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    Canadians Confront News Void on Facebook and Instagram as Election Nears

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    After Meta blocked news from its platforms in Canada, hyperpartisan and misleading content from popular right-wing Facebook pages such as Canada Proud has filled the gap.Mark Carney was just days away from announcing his bid to lead Canada’s Liberal Party in January when his face popped up on a viral right-wing Facebook page.Two photographs showed Mr. Carney, who became prime minister last month, at a garden party beside Ghislaine Maxwell, a convicted sex trafficker and former confidante of the disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein. There was no evidence that Mr. Carney and Ms. Maxwell were close friends, and his team dismissed the pictures as a fleeting social interaction from more than a decade ago.But they were perfect fodder for Canada Proud, a right-wing Facebook page with more than 620,000 followers. For days, Canada Proud posted about the images, including in paid ads that repeatedly said Mr. Carney had been “hanging out with sex traffickers.” More

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      View image in fullscreenThe first impression America gave me was gentle carelessness. We were driving down from Canada to visit family friends in Texas sometime in the mid- to late 1980s, and a young border patrol agent at a booth, crouched over a newspaper, leaning back in his chair, carelessly waved my family’s station wagon across without looking up. You didn’t even need a passport to enter the United States until I was 33.You need clear eyes at the border today. Europe and Canada have issued travel advisories after a series of arbitrary detentions, deportations to foreign jails without due process and hundreds of valid visas pulled or voided amid a sense of general impunity. While I have crossed the border a hundred times at least, sometimes once a month when I lived there, I cannot say when I will see America again, and I am quite sure I will never return to the country I once visited.The America I knew, the America I loved, has closed.And so I find myself like a man who has been admiring bubbles floating in the air, trying to recall their shape and swerve and shine after they’ve popped.America was a country of bubbles. I loved it as one loves anything that is both real and fantastical.Donald Trump has blown himself into a bubble of gilded ceilings, ersatz Roman murals, sycophants on tap and midnight rants of imperial conquest on personally owned social media networks. He is only one story. America was millions of bubbles. For some reason, I find myself remembering Tom Waits in a junkyard making Bone Machine, turning rusted fenders and tossed-out dry cleaners and cracked sheet metal into a scrap marimba of his own invention. Even its dumps could give birth to magic.Golf course palaces and wrecking-lot percussion: twin American truths.You felt the meaning of America the moment you entered. In Canada, wilderness is wilderness. The northern forests I come from resist interpretation; that is their power. But when you cross the border from, say, Quebec into Maine, you can feel myth accruing around the bark of the trees. You are in the haunted forests of New England, redolent with burned witches and ghost stories. Further south, the foggy murderous oaks loom gothically. Out west, the deserts beg for cowboys to cross them. Canada is a country that disillusions you. America is one illusion after another, some magnificent, others treacherous or vicious.Every landscape in America is setting, and you have to pose inside them. In my 20s, I drove Highway 1 from San Francisco to Los Angeles. An older and wiser friend told me to rent a convertible, and I laughed the suggestion off, since it felt like something you would do in the movies. Huge mistake. That drive down the California coast – cows by the big-wave Pacific, condors in the clefts of Big Sur – demands an open roof.I learned then: when you go to America, always pick the option that feels like what you would do in the movies.In San Francisco, right by the Yahoo offices on Mission Street, was a small homeless encampment. I could just see inside one of the tents through an open flap, where a boy – he would have been about 10 years old – was playing with little treasures on a small tray – a ring, a toy car, a key chain. Even the tents of the homeless were little bubbles.In Malibu, at a sushi bar, elegant Japanese surf bums lounged between orders, watching Game 7 of the World Series, languidly curling out cucumber spirals the chefs used instead of seaweed. That was their thing – cucumber-based rolls. That restaurant is ash now.View image in fullscreenSometimes, you can see the bubbles better from the air. Flying into Palm Springs, the desert circumscribed, encroaching, revealed the furious machinery working to push it away. Palm Springs is pure delight on the ground: the misted pools, the cocktails filled with the exactly the right ice shapes, the street names hanging on to the faded glamour of the tacky talkshow guests from half a century ago.The airport has no roof; that’s how crazy a city it is. A glistening shivering bubble, effortless once inside.The sheer prosperity of the country could be breathtaking. I had just come back from Senegal when the Guardian sent me on assignment to rust belt Ohio, during the first stirrings of Trumpism, back in 2015. I was there to report on the growing swell of populism by way of the postindustrial immiseration of middle America.I was stopping for gas on the way to a rally, and at the station they were selling a hotdog with as much chilli and cheese as you liked for $1.99. The chilli and cheese came out of the wall. You pressed two buttons, one for chilli and one for cheese.On the streets of Dakar, children hawk packs of peanuts and plastic bags of clean water on the street, and I wondered if you could even explain to them that there existed a place, on the same earth, where chilli and liquid cheese came out of a wall, and you could have as much of it as you liked for the equivalent of 20 minutes’ work at the minimum wage, and that some of the people in that place considered themselves so hard done by that their resentful fury threatened the political order, that they just wanted to burn it all down.It was more than money and grandeur, though. The openness, the generosity of ordinary people, floated free over the country.When I was researching my book The Next Civil War, the far-right people I met, the militia folks, in Oklahoma and in Ohio, at gun shows and Trump rallies and prepper conventions, were, without exception, polite in person – no doubt because I’m white, with blond hair and blue eyes, so I can pretend to be a good ol’ boy when required. They lived in dark bubbles, bubbles of serpentine paranoia and weird loathings and strange fantasies of breakdown.They welcomed me into their bubbles as equably as concierges. Militia pie is delicious; the crusts are richer, flakier. I think they use lard. Anyway, they talked to me about their hopes for the destruction of their government cheerfully and frankly, because they were living the movies playing in their minds and they wanted me to witness the projection.At one prepper convention I remember, a vendor was selling gluten-free rations for bunker survival. That was America in a bucket to me: even at the end of the world, don’t let a gluten allergy interfere with your active lifestyle.View image in fullscreenMuch later, for another publication, I attended a human-fairy congress in rural Washington state. Both humans and fairies were welcome to attend but only humans could enroll in the courses on fairy gardening and fairy marriages. They were the residue of the hippies, I suppose. The final event was a big dance where the fairies joined them and parlayed a message from the spirit realm. A young man dressed in Tibetan shaman robes ran into the luscious meadow set between ponderosa pines shouting “I! Feel! Better!” He was a definitive American type – a seeker who just went with his seeking.In America, one bubble was as good as another: the next week, many of the human-fairy enthusiasts were headed to a cosmic Sasquatch festival.On the other side of the state, in the Olympia forest, I interviewed illegal lumber poachers who cut a cord of firewood a day from the dead trees on public lands for meth and food and gas money, a primitive existence not that far from stone age tribes or medieval peasants. As I approached their compound, a coagulation of wrecked cars and rotten RVs and driftwood lean-tos with hanging tarps, a turkey strutted out to defend their ad hoc architecture of detritus. They had a guard turkey. The guard turkey was the shine of their bubble, like something in a dream.The American dream. For technocrats, a dying breed in the US, the term was shorthand for each generation doing better than the one before, for generally upward social mobility. There was more to it than that. There was an idea, an assumption really, that if you had enough talent and worked hard and did the smart thing, with a little luck you could live life just as you wanted. The country’s founding promise, after all, is “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness”.That promise is why success in America does not lead to gratitude but to an intense sensation of loss. The elite take any deviation from their fantasy existence as a broken contract. They’ve been ripped off. That is a big feeling among the most successful people in America: the sense of being ripped off.The country clubs are rife with men and women, in incredible luxury, complaining bitterly about the state of the country. The richest and most powerful, the Americans who have won, who have everything, are still not happy, and why? Their answer is that the American dream must be broken. There is no one who feels more betrayed by the American dream than the world’s richest man. Why else do you think he’s out there with a chainsaw?The American elites of the past 20 years have called their foremost principle freedom, but what they meant was impunity. That’s what the original slave masters built: a world where they could do whatever they wanted to whomever they wanted, without consequences. That’s what the techlords dream of today.The truly frictionless world they seek eludes them exactly because it is a dream, because it is unreal. The ultimate truth of bubbles is that they pop.Another bubble: when I was teaching Shakespeare in Harlem, at the City College of New York, I had a homeless student who slept in his car and never missed my seminar on revenge tragedy. You can only live that way if you live in a bubble buoyed by dreams.I, too, have floated in American bubbles. I have inhabited its intoxication. If it were not for America, I would be working part-time in a coffee shop.In the early 2010s, I was a writer stuck between Toronto and New York, and I had written my attempt at the great Canadian novel, about Alberta and Quebec and the unspoken fascination between them – between Montreal, with its wild heart, and the wild prairies filled with longing for a distant recognition. Nationalism was completely out of fashion then. No one in Canada would even look at the manuscript. My friends at small presses stopped accepting my invitations for drinks. You can be a loser and you can be a nag, but nobody wants both at the same time – even in Canada.View image in fullscreenI had been sitting on the book for a year when David Granger, my editor at Esquire, invited me down to New York, rented out a room at a Midtown Manhattan restaurant, and threw a party for me, just to give a speech to the gathered editors of Hearst about what a great writer I was. I returned to Canada, asked myself what the hell was I thinking trying to tell the stories of people who didn’t care if their stories were told, rewrote the novel so it was set in New York, and sold it in a few weeks for six figures.People used to say, about New York: “If you can make it here you can make it anywhere.” Nothing could be further from the truth. The whole point of New York was that it was the city that wanted you to make it. David Granger blew a bubble around me, and the David Grangers on this planet are all American; that’s the fact of the matter.You work hard, you play hard. So many Americans will do whatever it takes to prevent their bubbles from bursting. The second Trump administration has clarified this national trait. As the authoritarian impulse strips America of any motivating ideals, the only -ism surviving is careerism.The past decade has demonstrated that there is nothing that will cause an American politician to resign. There is no line they won’t cross. To keep the bubble from popping, they will drink their own blood until there’s nothing left but a husk. There are currently people in America who are racist, not because they actually think other races are inferior, but because they think it will advance their careers, just as there were people pretending to be civil rights activists when they thought it looked good on a résumé.At the same time as there can be a terrible indifference to those outside the bubbles, there is no other group of people, in the world, happier to see others succeed than Americans. In Florida, there was a private poker room I used to go to, under a dog track in Sarasota, where you could meet the full spectrum of the Floridian population – grill-fronted southern bubbas, Jewish grandmothers, tweakers.They were just so much fun to sit playing cards with, discussing whether life had any purpose or discernible order. I remember, cancer had struck one of the dealers, who was in her mid-20s, and, to help with the medical bills, the house gave all the profits from a night over to her. It wasn’t just the rake, either. They held a silent auction, old customers forked over fistfuls of dollars straight up, and it was magnificent, a sheer festival of generosity.View image in fullscreenBut my little Canadian heart reserved an obvious thought: “You don’t have to do all this.” You don’t have to live this way. No other industrialized country in the world has to throw parties to raise money for its sick people. They could not see their own strangeness. Their bubbles reflect themselves back to them as the world.But it was a hell of a fun night.Fun. America was fun.Other countries do pleasure or luxury or celebration. America did fun. The Beatles were fun because they played American music. McDonalds conquered the world because they put a fun-for-five-minutes piece of plastic in with the fries and called it the Happy Meal. “What’s great about this country is that America started the tradition where the richest consumers buy essentially the same things as the poorest,” Andy Warhol once wrote. “A Coke is a Coke and no amount of money can get you a better Coke than the one the bum on the corner is drinking.”Everyone drinks the drink of bubbles, the fun drink.The bubbles by which they lived were the subject of their greatest works of art. In the great one-hit wonder paintings, like Christina’s World by Andrew Wyeth or Nighthawks by Edward Hopper, you can feel the souls pressed up against their bubbles or sinking back in them. This year is the 100th anniversary of The Great Gatsby, and obviously it is the great American novel, the novel of the careless people who smash up the world and retreat into their money and their supreme indifference, the novel of bubbles.But the definitive work of American art isn’t Gatsby; it’s the roadrunner cartoons. If Coyote keeps running, he can run over air. It is only when he looks down that he falls.In Judaism, it is forbidden to throw out sacred books. They keep the shreds of exhausted texts in a storage room called a genizah.View image in fullscreenThe American text is exhausted. I am going to keep my memories of America in a genizah in my mind, the ones I have written here but also: dawn over the Shenandoah seen from the flatbed of an F-150; Broadway Boogie Woogie by Piet Modrian in the MoMA; a New Orleans band that must have played When the Saints Go Marching In 10,000 times playing it as if it were the first time; the smell of tacos al pastor in a Tulsa parking lot; low-limit craps in Vegas; a western oriole strutting in pine needles; the stump of the “Tree of Hope” in Harlem; the Siesta Key Oyster Bar, where the walls were covered with Iraqi money stapled there by returning soldiers; the sausages at the Wrigley Field ballpark in Chicago; the New York hustler who went down the A train selling his romance novels out of a box; that wave at the border I may have half-imagined.Countries fall out of the free world. They fall back in, too. These memories are not yet dead. They are only closed.But for now, a great foam is lifting, drifting, blowing through unsettled air, and all I can hear, in the distance, is the sound of bubbles popping.View image in fullscreen

      Stephen Marche lives in Toronto and is the author of The Next Civil War and On Writing and Failure More

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      in US Politics

      Denied, detained, deported: the most high-profile cases in Trump’s immigration crackdown

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      Donald Trump retook the White House vowing to stage “the largest deportation operation in American history”. As previewed, the administration has set about further militarizing the US-Mexico border and targeting asylum seekers and refugees while conducting raids and deportations in undocumented communities, detaining and deporting immigrants and spreading fear.Critics are outraged, if not surprised. But few expected the new legal chapter that unfolded next: a multipronged crackdown on certain people seen as opponents of the US president’s ideological agenda. This extraordinary assault has come in the context of wider attacks on higher education, the courts and the constitution.Here are some of the most high-profile individual cases that have captured the world’s attention so far because of their extreme and legally dubious nature, mostly involving documented people targeted by the Trump administration in the course of its swift and unlawful power grab.Students and academics hunted and ‘disappeared’In recent weeks, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) teams suddenly began arresting and detaining foreign-born students and academics on visas or green cards. In most cases the government has cited their roles in pro-Palestinian campus protests over Israel’s war in Gaza following the 7 October 2023 attack. Claims that they “support Hamas” are invoked as justification for wanting to deport them, even though they have not been charged with any crimes. Those taken include:Mahmoud KhalilA recent graduate student of Columbia University in New York, Mahmoud Khalil, 30, is a Palestinian green card holder who was a leader during protests last year. He was arrested in front of his pregnant wife and has been in a detention center in Louisiana since mid-March.View image in fullscreenThe government is using obscure immigration law to make extraordinary claims in cases like Khalil’s that it can summarily detain and deport people for constitutionally-protected free speech if they are deemed adverse to US foreign policy. A far-right group has claimed credit for flagging his and others’ names for scrutiny by the authorities.Rümeysa ÖztürkView image in fullscreenUS immigration officials wearing masks and hoodies encircled and grabbed the Tufts University PhD student in a suburb of Boston and bustled her into an unmarked car, shown in onlooker video. Öztürk, a Fulbright scholar and Turkish national on a visa, had co-written an op-ed in the student newspaper, criticizing Tufts’ response to Israel’s military assault on Gaza and Palestinians. She was rushed into detention in Louisiana in apparent defiance of a court order. Öztürk, 30, says she has been neglected and abused there in “unsafe and inhumane conditions”.Mohsen MahdawiView image in fullscreenMahdawi, a Palestinian green-card holder and student at Columbia University, was apprehended by Ice in Colchester, Vermont, on 14 April, according to his lawyers and a video of the incident, first reported by the Intercept.He was prominent in the protests at Columbia last year. During his apprehension he was put into an unmarked car outside a federal office where he was attending an interview to become a naturalized US citizen, his lawyer said.Yunseo ChungView image in fullscreenAnother student at Columbia, Chung, 21, sued the Trump administration for trying to deport her, and has gone into hiding. She is a pro-Palestinian campaigner and was arrested by the New York police in March while protesting against the university’s punishments of student activists, as first reported by the New York Times. She said a government official told her lawyer they want to remove her from the country and her residency status was being revoked. Chung was born in South Korea and has been in the US since she was seven.Alireza DoroudiView image in fullscreenThe Democrats on campus group at the University of Alabama said of the arrest of Doroudi, an Iranian studying mechanical engineering: “Donald Trump, Tom Homan [Trump’s “border czar”], and Ice have struck a cold, vicious dagger through the heart of UA’s international community.”Less is known about the federal government’s claims against Doroudi but it is understood he was taken to the same Ice processing center in Jena, Louisiana, where Khalil is behind bars, NBC reported.Badar Khan SuriView image in fullscreenMore than 370 alumni of Washington DC-based Georgetown University joined 65 current students there in signing on to a letter opposing immigration authorities’ detention of Dr Badar Khan Suri, a senior postdoctoral fellow at the institution’s Alwaleed Bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding (ACMCU).The authorities revoked his student visa, alleging the citizen of India’s father-in-law was an adviser to Hamas officials more than a decade ago – and claiming he was “deportable” because of his posts on social media in support of Palestine. He was taken to Louisiana and then detention in Texas and was given court dates in May.Kseniia PetrovaThe Harvard Medical School research scientist was stopped at Boston’s Logan airport by US authorities on her way back from France in February, over what appeared to be an irregularity in customs paperwork related to frog embryo samples. She was told her visa was being revoked and she was being deported to her native Russia.When Petrova, 30, said she feared political persecution there because she had criticized the invasion of Ukraine, she was taken away and also ended up in an overcrowded detention facility in Louisiana.Student visas revokedMore than 1,300 international students from at least 200 colleges across the US have had their “legal status changed” by the state department, including the revoking of visas, between mid-March and mid-April, Inside Higher Education has reported. The specialist publication called it “an explosion of visa terminations”.The schools and students have been given little information, but secretary of state Marco Rubio has lambasted protesters and campus activists as “lunatics”. Some have been cited for pro-Palestinian views, others concluded they must have been targeted because of minor crimes or offenses, such as a speeding ticket. Some can find no specific reason why their visa would be revoked. Many are from India and China, the Associated Press reported, and panic is setting in on campuses.High-profile cases include:Felipe Zapata VelásquezView image in fullscreenThe family of University of Florida student Felipe Zapata Velásquez, 27, said he is “undergoing a physical and emotional recovery process” in his native Colombia after police arrested him in Gainesville in March for traffic offenses and turned him over to Ice. He agreed to be deported, to avoid lengthy detention and legal battles. Democratic congressman Maxwell Frost accused authorities of “kidnapping” Velásquez.Momodou TaalTaal, a dual citizen of Britain and Gambia, was pursuing a PhD at Cornell University’s Africana Studies and Research Center, and was an outspoken activist on the Ivy League campus. He was suspended last year for his role in anti-Zionist protests. He sued the Trump administration over labeling foreign student protesters anti-Semitic and was told to surrender to immigration officials. He has since left the country.Deported by (admitted) mistakeKilmar Ábrego GarcíaView image in fullscreenThe Salvadoran man was deported to El Salvador by mistake, which the Trump administration admitted. But then it essentially defied a US supreme court order to “facilitate” his return to his home and family in Maryland from a brutal mega-prison in the central American country. Ábrego García was undocumented but had protected status against being deported to El Salvador. He was flown there anyway, without a hearing. The administration accuses him of being a violent gangster and has abandoned him, infuriating a federal judge and prompting warnings of a constitutional crisis. He has not been charged with any crimes but was swept up with hundreds of Venezuelans also deported there. Sheet metalworkers union chief Michael Coleman described Ábrego García as an “apprentice working hard to pursue the American dream” and said he was not a gang member. Trump said he was eyeing Salvadoran prisons for US citizens.Deported to a third country, without due processThe US deported more than 230 Venezuelan men to the mega-prison in El Salvador without so much as a hearing in mid-March despite an infuriated federal judge trying to halt the flights, then blocking others. Donald Trump took extraordinary action to avoid due process by invoking the 1798 Alien Enemies Act (AEA), a law meant only to be used in wartime, prompting court challenges led by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). John Roberts, the US chief justice, rebuked the president when he threatened the judge. The justices, by a majority, did not stop Trump from using the AEA but the bench unanimously reaffirmed the right to due process and said individuals must be able to bring habeas corpus challenges.Most of the men are reportedly not violent criminals or members of violent gangs, as the Trump administration asserts, according to a New York Times investigation.Many appear to have been accused of being members of the transnational Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua partly on the basis of their tattoos, with their families speaking out, including:Andry José Hernández Romeroskip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionView image in fullscreenHernández, a 31-year-old makeup artist and hairdresser, entered California last year to attend an asylum appointment, telling the authorities he was under threat in Venezuela as a gay man. But he was detained and accused of being in Tren de Aragua because of his tattoos, then suddenly deported under Trump, deemed a “security threat”.Jerce Reyes BarriosThe former professional footballer, 36, has been accused of gang membership by the Department of Homeland Security, seemingly because of his tattoos, including one of a crown sitting atop a soccer ball with a rosary and the word “dios”.“He chose this tattoo because it is similar to the logo for his favourite soccer team, Real Madrid,” his lawyer, Linette Tobin, said, adding that her client fled Venezuela after protesting the government and being tortured.Francisco Javier García CasiqueView image in fullscreenRelatives were shocked when they spotted Francisco Javier García Casique, 24, in a propaganda video from El Salvador showing scores of Venezuelan prisoners being frog-marched off planes and into custody there. He is a barber in his home town of Maracay and is completely innocent of gang involvement, the family said, adding that Francisco and his brother Sebastián have matching tattoos quoting the Bible.Migrants seeking asylum removed to PanamaA US military plane took off from California in February carrying more than 100 immigrants from countries as far flung as Afghanistan, Iran, Uzbekistan, China, Sri Lanka, Turkey and Pakistan, dumping them in Panama. They were shackled and deported to a third country because their nations of origin refuse to accept them back from the US. Shocking scenes unfolded of the people locked in a hotel in Panama City, signaling and writing on the windows pleading for help.The people, including children, were then moved and held at a facility deep in the dense jungle that separates Panama from Colombia. They were later reportedly freed and were seeking asylum from other countries, their futures uncertain. One of those deported from the US was:Artemis GhasemzadehView image in fullscreenGhasemzadeh, 27, a migrant from Iran, wrote “Help us” in lipstick on a window of the hotel in Panama City, as a desperate way of alerting New York Times reporters on the street to her and fellow detainees’ plight. She had thought that, especially as a convert from Islam to Christianity who faces danger in Iran as a result, that she would be offered freedom in the US, she told the newspaper while still in custody.Americans questioned and threatenedAmir MakledView image in fullscreenMakled, a Detroit-born attorney, was questioned at the airport on returning from vacation. He was flagged to a terrorism response team, kept behind and pressured to hand over his phone, then give up some of its contents. The Lebanese American represents a pro-Palestinian student protester who was arrested at the University of Michigan. Experts said the incident was evidence of a weakening of fourth amendment constitutional protections at the border against “unreasonable search and seizure”.Nicole MicheroniView image in fullscreenThis Massachusetts immigration lawyer, a US-born American citizen, spoke out after receiving an email from the Trump administration telling her “it is time for you to leave the United States”. She said it was “probably, hopefully, sent to me in error. But it’s a little concerning these are going out to US citizens.” She told NBC she thought it was a scare tactic.Visitors detainedJasmine Mooney, CanadaView image in fullscreenCanadian Jasmine Mooney was shackled and ended up in Ice detention in the US for two weeks over an alleged work visa irregularity while on one of her frequent visits to California. She spoke out about the harsh conditions and the information black hole and how outraged she was that so many other detainees she met, who helped her, are stranded without access to the kind of resources that ultimately got her out.Rebecca Burke, UKView image in fullscreenThe British graphic artist was stopped at the border when she headed from Seattle to Canada as a backpacker and, because of a visa mix-up, she became one of 32,809 people to be arrested by Ice during the first 50 days of Trump’s presidency. Almost three weeks of grueling detention conditions later, she smuggled out her poignant drawings of fellow detainees when she was released.Jessica Brösche, GermanyThe German tourist and tattoo artist, 29, from Berlin was detained by US immigration authorities and deported back to Germany after spending more than six weeks in US detention, including what she described as eight days in solitary confinement. Her family compared her ordeal to “a horror film”.Fabian Schmidt, GermanyView image in fullscreenThe 34-year-old German national and US green card holder was apprehended and allegedly “violently interrogated” by US border officials as he was returning to New Hampshire from a trip to Luxembourg. His family said he was held for hours at Boston’s Logan airport, stripped naked and put in a cold shower, then later deprived of food and medicine, and collapsed. His case is being investigated and as of mid-April he was in Ice detention in Rhode Island.Sent back‘Jonathan’A man with a US work visa provided his anonymous account to the Guardian of being denied entry into the US after a trip to his native Australia to scatter his sister’s ashes. He was pulled aside on arrival in Houston, Texas, and accused, variously, of selling drugs and having improper paperwork. After being detained for over a day he was put on a flight back to Australia even though he has worked on the US east coast for five years, where he lived with his girlfriend.Denied entry – for criticizing Trump?Alvin Gibbs, Marc Carrey and Stefan Häublein of band UK SubsView image in fullscreenMembers of the punk rock band UK Subs said they were denied entry and detained in the US on their way to play a gig in Los Angeles, after being questioned about visas. Bassist Alvin Gibbs said: “I can’t help but wonder whether my frequent, and less than flattering, public comments regarding their president [Trump] and his administration played a role.” He and the two band mates were kept in harsh conditions for 24 hours then deported back to the UK.French scientistA French scientist, who has not been publicly named, was denied entry to the US after immigration officers at an airport searched his phone and found messages in which he had expressed criticism of the Trump administration, according to a French government minister. The researcher was on his way to a conference in Texas.“Freedom of opinion, free research, and academic freedom are values ​​that we will continue to proudly uphold,” Philippe Baptiste, France’s minister of higher education and research, told Le Monde. More

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      Are Easter Baskets Getting Out of Hand?

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      Social media feeds are awash in images of lavish baskets overflowing with expensive gifts. Some parents are giving their children bikes. Others are pushing back.“Is it even Easter if you don’t get a new bike?”So asks Judy Newton, a mother of three in Philadelphia, in a recent video on TikTok.In the weeks before Easter this Sunday, social media feeds have been full of videos of parents filling baskets with more than just the usual marshmallow Peeps. Instead, they are packing blankets, stuffed animals, shoes and knickknacks into large wicker baskets, tote bags or plastic buckets. And, yes, they are also giving bikes.“When you see some people post their videos on social media, it looks like Christmas morning,” Ms. Newton said. “Now these kids are getting that for Easter.”Baskets have, of course, long been associated with Easter. But in the age of influencer-driven consumption, Easter has been joined by Halloween (“boo baskets”), Christmas (“brr baskets”), Valentine’s Day and virtually every other holiday (“Leprechaun baskets” for St. Patrick’s Day) as social media encourages people to celebrate by spending lavishly.The Easter Bunny can hardly keep up.

      @kendra.crabtree Easter basket for girls!!! 🫶🏼💕 #easter #easterbasket #easterbasketideas #easter2025 #resurection #jesusisthereason #girlmom #fostermom #girls #spoiled ♬ original sound – KENDRA CRABTREE “Every holiday now, we make baskets,” said Talia Stenson, a mother and social media content creator in Sacramento. “And I think as the years have gone on, people just go above and beyond with these baskets, and now they’re almost a little too overboard.”

      @haileyjoor #easterbasket #easter2025 #boymom #basket #toddlermom #sahm ♬ original sound – mw🎧🧡 We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Canadian universities report jump in US applicants amid Trump crackdown

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      More students living in the United States are applying to Canadian universities or expressing interest in studying north of the border as Donald Trump cuts federal funding to universities and revokes foreign student visas.Officials at the University of British Columbia’s (UBC) Vancouver campus said the school reported a 27% jump in graduate applications as of 1 March from US citizens for programs starting in the 2025 academic year, compared with all of 2024.UBC Vancouver briefly reopened admissions to US citizens for several graduate programs this week with plans to fast-track applications from US students hoping to begin studies in September.University of Toronto, Canada’s largest university by number of students, also reported more US applications by its January deadline for 2025 programs, while a University of Waterloo spokesperson reported an increase in US visitors to campus and more web traffic originating from the United States since September.Gage Averill, UBC Vancouver’s provost and vice-president of academics, attributed the spike in US applications to the Trump administration abruptly revoking visas of foreign students and increased scrutiny of their social media activity.“That, as a result, and especially as a result of the very recent crackdown on visas in the United States for international students, and now the development of a center that’s reading foreign students’ social media accounts,” Averill said.The administration has frozen hundreds of millions of dollars in federal funding for numerous universities, pressing them to make policy changes and citing what it claims is a failure to fight antisemitism on campus. It has detained and begun deportation proceedings against some foreign students who took part in pro-Palestinian demonstrations, while visas for hundreds of other students have been canceled – actions that have raised concerns about speech and academic freedoms in the US. At the same time, Canada has capped the number of international students allowed to enter the country for the second year in a row, meaning there may be fewer spots for US and other international students.Canada’s immigration ministry said it expects learning institutions to only accept the number of students they can support, including providing housing options. Provinces and territories are responsible for distributing spaces under the cap, the ministry said.The University of Toronto, considered an alternative to US Ivy League schools, said it was seeing a “meaningful increase” in applications from those living or studying in the US over previous years. University of Waterloo, which is known for its technical graduate programs and churns out top-notch engineering talent, said some faculties including engineering have seen increased interest and applications from students in the US.“We have seen an increase in US visitors to the UW visitors centre on campus, and web traffic that originates in the US has increased by 15% since September 2024,” a University of Waterloo spokesperson said.It did not specify whether these students were foreign students studying in the US or US citizens.Averill said UBC has seen only a modest 2% increase in undergraduate applications for this year’s programs, which closed around the time of Trump’s inauguration. However, interest appears to be growing, with campus tour requests from US students up by 20%.“We were concerned about the United States universities, our sister institutions in the US, who are under enormous pressure right now,” said Averill, referring in particular to the Trump administration’s efforts to withhold funds from universities that continue with diversity and equity initiatives or study climate science.According to UBC’s annual report, the United States ranks as one of the top three countries for international student enrollment. Currently, about 1,500 US students are enrolled in both graduate and undergraduate programs at the university’s two campuses. More

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      Ford offers discounts on cars and trucks as auto tariffs kick in.

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      Ford Motor said on Thursday that it was lowering prices on most of its vehicles to the same levels it charges employees in a bid to boost sales as President Trump’s tariffs on imported cars took effect.The tariffs began on Thursday on vehicles imported from Mexico, Canada, Japan, Germany and other countries. The duties — 25 percent of the value of the vehicle in most cases — are expected to increase prices of new cars and trucks and dampen demand.About half the vehicles sold in the United States each year are produced in other countries. Mexico is the top source of those cars and Canada is among the largest. For three decades, the United States, Canada and Mexico have had a free-trade zone, and automakers have moved parts and vehicles freely among the three countries.Ford’s new program, which the company is calling “From America, for America,” could help reduce a large inventory of unsold cars. In February, Ford had more cars in inventory as measured by how many days it would take to sell them all than all but three other brands — Jaguar, Mimi and Dodge — according to Cox Automotive, a research firm.Ford’s new discounts apply to all new 2024 and 2025 vehicles, except for specialty versions of the Bronco sport-utility vehicle; the Mustang sports car; Super Duty versions of F-Series pickups; and a few other models.“Consumers will pay what we pay,” Rob Kaffl, Ford’s director of U.S. sales and dealer relations, said in a statement.The automaker also said it was extending another incentive program in which buyers of new electric models get a home charger for free, along with the cost of installation. That offer is now valid until June 30.Ford had more than 568,000 vehicles in inventory at the end of March, up about 8 percent from a year ago. More

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      Trump announces sweeping new tariffs, upending decades of US trade policy

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      Donald Trump announced sweeping tariffs on some of its largest trading partners on Wednesday, upending decades of US trade policy and threatening to unleash a global trade war on what he has dubbed “liberation day”.Trump said he will impose a 10% universal tariff on all imported foreign goods in addition to “reciprocal tariffs” on a few dozen countries, charging additional duties onto countries that Trump claims have “cheated” America.The 10% universal tariff will go into effect on 5 April while the reciprocal tariffs will begin on 9 April.“This is one of the most important days, in my opinion, in American history,” Trump said, in a long-winded speech on the White House lawn. For decades America had been “looted, pillaged and raped” by its trading partners, he said. “In many cases, the friend is worse than the foe.”Over the past few months, Trump has rattled global stock markets, alarmed corporate executives and economists, and triggered heated rows with the US’s largest trading partners by announcing and delaying plans to impose tariffs on foreign imports several times since taking office.But for the start of what appears to be a dramatic shift in American trade policy, one that could cause ricochets in the global economy, Trump tried to sell the tariffs with a celebratory tone.Nine giant US flags flanked Trump onstage in the Rose Garden, as the president spoke in front of his cabinet and a crowd of union workers wearing hard hats and fluorescent construction worker vests. Before Trump came onstage, a marine band played celebratory music to excite the crowd.At one point, Trump paused his speech to throw a Maga hat into the crowd. In the next breath, he announced the 10% universal baseline tariff.In the middle of his hour-long speech, the president displayed a chart that showed the “unfair” fees that countries placed on the US, alongside the new “USA Discounted Reciprocal Tariffs”. China charged the US 67% in “unfair” fees, and said the US would now levy a 34% fee. The EU charges 39% on imports, according to the White House, and will now be levied at 20%. Trump said the UK would be charged 10% – the baseline tariff – equal to the Trump administration’s calculations of the UK’s fees on US imports.Special exceptions were made for Canada and Mexico, though the countries were previously targets of proposed broad tariffs. The White House said that goods covered by an existing trade deal with Canada and Mexico will continue to see no tariffs.Trump said the tariff calculations also include “currency manipulation and trade barriers”, though the White House has not elaborated on how it calculated the new tariffs.It appears Trump has zeroed in on the industry-specific tariffs the countries have placed on American exports. In his speech, Trump criticized policies like the EU’s ban on imported chicken, Canadian tariffs on dairy and Japan’s levies on rice.Trump said the US would charge half of the fees he feels trading partners unfairly impose on the US because the US people are “very kind”. The countries have “placed massive tariffs on [US] products and created non-monetary tariffs to decimate our industries”, Trump said, calling them “common sense reciprocal tariffs”.“Reciprocal: that means they do it to us and we do it to them. Very simple, can’t get any more simple than that,” he said. “This indeed will be the golden age of America,” he said.Trump was ultimately following through with a promise he made during the election: on the campaign trail, Trump floated the idea of a 10% universal tariff on all imported goods.The new tariffs come on top of a lineup of levies that Trump has already implemented: an additional 20% tariff on all Chinese imports and a 25% tariff on all steel and aluminum imports. There is also a 10% tariff on energy imports from Canada.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionTrump also announced in March a 25% tariff on all imported vehicles and, eventually, imported auto parts, which will start going into effect on Thursday.“These tariffs are going to give us growth like you’ve never seen before, and it’ll be something very special to watch,” Trump said.Trump has made clear the goals he wants to accomplish through his tariffs: bring manufacturing back to the US; respond to unfair trade policies from other countries; increase tax revenue; and incentivize crackdowns on migration and drug trafficking. But the implementation of his tariffs has so far have been haphazard, with multiple rollbacks and delays, and vague promises that have yet to come to fruitionBut the threats have soured US relations with its largest trading partners. Canada’s prime minister, Mark Carney, has called them “unjustified” and pledged to retaliate. The European Union has said it has a “strong plan” to retaliate. Other retaliatory tariffs could eventually lead to higher prices that would hurt American exporters.The US stock market closed slightly up on Wednesday, ahead of Trump’s announcement, with a slight boost from news that Elon Musk may step away from his role in the White House soon to focus on his businesses.Even with the slight upswing, two of the three major stock exchanges saw their worst quarter in over two years after Monday marked the end of the first quarter.In March, consumer confidence plunged to its lowest level in over four years. Polls have shown that tariffs are unpopular with Americans, including Republicans. Only 28% of people in a poll from Marquette Law School released Wednesday said that tariffs help the economy.The uncertainty around Trump’s tariff policies have increased the likelihood of a recession, according to recent forecasts from economists at Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan and other banks. More

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      Trump prepares to unveil reciprocal tariffs as markets brace amid trade war fears

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      As Donald Trump prepared to unveil a swathe of reciprocal tariffs, global markets braced and some Republican senators voiced their opposition to a strategy that critics warn risks a global trade war, provoking retaliation by major trading partners such as China, Canada and the European Union.The US president said on Monday he would be “very kind” to trading partners when he unveils further tariffs this week, potentially as early as Tuesday night.The Republican billionaire insists that reciprocal action is needed because the world’s biggest economy has been “ripped off by every country in the world”, promising “Liberation Day” for the US.He could also unveil more sector-specific levies.Asked for details, he told reporters on Monday: “You’re going to see in two days, which is maybe tomorrow night or probably Wednesday.”But he added: “We’re going to be very nice, relatively speaking, we’re going to be very kind.”Some Republican senators spoke out against Trump’s tariffs on Canada and are considering signing on their support for a resolution blocking them, CNN reported. Senator Susan Collins warned that tariffs on Canada would be particularly harmful to Maine and that she intended to vote for a resolution aimed at blocking tariffs against Canadian goods.Republican Senator Thom Tillis also said he was considering backing the resolution, adding: “We need to fight battles with our foes first and then try to figure out any inequalities with our friends second.”Already, China, South Korea and Japan agreed on Sunday to strengthen free trade between themselves, ahead of Trump’s expected tariff announcement.But Trump said on Monday he was not worried that his action would push allies toward Beijing, adding that a deal on TikTok could also be tied to China tariffs.White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters that the goal on Wednesday would be to announce “country-based tariffs”, although Trump remained committed to imposing separate sector-specific charges.The uncertainty has jolted markets, with key European and Asian indexes closing lower, although the Dow and broad-based S&P 500 eked out gains.Market nervousness intensified after Trump said on Sunday his tariffs would include “all countries”.The Wall Street Journal reported on Sunday that advisers have considered imposing global tariffs of up to 20%, to hit almost all US trading partners. Trump has remained vague, saying his tariffs would be “far more generous” than ones already levied against US products.Trump’s fixation on tariffs is fanning US recession fears. Goldman Sachs analysts raised their 12-month recession probability from 20% to 35%.This reflects a “lower growth forecast, falling confidence and statements from White House officials indicating willingness to tolerate economic pain”. Goldman Sachs also lifted its forecast for underlying inflation at the end of 2025.China and Canada have imposed counter-tariffs on US goods, while the EU unveiled its own measures to start mid-April. Other countermeasures could come after Wednesday.For now, the IMF chief, Kristalina Georgieva, said at a Reuters event on Monday that US tariffs were causing anxiety, although their global economic impact should not be dramatic.Ryan Sweet of Oxford Economics said to “expect the unexpected”, anticipating that Trump would “take aim at some of the largest offenders”.Besides reciprocal country tariffs, Trump could unveil additional sector-specific levies on the likes of pharmaceuticals and semiconductors. He earlier announced car tariffs to take effect on Thursday.Economists have expected the upcoming salvo could target the 15% of partners that have persistent trade imbalances with the US, a group that the US treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, has dubbed a “Dirty 15”.The US has some of its biggest goods deficits with China, the EU, Mexico, Vietnam, Taiwan, Japan, South Korea, Canada and India.US trade partners are rushing to minimise their exposure, with reports suggesting India may lower some duties.The European Central Bank president, Christine Lagarde, said on Monday that Europe should move towards economic independence, telling France Inter radio that Europe faces an “existential moment”.Separately, the British prime minister, Keir Starmer, spoke with Trump on “productive negotiations” towards a UK-US trade deal, while the German chancellor, Olaf Scholz, said the EU would respond firmly to Trump but was open to compromise.It was “entirely possible” for fresh tariffs to be swiftly reduced or put on hold, said Greta Peisch, a partner at law firm Wiley Rein.In February, Washington paused steep levies on Mexican and Canadian imports for a month as the North American neighbours pursued negotiations.With Agence France-Presse More

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      in US Politics

      Will Trump’s ‘Liberation Day’ be the start of a trade war – or another climbdown?

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      Donald Trump won back the White House with a promise to transform the US economy. Millions of Americans, struggling with higher prices and bigger bills, elected a president who pledged to revive his country’s industrial heartlands – and leave the rest of the world to pick up the bill.On Wednesday – a day dubbed Liberation Day by the president and his aides – Trump has vowed to pull the trigger and impose an historic barrage of tariffs on goods from overseas he claims will fund an extraordinary revival.Ten weeks after obtaining power, Trump has said he will raise tariffs on all products from countries that charge tariffs on US exports; hit goods from Canada and Mexico with sweeping duties; introduce steep tariffs on foreign cars, computer chips and drugs; and target countries importing oil from Venezuela with duties on their US exports.This is “the big one”, according to the president. Business leaders and economists are certainly worried about the scale of his trade strategy, which the Tax Foundation already estimates could knock US gross domestic product (GDP) by roughly 0.7% and cost about 500,000 US jobs.“The escalating tariffs are a body blow to the global trading system,” said Eswar Prasad, professor of trade policy at Cornell University, and a former official at the International Monetary Fund.Wherever you stand, a move on this scale would constitute a radical shake-up – and set the stage for a fundamental overhaul of the US economy. And yet, even as he ramped up the rhetoric, Trump has appeared to tread carefully.“I will immediately begin the overhaul of our trade system to protect American workers and families,” the president declared at his inauguration in January. “Instead of taxing our citizens to enrich other countries, we will tariff and tax foreign countries to enrich our citizens.”While the threats were immediate, the action was not.Take Canada and Mexico. The administration has adopted a strikingly hardline stance against the US’s largest and nearest trading partners, but its imposition of blanket tariffs has been hit by a dizzying array of shifting deadlines, delays and reversals.An initial pledge to impose tariffs from “day one” shifted, without explanation, to February. When February rolled around, a last-ditch deal kicked the can to March. When the tariffs were finally imposed, it was a little over 24 hours before carmakers were granted a temporary exemption, and 48 hours before all goods covered by an existing trade deal between the US, Mexico and Canada were spared for another month.All the while, Trump and his most senior officials have slowly, but surely, accepted the risks they are raising in pursuit of the rewards they have vowed to obtain.“Tariffs don’t cause inflation,” the president claimed in January. OK, prices “could go up somewhat short term”, he conceded in February. “There’ll be a little disturbance,” he added in March, stressing that he was alright with that.The US treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, acknowledged earlier this month that there may well be a “one-time price adjustment” as a result of Trump’s tariffs. “Access to cheap goods is not the essence of the American dream,” he argued.While Trump predicts that slapping high US tariffs on foreign goods will prompt an influx of international companies to make products inside the US, rather than out, companies and investors worldwide are already struggling to keep up with his administration’s erratic trade policymaking.So far, since his return to office, Trump has hiked tariffs on Chinese exports to the US and raised tariffs on foreign steel and aluminium to 25%.The average US tariff rate has already shot up from 2.5% to 8.4% this year, the highest level since 1946, according to the Tax Foundation.Alex Durante, its senior economist, said the country is “inching towards” the kind of tariffs last seen since the 1930s, when the Smoot-Hawley bill, among the most decried pieces of legislation in US history, introduced tariffs on thousands of goods.“With each tariff action we’re rapidly approaching a universal tariff that would be damaging to the economy,” said Durante. “Behind the scenes, I think there is probably some concern, even among some of [Trump’s] staff, that they’re rapidly approaching the point of no return.”As his administration grappled with the fallout from the inadvertent inclusion of a journalist in a group chat about secret military plans last week, the president summoned reporters to the Oval Office to pre-announce tariffs on foreign cars. “This is very exciting,” he told them.The excitement is far from universal. Prasad, at Cornell, said: “We are shifting to a world where a commonly accepted set of rules is being displaced by unilateral actions that ostensibly promote a fair trading system, but will instead create volatility and uncertainty, inhibiting the free flow of goods and financial capital across national borders.”The car tariffs would be “a hurricane-like headwind to foreign (and many US) automakers”, said Dan Ives, an analyst at Wedbush Securities, who suggested they would push up prices by as much as $10,000 in the US. “We continue to believe this is some form of negotiation and these tariffs could change by the week,” he added, “although this initial 25% tariff on autos from outside the US is almost an untenable head-scratching number for the US consumer”.Such action is also widely expected to prompt retaliation – with US exporters in the firing line.While a spokesperson for the European Commission stressed it was too early to detail the European Union’s response to actions “still not implemented” by the US, they added: “I can assure you that it will be timely, that it will be robust, that it will be well calibrated and that it will achieve the intended impact.”Trump is watching closely. As countries and markets hit by new US tariffs consider how to hit back, the president publicly warned the EU and Canada that he would hit them with “far larger” duties if they worked together on their response.Some doubt whether the federal government has enough capacity to execute the trade onslaught which Trump has said is coming. “I simply just don’t think that [the US Trade Representative] right now has enough staff to even figure out how to implement some of these tariffs,” said Durante.But after myriad false starts and much fluctuation, the lingering question – despite all the shots, warnings and vows – is not how far Trump can take his trade wars, but how far he will.The president is, at heart, a salesman. In business, he sold real estate – with mixed success. In television, and then politics, he sold stories – with extreme success.Millions of Americans bought the image he constructed on The Apprentice of himself as a phenomenally successful entrepreneur. Millions more bought his promise on the campaign trail to share this phenomenal success with the rest of the nation.Trump is no longer selling a promise, but his strategy to deliver it. He won the White House twice by using stories, sometimes unbound by truth, to bend perceptions, break norms and build support. But rhetoric – however bold, and brash – can’t change reality.The president says unleashing a wave of tariffs, and triggering an abrupt surge in costs in the US and across the world, would cause just a “little disturbance”.Should Wednesday’s action prove as drastic as billed, businesses and consumers may struggle to reconcile this description with what they encounter.Liberation Day is the moniker coined by this administration. Liability Day might prove more apt. More