in the war that he started.
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Secretary of State Marco Rubio has won over some former critics while Vice President JD Vance struggles with Trump's shadow.
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"The country's most important civil rights law no longer effectively exists, and that's going to have ramifications on American democracy for a very long time." Mother Jones correspondent Ari Berman reacts to the Supreme Court's recent 6-3 decision rejecting key principles of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. Since the court issued its ruling last week, Republican-controlled states have begun to redraw their voting maps in a "gerrymandering arms race" that "could lead to the largest drop in Black representation since the Jim Crow era," explains Berman. "We're returning to the days of literacy tests and poll taxes — not through those devices, but through specifically trying to eliminate Black office holders. And Southern legislators are very clear they are going to do this. They feel unshackled by the Supreme Court ruling. They are being pressured by President Trump to do it, and they feel like all the guardrails are off right now."
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Saudi Arabia's refusal of support suggests that President Trump's unpredictable approach to Iran has strained ties with one of his closest allies in the Middle East.
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The political terrain remains forbidding, but the president's crumbling approval ratings and the Iran war's weight on the economy offer the party an opening.
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Amid the war with Iran, surging gas prices and backlash to his immigration policies, the president continues to dedicate extensive time to his signature project.
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Reporters Without Borders warns press freedom has fallen to its lowest level since the group began publishing its annual World Press Freedom Index in 2002. The index has charted how press freedoms have deteriorated in the United States and elsewhere over the past 25 years. The U.S. was ranked 17th in the world in 2002. In the latest index, the U.S. is down to 64th, falling seven places since last year.
"It's tempting to lay all of this at the feet of President Donald Trump, and to be clear, he is the single biggest threat to American press freedom today," says Clayton Weimers, the North America director for Reporters Without Borders. "But the mere fact that we fell from 57th last year tells us that this isn't just a Trump problem. We have structural deficiencies that are imperiling the future of press freedom in this country." Weimers cites these deficiencies as the consolidation of U.S. media and loss of journalism jobs, "emboldened" politicians' attacks on reporters, and violence against journalists by law enforcement agents.
Weimers also comments on the January FBI raid on the home of Washington Post reporter Hannah Natanson, the White House Correspondents' Association Dinner shooting and Israel's attacks on journalists in Lebanon and Gaza.
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