Latest news with #VicePresident
The Guardian
2 hours ago
- Politics
- The Guardian
Will I get deported for sharing this meme of JD Vance?
I have a very important public service announcement to make. Do not, under any circumstances whatsoever, make fun of Vice-President JD Vance by sharing one of the millions of unflattering memes dedicated to him. Don't you dare chuckle at the images of him looking like the 'lollipop kid' in Shrek (the resemblance is uncanny) or a chicken nugget. And, whatever you do, do not share the meme that you can find here, where he looks like a big bald baby. You risk hurting the poor man's feelings and, also, you might get kicked out of the country. So says a 21-year-old Norwegian called Mads Mikkelsen, anyway. Mikkelsen recently accused American border officials of denying him entry into the US because he had a meme of a bloated baby Vance saved on his phone. Mikkelsen, who had travelled to the US to visit friends, told the Norwegian paper Nordlys that immigration officers at Newark airport interrogated him, forced him to give fingerprints and blood samples, and went through his phone. After they found the Vance meme, as well as a picture of Mikkelsen holding a homemade wooden pipe, they sent him home. 'Both pictures had been automatically saved to my camera roll from a chat app, but I really didn't think that these innocent pictures would put a stop to my entry into the country,' Mikkelsen told Nordlys. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has rejected Mikkelsen's claim that he was kicked out of the country for disrespecting the vice-president. 'FACT CHECK. Claims that Mads Mikkelsen was denied entry because of a meme are unequivocally FALSE,' they posted on Facebook earlier in the week. 'TRUTH: Mikkelsen was refused entry into the US for his admitted drug use.' A homeland security assistant secretary, Tricia McLaughlin, also called the story 'BS' in a post on X. Mikkelsen, meanwhile, insisted to the fact-checking website Snopes that the meme played a role in getting him denied entry. The 21-year-old claimed border officials told him he was getting sent home because of 'extremist propaganda [the meme] and narcotic paraphernalia'. However, that claim hasn't been verified. We may never know if the Vance meme really did play a role in getting Mikkelsen kicked out of the country. While I don't normally side with border officials, one imagines the pipe picture was probably the actual culprit. Still, the story, which made headlines around the world, won't help America's tourism industry. International visitors are staying out of the US after a spate of stories about tourists getting sent to Ice detention centers without any explanation. The World Travel & Tourism Council has said the country could lose $12.5bn in international visitor spending this year. The story has also reignited interest in JD Vance memes, which have been circulating for months now, peaking at end of February after the vice-president scolded Volodymyr Zelenskyy in an exchange that launched a million memes. Indeed, the Irish lawmaker Ivana Bacik recently held up the Vance baby meme while speaking in the Irish parliament about the Mikkelsen story. While claims that making fun of Mr Hillbilly Elegy may get you deported might be exaggerated, the fact that so many people immediately believed Mikkelsen's claims is a sign of just how badly the US's international image has been damaged and how dystopian the country has become. The US is heading very quickly towards authoritarianism. It is cracking down on dissent and protest. Book banning has surged and the Trump administration has instructed the Department of Education to end their investigations into these bans, calling them a 'hoax'. Free speech rights are being shredded. And the people responsible for all this? They're not evil geniuses, they're embarrassing dweebs with massively meme-able faces. 'I knew that one day we might have to watch as capitalism and greed and bigotry led to a world where powerful men, deserving or not, would burn it all down,' Rebecca Shaw said in a Guardian piece earlier this year. 'What I didn't expect, and don't think I could have foreseen, is how incredibly cringe it would all be.' 'The Alliance for Immigrant Survivors, a national network of advocates for those hurt by domestic violence, found that 75% of the 170 advocates they surveyed across the country said the immigrants they serve fear they'll face arrest or deportation if they contact authorities,' reports USA Today. Meanwhile the Fox News host Jesse Waters seems to think all this is hilarious. 'I bet a bunch of guys that are dating illegal alien Spanish girls are like Ice, here's the address! She hasn't been very good,' Watters recently said. In related news, a man was recently arrested for allegedly impersonating an Ice officer and sexually assaulting a woman, saying he'd deport her if she didn't comply. Mark Rutte made a weird statement in which he referred to Trump as 'Daddy' and then quickly walked it back. Speaking at an office hours event, the Michigan representative Karl Bohnak (a Republican), said 'I don't' after a constituent asked him, 'So you don't support a woman's autonomy over her own body?' The case, Medina v Planned Parenthood South Atlantic, 'is part of a longstanding effort by anti-abortion activists to 'defund' Planned Parenthood by cutting it out of Medicaid', the Guardian reports. 'Of the 2.4 million people treated at Planned Parenthood each year, almost half use Medicaid.' The prime minister, Nikol Pashinyan, told his Facebook followers that he was prepared to expose himself to the head of the Armenian church, to prove they were wrong that he had been circumcised. This is just the latest development in an ongoing spat between Pashinyan and the head of the Armenian Apostolic church. And they say women are too emotional to lead! Sign up to The Week in Patriarchy Get Arwa Mahdawi's weekly recap of the most important stories on feminism and sexism and those fighting for equality after newsletter promotion As the title suggests, the game involves a male protagonist who is looking to get revenge on 'gold-digging' women. After a lot of controversy it's been renamed Emotional Fraud Simulator, but the content is the same. 'I cannot go into further detail about the number of victims in the case beyond confirming that it is a double-digit number,' the Oslo police attorney said. Mel Owens, a 66-year-old former NFL player, who is the new star of ABC's senior-focused dating show, has said he is only looking to date women between 45 and 60. 'If they're 60 or over, I'm cutting them.'' The handful of attenders included a local podcast host who praised the city's lack of Black residents. '[A] job title isn't everything, and it's more important to stay true to your values,' Judge Karen Ortiz, who worked in the US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission's New York office, said. That's according to a brilliant advertising campaign which aimed to destigmatise herpes via a spoof tourism advertisement. Israeli officers and soldiers said that they were ordered to fire at unarmed civilians waiting for humanitarian aid, Haaretz reports. Here's something to mews about: is it disgusting to kiss your partner after kissing your cat? You still have time to vote on this very im-paw-tant question via a Guardian poll.
The Guardian
3 hours ago
- Politics
- The Guardian
Will I get deported for sharing this meme of JD Vance?
I have a very important public service announcement to make. Do not, under any circumstances whatsoever, make fun of Vice-President JD Vance by sharing one of the millions of unflattering memes dedicated to him. Don't you dare chuckle at the images of him looking like the 'lollipop kid' in Shrek (the resemblance is uncanny) or a chicken nugget. And, whatever you do, do not share the meme that you can find here, where he looks like a big bald baby. You risk hurting the poor man's feelings and, also, you might get kicked out of the country. So says a 21-year-old Norwegian called Mads Mikkelsen, anyway. Mikkelsen recently accused American border officials of denying him entry into the US because he had a meme of a bloated baby Vance saved on his phone. Mikkelsen, who had travelled to the US to visit friends, told the Norwegian paper Nordlys that immigration officers at Newark airport interrogated him, forced him to give fingerprints and blood samples, and went through his phone. After they found the Vance meme, as well as a picture of Mikkelsen holding a homemade wooden pipe, they sent him home. 'Both pictures had been automatically saved to my camera roll from a chat app, but I really didn't think that these innocent pictures would put a stop to my entry into the country,' Mikkelsen told Nordlys. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has rejected Mikkelsen's claim that he was kicked out of the country for disrespecting the vice-president. 'FACT CHECK. Claims that Mads Mikkelsen was denied entry because of a meme are unequivocally FALSE,' they posted on Facebook earlier in the week. 'TRUTH: Mikkelsen was refused entry into the US for his admitted drug use.' A homeland security assistant secretary, Tricia McLaughlin, also called the story 'BS' in a post on X. Mikkelsen, meanwhile, insisted to the fact-checking website Snopes that the meme played a role in getting him denied entry. The 21-year-old claimed border officials told him he was getting sent home because of 'extremist propaganda [the meme] and narcotic paraphernalia'. However, that claim hasn't been verified. We may never know if the Vance meme really did play a role in getting Mikkelsen kicked out of the country. While I don't normally side with border officials, one imagines the pipe picture was probably the actual culprit. Still, the story, which made headlines around the world, won't help America's tourism industry. International visitors are staying out of the US after a spate of stories about tourists getting sent to Ice detention centers without any explanation. The World Travel & Tourism Council has said the country could lose $12.5bn in international visitor spending this year. The story has also reignited interest in JD Vance memes, which have been circulating for months now, peaking at end of February after the vice-president scolded Volodymyr Zelenskyy in an exchange that launched a million memes. Indeed, the Irish lawmaker Ivana Bacik recently held up the Vance baby meme while speaking in the Irish parliament about the Mikkelsen story. While claims that making fun of Mr Hillbilly Elegy may get you deported might be exaggerated, the fact that so many people immediately believed Mikkelsen's claims is a sign of just how badly the US's international image has been damaged and how dystopian the country has become. The US is heading very quickly towards authoritarianism. It is cracking down on dissent and protest. Book banning has surged and the Trump administration has instructed the Department of Education to end their investigations into these bans, calling them a 'hoax'. Free speech rights are being shredded. And the people responsible for all this? They're not evil geniuses, they're embarrassing dweebs with massively meme-able faces. 'I knew that one day we might have to watch as capitalism and greed and bigotry led to a world where powerful men, deserving or not, would burn it all down,' Rebecca Shaw said in a Guardian piece earlier this year. 'What I didn't expect, and don't think I could have foreseen, is how incredibly cringe it would all be.' 'The Alliance for Immigrant Survivors, a national network of advocates for those hurt by domestic violence, found that 75% of the 170 advocates they surveyed across the country said the immigrants they serve fear they'll face arrest or deportation if they contact authorities,' reports USA Today. Meanwhile the Fox News host Jesse Waters seems to think all this is hilarious. 'I bet a bunch of guys that are dating illegal alien Spanish girls are like Ice, here's the address! She hasn't been very good,' Watters recently said. In related news, a man was recently arrested for allegedly impersonating an Ice officer and sexually assaulting a woman, saying he'd deport her if she didn't comply. Mark Rutte made a weird statement in which he referred to Trump as 'Daddy' and then quickly walked it back. Speaking at an office hours event, the Michigan representative Karl Bohnak (a Republican), said 'I don't' after a constituent asked him, 'So you don't support a woman's autonomy over her own body?' The case, Medina v Planned Parenthood South Atlantic, 'is part of a longstanding effort by anti-abortion activists to 'defund' Planned Parenthood by cutting it out of Medicaid', the Guardian reports. 'Of the 2.4 million people treated at Planned Parenthood each year, almost half use Medicaid.' The prime minister, Nikol Pashinyan, told his Facebook followers that he was prepared to expose himself to the head of the Armenian church, to prove they were wrong that he had been circumcised. This is just the latest development in an ongoing spat between Pashinyan and the head of the Armenian Apostolic church. And they say women are too emotional to lead! Sign up to The Week in Patriarchy Get Arwa Mahdawi's weekly recap of the most important stories on feminism and sexism and those fighting for equality after newsletter promotion As the title suggests, the game involves a male protagonist who is looking to get revenge on 'gold-digging' women. After a lot of controversy it's been renamed Emotional Fraud Simulator, but the content is the same. 'I cannot go into further detail about the number of victims in the case beyond confirming that it is a double-digit number,' the Oslo police attorney said. Mel Owens, a 66-year-old former NFL player, who is the new star of ABC's senior-focused dating show, has said he is only looking to date women between 45 and 60. 'If they're 60 or over, I'm cutting them.'' The handful of attenders included a local podcast host who praised the city's lack of Black residents. '[A] job title isn't everything, and it's more important to stay true to your values,' Judge Karen Ortiz, who worked in the US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission's New York office, said. That's according to a brilliant advertising campaign which aimed to destigmatise herpes via a spoof tourism advertisement. Israeli officers and soldiers said that they were ordered to fire at unarmed civilians waiting for humanitarian aid, Haaretz reports. Here's something to mews about: is it disgusting to kiss your partner after kissing your cat? You still have time to vote on this very im-paw-tant question via a Guardian poll.
Wall Street Journal
a day ago
- Politics
- Wall Street Journal
Alina Habba Stood by Trump in Court. Now She's One of His Most Loyal Prosecutors.
When Alina Habba began her interim post as the U.S. attorney for New Jersey, she was dismayed to find no photos of President Trump in her office. She instructed her staff to hang pictures of him and Vice President JD Vance—and then got upset when the portraits were too small. Much larger photos are now displayed in their place.
Arab News
a day ago
- Politics
- Arab News
Philippines VP Duterte must go on trial due to severity of charges, prosecutors say
MANILA: Philippine Vice President Sara Duterte must be tried, and ultimately convicted, over serious charges, including an alleged threat to have the president killed, prosecutors argued in a submission to a Senate impeachment court on Friday. Duterte is facing removal from her post and a lifetime ban from office if convicted. She has denied wrongdoing and maintains her impeachment is politically motivated and the result of an acrimonious falling out between her and President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. Lower house prosecutors said the weight of the evidence against Duterte justifies a full-blown trial, rejecting her defense that the allegations against her in an impeachment complaint were unsubstantiated. 'The severity of the charges leaves no room for technical evasion. A trial is not only warranted but necessary to reinforce justice, uphold democratic principles, and affirm that no individual, regardless of rank of influence, stands above the law,' they said in their response to Duterte's defense. 'It is obvious from a simple reading of (Duterte's response), which relies on misleading claims and baseless procedural objections, that the only legal strategy of the defense is to have the case dismissed and avoid trial,' the prosecutors said. Duterte, who was impeached by the lower house in February, has described the impeachment complaint as unconstitutional and 'nothing more than a scrap of paper.' Included in the complaint were allegations she misused public funds while vice president and education secretary and had plotted to assassinate Marcos, the first lady and the house speaker based on remarks during a November press conference about hiring an assassin. Duterte's impeachment is widely seen in the Philippines as part of a broader power struggle ahead of the 2028 election, which Marcos cannot contest due to a single-term limit for presidents and will likely seek to groom a successor to protect his legacy. Marcos has distanced himself from the impeachment. Duterte, the daughter of former President Rodrigo Duterte, is expected to run for the presidency in 2028 if she survives the impeachment and would be a strong contender.
Reuters
a day ago
- Politics
- Reuters
Philippines VP Duterte must go on trial due to severity of charges, prosecutors say
MANILA, June 27 (Reuters) - Philippine Vice President Sara Duterte must be tried, and ultimately convicted, over serious charges, including an alleged threat to have the president killed, prosecutors argued in a submission to a Senate impeachment court on Friday. Duterte is facing removal from her post and a lifetime ban from office if convicted. She has denied wrongdoing and maintains her impeachment is politically motivated and the result of an acrimonious falling out between her and President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. Lower house prosecutors said the weight of the evidence against Duterte justifies a full-blown trial, rejecting her defence that the allegations against her in an impeachment complaint were unsubstantiated. "The severity of the charges leaves no room for technical evasion. A trial is not only warranted but necessary to reinforce justice, uphold democratic principles, and affirm that no individual, regardless of rank of influence, stands above the law," they said in their response to Duterte's defence. "It is obvious from a simple reading of (Duterte's response), which relies on misleading claims and baseless procedural objections, that the only legal strategy of the defence is to have the case dismissed and avoid trial," the prosecutors said. Duterte, who was impeached by the lower house in February, has described the impeachment complaint as unconstitutional and "nothing more than a scrap of paper." Included in the complaint were allegations she misused public funds while vice president and education secretary and had plotted to assassinate Marcos, the first lady and the house speaker based on remarks during a November press conference about hiring an assassin. Duterte's impeachment is widely seen in the Philippines as part of a broader power struggle ahead of the 2028 election, which Marcos cannot contest due to a single-term limit for presidents and will likely seek to groom a successor to protect his legacy. Marcos has distanced himself from the impeachment. Duterte, the daughter of former President Rodrigo Duterte, is expected to run for the presidency in 2028 if she survives the impeachment and would be a strong contender.
