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Donald Trump’s order to withhold $5 billion earmarked to grow the electric vehicle charging network in the United States is being challenged in court by more than a dozen states, California officials said Wednesday.The lawsuit is the latest attempt by a coalition of largely liberal jurisdictions looking to push back on what they see as the American president’s overreach, especially on environmental issues.”The President continues his unconstitutional attempts to withhold funding that Congress appropriated to programs he dislikes,” said California Attorney General Rob Bonta.”This time he’s illegally stripping away billions of dollars for electric vehicle charging infrastructure, all to line the pockets of his Big Oil friends.”A mammoth congressional bill passed in 2022 aimed at bolstering America’s crumbling infrastructure included $5 billion to help build out charging points for electric vehicles.But as soon as he arrived in the Oval Office in January, Trump ordered that the money be stopped, part of a slew of executive orders the Republican has issued, which also included demands that the United States produce more fossil fuels.The cash had been allocated by Congress to the states, and in some cases was expected to be paired with state and private funds as jurisdictions look to grow charging networks and reduce the range anxiety that drivers of gas cars sometimes say puts them off switching to electric vehicles.The lawsuit announced Wednesday contends that as president, Trump does not have the power to divert monies the legislature has allocated.”The complaint asks the court to declare that the… directive is unlawful and to permanently stop the administration from withholding the funds,” a statement said.Trump, a climate change skeptic, has long been hostile to electric vehicles and has repeatedly lashed out at Environmental Protection Agency rules requiring automakers to cut greenhouse gas emissions in their cars.California, which is home to the lion’s share of EVs and hybrid vehicles in the United States, plans to phase out the sale of new gas-powered vehicles by 2035.The lawsuit comes as Republicans in Congress are trying to remove the rules that allow the state — the biggest and richest in the nation — to make its own vehicle emission rules.”The facts don’t lie: The demand for clean transportation continues to rise, and California will be at the forefront of this transition to a more sustainable, low-emissions future,” said Bonta.”California will not back down, not from Big Oil, and not from federal overreach.”Bonta is joined in the lawsuit by attorneys general from, Colorado, Arizona, Delaware, Hawaii, Illinois, Maryland, Minnesota, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, Rhode Island, Washington, Wisconsin, Vermont, and the District of Columbia.

Joseph Nye, a versatile and influential political scientist and US policymaker who coined the term “soft power,” a concept of nations gaining dominance through attractiveness now scoffed at by President Donald Trump, has died, Harvard University announced Wednesday. He was 88.Nye, who died Tuesday, first joined Harvard’s faculty in 1964 and served as dean of the Harvard Kennedy School as well as in positions under presidents Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton.The author of 14 books and more than 200 journal articles, the neo-liberal thinker studied topics as varied as arms control and pan-Africanism but became best known for developing the term “soft power” in the late 1980s.As opposed to hard power, such as weapons and economic sanctions, soft power includes values and culture that can win over others.”Soft power — getting others to want the outcomes that you want — co-opts people rather than coerces them,” Nye wrote in a 2004 book on the topic.Among other examples, he pointed to growing US influence in Latin America when Franklin Roosevelt instituted a “good neighbor policy” and, conversely, how the Soviet Union lost Eastern Europe through brutality even as Moscow’s hard power grew.Trump, since returning to office in January, has sharply reduced US soft power, including through dismantling foreign assistance and cracking down on international students, and has sought to ramp up military spending.In responses to AFP in February about how he saw Trump’s second term, Nye wrote: “Trump does not really understand power. He only thinks in terms of coercion and payment.” “He mistakes short-term results for long-term effects. Hard coercive power (such as a threat of tariffs) may work in the short term while creating incentives for others to reduce their reliance on the US in the longer term,” he wrote to AFP by email.”Our success over the past eight decades has also been based on attractiveness.”But he said that US soft power had seen cycles in the past, pointing to the unpopularity of the United States during the Vietnam War.”We will probably recover somewhat after Trump, but he has damaged trust in the US,” he wrote.- Nuclear thinker -Nye acknowledged the limitations of soft power alone. In his book, he wrote: “Excellent wines and cheese do not guarantee attraction to France, nor does the popularity of Pokemon games assure that Japan will get the policy outcomes it wishes.”Nye was considered a possible national security advisor if John Kerry won the White House in 2004. He was also particularly active on Japan, where former president Barack Obama considered appointing him ambassador.Always attentive to soft power, Nye took to the opinion pages of The New York Times in 2010 to criticize some in the Obama administration for seeking to play “hardball” with a new, inexperienced Japanese government over base relocation, calling for a “more patient and strategic approach” to the longtime US ally.Much of Nye’s time in government was focused on nuclear policy. He argued that the risk of nuclear weapons could have deterred major powers from entering World War I — but that the spread of nuclear weapons since the end of the Cold War posed new dangers.”He was proudest of having contributed both intellectually… and practically (in the Carter and Clinton administrations) to preventing nuclear war,” fellow Harvard scholar Graham Allison said in a statement.

US envoy Steve Witkoff briefed members of the UN Security Council on Wednesday about various topics, including Gaza, participants in the closed-door talks said.The informal meeting in New York came a day after Witkoff was formally sworn in as President Donald Trump’s special envoy for the Middle East.At the swearing-in ceremony, Trump teased a “very, very big announcement” to come before his multi-nation visit to the Middle East next week, without providing details.Witkoff, a billionaire real estate developer and close Trump ally, has been acting as lead US negotiator on several major disputes, including the Israel-Hamas war, the Russia-Ukraine conflict and  Iran’s nuclear program.After the meeting Wednesday, ambassadors from the UN Security Council’s 14 other members declined to give details of Witkoff’s remarks.”It was confidential,” Pakistani Ambassador Asim Iftikhar Ahmad said.Panamanian Ambassador Eloy Alfaro de Alba called it “an informal meeting, it was very interesting, about various subjects, not only Gaza.”Since Trump’s return to office in January there has not been a permanent US ambassador to the UN, making it difficult for council members to stay abreast of American positions on various issues, some diplomats have said.Witkoff also met separately on Wednesday with Israel’s UN ambassador, Danny Danon.Danon said afterward they had an “important discussion about the regional issues.””We will continue to cooperate with our strongest ally, the United States,” he added.

The US Federal Reserve on Wednesday announced another pause in rate cuts and warned of higher risks to its inflation and unemployment goals in a likely reference to President Donald Trump’s tariff rollout.Policymakers voted unanimously to hold the US central bank’s key lending rate at between 4.25 percent and 4.50 percent, the Fed said in a statement.Speaking to reporters in Washington after the decision was published, Fed Chair Jerome Powell said there was “a great deal of uncertainty” about where the Trump administration’s tariff policies will end up. The US president introduced steep levies last month on China and lower “baseline” levies of 10 percent on goods from most other countries, sparking weeks of turbulence in the financial markets. The White House also slapped higher tariffs on dozens of other trading partners and then abruptly paused them until July to give the United States time to renegotiate existing trade arrangements.Many analysts have warned that the administration’s actions will likely push up inflation and unemployment while slowing growth — at least in the short run.That could complicate the path towards rate cuts for the Fed, which has a dual mandate to act independently of political pressure to keep inflation at two percent over the longer term, and the unemployment rate as low as possible. – ‘A really difficult choice’ -The Fed said Wednesday that “swings in net exports” did not appear to have affected the solid economic activity — a nod to the pre-tariff surge in imports in the first quarter ahead of the introduction of Trump’s “liberation day” tariffs.Wall Street stocks closed higher following the Fed’s decision.The “hard” economic data published in recent weeks points towards an economic slowdown, while the unemployment rate has hovered close to historic lows, and the inflation rate has trended towards the Fed’s two percent target.However, the “softer” economic survey data have pointed to a sharp drop-off in consumer confidence and growing expectations of higher inflation over the longer term — in contrast to the market’s inflation expectations, which remain relatively well-anchored.”All the hard data are backward looking,” former Fed economist Rodney Ramcharan told AFP on Wednesday. “And all the soft data that they’re getting…those data look pretty bad.””The Fed doesn’t have a lot of good options in front of them,” added Ramcharan, now a professor of finance at the University of Southern California’s Marshall School of Business. “It’s a really difficult choice.”- Rate cuts delayed – Powell was also asked about the recent public criticism leveled at him and the Fed by senior government officials — including the president, who has called for him to cut rates to boost economic growth.An upbeat Powell said Trump’s criticism didn’t affect the Fed’s job of tackling inflation and unemployment “at all.””We are always going to consider only the economic data, the outlook, the balance of risks, and that’s it,” he added. Following the April tariff rollout, many analysts pared back or delayed their expectation of rate cuts for this year, predicting that tariffs will push up prices and slow growth — at least in the short run.  “The best course of action for the FOMC may simply be to wait for more clarity about trade policy and its implications for the U.S. economy,” Wells Fargo chief economist Jay Bryson wrote in an investor note after the decision was published by the Fed’s rate-setting Federal Open Market Committee.”While the Fed is, and should be, focused on the fragility of inflation expectations, we expect that by late summer labor market weakness will prompt a policy response,” JPMorgan chief economist Michael Feroli wrote in a note to clients, penciling in a first rate cut for September. 

A Polish model testified Wednesday against fallen film mogul Harvey Weinstein in his retrial on sex assault charges, the first time the woman claiming the former Miramax boss forced oral sex on her has been heard in criminal court.Kaja Sokola, 39, alleges that Weinstein sexually assaulted her in spring 2006 in a Manhattan hotel, claims the former cinema scion denies.While the other accusers in the New York case — onetime production assistant Miriam Haley and then-aspiring actress Jessica Mann — testified at Weinstein’s original trial, Sokola is being heard for the first time.The accounts of the other two women helped galvanize the #MeToo movement nearly a decade ago, but the case is being re-prosecuted as Weinstein faces a new trial in New York.Weinstein’s 2020 convictions on charges relating to Haley and Mann were overturned last year by the New York Court of Appeals, which ruled that the way witnesses were handled in the original trial was unlawful.The former Miramax studio boss is charged in the New York retrial with the 2006 sexual assault of Haley and the 2013 rape of Mann, as well as the assault on Sokola.He was in court Wednesday, pushed to the defense bench in a wheelchair to which he was handcuffed until he was unshackled by one of the two court officers guarding him.He leaned back in his chair as Sokola entered the courtroom and swore an oath, listening intently to her recall her experience which was not shared with the jury at his initial trial in 2020.Prosecutor Shannon Lucey walked Sokola through her education and first forays into modeling, showing the court several shots of her as a teen adorning magazine spreads, before touching on how she came to New York in 2002 to work. Her testimony will continue Thursday.Weinstein — the producer of box office hits such as “Pulp Fiction” and “Shakespeare in Love” — has never acknowledged any wrongdoing.He is serving a 16-year prison sentence after being convicted in California of raping and assaulting a European actress more than a decade ago.

Three former Memphis police officers were found not guilty of all charges Wednesday in the beating death of a Black motorist that sparked calls for police reform, local media reported.Five Black police officers were charged in connection with the January 2023 death of Tyre Nichols, 29, who was kicked, punched, tased and pepper sprayed.The five officers, members of a since-disbanded special anti-crime squad called the Scorpion Unit, were captured on video beating Nichols during a traffic stop near his home in the Tennessee city of Memphis.He died at a hospital three days later.Two of the officers pleaded guilty to state and federal charges while the three others — Tadarrius Bean, Demetrius Haley and Justin Smith — chose to go to trial.A jury acquitted Bean, Haley and Smith on Wednesday of all of the state charges they faced, including the most serious charge of second-degree murder, the Commercial Appeal reported.The Memphis newspaper said the mostly white jury deliberated for eight and a half hours before delivering the not guilty verdict.Ben Crump and Antonio Romanucci, prominent civil rights attorneys who have represented the Nichols family, condemned the verdict as a “devastating miscarriage of justice.””Tyre’s life was stolen, and his family was denied the justice they so deeply deserve,” they said in a statement. “We are outraged, and we know we are not alone.”Bean, Haley and Smith have already been convicted of federal charges including witness tampering and could face up to 20 years in prison. Haley was also convicted of using excessive force.Sentencing was delayed until the conclusion of the state trial.The two other former Memphis police officers, Emmitt Martin and Desmond Mills, reached plea agreements in the state and federal cases in which they pleaded guilty to using excessive force and witness tampering.Then-vice president Kamala Harris attended Nichols’s funeral and his relatives were invited to president Joe Biden’s State of the Union address in Washington.

US President Donald Trump downplayed the role of European countries in World War II on Wednesday as he formally designated May 8 as a day to celebrate victory over Nazi Germany.”The victory was mostly accomplished because of us, like it or not,” Trump said at the White House shortly after issuing a proclamation on the new “Victory Day.””It was American tanks and ships and trucks and airplanes and service members that vanquished the enemy 80 years ago this week. Without America, the Liberation would never have happened.”Trump had announced his intention to rename May 8 earlier this week, noting that unlike much of Europe his country had no day to mark the defeat of Nazi Germany in 1945.Trump said he also planned to establish a separate “Victory Day” for World War I — and claimed US credit for ending that conflagration too.”Without us those wars would not have been won,” he said.Trump’s comments came despite the fact that many European allies suffered far more casualties and devastation than the United States in the two global conflicts.The United States suffered significant losses after joining World War II in 1941, with more than 400,000 service members killed, and played a crucial role in the D-Day landings and defeat of Adolf Hitler.The Soviet Union, of which Russia was the largest republic, suffered the most with more than 20 million killed.Britain lost 384,000 soldiers and 70,000 civilians in World War II. 

The US Federal Reserve on Wednesday announced another pause in rate cuts and warned of higher risks to its inflation and unemployment goals in a likely reference to President Donald Trump’s tariff rollout.Policymakers voted unanimously to hold the US central bank’s key lending rate at between 4.25 percent and 4.50 percent, the Fed said in a statement.Speaking to reporters in Washington after the decision was published, Fed Chair Jerome Powell said there was “a great deal of uncertainty about, for example, where tariff policies are going to settle out.”The bank has a dual mandate to act independently to tackle inflation and unemployment, primarily by hiking, holding, or easing its benchmark lending rate. Many analysts have warned that the administration’s actions will likely push up inflation and unemployment, while slowing growth — at least in the short run.The Fed said that “swings in net exports” did not appear to have affected the solid economic activity — a nod to the pre-tariff surge in imports in the first quarter ahead of the introduction of Trump’s “liberation day” tariffs.The US president introduced steep levies last month on China, and lower “baseline” levies of 10 percent on goods from most other countries, sparking weeks of turbulence in the financial markets. The White House also slapped higher tariffs on dozens of other trading partners, and then abruptly paused them until July to give the United States time to renegotiate existing trade arrangements.Data published in recent weeks point to an economic contraction in the first quarter of the year, while the unemployment rate has hovered close to historic lows, and the inflation rate has trended towards the Fed’s long-term target of two percent.- Rate cuts delayed – Powell also faced questions on the recent public criticism leveled at him and the Fed by senior government officials — including the president, who has called for him to cut rates to boost economic growth.An upbeat Powell said the criticism from Trump “doesn’t affect doing our job at all.””We are always going to consider only the economic data, the outlook, the balance of risks, and that’s it,” he added. Following the April tariff rollout, many analysts pared back or delayed their expectation of rate cuts for this year, predicting that tariffs will push up prices and slow growth — at least in the short run. “It seems highly unlikely that the Fed will receive a clear enough signal to act by the June meeting, since the 90-day pause on ‘reciprocal’ tariffs lasts through 8 July,” economists at UniCredit wrote in a recent note to clients, adding they did not expect a rate cut before September. “The best course of action for the FOMC may simply be to wait for more clarity about trade policy and its implications for the U.S. economy,” Wells Fargo chief economist Jay Bryson wrote in an investor note after the decision was published by the Fed’s rate-setting Federal Open Market Committee.

As President Donald Trump’s administration purges public records since storming back to power, experts and volunteers are preserving thousands of web pages and government sites devoted to climate change, health or LGBTQ rights and other issues.Resources on AIDS prevention and care, weather records, references to ethnic or gender minorities: numerous databases were destroyed or modified after Trump signed an executive order in January declaring diversity, equality and inclusion programs and policies within the federal governmentto be illegal.More than 3,000 pages from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention site were taken down and more than 1,000 from the Justice Department’s website, Paul Schroeder, president of the Council of Professional Associations on Federal Statistics, told AFP.- 404 error -Some websites have disappeared altogether, such as that of the US development agency USAID, which has been effectively shuttered as Trump slashes US aid to poor countries. And the National Children’s Health Survey page displays a “404 error” message.Federal agencies must now avoid hundreds of words such as “woman,” “disability,” “racism”, “climate crisis” and “pollution” in their communications, the New York Times reported.”The focus has been on removing language related to environmental (or) climate justice on websites, as well as removing data and tools related to environmental (or) climate justice,” Eric Nost, a geographer at Canada’s University of Guelph and member of the Environmental Data and Governance Initiative (EDGI) told AFP. “This Trump administration moved more quickly and with a greater scope than the previous Trump administration,” he said.EDGI, a consortium of academics and volunteers, began safeguarding public climate and environmental data after Trump’s first election in 2016.Among the tools used are the WayBack Machine from the non-profit Internet Archive, or Perma.cc, developed by the Library Innovation Lab at Harvard Law School.These systems, which long predate Trump’s election, help “courts and law journals preserve the web pages they cite to,” said Jack Cushman, director of the Library Innovation Lab.Long used by journalists, researchers and NGOs, web archiving enables a page to be preserved, even if it were to disappear from the internet or be modified later.This data is then stored on servers in a large digital library, allowing anyone to consult it freely.- Volunteer work -Archiving initiatives have multiplied, expanded and coordinated since Trump’s return to the White House.The Data Rescue Project (DRP) brought together several organizations to save as much data as possible.”We were concerned about data being deleted. We wanted to try to see what we could do to rescue them,” Lynda Kellam, a university librarian and DRP organizer, told AFP.She first launched the project as an online Google doc in February — a simple word-processing tool listing downloaded PDF files, original dataset titles and archived links.It is now maintained by volunteers “who are working after work” to keep it running, said Kellam.”We are all volunteers, even myself. We have other jobs so that has been challenging,” Kellam added.The data collection work, largely carried out by associations and university libraries, is threatened by a lack of resources.”Funding is the key issue… as the library and archives community rushes to take on a larger preservation challenges than ever before,” Cushman said.”We need to fund coordinators for the ongoing effort, new tools, and new homes for the data.”Harvard is also battling the ire of the Trump administration, which has cut federal grants to the prestigious university and threatened its tax-exempt status after it refused to comply with the president’s demands to accept government oversight.”Data is the modern lighthouse, helping us plan our lives: it shows where we are so we can plan where we’re going,” Cushman said.”Businesses, individuals, and governments will suffer greatly from any failure to collect and share reliable data on weather and climate, health, justice, housing, employment, and so on.”

Shares in Google parent Alphabet plunged more than eight percent on Wednesday after Apple executive Eddy Cue testified in federal court that Google’s search traffic on Apple devices declined last month for the first time in over two decades.Cue, Apple’s senior vice president of services, told the Washington antitrust trial that Google was losing ground to AI alternatives like ChatGPT and Perplexity.His revelation that this decline “has never happened in 22 years” sent shockwaves through Wall Street, wiping more than $170 billion from Google’s market capitalization in a single trading session.The testimony came during a pivotal trial where District Judge Amit Mehta will determine remedies for Google’s previously ruled illegal search monopoly. The case, ongoing since 2020, has exposed Google’s practice of paying Apple tens of billions dollars annually to remain the default search engine on Safari browsers and Apple smartphones.Investors were further unsettled when Cue suggested Apple might soon offer AI alternatives as default search options on its devices, heightening concerns that Google’s advertising revenue could face serious threats from AI competitors.With the three-week trial set to conclude Friday, government attorneys are pushing Judge Mehta to order Google to divest its Chrome browser.They argue that AI technologies will only strengthen Google’s dominance by leveraging its vast data resources across products like Maps, YouTube, and Chrome to stifle competition.However, Cue’s testimony bolstered Google’s defense that AI is already disrupting its search dominance, with chatbots now posing legitimate threats to its business model.- ‘Losing sleep’ -When Judge Mehta issues his ruling in August, he could end Google’s default search agreements with Apple and others — a prospect that Cue told the court he was “losing sleep” over, with potential revenue losses impacting Apple’s product development and operating system investment.Alternatively, Mehta might order Google to share its search data with competitors, which CEO Sundar Pichai warned would effectively amount to a “de facto divestiture of search.”As a counter offer, Google proposes a more limited remedy that would allow it to continue paying for default placement of its search engine, but with an annual renegotiations and greater freedom for smartphone manufacturers to choose which Google apps to install on their devices.The Google case represents just one of five major tech antitrust actions currently pursued by the US government, with Meta facing similar scrutiny in the same courthouse.Google recently lost a separate case regarding its ad technology business and may face additional divestitures, while Apple and Amazon are also expected to confront antitrust challenges in US courts.