Education department says $2.3bn in funds to be frozen after university rejects slew of demands as political ploy
The US education department is freezing about $2.3bn in federal funds to Harvard University, the agency said on Monday.
The announcement comes as the Ivy League school has decided to fight the White House’s demands that it crack down on antisemitism and alleged civil rights violations, including shutting down diversity, equity and inclusion programs.
Continue reading...Notices show Trump administration setting stage for levies on both sectors on national security grounds
The Trump administration is kicking off investigations into imports of pharmaceuticals and semiconductors as part of a bid to impose tariffs on both sectors on national security grounds, notices posted to the Federal Register on Monday showed.
The filings scheduled to be published on Wednesday set a 21-day deadline from that date for the submission of public comment on the issue and indicate the administration intends to pursue the levies under authority granted by the Trade Expansion Act of 1962. Such inquiries need to be completed within 270 days after being announced.
Continue reading...JD Vance, the man entrusted as America’s back-up in times of emergency, may not be the safest pair of hands if Monday’s events are anything to go by. The vice-president ended the Ohio State football team’s visit to the White House by fumbling the team’s national championship trophy.
After laudatory speeches by Donald Trump, Buckeyes coach Ryan Day and Vance on the South Lawn, the Vance – an Ohio State graduate – tried to lift the trophy. He didn’t appear to realize that the top of the trophy is detachable from its base. After a moment of struggle, the vice-president lost his grip on the two pieces. OSU running back TreVeyon Henderson, standing behind Vance, grabbed the football-shaped top of the trophy, but the base fell to the ground, forcing Vance to grasp around as it rolled away from him.
Continue reading...Analysis finds Amazon, Meta, Alphabet, Netflix, Apple and Microsoft averaged 18.8%, compared with 29.7% US average
The big American tech firms known as the “Silicon Six” have been accused of paying almost $278bn (£211bn) less corporate income tax in the past decade compared with the statutory rate for US companies making the same profits.
Amazon, Meta, Alphabet, Netflix, Apple and Microsoft generated $11tn of revenue and $2.5tn of profits over the past 10 years.
Continue reading...Administration advances new misrepresentations of US supreme court order in case of Kilmar Abrego García
The Trump administration on Monday misrepresented a US supreme court decision that compelled it to return a man wrongly deported to El Salvador, using tortured readings of the order to justify taking no actions to secure his release.
The supreme court last week unanimously ordered the administration to “facilitate” the release of Kilmar Abrego García, who was supposed to have been protected from deportation to El Salvador regardless of whether he was a member of the MS-13 gang.
Continue reading...Two students traveling on spring break were arrested and charged with assault in Copenhagen, police say
Two American college students traveling for spring break were arrested in Copenhagen, charged with assault, and held in a Danish prison for two weeks following an alleged dispute with an Uber driver, Danish police said.
The family of Owen Ray, a 19-year-old studying at Miami University in Ohio, said he and an unnamed friend have been forced to forfeit their passports and remain in the country.
Continue reading...Mahdawi was at a naturalization interview in Vermont when he was taken in move his lawyers say is ‘retaliation’
Mohsen Mahdawi, a Palestinian green card holder and student at Columbia University, was apprehended by US immigration authorities in Vermont on Monday, according to his lawyers and a video of the incident.
Mahdawi, who was a leader of the pro-Palestinian protests at Columbia last spring, was arrested by Ice on Monday morning in Colchester, Vermont, while he was attending a naturalization interview, his lawyer said in a statement to the Guardian.
Continue reading...The US says it can’t aid in his return as he’s in El Salvador; El Salvador says to help would be like ‘smuggling’ him back
It is difficult to find a term more fitting for the fate of the Maryland father Kilmar Abrego García than Kafkaesque.
Abrego García is one of hundreds of foreign-born men deported under the Trump administration to the Cecot mega-prison in El Salvador as part of a macabre partnership with the self-declared “world’s coolest dictator”, Nayib Bukele.
Continue reading...Trump officials claim they’re not legally bound to bring Kilmar Abrego García back despite supreme court ruling
The president of El Salvador said in a meeting with Donald Trump in the White House on Monday that he would not order the return of a Maryland man who was deported in error to a Salvadorian mega-prison.
“The question is preposterous,” Nayib Bukele said in the Oval Office on Monday, where he was welcomed by Trump and spoke with the president and members of his cabinet. “How can I smuggle a terrorist into the United States? I’m not going to do it.”
Continue reading...All-female crew led by Jeff Bezos’s fiancee Lauren Sánchez lands in Texas after reaching the edge of outer space
Six women – including the pop star Katy Perry and morning TV host Gayle King – safely completed a trip to the edge of outer space and back from a private Texas ranch on Monday morning on a rocket belonging to Jeff Bezos, the Amazon co-founder and commercial space flight entrepreneur.
The women, who also included Bezos’s fiancee, Lauren Sánchez, made the trip to the Kármán line – the internationally recognized boundary of space – to float about, weightlessly, in the rocket’s capsule for three minutes before returning to Earth.
Continue reading...FAA said New York Helicopter Tours will be shuttering ‘immediately’ after accident that killed all six on board
The company that operated the helicopter that crashed into New York City’s Hudson River on Thursday – killing all six people on board – has been shuttered with immediate effect, the US’s Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) said late on Sunday.
New York Helicopter Tours is “shutting down their operations immediately”, the FAA said in a statement on X. The agency added that it would launch a review of the company’s license and safety records in the meantime.
Continue reading...Ukrainian president calls on US counterpart to visit country as Trump appears to downplay Russia’s latest strike by calling it ‘mistake’
Volodymyr Zelenskyy has urged Donald Trump to visit Ukraine to see the devastation caused by Russia’s invasion, while the US president appeared to play down Moscow’s latest deadly attack, the worst on civilians this year, calling it “a mistake”.
International leaders condemned Russia’s strike on the centre of the Ukrainian city of Sumy on Sunday, which killed 34 people, including two children. Two ballistic missiles hit as people made their way to church for Palm Sunday.
Continue reading...President says he will lay out new levies on Monday and relief on electronics will be short-lived. Plus, the rise of end times fascism and how to defeat it
Good morning.
Donald Trump’s tariff war has plunged deeper into chaos after a cabinet official floated a plan for new levies on semiconductors – a crucial component in electronic goods – just days after the Trump administration exempted computers and smartphones from tariffs.
How is the continuing tariff whiplash being received? The billionaire investor Ray Dalio said he was worried the US would experience “something worse than a recession” as a result of Trump’s trade policies.
What has the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, said? He issued a dramatic plea to Trump telling him: “Before any kind of decisions, any kind of forms of negotiations, come to see people, civilians, warriors, hospitals, churches, children destroyed or dead.”
Continue reading...Authorities say suspect told them he would have beaten Josh Shapiro with sledgehammer if he had found him
A man who authorities said scaled an iron security fence in the middle of the night, eluded police and broke into the Pennsylvania governor’s mansion – where he set a fire – had planned to beat the governor, Josh Shapiro, with a hammer if he found him because he hates the politician, according to court documents released on Monday.
The fire left significant damage and forced Shapiro, his family and guests to evacuate the building early on Sunday. The man, arrested later in the day, faces charges including attempted homicide, terrorism, aggravated arson and aggravated assault, authorities said.
Continue reading...Letter says Trump administration’s detention of Khan Suri ‘represents a fundamental violation of academic freedom’
More than 370 alumni of Georgetown University joined 65 current students there in signing on to a letter opposing immigration authorities’ detention of Dr Badar Khan Suri, a senior postdoctoral fellow at the institution’s Alwaleed Bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding (ACMCU).
The letter, dated Sunday and shared with the Guardian, follows the Trump administration’s detention of Khan Suri – a citizen of India – on 17 March. He is being held at an immigration prison in Alvarado, Texas, where his next hearing is scheduled for 6 May.
Continue reading...Unctad says many countries targeted with high tariff rates are unlikely to be a threat to US
The UN’s trade and development arm, Unctad, is calling on Donald Trump to exempt the world’s poorest and smallest countries from “reciprocal” tariffs, or risk “serious economic harm”.
In a report published on Monday, Unctad identifies 28 nations the US president singled out for a higher tariff rate than the 10% baseline – despite each accounting for less than 0.1% of the US trade deficit.
Continue reading...Effects could tip one into recession and undermine other’s fragile economy but prospects for rapprochement are not hopeless
Sky-high tariffs that now hang heavily over US-China trade mean, effectively, that they have declared a trade embargo on each other, normally an act of war. The economic consequences for both will hurt.
The US’s $150bn (£113bn) or so of exports to China will fall away quickly, while China’s $440bn worth of exports to the US may drop by up to 75% over the next 18 months, unless some sort of negotiation happens. No one will be spared the effects.
Continue reading...Xi Jinping expected to present China as reliable partner in contrast to US, which imposed – then suspended – tariffs over 40% on some countries
The Chinese president, Xi Jinping, warned there would be “no winners” in a trade war and that protectionism “leads nowhere”, as he began a three-nation trip to south-east Asia, starting in Vietnam on Monday.
Xi’s tour, which started in Hanoi, also includes rare visits to Malaysia and Cambodia and will seek to strengthen ties with China’s closest neighbours amid a trade war that has sent shock waves through global markets.
Continue reading...Chinese customs official says trade has diversified away from US in recent years and plays up its ‘vast domestic market’
China has played down the risk of damage to its exports from Donald Trump’s tariffs, with an official saying the “the sky won’t fall”, as stock markets rose on Monday amid signs of a retreat on electronics restrictions.
The world’s second-largest economy has diversified its trade away from the US in recent years, according to Lyu Daliang, a customs administration spokesperson, in comments reported by state-owned agency Xinhua.
Continue reading...Under Pete Marocco’s lead, nearly all USAID staff was fired, with funding slashed and contractors dismissed
Pete Marocco, the Trump administration official who played a major role in dismantling the US Agency for International Development (USAID), has left the state department, a US official said on Sunday.
Donald Trump’s administration has moved to fire nearly all USAID staff, as billionaire Elon Musk’s so-called “department of government efficiency” has slashed funding and dismissed contractors across the federal bureaucracy in what it calls an attack on wasteful spending.
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