US President Donald Trump said Tuesday that he will deploy National Guard troops to Chicago, calling the Democratic-run midwestern city a “hellhole” ravaged by gun crime.”We’re going in,” the Republican president told reporters, while hinting that he would also send soldiers to Baltimore, another Democratic-run city.Trump denied charges he is strictly targeting cities run by his political opponents for his anti-crime campaign and his crackdown on undocumented migrants.”I have an obligation,” he said, citing Chicago crime statistics. “This isn’t a political thing. I have an obligation when 20 people are killed over the last two and a half weeks and 75 are shot with bullets.”Trump, who already sent National Guard troops into the streets of Democratic-run Washington last month, declined to say exactly when he would send soldiers to Chicago, where the Democratic state governor and mayor strongly oppose the plan.”Chicago is a hellhole right now. Baltimore is a hellhole right now,” Trump said.Posting earlier on his Truth Social platform, the Republican president said he “will solve the crime problem (in Chicago) fast, just like I did in (Washington).””Chicago is the worst and most dangerous city in the World, by far,” he said, adding that JB Pritzker, the Democratic governor of the state of Illinois where Chicago is located, “needs help badly, he just doesn’t know it yet.”Trump followed up with a provocative, all-caps post: “CHICAGO IS THE MURDER CAPITAL OF THE WORLD!”Pritzker has clashed with Trump over the deployment, accusing the president of preparing “an invasion.””Chicago does not want troops on our streets,” the Democratic governor said at a press conference on Tuesday.”Crime is down in Chicago. Murders are down by almost 50 percent in the last four years,” he said.”None of this is about fighting crime or making Chicago safer,” Pritzker added. “For Trump, it’s about testing his power and producing a political drama to cover up for his corruption.”- President as police chief? -Trump ordered the deployment of the National Guard into Washington in August, and repeated his claims on Tuesday that it has improved city safety.”It’s now a safe zone,” he said. “We have no crime.”Thousands of National Guard troops and US Marines were deployed to Los Angeles in June to assist police as they cracked down on protests and unrest in the California city over Trump’s sweeps for undocumented migrants.On Tuesday, a federal judge declared that Trump effectively violated the law when he used troops in Democratic-run Los Angeles, and barred National Guard reservists or Marines from performing police functions including arrests or searches and seizures.District Judge Charles Breyer in San Francisco warned in his ruling that Trump appears intent on “creating a national police force with the President as its chief.”Breyer’s injunction, however, would only come into force on September 12, potentially leaving an opening for the conservative-majority Supreme Court to rule on the case.rotesters marched through parts of Chicago on Monday in a “Workers over Billionaires” rally that also saw people vocalize their opposition to Trump sending troops into the city.

US experts on Tuesday denounced a Trump administration climate report for reviving the tobacco-industry’s tactics to sow doubt around scientific consensus.In a 440-page rebuttal, 85 scientists accused the government of relying on a handful of contrarians who drew on discredited studies, misrepresented evidence, and bypassed peer review to reach pre-determined conclusions.The administration’s 150-page report, released on the Department of Energy’s website in late July, was intended to support its proposal to overturn the 2009 “Endangerment Finding” — the legal basis for numerous federal regulations of greenhouse gases.”This report makes a mockery of science,” said Andrew Dessler, a climate scientist at Texas A&M University and a co-author of the rebuttal.”It relies on ideas that were rejected long ago, supported by misrepresentations of the body of scientific knowledge, omissions of important facts, arm waving, anecdotes, and confirmation bias.”Entitled “A Critical Review of Impacts of Greenhouse Gas Emissions on the US Climate,” the DOE document made a series of startling and at times contradictory claims. These include that extreme weather events linked to emissions are not increasing, US temperatures are not rising, higher atmospheric carbon dioxide would boost agriculture, and solar activity could explain warming trends.- ‘Zombie arguments’ -The rebuttal marshals experts from multiple disciplines to challenge each assertion.”Just as the tobacco industry funded scientists to question the harms of smoking, the fossil fuel industry engaged in a coordinated campaign throughout the 1990’s to fund scientists willing to argue that it was the Sun, and not humans, causing the climate change observed up to that point,” said Ted Amur, a climate scientist at Aon Impact Forecasting, adding he was alarmed to see “zombie arguments” brought back.The DOE report claimed that the “Dust Bowl” years of 1930–1936 — among the nation’s hottest summers — disproved the reality of human-caused warming. But the counter report said this was deeply misleading, since poor land management at the time had turned the Great Plains into a desert-like wasteland that amplified the heat.On agriculture, the rebuttal notes that while elevated carbon dioxide can sometimes spur yields in isolation, rising heat and shifting rainfall patterns are expected to cause overall declines.The DOE report also downplays the threat of ocean acidification, claiming “life in the oceans evolved when the oceans were mildly acidic” billions of years ago. But the rebuttal counters this is “irrelevant” since complex life was not present during Earth’s early history.Ecologist Pamela McElwee of Rutgers University faulted the report for largely ignoring impacts on biodiversity despite the outsized social and economic consequences. “US coral reefs alone provide an estimated $1.8 billion in coastal protection from storms and floods annually,” she said.Since returning to office in January, President Donald Trump has gone far beyond the pro-fossil fuel agenda of his first term. Republicans recently passed the “Big Beautiful Bill,” gutting clean energy tax credits and opening sensitive areas to drilling.He has also withdrawn the United States from the Paris Agreement and is pressing his fossil fuel agenda abroad –requiring the EU to buy more US liquefied natural gas in a trade deal and pressuring the World Bank to scale back its climate focus, among other actions.