Key events
Oliver Stone to testify at John F Kennedy assassination hearing
Film director Oliver Stone will testify at a US House of Representatives hearing on Tuesday that is considering thousands of pages of documents related to the 1963 assassination of John F Kennedy released this month at the direction of President Donald Trump.
Representative Anna Paulina Luna, chair of the Task Force on the Declassification of Federal Secrets, said that lawmakers will hear from witnesses about the value of the documents.
“By investigating the newly released JFK files, consulting experts, and tracking down surviving staff of various investigative committees, our task force will get to the bottom of this mystery and share our findings with the American people,” Luna said.
Shortly after taking office for his second term in January Trump signed an executive order directing national intelligence and other officials to quickly come up with a plan for the full and complete release of all records relating to President Kennedy’s assassination.
The archives’ Kennedy assassination collection has more than 6m pages of records, the vast majority of which had been declassified and made public before Trump’s order. Kennedy’s murder has been attributed to lone gunman Lee Harvey Oswald.
Special elections to deliver voters’ verdict on Trump’s chaotic first months
Good morning and welcome to the US politics live blog. I’m Tom Ambrose and I will be bringing you all the latest news lines over the next few hours.
We start with news that several elections today will be a crucial test of the popularity of the chaotic and extremist first two months of Donald Trump’s second term and the clout of his close ally, Elon Musk, the world’s richest man who has been tasked with radically reforming the US federal government.
They could also offer a glimmer of hope to Democrats – fresh off a surprise upset win in a local race in Pennsylvania last week – that their divided political party could be seeing a resurgence in its fortunes.
Or, if they fail to land further blows on Republicans, it will be yet another sign that the party is destined for a long period in the wilderness amid historic lows of its popularity in recent polls.
Many eyes are focused on two previously Republican-held congressional seats in Florida, where its sixth and first congressional districts are vacant and up for grabs.
Mike Waltz left to take up a cabinet job for Trump and Matt Gaetz resigned to pursue a failed bid to become attorney general. House Republicans currently hold a razor-thin majority over Democrats, 218 to 213, with four seats vacant, in the lower chamber of Congress.
Republican nerves about how tight the House could become were emphasized last week after Trump pulled the nomination of New York congresswoman Elise Stefanik to be United Nations ambassador – a move widely seen as admitting that marginal Republican districts are at risk of being lost.
It is the old district of Waltz, Trump’s embattled national security adviser, that is most at risk. State senator Randy Fine has lagged behind his Democratic opponent, Josh Weil, in fundraising amid concerns that he could lose the district – though such a defeat is far from certain.
Read my colleague Richard Luscombe’s full report on the elections here:
In other news:
-
Trump said Wednesday will be “Liberation Day” when he announces reciprocal tariffs on nearly all US trading partners. Global stock markets were a sea of red on Monday and investors fled to gold amid recession fears.
-
The Trump administration has announced a review of federal contracts and grants at Harvard University over allegations of antisemitism.
-
Senate majority leader John Thune said he believes Donald Trump is “probably messing with you” with his remarks on Sunday that there are “methods” by which he could run for a third term.
-
A coalition of civil rights groups filed a lawsuit on Monday seeking to block portions of Donald Trump’s executive order that would require voters to prove their citizenship in order to vote.
-
Trump took aim at ticket scalping in a new executive order signed today, which directs the Department of Justice and the FTC to crack down on ticket resellers who price-gouge.
-
Tens of millions of dollars is being withheld for Planned Parenthood chapters across the US in an attempt by the Trump administration to force the clinics to change their operations.
-
A federal judge has put the Trump administration plans to deport hundreds of thousands of Venezuelan immigrants on pause, ruling Monday that protections struck down by officials should be reinstated while lawsuits continue.
