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A photo of seashells posted on Instagram by the former FBI director James Comey is now being investigated by the US Secret Service, after the US homeland security secretary Kristi Noem said it constituted a “threat” against Donald Trump.On Thursday, Comey posted a photo of seashells forming the message “8647”, with a caption that read: “Cool shell formation on my beach walk.”Trump’s supporters have interpreted the message as an endorsement of violence against Trump – the 47th president. There is more debate around the use of 86, a slang term often used in restaurants to mean getting rid of or throwing something out, and which, according to Merriam-Webster, has been used more recently, albeit sparingly, to mean “to kill”.Comey later took down his post, saying in a statement that he was unaware of the seashells’ potential meaning and saying that he does not condone violence of any kind.“I posted earlier a picture of some shells I saw today on a beach walk, which I assumed were a political message,” Comey said in a statement. “I didn’t realize some folks associate those numbers with violence. It never occurred to me, but I oppose violence of any kind so I took the post down.”A spokesperson for the Secret Service confirmed the agency was “aware of the incident” and said it would “vigorously investigate” any potential threat, but did not offer further details.The post ignited a firestorm on the right, with Trump loyalists accusing the former FBI director of calling for the president’s assassination. Trump survived an attempt on his life at a campaign event in Pennsylvania last year.“Disgraced former FBI director James Comey just called for the assassination of POTUS Trump,” Noem wrote on X. “DHS and Secret Service is investigating this threat and will respond appropriately.”Comey and Trump have a deeply antagonistic relationship that stretches back to the early days of the first Trump administration when, according to Comey, Trump sought to secure a pledge of loyalty from the then FBI director, who refused.In a move that shocked Washington, Trump dismissed Comey, who was leading the criminal investigation into Russian meddling in the US election. Comey later wrote a memoir that recounted the episode, prompting Trump to declare him an “untruthful slime ball”.Comey has remained a Maga world bête noire, drawing rightwing ire whenever he steps into the political fray.Allies of the president were swift to condemn Comey on Thursday. “We are aware of the recent social media post by former FBI director James Comey, directed at President Trump,” Kash Patel, the FBI director, wrote on X, adding: “We, the FBI, will provide all necessary support.”Taylor Budowich, the White House deputy chief of staff, also responded by calling the photo “deeply concerning” and accused Comey of putting out “what can clearly be interpreted as ‘a hit’ on the sitting President of the United States”.Tennessee Congressman Tim Burchett, a staunch Trump supporter, called for Comey to be jailed. “Arrest Comey,” he wrote on X. More
US supreme court justices on Thursday took issue with Donald Trump’s attempt to sidestep the constitution to limit birthright citizenship, in a trio of immigration cases that could reshape presidential power and the role of federal courts.The cases before the court stem from the president’s January executive order that would deny US citizenship to babies born on American soil if their parents aren’t citizens or permanent residents. The plan is likely to be ultimately struck down, as it directly contradicts the 14th amendment, which grants citizenship to “all persons born or naturalized in the United States”.But the court is mulling whether there is some weight to the justice department’s argument that “nationwide injunctions” often issued by federal judges unfairly tie the president’s hands. “These injunctions have reached epidemic proportions since the start of the Trump administration,” the department wrote in a March filing. The administration is asking for the scope of the injunctions to be narrowed, so they only apply to the people, organizations or states that sued.Nationwide injunctions come under scrutinyThe supreme court’s conservative majority, which includes three Trump appointees, has previously signaled skepticism about nationwide injunctions. Justice Neil Gorsuch called the issue a “question of great significance” requiring the court’s attention. But critics warn that limiting judges’ powers to block policies nationwide would force people to file thousands of individual lawsuits to protect their rights.Read the full storyJames Comey investigated over seashell photo claimed to be ‘threat’ against TrumpA photo of seashells posted on Instagram by the former FBI director James Comey is being investigated by the Secret Service after the homeland security secretary, Kristi Noem, said it constituted a “threat” against Trump.Comey posted a photo of seashells forming the message “8647”, with a caption that read: “Cool shell formation on my beach walk.” Trump’s supporters have interpreted the message as a coded endorsement of violence against Trump.Read the full storyTrump strikes deals with UAE worth $200bnTrump announced deals totaling more than $200bn between the United States and the United Arab Emirates – including a $14.5bn commitment among Boeing, GE Aerospace and Etihad Airways – as he pledged to strengthen ties with the Gulf state during a multi-day trip to the Middle East.Read the full storyWhite Afrikaner in US has history of antisemitic postsOne of the white Afrikaners brought into the US as refugees by the Trump administration this week has a history of antisemitic social media posts, despite the White House using alleged antisemitism as a rationale for deporting pro-Palestinian protesters.Read the full storyTrump has ‘problem’ with Tim CookTrump has admonished Apple and its chief executive, Tim Cook, over the tech firm’s reported plans to source production of US-bound iPhones from India.Read the full storyJudge pleads not guilty to helping man evade IceA Wisconsin judge pleaded not guilty on Thursday to charges that she helped a man who is in the country illegally evade US immigration authorities looking to arrest him in her courtroom.Read the full storyTrump signs deal with UAE to build largest AI campus outside USThe United Arab Emirates and the United States have signed an agreement for the Gulf country to build the largest artificial intelligence campus outside the United States, one of several deals around AI made during Donald Trump’s visit to the Middle East.Read the full storyGOP cut to green tax credits would raise utility billsAs House Republicans propose taking a sledgehammer to the green tax credits in Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act, new data shows the loss of those incentives could lower some Americans’ household income by more than $1,000 a year due to increased utility bills and job losses.Read the full storyWhat else happened today:
A federal judge in New Mexico dismissed trespassing charges against dozens of immigrants caught in a new military zone on the US-Mexico border, in a blow to the Trump administration’s efforts to crack down on border crossings.
The Democratic mayor of Newark said federal prosecutors sought to “humiliate and degrade” him by taking his fingerprints and mugshot for a second time.
The first Melania Trump statue in her native Slovenia was destroyed by fire and now its bronze replacement has gone missing, prompting a police investigation.
Catching up? Here’s what happened on 14 May 2025. More
Donald Trump has announced deals totaling more than $200bn between the United States and the United Arab Emirates, including a $14.5bn commitment among Boeing, GE Aerospace and Etihad Airways, as he pledged to strengthen ties between the US and the Gulf state during a multiday trip to the Middle East.The White House said on Thursday that Boeing and GE had received a commitment from Etihad Airways to invest $14.5bn to buy 28 US-made Boeing 787 and 777X aircraft powered by GE engines.“With the inclusion of the next-generation 777X in its fleet plan, the investment deepens the longstanding commercial aviation partnership between the UAE and the United States, fueling American manufacturing, driving exports,” the White House said.Antonoaldo Neves, the CEO of Etihad, said last month that the airline planned to add 20 to 22 new planes to its fleet of roughly 100 aircraft this year, as it aims to expand to more than 170 planes by 2030 and boost Abu Dhabi’s economic diversification strategy.Etihad, which is owned by Abu Dhabi’s $225bn wealth fund ADQ, has been through a multiyear restructuring and management shake-up, but has expanded under Neves.He said that 10 of the new aircraft this year would be Airbus A321LRs, which the carrier launched on Monday and will start operating in August. The remainder include six Airbus A350s and four Boeing 787s.The news follows a Wednesday announcement that Boeing had landed its largest-ever deal for wide-body airplanes, after securing an order for $96bn worth of Boeing jets from Qatar.The deal-making comes as the US president nears the ends of his multiday tour in the Middle East. Controversy has dogged the visit after the president announced earlier this week that he planned to accept a $400m luxury jumbo jet from the government of Qatar, raising numerous ethical concerns.Trump has since doubled down on his plans to accept the airplane as the new Air Force One, and eventually transfer it to his presidential library. “We’re the United States of America. I believe we should have the most impressive plane,” he said on Wednesday. More
A federal judge in New Mexico on Thursday dismissed trespassing charges against dozens of immigrants caught in a new military zone on the US-Mexico border, marking a setback for Trump administration efforts to raise penalties for unlawful crossings into the US.Chief US magistrate judge Gregory Wormuth began filing the dismissals late on Wednesday, ruling that immigrants did not know they were entering the military zone in New Mexico and therefore could not be charged, according to court documents and a defense attorney.Assistant federal public defender Amanda Skinner said Wormuth dismissed trespassing charges against all immigrants who made initial court appearances on Thursday. The immigrants still face charges accusing them of crossing the border illegally.“Judge Wormuth found no probable cause,” Skinner said in an email.New Mexico US attorney Ryan Ellison, who filed the first trespassing charges against migrants on 28 April, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.The so-called New Mexico national defense area was established in April along 180 miles (290km) of the border, and US army troops were authorized to detain immigrants entering the area from Mexico.A second buffer zone was set up in Texas this month. Defense secretary Pete Hegseth said in a social media post the military would continue to expand the zones to gain “100% operational control” of the border.US attorneys charged over 100 immigrants with crossing the border illegally and trespassing in the military zones in New Mexico and Texas. Potential combined penalties were up to 10 years imprisonment, according to Hegseth.But Wormuth pushed back against the charges for the immigrants in New Mexico, ordering Ellison on 1 May to show proof they were aware they entered the military zone unlawfully.Defense attorneys argued warning signs in the area were inadequate to inform immigrants they were committing a crime, a position Wormuth agreed with.“The criminal complaint fails to establish probable cause to believe the defendant knew he/she was entering” the military zone, Wormuth wrote in his orders dismissing charges.The Department of Defense did not immediately respond to Reuters’ request for comment. More
Some of the children were too young to stand on their own. Instead, they sat on their parents’ knees or in their parents’ arms, waving American flags. Many of them seemed confused about what, exactly, was even happening.But these kids were in the midst of making history: their families were among the first to take advantage of Donald Trump’s February executive order granting white South Africans refugee status in the United States, on the grounds that Afrikaner landowners – who make up just 7% of South Africa’s population yet, decades after the end of apartheid, control about half of its land – are facing persecution. While the doors to the US refugee program have been slammed shut to virtually everyone else, these Afrikaners showed up in the US earlier this week, their refugee status promising a path to US citizenship.Days later, the Trump administration took a far narrower view of who deserves access to the American polity. On Thursday morning, a lawyer for the Trump administration argued in front of the US supreme court that the 14th amendment does not guarantee citizenship to the American-born children of “illegal aliens” – a view contradicted by more than a century of legal precedent.This split screen raises a vital question: is the Trump administration really interested in helping children and families flourish – or only the “right” families?Over the last several months, the Trump administration’s policies on immigration, families, and children have been pockmarked by all kinds of contradictions. The administration is reportedly considering numerous policies to convince people to have more children, such as “baby bonuses” of $5,000 or medals for mothers who have six or more kids. The Department of Transportation has issued a memo directing the agency to “give preference to communities with marriage and birth rates higher than the national average”. And JD Vance has proclaimed: “I want more babies in the United States of America.”These moves are, in part, fueled by the growing power of the pronatalism movement, which believes that the declining birthrate in the US is an existential threat to its workforce and its future.Why, then, does the government want to exclude an estimated 150,000 babies born every year?“It’s hard to look at any of these policies and not believe that they’re created for the purpose of satisfying a political base that was promised some sort of notions of recreating a nostalgia for a white Christian nationalist nation,” said P Deep Gulasekaram, a professor of immigration law at the University of Colorado Law School.If the fate of the US workforce is really of concern, experts say immigration could help grow it – but the Trump administration has taken a hardline stance against immigrants from the Global South and their children. The administration has not only reportedly turned the refugee agency responsible for caring for children who arrive in the US alone into an arm of Ice, but also slashed funding for legal representation of children in immigration proceedings. Meanwhile, Republicans in Congress are trying to block parents who lack Social Security Numbers – such as undocumented people – from benefiting from the child tax credit, even in cases where their children are US citizens.The Trump administration has also unveiled new screening protocols that make it far more difficult for undocumented people to “sponsor”, or take custody of, children who enter the US alone. Just last week, the National Center for Youth Law and the legal advocacy group Democracy Forward sued the Trump administration over the changes, which they say have forced kids to languish in government custody. Between December 2024 and March 2025, kids went from spending an average of two months in government custody to spending an average of six.“This administration has compromised the basic health and safety of immigrant children in egregious ways,” Neha Desai, managing director of children’s human rights and dignity at the National Center for Youth Law, said in an email.In March, KFF, a charity that conducts health policy research, conducted focus groups of Hispanic adults who are undocumented or likely living with someone who is undocumented. Many spoke of the effect that the Trump administration’s policies are having on their families and kids.“I have a six-year-old child. Honestly, I’m afraid to take him to the park, and he asks me, ‘Mom, why don’t we go to the park?’” one 49-year-old Costa Rican immigrant woman told KFF. “How do I tell him? I’m scared.”“Even the children worry. ‘Mom, did you get home safely?’ They’re already thinking that something is going to happen to us on the street,” added a 54-year-old Colombian immigrant woman. “So that also makes me very nervous, knowing that there might come a time when they could be left here alone.”The supreme court arguments on Thursday centered not on the constitutionality of birthright citizenship, but on the legality of lower court orders in the case. Still, some of the justices expressed concerns about what the case could mean for children.Eliminating birthright citizenship, Justice Elena Kagan suggested, could render children stateless. The high court needed a way to act fast, she said.If the justices believe that a court order is wrong, she asked, “why should we permit those countless others to be subject to what we think is an unlawful executive action?”Both the historical and legal record make clear that the 14th Amendment encapsulates birthright citizenship, Gulasekaram said. But, he said, predicting the supreme court’s moves is a “fool’s errand”.“There’s really no way of getting around the the conclusion that this is a call to some form of racial threat and racial solidarity as a way of shoring up support from a particular part of the of the of the Trump base,” Gulasekaram said. “Citizenship and the acquisition of citizenship has always been racially motivated in the United States.” More
As House Republicans propose taking a sledgehammer to the green tax credits in Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act, new data shows the loss of those incentives could lower some Americans’ household income by more than $1,000 a year due to increased utility bills and job losses.Though Donald Trump has called climate spending a “waste” of money, the data – published by the industry group Clean Energy Buyers Association (Ceba) on Thursday – provides evidence that rescinding them would actually increase expenses for ordinary Americans in red and blue districts alike.The rollback would increase the price of electricity and gas, the report found. And it would lead to job losses and “economic slowdown”, it says.“Americans voted to combat the cost-of-living crisis in the 2024 election,” said Rich Powell, CEO of Ceba. “Now is the time for Congress to incentivize private investment in more sources of low-cost, reliable energy that fuels economic growth and jobs, helps the United States secure energy dominance and independence, and decreases energy costs nationwide.”The new figures, crunched for Ceba by the National Economic Research Associates consulting firm, focus specifically on credits 48E and 45Y, for clean energy investment and production respectively. In a reconciliation package draft this week, the House ways and means committee proposed phasing out these incentives after 2031, and placing many new restrictions on them in the meantime.If the rollbacks proceed as proposed, the new study found, at least 19 states would see the cost of energy increase for both consumers and industry between 2026 to 2032. (More states would probably see similar impacts, but the authors did not examine all 50 “because of the turnaround time for research”, Ceba said).New Jersey is the state expected to see the biggest economic losses if the clean energy investment and production credits are repealed, the authors found. There, the authors found the rollback could increase household gas and utility bills by 2.9% and 13.3% respectively. The repeal would also trigger the loss of 22,180 jobs, they found.All told, households across the state would see a stunning $1,040 average loss in annual household income and a $3.24bn decrease in state GDP, the authors wrote.“As commercial and industrial activity declines, demand for labor and capital falls, leading to wage losses, declining household income, and shrinking investment,” the research says.The authors’ outlook for state-level electricity markets assumes an incremental growth in electricity demand due to the growth of data centers. Some of Ceba’s members are tech giants – including Amazon, Google and Meta – who are bringing more data centers online.An earlier Ceba report, published in February, forecast the effect on electricity prices alone across all 50 states. If the clean energy investment and production credits are repealed, the average American household would see their annual household utility bills increase by $110 by 2026, it found.Wyoming would see the largest rise of 29.5% on average for households across the state, the earlier report found. More
Ras Baraka, the Democratic mayor of Newark, said federal prosecutors were seeking to “humiliate and degrade” him by making him give fingerprints and have a mugshot taken for a second time on Thursday.The move came after a court appearance on a trespassing charge stemming from his arrest at an immigration detention center where he was protesting with several members of Congress.The charges against Baraka have unfolded amid fears that the Trump administration is seeking to prosecute Democratic politicians, judges or others who have opposed its policies.Baraka appeared in court for a roughly 15-minute procedural hearing before magistrate judge André Espinosa. The hearing covered mostly scheduling for discovery in the case, which stemmed from an encounter on Friday outside the Delaney Hall immigration detention center.Assistant prosecutor Stephen Demanovich said the government disputed Baraka’s claims that he committed no crime and was invited on to the facility’s property. Confusion over whether Baraka had been fingerprinted and processed after his arrest unfolded after the judge brought the proceedings to a close.As the parties began to walk away, the judge added that the mayor would need to be processed by the US Marshals Service and that it would take 10 minutes. Baraka, looking confused, said he had already been processed after his arrest. The judge said “agents” had processed him but not the marshals.“Let’s go,” Baraka said, before indicating he would go with the marshals.Speaking to a crowd of supporters outside court, Baraka addressed why it took him a while to emerge from the building.“They’re trying their best to humiliate and degrade me as much as they possibly can,” he said. “I feel like what we did was completely correct. We did not violate any laws. We stood up for the constitution of this country, the constitution of the state of New Jersey.”The trespassing charge against Baraka carries a maximum sentence of 30 days in prison.One of Baraka’s attorney’s, Rahul Agarwal, said the defense expected to seek to dismiss the charges because the mayor was arrested by federal agents on private property. He added that it was a “selective prosecution” and that only the mayor had been arrested.Demanovich said the government disputed that but did not go into detail.Baraka has been an outspoken opponent of Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown and a vocal opponent of the facility’s opening.In video of the Friday altercation shared with the Associated Press, a federal official in a jacket with the homeland security investigations logo can be heard telling Baraka he could not enter because “you are not a Congress member”.Baraka then left the secure area, rejoining protesters on the public side of the gate. Video showed him speaking through the gate to a man in a suit, who said: “They’re talking about coming back to arrest you.”“I’m not on their property. They can’t come out on the street and arrest me,” Baraka replied.Minutes later, several Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) agents, some wearing face coverings, surrounded him and others on the public side. Baraka was dragged back through the gate in handcuffs.Delaney Hall is a two-storey building next to a county prison and formerly operated as a halfway house. In February, Immigration and Customs Enforcement awarded a 15-year contract to the Geo Group Inc to run the detention center.Politicians and activists have said facility has been reopened in contravention of local ordinances and without the necessary permits. It is the largest such facility in the north-eastern US, and the first to open during Trump’s second term, according to Ice.A trial date for Baraka has not yet been set.The Associated Press contributed reporting More
