House votes for a third time to end Iran war in symbolic move as conflict drags on – US politics live

The US has announced visa restrictions on some South Africans as Donald Trump’s administration continues to claim that South Africa’s government racially discriminates against white minority Afrikaners.

The announcement did not specify individuals who were barred from the US. Trump has spent his second term falsely claiming there is a “white genocide” in South Africa and railing against its affirmative action policies.

Since the start of last year, the US has cut aid to South Africa, barred it from this year’s G۲۰ summit in Miami and set up a refugee programme for Afrikaners and other South African racial minorities. Meanwhile, the Trump administration has been dismantling refugee and asylum programmes for people fleeing war and persecution.

“The South African people are being failed by a government that is destroying its economy through an obsessive pursuit of racial grievance against the Afrikaner minority,” the US secretary of state, Marco Rubio, said in a post on X.

“The South African government has consistently failed to adequately address rural crime, violent and dehumanising rhetoric, and race-based discriminatory policies against Afrikaners and other minority populations.”

The US visa restrictions would target “foreign nationals who enact or enable policies that promote race-based discrimination, incite violence, or enable land confiscation without compensation in South Africa”, Rubio added.

The Trump administration has cut or frozen up to $۱۷۷ billon in federal grants since the president took office for his second term, according to a tracking tool by a pro-democracy nonprofit and a group of researchers and scientists.

The cuts affected all ۵۰ states and the District of Columbia, with health, nutrition, the environment and disaster relief making up the largest share of cuts, the States United Democracy Center and Grant Witness organization found.

AP reported that among the grants that were eliminated, frozen or delayed were ones related to maternal health in Michigan, education research in Mississippi and assistance to minority farmers in Iowa, the researchers found.

California, Texas, New York, Illinois and North Carolina saw the highest amounts of interrupted grant money. The tracking tool is called Lost Funds.

“By bringing thousands of funding disruptions from the Trump administration together in a publicly accessible, verified database, Lost Funds puts the magnitude of their impact on full display,” Scott Delaney, co-founder of Grant Witness, said in a statement.

Hello and welcome to the US politics live blog.

For a third time, the US House has voted to end the war in Iran, approving a war powers resolution that would halt president Donald Trump’s ability to continue military action without congressional approval.

The roll call late Tuesday, ۲۲۰-۲۰۴, was similar to earlier efforts this summer, with a few more Republicans joining all Democrats voting to bring an end to the conflict.

None of the resolutions have made it to the president’s desk, where Trump would almost certainly veto the measure, AP reported.

“Remember when Donald Trump said that this war would last just a few weeks?” said Democratic representative Seth Moulton, who served as a marine during the Iraq war and pushed the resolution forward.

He said it’s time for Congress to “actually ask tough questions, as the Constitution directs us to do, rather than be subservient to another warmongering administration.”

Republican Brian Mast of Florida, the chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, questioned which military resources Democrats would want to remove from the region where he said Iran remains a threat.

Mast said Trump is against “forever wars, and that is what he is ending” – the decades of hostilities from Iran. “They are a continuous ongoing threat to the United States,” Mast said. “Enough is enough.”

The action is likely the last House vote on the Iran war ahead of the midterm elections, where the conflict overseas is playing a substantial role in the political campaigns.

In other developments:

• As part of a $۲.۸bn package of military aid, the Trump administration plans to send Israel a type of one-ton bombs that were withheld by the Biden administration over concerns that they were being used to kill Palestinian civilians in Gaza.

• Donald Trump “threw a tantrum” when he heard that Democratic congresswoman Joyce Beatty, a trustee of the Kennedy Center whose lawsuit forced Trump’s name to be removed from the facade of the memorial, had again prevailed in court.

• A televised Michigan Senate debate in Detroit on Tuesday was distinctly one-sided, because the Democratic nominee, Dr Abdul El-Sayed turned up, while his Republican rival, Mike Rogers, chose not to attend.

• Todd Blanche, the US attorney general, alerted reporters at the White House to stand by for what he called “a big development” in the federal crackdown on voting by non-citizens to be announced by Ryan Raybould, the US attorney for the Northern District of Texas. When it came, however, Raybould’s announcement, that his office had charged six lawful permanent residents and one undocumented immigrant for voting in federal elections over the past eight years, hardly lived up to the billing.