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A federal judge on Monday challenged the Trump administration’s reasons for slashing billions of dollars in federal funding to Harvard University, triggering a furious response from the president.Judge Allison Burroughs pressed the administration’s lawyer to explain how cutting grants to diverse research budgets would help protect students from alleged campus anti-Semitism, US media reported.Trump preemptively fired off a post on his Truth Social platform blasting Burroughs, an appointee of Democratic president Barack Obama, claiming without evidence that she had already decided against his government — and vowing to appeal.The Ivy League institution sued in April to restore more than $2 billion in frozen funds. The administration insists its move is legally justified over Harvard’s failure to protect Jewish and Israeli students, particularly amid campus protests against Israel’s war in Gaza.The threat to Harvard’s funding stream forced it to implement a hiring freeze while pausing ambitious research programs, particularly in the public health and medical spheres, that experts warned risked American lives.Harvard has argued that the administration is pursuing “unconstitutional retaliation” against it and several other universities targeted by Trump early in his second term.Both sides have sought a summary judgment to avoid trial, but it was unclear if Burroughs would grant one either way.The judge pressed the lone lawyer representing Trump’s administration to explain how cutting funding to Harvard’s broad spectrum of research related to combatting anti-Semitism, the Harvard Crimson student newspaper reported from court.”The Harvard case was just tried in Massachusetts before an Obama appointed Judge. She is a TOTAL DISASTER, which I say even before hearing her Ruling,” Trump wrote on Truth Social.”Harvard has $52 Billion Dollars sitting in the Bank, and yet they are anti-Semitic, anti-Christian, and anti-America,” he claimed, pointing to the university’s world-leading endowment.Both Harvard and the American Association of University Professors brought cases against the Trump administration’s measures which were combined and heard Monday.- ‘Control of academic decision making’ -Trump has sought to have the case heard in the Court of Federal Claims instead of in the federal court in Boston, just miles away from the heart of the university’s Cambridge campus.”This case involves the Government’s efforts to use the withholding of federal funding as leverage to gain control of academic decision making at Harvard,” Harvard said in its initial filing.The Ivy League institution has been at the forefront of Trump’s campaign against top universities after it defied his calls to submit to oversight of its curriculum, staffing, student recruitment and “viewpoint diversity.”Trump and his allies claim that Harvard and other prestigious universities are unaccountable bastions of liberal, anti-conservative bias and anti-Semitism, particularly surrounding protests against Israel’s war in Gaza.The government has also targeted Harvard’s ability to host international students, an important source of income who accounted for 27 percent of total enrollment in the 2024-2025 academic year.A proclamation issued in June declared that the entrance of international students to begin a course at Harvard would be “suspended and limited” for six months and that existing overseas enrollees could have their visas terminated.The move has been halted by a judge.The US government earlier this month subpoenaed Harvard University for records linked to students allegedly involved in a wave of pro-Palestinian student protests that the Trump administration labeled anti-Semitic.Washington has also told a university accrediting body that Harvard’s certification should be revoked after it allegedly failed to protect Jewish students in violation of federal civil rights law.

The White House on Monday barred The Wall Street Journal from traveling with US President Donald Trump during his upcoming visit to Scotland, after the newspaper reported that he wrote a bawdy birthday message to his former friend, alleged sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein. The move comes after Trump on Friday sued the WSJ and its media magnate owner Rupert Murdoch for at least $10 billion over the allegation in the article, which Trump denies.The Trump administration’s handling of the Epstein case has threatened to split the Republican’s far-right Make America Great Again (MAGA) base, with some of his supporters calling for a full release of the so-called “Epstein Files.”The punishment of the Wall Street Journal marks at least the second time the Trump administration has moved to exclude a major news outlet from the press pool over its reporting, having barred Associated Press journalists from multiple key events since February.”As the appeals court confirmed, The Wall Street Journal or any other news outlet are not guaranteed special access to cover President Trump in the Oval Office, aboard Air Force One, and in his private workspaces,” said Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt.”Due to The Wall Street Journal’s fake and defamatory conduct, they will not be one of the thirteen outlets on board (Air Force One).”Trump departs this weekend for Scotland, where he owns two golf resorts and will meet with UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer. Earlier this month, the US Department of Justice, under Trump-appointed Attorney General Pam Bondi, said there was no evidence suggesting disgraced financier Epstein had kept a “client list” or was blackmailing powerful figures before his death in 2019.In its story on Thursday, the WSJ reported that Trump had written a suggestive birthday letter to Epstein in 2003, illustrated with a naked woman and alluding to a shared “secret.”Epstein, a longtime friend of Trump and multiple other high-profile men, was found hanging dead in a New York prison cell in 2019 while awaiting trial on charges that he sexually exploited dozens of underage girls at his homes in New York and Florida.The case sparked conspiracy theories, especially among Trump’s far-right voters, about an alleged international cabal of wealthy pedophiles. Epstein’s death — declared a suicide — before he could face trial supercharged that narrative.Since returning to power in January, Trump has moved to increase control over the press covering the White House.In February, the Oval Office stripped the White House Correspondents’ Association (WHCA) of its nearly century-old authority to oversee which outlets have access to certain restricted presidential events, with Trump saying that he was now “calling the shots” on media access.In a statement, the WHCA president urged the White House to “restore” the Journal to the pool.”This attempt by the White House to punish a media outlet whose coverage it does not like is deeply troubling, and it defies the First Amendment,” said WHCA President Weijia Jiang.”Government retaliation against news outlets based on the content of their reporting should concern all who value free speech and an independent media.”

A Chinese-born US researcher pleaded guilty on Monday to stealing trade secrets, including technology used to detect nuclear missile launches, the Justice Department said.Chenguang Gong, 59, of San Jose, California, was accused of transferring more than 3,600 files from the research and development company where he worked to his personal storage devices.Gong pleaded guilty in a central California district court on Monday to one count of theft of trade secrets and faces a maximum penalty of 10 years in prison.Sentencing was set for September 29.Gong, who became a US citizen in 2011, worked briefly in 2023 as an engineer at a Los Angeles-area research and development company, the Justice Department said.The company was not identified.Among the files Gong downloaded were blueprints for infrared sensors designed for use in space-based systems to detect nuclear missile launches and track ballistic and hypersonic missiles, the Justice Department said.Also stolen were blueprints for sensors designed to enable US military aircraft to detect incoming heat-seeking missiles and take countermeasures.The Justice Department said Gong, while employed at several major technology companies in the United States between 2014 and 2022, had submitted applications to join so-called “Talent Programs” funded by the Chinese government.The programs are designed to identify individuals with “expert skills, abilities, and knowledge of advanced sciences and technologies” that can advance the Chinese economy and military capabilities, it said.

Top US officials promised President Ferdinand Marcos of the Philippines on Monday that Washington will defend its longtime ally and ramp up military resources aimed at deterring an assertive China.Marcos will meet Tuesday with President Donald Trump, who has rattled many European allies by demanding they pay more to be protected as part of NATO.Both Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who have both identified China as a top threat, stated their commitment to the seven-decade treaty with the Philippines as they held separate meetings with Marcos on Monday.”Together we remain committed to the Mutual Defense Treaty. And this pact extends to armed attacks on our armed forces, aircraft or public vessels, including our Coast Guard anywhere in the Pacific, including the South China Sea,” Hegseth told Marcos.Noting growing US defense spending, Hegseth said that the two countries “must forge a strong shield of real deterrence for peace, ensuring the long-term security and prosperity for our nations.””We do not seek confrontation, but we are and will be ready and resolute,” Hegseth said.Marcos welcomed US support, noting the “changing political geopolitical forces and the political developments around our part of the world.”China and the Philippines have engaged in a series of confrontations in the contested waters, which Beijing claims almost entirely, despite an international ruling that the assertion has no legal basis.Since his election in 2022, Marcos has boosted cooperation between the former US colony and the United States, both under Trump and his predecessor Joe Biden.

Former mechanic and taxi driver Adolfo Macias rose from a life of petty crime to the top of Ecuador’s drug gang hierarchy, using extreme violence to try and submit an entire country to his will.His reign of terror has seemingly come to an end, however, as the 45-year-old head of Ecuador’s “Los Choneros” gang pleaded “not guilty” to drug and weapons charges in a New York court Monday.In January 2024, Macias — alias “Fito” — made international headlines when he escaped from a prison in Ecuador’s port city of Guayaquil — a hub for drug exports.He had been serving a 34-year sentence for weapons possession, narcotics trafficking, organized crime and murder.Jail did little to check Macias’s ambitions: he earned his law degree behind bars and continued pulling the strings of the criminal underworld.Videos have emerged of him holding wild prison parties, some with fireworks. In one recording, a mariachi band and the drug lord’s daughter perform a narco-glorifying ballad in the prison yard while he laughingly strokes a fighting cock.Fito exercised “significant internal control over the prison,” the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) noted in a 2022 report following a meeting with the gang leader.His escape prompted the government to deploy the military, to the anger of Los Choneros, which unleashed a wave of violence in response.The gang detonated car bombs, held prison guards hostage and stormed a television station during a live broadcast in several days of running battles that prompted President Daniel Noboa to declare a “state of internal armed conflict.”In June this year, a massive military and police operation dragged a bedraggled Fito from a bunker concealed under floor tiles in a luxury home in the fishing port of Manta, where he was born.No shots were fired, and the government was quick to release photos of the overweight, disheveled Macias appearing rather less dangerous than his deadly reputation.On Sunday, he was put on a New York-bound plane in Guayaquil wearing shorts, a bulletproof vest and helmet, and on Monday he appeared in court. He was smiling.- ‘Ruthless’ -Macias became leader of Los Choneros in 2020, at a time when it was transitioning away from petty crime and establishing links with the big-league Colombian and Mexican drug cartels.”The defendant served for years as the principal leader of Los Choneros, a notoriously violent transnational criminal organization, and was a ruthless and infamous drug and firearms trafficker,” US attorney Joseph Nocella said in a statement ahead of Monday’s hearing. “The defendant and his co-conspirators flooded the United States and other countries with drugs and used extreme measures of violence in their quest for power and control,” he added.Macias has also been linked to the assassination of presidential candidate and anti-corruption crusader Fernando Villavicencio at a political rally in 2023.Villavicencio had accused Los Choneros of threatening his life.The gang is one of dozens blamed for bringing bloodshed to Ecuador, once one of the world’s safest nations, but now one of its deadliest.The country is wedged between the world’s top two cocaine exporters — Colombia and Peru — and more than 70 percent of all worldwide production now passes through Ecuador’s ports, according to government data.Under Macias’s leadership, Los Choneros “have leveraged their connections and sway… to become a key link in the transnational cocaine supply chain,” according to an analysis by the InSight Crime think-tank.It said the gang oversees the arrival of cocaine shipments from Colombia and uses a fleet of speedboats to send it on to Central America and Mexico, from where it is shipped to consumer markets in North America and Europe.”With or without Fito, Ecuador will continue to be a top cocaine transit nation,” said the NGO.Macias had also escaped prison in 2013, but managed to elude authorities for only three months at the time.On Sunday, he became the first Ecuadoran extradited by his country since the measure was written into law last year, after a referendum in which Noboa sought the approval of measures to boost his war on criminal gangs.

In interviews published one year after Joe Biden abandoned his re-election bid, his son Hunter lashed out at actor George Clooney for leading the public charge on calling for the elderly president to bow out.”Fuck him. And everybody around him,” Biden’s younger son said in a profanity-laced interview with independent journalist Andrew Callaghan, who has 3 million followers on YouTube.”Really, do you think in middle America, that voter in Green Bay, Wisconsin, gives a shit what George Clooney thinks about who she should vote for?” Biden also said in a podcast with Jaime Harrison, former chair of the Democratic National Committee. Clooney was one of the first high-profile Democrats to publicly call on Joe Biden to withdraw from the presidential race, just three months before the election.Biden, then 81 years old, was at the time facing growing doubts in his own camp about his health and mental acuity, after a disastrous debate with Donald Trump at the end of the June.”I Love Joe Biden. But We Need a New Nominee,” read the headline for Clooney’s essay, published in the New York Times on July 10, 2024. The Oscar-winning actor and producer recounted having seen the president at a Hollywood fundraiser the month prior, describing him as no longer the politician he was in 2010 or 2020.”I consider him a friend, and I believe in him…In the last four years, he’s won many of the battles he’s faced,” Clooney wrote. “But the one battle he cannot win is the fight against time.”Less than two weeks later, on July 21, the president announced he was quitting the race.In the interviews released on Monday, Hunter Biden angrily remembered the events leading to the end of his father’s decades-long political career.”Why do I have to fucking listen to you? What right do you have to step on a man who’s given 52 years of his fucking life to the service of this country and decide that you, George Clooney, are going to take out basically a full page ad in the fucking New York Times?” he said in the Callaghan interview.Plagued for years with legal troubles and drug addiction, Hunter Biden became a favorite target of Republicans, who viewed him as the president’s Achilles Heel.Hunter received an unconditional pardon from his father in December 2024, after Trump defeated the Democratic replacement candidate, vice president Kamala Harris.

The Trump administration released hundreds of thousands of pages of records on Monday about the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. despite concerns from the civil rights leader’s family.”The American people have waited nearly sixty years to see the full scope of the federal government’s investigation into Dr King’s assassination,” Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard said in a statement.”We are ensuring that no stone is left unturned in our mission to deliver complete transparency on this pivotal and tragic event in our nation’s history.”Gabbard said more than 230,000 pages of documents were being released and were being published “with minimal redactions for privacy reasons.”President Donald Trump signed an executive order after taking office declassifying files on the 1960s assassinations of president John F. Kennedy, his brother Robert F. Kennedy and King.The National Archives released records from John F. Kennedy’s November 1963 assassination in March and files related to the June 1968 murder of Robert F. Kennedy in April.King was assassinated in April 1968 in Memphis, Tennessee. James Earl Ray was convicted of the murder and died in prison in 1998, but King’s children have expressed doubts that he was the assassin.In a statement on Monday, King’s two surviving children, Martin Luther King III and Bernice King, said they “support transparency and historical accountability” but were concerned the records could be used for “attacks on our father’s legacy.”The civil rights leader was the target during his lifetime of an “invasive, predatory, and deeply disturbing disinformation and surveillance campaign” orchestrated by then FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, they said in a joint statement.The FBI campaign was intended to “discredit, dismantle and destroy Dr. King’s reputation and the broader American Civil Rights Movement,” they said. “These actions were not only invasions of privacy, but intentional assaults on the truth.””We ask those who engage with the release of these files to do so with empathy, restraint, and respect for our family’s continuing grief,” they said.The Warren Commission that investigated the shooting of John F. Kennedy determined it was carried out by a former Marine sharpshooter, Lee Harvey Oswald, acting alone.That formal conclusion has done little, however, to quell speculation that a more sinister plot was behind Kennedy’s murder in Dallas, Texas, and the slow release of the government files added fuel to various conspiracy theories.President Kennedy’s younger brother, Robert, a former attorney general, was assassinated while campaigning for the Democratic presidential nomination.Sirhan Sirhan, a Palestinian-born Jordanian, was convicted of his murder and is serving a life sentence in a prison in California.

Immigrants held at US detention centers have experienced abusive and degrading treatment, a Human Rights Watch report said Monday, in a sharp rebuke of President Donald Trump’s migrant crackdown.The 92-page report alleges medical neglect, overcrowding and “inhuman” cell conditions at a time when the Trump administration is ramping up immigration enforcement with the promise of deporting millions.”People in immigration detention are being treated as less than human,” Belkis Wille, associate crisis and conflict director at HRW, said in a statement.In one alleged instance, shackled detainees being prepared for a transfer had to kneel and eat food from styrofoam plates with their hands behind their backs.”We had to put the plates on chairs and then bend down and eat with our mouths, like dogs,” one man was quoted as saying.The report, which focuses on three facilities in Florida, cites migrants sleeping on concrete floors and using their shoes as pillows. One man said he was denied access to soap or water to wash his hands for 20 consecutive days. Another complained that he was not allowed his medications, including insulin and an asthma inhaler.Some women reported being held in a cell with exposed toilets that were visible to men in nearby rooms. HRW, a New York-based nonprofit, documented the experiences of 17 immigrants for the report. Advocacy groups Americans for Immigrant Justice and Sanctuary of the South also contributed to the research.Florida is notably home to a new detention center dubbed “Alligator Alcatraz,” which Trump visited in July, boasting about the harsh conditions and joking that the reptilian predators will serve as guards.The president has vowed to lead the largest migrant deportation program in US history, and lawmakers this month voted to inject around $45 billion into constructing immigration detention facilities.Trump’s hardline migration policy was a key element of his presidential campaign but has also sparked protests in the United States, which has the largest immigrant population in the world.The average daily migrant detention population in the United States has surged more than 40 percent since last June, according to the HRW report. It added that nearly 72 percent of individuals held as of mid-June had no criminal history.”The US government is detaining many people who pose no threat to public safety in conditions that violate basic human rights and dignity,” Wille said in a statement.

The 700 US Marines in Los Angeles are being withdrawn, ending a contentious deployment of the troops in the city, the Pentagon announced on Monday.President Donald Trump ordered thousands of National Guard and hundreds of Marines into Los Angeles last month in response to protests over federal immigration sweeps — a move opposed by city leaders and California’s Democratic Governor Gavin Newsom.Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth “has directed the redeployment of the 700 Marines whose presence sent a clear message: lawlessness will not be tolerated,” Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell said in a statement.”Their rapid response, unwavering discipline, and unmistakable presence were instrumental in restoring order and upholding the rule of law,” he added.Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass also announced the withdrawal of the Marines in a post on X, saying it was “another win” for the city and that the presence of the troops was “an unnecessary deployment.”The removal of the Marines comes after the Pentagon said last week that Hegseth had ordered the withdrawal of 2,000 National Guard personnel from Los Angeles, roughly halving the deployment of those troops in the city.As a so-called “sanctuary city” with hundreds of thousands of undocumented people, Los Angeles has been in the crosshairs of the Trump administration since the Republican returned to office in January.After immigration enforcement raids spurred unrest and protests last month, Trump — who has repeatedly exaggerated the scale of the unrest — dispatched the National Guard and Marines to quell the disruption.It was the first time since 1965 that a US president deployed the National Guard against the wishes of a state governor.

US actor Malcolm-Jamal Warner, who played the son in the smash-hit sitcom “The Cosby Show,” has drowned in Costa Rica, authorities in the country said Monday. He was 54.Warner played the loveable Theo Huxtable for all eight seasons of the show, helmed by disgraced comic actor Bill Cosby.”We received a report of an adult male who died of drowning asphyxiation at Coles Beach in Cahuita” on Sunday afternoon, said a statement from investigating police.”When the victim entered the sea he was apparently pulled out by a current. “The man was assisted by bystanders on the beach, but was pronounced dead by Red Cross lifeguards.”Local authorities identified him as the actor, and said his body had been transferred to a morgue for further analysis.Warner, who was nominated for an Emmy for his work on “The Cosby Show,” also appeared in sitcoms “Malcolm & Eddie” and “Reed Between the Lines.””The Cosby Show,” which ran from 1984 to 1992, was one of the biggest TV hits of its time, detailing the lives of a middle-class Black family in New York.The show was inspired by the stand-up routines of Bill Cosby, who played the family’s patriarch, a successful doctor.The show was a commercial and critical hit, and was seen as groundbreaking for its depiction of a loving, happy Black family.But its legacy has been overshadowed in recent years by dozens of complaints of sexual assault against Cosby, a man once known as “America’s Dad.”