The horror stories about US immigration officers harassing visitors to the country keep piling up. It seems like they seek even the most trivial of reasons to give visitors a hard time. Take this example.

Two teenage girls from Germany were detained, arrested, and deported at an airport in Hawaii after immigration officials said it was suspicious they had not booked a hotel room.

Backpackers Charlotte Pohl, 19, and Maria Lepere, 18, arrived in Honolulu from Auckland while undergoing a round-the-world trip. The duo planned to spend five weeks in Hawaii before moving onto California and Costa Rica for the next legs of their journey.

But despite having ESTA travel authorization, immigration officials accused them of attempting to enter the U.S. to work illegally, and they were placed in handcuffs and taken to a nearby detention center they later learned was a deportation facility.

Upon arrival, they were subjected to full-body scans, strip searches and forced to wear green prison jumpsuits, German outlet Ostee Zeitung reports. They were then placed in a holding facility with serious criminals, including an alleged murderer who had been locked up for 18 years, and were forced to spend the night in a freezing cold double cell.

“It was all like a fever dream,” Maria told the German outlet. “It was a shock; we didn’t expect it. We had already noticed a little bit about what was going on in the U.S. But at the time, we didn’t think it was happening to Germans. That was perhaps very naive. We felt so small and powerless.”

After a sleepless night in the freezing cell, the girls were woken early and escorted back to the airport in handcuffs. Upon arrival, they were forced to board a Hawaiian Airlines flight to Tokyo and were told they would receive their passports back once they arrived in Japan.

Included in their travel documents were interrogation transcripts signed by the girls, which “contained sentences we didn’t actually say,” said Charlotte after the ordeal. “They twisted it to make it seem as if we admitted that we wanted to work illegally in the US.”

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As if the ever-increasing cruelty and brutality of Israel’s genocidal actions in Gaza and the long-running war following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was not creating enough misery in the world, we now have the possibility of yet another conflict, this time between India and Pakistan.

Those two countries have been having tensions along their border for a long time, fueled by the dispute over Kashmir. While the intensity has waxed and waned, it was usually limited to skirmishes between troops of these two countries patrolling the s0-called line of demarcation. But the most recent flare-up looks like the most serious in a long time, with an attack on Hindu tourists in Kashmir resulting in India launching a wave of missile attacks and Pakistan vowing to retaliate.
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The Labour party won the general election in Australia, roundly defeating the conservative coalition led by the Liberal party. While needing 76 seats to have a majority, Labour already has 85, with the coalition only 41. Various independent candidates have nine seats, with 16 yet undecided.

As in Canada, the conservatives hoped to win but Trump’s baleful influence effect seems to have sunk them in Australia too. Like in Canada, the Liberal party leader Peter Dutton lost his own long-held seat.

Dutton’s brand of hard-line conservatism, his support for controversial immigration policies – like sending asylum seekers to offshore detention centres – and his fierce criticism of China, all led to comparisons with US President Donald Trump.

It’s a likeness he has rejected but then the Coalition pursued policies that seemed to have been borrowed from the Trump administration.

Dutton said that if elected he would cut public sector jobs – more than 40,000 by some estimates. This reminded voters of billionaire Elon Musk’s Doge, or Department of Government Efficiency, which has slashed US bureaucracy. Dutton later walked back the plan.

The Coalition even appointed Jacinta Nampijinpa Price as shadow minister for government efficiency. And images of her wearing a cap with the words Maga – short for the popular Trump slogan, Make America Great Again – have became a key talking point.

None of this served Dutton well and he knew it. Towards the end of the campaign, he tried to shake off Trump’s shadow, and in the final leaders’ debate he repeatedly told the audience that he didn’t know Trump before attempting to answer questions on him.

“The Coalition will probably regret issuing messages that came across as supporting Trump and opposing the US Democrats,” said Frank Mols, a political science lecturer at the University of Queensland.

Trump is proving to be a millstone around the neck of any politician who embraces him.

In the US, these results and Trump’s own historically low approval ratings must be sending jitters through members of his party who have been unswervingly supportive of him. But we will not know until the mid term elections in November 2026 what the effect will be and a lot can happen in that time.

As expected, the Liberals have won in Canada’s general elections, winning 168 ridings, just short of the 172 needed to get an absolute majorities. Hence they will need the support of smaller parties to govern. Those parties got 31 seats.

The Conservatives won just 144 seats, more than they had in the outgoing parliament but still a huge disappointment since in January of this year they were expected to win big. But that was before Trump decided to make inflammatory and demeaning statements about Canada. Not only did they lose, their leader Paul Poilievre lost the own seat, one that he had held since 2004. The New Democratic Party faired very poorly and their leader Jagmeet Singh also lost his seat.

Until the end of 2024, internal discussions within the Liberal party were grim: under their most optimistic scenarios, they could only hope of holding the Conservatives to a minority government. Outright victory was nowhere on the party’s radar.
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Trump’s threats to annex the country to make it the 51st state, his belittling of Trudeau as “governor” and threats of economic coercion have all contributed to a sharp feeling of anger and betrayal towards Canada’s southern neighbour.

“The shift in polls was absolutely without precedent,” said David Coletto, the head of the polling firm Abacus. “But to see the honeymoon that followed – and the way that support held, is also unprecedented. I can’t think of other jurisdictions around the world where we’ve seen this complete reset. And this turns on two factors: how unpopular Justin Trudeau was, and how much of a threat and gamechanger Donald Trump has meant to Canada.”

Carney’s come-from-behind win was fueled by by his strong stance against Trump’s arrogant and condescending attitude towards Canada. The UK’s Keir Starmer and other world leaders should take note.

Carney should send Trump a thank you card.

Reports are emerging that the UK government, responding to repeated requests from Trump, is putting pressure on the organization that runs the British Open golf championship to assign the 2028 tournament to Trump’s golf course in Scotland.

One source described the talks as direct lobbying from the government, although others said officials had asked about hypothetical problems with the idea, rather than insisting that it happen.

One person with knowledge of the discussions said: “The government is doing everything it can to get close to Trump. One concrete thing is that the Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) have been involved in pushing for the Open to return to Trump-owned Turnberry.”

Both the DCMS and Trump Turnberry declined to comment.

Two other people briefed on conversations between the US president and Keir Starmer said Trump had asked the prime minister multiple times about hosting the Open at Turnberry, which the Trump Organization has owned since 2014.
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Hosting the Open could provide a welcome financial boost for SLC Turnberry, the course’s operating company, which is run by the president’s sons, Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr. Last year the company lost £1.7m, having made £571,000 in the previous year – its only profit in 10 years.

Trump of course has no shame in using his office to advance his personal business nterests.

The UK has a long, long history of their governments being servile to the US, and this is even when they have Labour governments like they have now. This is not as big a deal as Tony Blair being obscenely obsequious to George W. Bush and giving him cover for the invasion of Iraq. But it does indicate a subservient attitude that seeks to ingratiate themselves with US presidents.

It is not clear that they get anything worthwhile in return for their cravenness. Trump seems to only respect governments that respond with firmness, like China and Russia. Trying to please him only makes him worse.

We are witnessing the transition from Trump being bold and bombastic to becoming weak and pathetic as his aggressive actions are turning out to be ineffective, resulting in him having to lie and plead.

We see that most clearly in his actions with China. He must have thought that the high tariffs he slapped on imports from that country would swiftly cause them to buckle. But they have hung tough and reciprocated with high tariffs of their own and the stock markets cratered. So now he is reduced to essentially pleading with them to call him and promising them that he will be “very nice” to them if they call. He claims that the two countries have been in talks but the Chinese dismissed that.
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