AFP USA

President Donald Trump’s administration asked the US Supreme Court on Wednesday for an expedited ruling preserving the tariffs that have roiled global markets, saying a lower court ruling against it has already damaged trade negotiations.Solicitor General John Sauer urged the court in a filing to “expedite resolution of this case to the maximum extent feasible, given the enormous importance of quickly confirming the full legal standing of the President’s tariffs.”The petition comes after a 7-4 ruling by the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, which found that Trump exceeded his authority in tapping emergency economic powers to impose wide-ranging duties.The judges, however, allowed the levies to stay in place through mid-October, giving Trump time to take the fight to the Supreme Court.Since returning to the presidency, Trump has invoked the International Emergency Economic Powers Act to impose “reciprocal” tariffs on almost all US trading partners, with a 10-percent baseline level and higher rates for dozens of economies including the European Union and Japan.The US president tapped similar powers to slap separate tariffs on Mexico, Canada and China over what he said was the flow of deadly drugs into the United States.The appeals court ruling also cast doubt over deals Trump has struck with key trading partners like the EU, raising the question of what would happen to the billions of dollars collected by the United States since the tariffs were put in place — if the conservative-majority Supreme Court does not side with him.- ‘Walking away’ from talks -Several legal challenges have been filed against the tariffs. If they are ultimately ruled illegal, companies could potentially seek reimbursements.On Tuesday, Trump told reporters that “if you took away tariffs, we could end up being a third-world country.”In a declaration filed with the petition, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent warned that the appellate court’s decision “gravely undermines the President’s ability to conduct real-world diplomacy and his ability to protect the national security and economy of the United States.” Bessent said that “world leaders are questioning the President’s authority to impose tariffs, walking away from or delaying negotiations,” adding that the ruling had stripped the administration of “substantial negotiating leverage.”He also warned that delaying a final ruling until June 2026 could result in a scenario where “$750 billion-$1 trillion in tariffs have already been collected, and unwinding them could cause significant disruption.”The solicitor general requested oral arguments by early November.

A US judge ordered the Trump administration on Wednesday to overturn deep funding cuts to Harvard University that froze more than $2 billion over allegations of antisemitism and bias at the Ivy League institution.The administration, which vowed to appeal, insisted its move was legally justified over Harvard’s alleged failure to protect Jewish and Israeli students amid campus protests against Israel’s war in Gaza. Harvard denied those claims, saying Trump was instead focused on controlling the prestigious school’s hiring, admissions and curriculum.The cuts 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 — pauses experts warned put American lives at risk.The ruling could shape talks on a settlement reportedly underway between Harvard and the White House under which the university would pay a sum acknowledging Trump’s claims, with federal funding restored in return.Other universities have struck similar deals with the administration.”The Court vacates and sets aside the Freeze Orders and Termination Letters as violative of the First Amendment,” Boston federal judge Allison Burroughs said in her order.”All freezes and terminations of funding to Harvard made pursuant to the Freeze Orders and Termination Letters on or after April 14, 2025 are vacated and set aside.”The ruling also bars the administration from using the same reasoning to cut funding in the future.Albany Law School Professor Ray Brescia told AFP that despite the overwhelming legal victory Wednesday, Harvard may still follow the example of Columbia University and settle with the administration.Trump “could go back to the negotiating table and offer Harvard a better deal than they have been offering. I think that there has been some talk about a $500 million settlement,” he said.”People settle cases all the time for lots of reasons, even if they think they are 100 percent right.”Harvard president Alan Garber said that “even as we acknowledge the important principles affirmed in today’s ruling, we will continue to assess the implications of the opinion.”The ruling “validates our arguments in defense of the University’s academic freedom,” he added.- ‘Smokescreen’ for university ‘assault’ -In her ruling, Burroughs pointed to Harvard’s own admissions in legal filings that there had been an issue of antisemitism on campus — but said the administration’s funding cuts would have no bearing on the situation.”It is clear, even based solely on Harvard’s own admissions, that Harvard has been plagued by antisemitism in recent years and could (and should) have done a better job of dealing with the issue,” she wrote. “That said, there is, in reality, little connection between the research affected by the grant terminations and antisemitism.”The judge, appointed by Democratic former president Barack Obama, said evidence suggests Trump “used antisemitism as a smokescreen for a targeted, ideologically motivated assault on this country’s premier universities.”White House spokeswoman Liz Huston said “this activist Obama-appointed judge was always going to rule in Harvard’s favor.””Harvard does not have a constitutional right to taxpayer dollars… We will immediately move to appeal this egregious decision,” she said.Trump had 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.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 antisemitism.

A US federal jury on Wednesday ordered Google to pay about $425 million for gathering information from smartphone app use even when people opted for privacy settings, the company confirmed.”This case is about Google’s illegal interception of consumers’ private activity on consumer mobile applications (apps),” attorneys for the plaintiffs charged in a class action suit filed in July 2020.The jury verdict came at the end of a trial in San Francisco, and a day after a federal judge in Washington, DC, handed the internet giant a victory by rejecting the government’s demand that Google sell its Chrome web browser as part of a major antitrust case.”This decision misunderstands how our products work, and we will appeal it,” Google spokesperson Jose Castaneda said in a statement. “Our privacy tools give people control over their data, and when they turn off personalization, we honor that choice.”In the smartphone app privacy suit, plaintiffs argued that Google intercepted, tracked, collected and sold users’ mobile app activity data regardless of what privacy settings they chose.”Google’s privacy promises and assurances are blatant lies,” the plaintiffs’ attorneys said in the lawsuit.Google has long been under pressure to balance targeting money-making ads at the heart of its financial success with protecting the privacy of users.The Silicon Valley giant has been striving to replace online activity tracking “cookies” with a mechanism less invasive but equally effective.Cookies are small files saved to browsers by websites that can collect data about users’ online activity, making them essential to online advertising and the business models of many large platforms.France’s data protection authority on Wednesday issued record fines against Google and fast-fashion platform Shein for failing to respect the law on internet cookies.The two groups, each with tens of millions of users in France, received two of the heaviest penalties ever imposed by the CNIL watchdog: 150 million euros ($175 million) for Shein and 325 million euros for Google.Both firms failed to secure users’ free and informed consent before setting advertising cookies on their browsers, the authority found in a decision the companies can still appeal.Google said it would study the decision and that it has complied with earlier CNIL demands.Wednesday’s fine against Google is the third issued by the CNIL over the search giant’s use of cookies, after paying 100 million euros in 2020 and 150 million in 2021.

US President Donald Trump floated the idea Wednesday of deploying troops to the southern tourist hub of New Orleans, as he targets Democratic-run cities in a high-profile crackdown on crime.The Republican leader has touted his campaign against what he describes as high-crime cities flooded with undocumented immigrants, so far sending troops to Los Angeles and the capital Washington over the objections of local officials.Critics say Trump is overstepping his powers in ordering troops to carry out duties, including arrests and search and seizures, typically handled by local police and immigration agents.”So we’re making a determination now, do we go to Chicago or do we go to a place like New Orleans, where we have a great governor, Jeff Landry, who wants us to come in and straighten out a very nice section of this country that’s become … quite tough, quite bad,” the US president told reporters at the White House.Trump vowed he could get New Orleans under control “in about two weeks.”Landry, a Trump ally, responded enthusiastically on X, saying, “We will take President @realDonaldTrump’s help from New Orleans to Shreveport!”Though much of Louisiana is staunchly Republican, the state’s largest city of New Orleans is deeply Democratic, with pockets of severe poverty contributing to its crime rate.Like other cities targeted by Trump in his crackdown and in keeping with national trends, New Orleans has recorded sharp declines in murders and other violent crimes this year.”Militarizing the streets of New Orleans is not a solution,” Democratic US congressman Troy Carter, who represents New Orleans and surrounding areas, said on X.”If the President wants to provide federal resources to the City, I’ll work with him to provide funding to recruit and better train police officers, better fund our district attorney, fix the infrastructure at Orleans Parish Prison and fund the very programs he has cut that get at the root cause of crime: systemic poverty.”On Wednesday, Landry also appeared alongside Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and US Attorney General Pam Bondi at a press conference outside of the Angola prison to announce a new facility there to separately house up to 400 immigrants convicted of crimes.”Angola is the largest maximum security prison in the country, with 18,000 acres bordered by the Mississippi River, swamps filled with alligators and forests filled with bears. Nobody really wants to leave the place,” Landry told reporters. “The idea is to consolidate the worst of the worst, criminal illegal aliens, gang members, rapists, drug dealers, human smugglers that have no place in this country.”Trump had been focusing most of his recent military deployment threats on the Democratic stronghold of Chicago, which he described Tuesday as a “hellhole” ravaged by gun crime.JB Pritzker, the Democratic governor of the state of Illinois where Chicago is located, responded that Trump is “producing a political drama to cover up for his corruption.”Trump has also proposed putting boots on the ground in New York and Baltimore.

The United States announced Wednesday it had seized more than 700,000 pounds (300,000 kilograms) of meth precursor chemicals that officials said were en route from China to Mexico’s Sinaloa cartel. “This is the largest seizure of precursor chemicals used to manufacture methamphetamine in US history,” US Attorney for the District of Columbia Jeanine Pirro told reporters at the Port of Houston in the southern state of Texas. She spoke in a warehouse filled with plastic-wrapped blue barrels — 13,000 of them, according to Pirro — shipped from Shanghai on two separate vessels, and bound for laboratories of the Sinaloa Cartel in Mexico when they were seized “on the high seas” last week.”Foreign law enforcement partners” assisted US personnel to consolidate the shipments in Panama and bring them to Houston, said Todd Lyons, acting director of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).The Trump administration’s designation of the Sinaloa cartel as a foreign terrorist organization has given federal authorities the ability to track precursor chemicals before they reach US soil, Lyons said.”Everyday, tons of chemicals that are used to create synthetic drugs like methamphetamine and fentanyl are shipped from China to Mexico in China’s undeclared war against America and their citizens,” Pirro said.The chemicals would have been used to make 420,000 pounds of methamphetamine with a street value in Houston of $569 million, Pirro said.The seizure was announced a day after Trump said US forces had attacked a drug-smuggling boat off Venezuela, killing 11 “narcoterrorists” in international waters. The attack marked a major escalation of US action after Trump signed an executive order authorizing military action against drug cartels. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, in Mexico for a meeting with President Claudio Sheinbaum on Wednesday, vowed the United States would ramp up strikes on cartels, but assured Mexico of respect for its sovereignty.Also this week, the US Treasury Department sanctioned a Chinese chemical company, Guangzhou Tengyue, that it said was involved in the manufacture and sale of synthetic opioids to Americans. Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control also sanctioned two individuals connected to the company, Huang Xiaojun and Huang Zhanpeng, alleging they were directly involved in shipping illicit drugs to the United States. The sanctions freeze any property or assets they have in the United States.Drug overdoses are the leading cause of death for Americans aged 18 to 45, according to US officials, who say companies in China are the main source of chemicals use to make illicit drugs that enter the United States. 

Republican members of the US House of Representatives voted on Wednesday to create a new subcommittee to investigate the January 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol.The move comes nearly three years after a Democratic-led House panel blamed then-president Donald Trump for the storming of Congress by his supporters.Trump was impeached by the Democratic-controlled House for inciting the attack on the Capitol but was acquitted by the Republican-majority Senate.After taking office for a second time in January, Trump pardoned more than 1,500 people charged or convicted of assaulting the Capitol to prevent the certification by Congress of Democrat Joe Biden’s presidential victory.Trump continues to falsely claim that he won the November 2020 election and has repeatedly condemned the findings of the previous January 6 committee.The official objective of the new subcommittee is to “investigate the remaining questions surrounding January 6, 2021.”The subcommittee will have eight members including three Democrats and is to release its final report by December 2026.

A US judge ordered Wednesday that deep funding cuts by the Trump administration to Harvard University be overturned, after they were imposed over claims of anti-Semitism and bias at the Ivy League institution.Harvard sued in April to restore more than $2 billion in frozen funds. The administration insisted its move was legally justified over Harvard’s alleged failure to protect Jewish and Israeli students, particularly amid campus protests against Israel’s war in Gaza.The cuts 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 — pauses experts warned risked American lives.”The Court vacates and sets aside the Freeze Orders and Termination Letters as violative of the First Amendment,” Boston federal judge Allison Burroughs said in her order.”All freezes and terminations of funding to Harvard made pursuant to the Freeze Orders and Termination Letters on or after April 14, 2025 are vacated and set aside.”Burroughs pointed to Harvard’s own admissions in legal filings that there had been an issue of anti-Semitism on campus — but said that the administration’s funding cuts would have no bearing on the situation.- ‘Smokescreen’ for university ‘assault’ -“It is clear, even based solely on Harvard’s own admissions, that Harvard has been plagued by anti-Semitism in recent years and could (and should) have done a better job of dealing with the issue,” she wrote. “That said, there is, in reality, little connection between the research affected by the grant terminations and anti-Semitism.”The judge, appointed by Democratic former president Barack Obama, said the evidence she had seen suggested Trump “used anti-Semitism as a smokescreen for a targeted, ideologically-motivated assault on this country’s premier universities.”Both Harvard and the American Association of University Professors brought cases against the Trump administration’s measures which were combined.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.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 top health official in Florida vowed Wednesday to end all vaccine mandates in the state, including school requirements, likening the measure to prevent childhood diseases to “slavery.”The announcement thrust the conservative-leaning state into the heart of an intensifying national fight, as vaccine-skeptic federal Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. pushes to steer the country away from the life-saving practice.More than 1,000 current and former workers from the federal health department signed a scathing letter to Congress Wednesday accusing Kennedy of putting the health of Americans at risk and demanding that he resign.On the West Coast, the Democratic-led states of California, Washington and Oregon said they were creating a new body to issue their own immunization guidelines, arguing it was needed to counter “politicization” at the federal level — underscoring just how divisive the issue has become.”The Florida Department of Health, in partnership with the governor, is going to be working to end all vaccine mandates in Florida — all of them, every last one of them,” Florida Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo told a cheering audience at the Grace Christian School in Valrico.”Every last one of them is wrong and drips with disdain and slavery,” added Nigerian-born Ladapo, a Harvard-trained physician who has served as the state’s top health official since 2021. He was previously known for his opposition to mRNA Covid vaccines, which he has falsely claimed contaminate a person’s genome.”Who am I as a man standing here now to tell you what you should put in your body? Who am I to tell you what your child should put in (their) body? I don’t have that right. Your body is a gift from God.”Speaking at the same event, Governor Ron DeSantis said Republicans would soon introduce a “big medical package” to put the changes into law.”It is a dangerous time to be a child in the United States of America,” renowned pediatrician and vaccine expert Paul Offit told AFP. “Goodness, it’s going to be really hard to rebuild these things back up again.”- Disease comeback -If fully enacted, Florida would become the first US state to abandon school vaccine requirements, long credited with wiping out once-common childhood scourges such as measles, mumps, rubella, polio and hepatitis B.But resistance to vaccines has swelled in recent years, stoked by false claims linking them to autism — a debunked notion Kennedy himself promoted for years before taking office as health secretary.The issue has become deeply polarized along partisan lines, with conservatives more likely to seek exemptions on religious grounds.As a result, the United States in 2025 saw its worst measles outbreak in more than three decades, with 1,431 cases centered on a Mennonite community in Texas.Kennedy has used his office to curb access to Covid shots and weave anti-vaccine conspiracy theories into federal policy — and last week ousted Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) director Sue Monarez over immunization guidelines, plunging the agency into turmoil.That move helped spur California, Washington and Oregon, together home to more than 50 million people, to announce the formation of a “West Coast Health Alliance” that will work with scientists and medical associations to craft its own recommendations.”President (Donald) Trump’s mass firing of CDC doctors and scientists — and his blatant politicization of the agency — is a direct assault on the health and safety of the American people,” California Governor Gavin Newsom said in a joint statement with officials from the other two states.In their letter, the current and former federal health department workers wrote they had sworn an oath to uphold the Constitution and urged Trump and Congress to appoint a new health secretary if Kennedy does not resign.

Victims of notorious sex offender Jeffrey Epstein said Wednesday they were compiling a confidential list of his associates who abused underage girls.President Donald Trump, a one-time close friend of the deceased financier, sought meanwhile to dampen the enduring political furor over the Epstein case.”This is a Democrat hoax that never ends,” Trump told reporters at the White House.”They’re trying to get people to talk about something that’s totally irrelevant to the success that we’ve had as a nation since I’ve been president,” he said.Trump’s comments came as eight of Epstein’s victims held an emotional news conference at the US Capitol, where some of them spoke publicly for the first time about the sexual abuse they suffered.Some of the women were as young as 14 when introduced to Epstein.”We were just kids,” said Marina Lacerda, who said she was paid $300 to give “an older guy” a massage at his New York mansion.”It went from a dream job to the worst nightmare,” said Lacerda, who was “Minor Victim 1″ in Epstein’s federal indictment.The women urged the Justice Department to release all of the Epstein investigation files and for Congress to pass a bill compelling their publication.”There is no hoax. The abuse was real,” said Haley Robson, who was recruited to give a massage to Epstein when she was 16 years old.”If I disobeyed him I knew something bad would happen,” Robson said.Epstein died in a New York jail cell in 2019 while awaiting trial for sex trafficking of underage girls.Many of Trump’s supporters have been obsessed with the Epstein case for years and have held as an article of faith that “deep state” elites were protecting Epstein associates in the Democratic Party and Hollywood.They were further incensed in July when the FBI and Justice Department said that Epstein had committed suicide, did not blackmail any prominent figures, and did not keep a “client list.”Lisa Phillips, another Epstein victim, said she and other women were putting together a list of their own of Epstein associates.”We know the names. Many of us were abused by them,” Phillips said. “We will confidentially compile the names we all know were regularly in the Epstein world.”We are not asking for pity. We are demanding accountability.”- ‘Your time is up’ -Robson said she and other Epstein victims “know who was involved” and condemned law enforcement for failing to act.”We know the players and we are sitting here for 20 years waiting for you to get up and do something,” she said. “Well guess what? Your time is up, and now we’re doing it.”Republican lawmaker Marjorie Taylor Greene attended the press conference and said if given a list “I will walk in the Capitol on the House floor and I’ll say every damn name that abused these women.””I’d be proud to do it,” she said.Attorney Brad Edwards, who has represented scores of Epstein’s victims, said he did not believe the well-connected hedge fund manager kept a list of “clients” he provided with girls.”I don’t think he wrote the names of those people down,” Edwards said. “There’s not a list of, ‘Hey, here’s all of the people that I sent females to.’ That’s just not how that organization worked.”Trump was once a friend of Epstein’s and, according to The Wall Street Journal, the president’s name was among hundreds found during a Justice Department review of the Epstein files, though there has been no evidence of wrongdoing.The news conference was held a day after a House of Representatives committee released 33,000 documents from the investigation into Epstein and his accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell, who is serving a 20-year prison sentence for sex trafficking.Thousands of documents related to the Epstein probe have been circulated previously and Robert Garcia, the ranking Democrat on the House committee, said most of the records released on Tuesday had already been made public.

US President Donald Trump’s deadly strike on an alleged drug-smuggling boat from Venezuela marks a significant escalation from law enforcement to military action against cartels that his administration has branded as terror groups.Video footage posted by Trump on social media Tuesday showed a multi-engine speedboat with several people aboard bouncing across the waves — but rather than being stopped and boarded, the vessel is suddenly engulfed in an inferno.The US president said 11 members of the Tren de Aragua gang were killed in the strike, which should “serve as notice to anybody even thinking about bringing drugs into the United States of America.”Ryan Berg, director of the Americas Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said the strike “demonstrates a change in the rules of engagement.””There is no longer US Coast Guard boarding of vessels; there is an approach far more similar to how the United States deals with pirates in the Gulf region, or terrorists in the Sahel,” he said.The United States — which has a long history of carrying out strikes against suspected militants without due process — designated Venezuela’s Tren de Aragua, Mexico’s Sinaloa Cartel and several other drug trafficking organizations as terror groups earlier this year.The strike on the boat comes at a time of soaring tensions between the United States and Venezuela over the deployment of American warships in the region that the Washington says are to combat trafficking but which Caracas views as a threat.- ‘Highly dissuasive effect’ -The United States alleges that leftist Venezuelan leader Nicolas Maduro heads a cocaine trafficking cartel and recently doubled its bounty to $50 million in exchange for his capture to face drug charges.Maduro has meanwhile accused Trump of attempting to effect regime change and launched a drive to sign up thousands of militia members.Asked about the potential for escalation with Venezuela as a result of the strike, Berg said that “Maduro is unlikely to say much, given that doing so would essentially confirm the administration’s assertion that he is a narcotrafficker and the head of a cartel.”Gustavo Flores-Macias, dean of the University of Maryland School of Public Policy, noted that the United States has a history of military interventions in Latin America, but said this one was the first under Trump’s policy of designating cartels as terror groups.”With the turn toward military strikes instead of traditional law enforcement in addressing drug trafficking in the region, the White House is looking to send a strong message,” Flores-Macias said.That message is aimed “not only to deter drug traffickers but also as a show of force to put the government of Nicolas Maduro on notice that the US is considering military action in Venezuela,” he said.It remains to be seen how effective Trump’s policy will be at curbing trafficking in the Caribbean, but Berg said the US Navy’s multi-ship deployment “could disrupt Southern Caribbean trafficking routes for some time, with its generational scale and size.””In the short term, (the strike) is likely to have a highly dissuasive effect,” he said. “Few will risk being in a ‘go fast’ boat anytime soon.”