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      Justice department removes disability guidelines for US businesses

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      The Department of Justice removed 11 guidelines for US businesses on compliance with the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), including some that deal with Covid-19 and masking and accessibility.The ADA was signed into law in 1990 and is the key civil rights law that protects Americans with disabilities from discrimination.Updates have already been made to the ADA.gov website to reflect the removal of the guidances. Multiple pages were removed from the ADA’s archive website, including one page that explained how retail businesses are required to have accessible features and another on customer service practices for hotel and lodging guests with disabilities.In a webpage titled “Covid-19 and the Americans with Disabilities Act”, the justice department removed five out of seven questions that were listed on the page as recently as recently as early March.The removed guidances include questions about whether the justice department issues exemptions for mask requirements and resources to help explain an employee with a disability’s rights to an employer during the Covid-19 pandemic.In a press release, the justice department called the guidance “unnecessary and outdated”.“Avoiding confusion and reducing the time spent understanding compliance may allow businesses to deliver price relief to consumers,” the press release said.The justice department said it will highlight tax incentives that will help businesses cover the costs of making accessibility improvements for customers and employees.The department referred to a 20 January executive order as the reason why it was removing the ADA guidelines.In the executive order, Donald Trump pointed vaguely at government regulation as the reason behind inflation. The White House said the Biden administration “made necessary goods and services scarce through a crushing regulatory burden and radical policies designed to weaken American production”.“Unprecedented regulatory oppression from the Biden administration is estimated to have imposed almost $50,000 in costs on the average American household,” the White House claimed in the executive order.At the time, the order did not specify what regulations the Trump administration would remove but directed agencies to evaluate business regulations.“Putting money back into the pockets of business owners helps everyone by allowing those businesses to pass on cost savings to consumers and bolster the economy,” said the acting US assistant attorney general Mac Warner in a statement.This isn’t the first time Republicans have tried to curb the ADA for the sake of making it easier on businesses. In 2017, Republicans in Congress introduced a bill that would have made it harder for Americans with disabilities to bring lawsuits against businesses and employers. More

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      US Institute of Peace sues Trump administration to block Doge takeover

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      The US Institute of Peace and many of its board members have sued the Trump administration, seeking to prevent their removal and stop Elon Musk’s so-called “department of government efficiency”, AKA Doge, from taking over and accessing the independent non-profit’s building and systems.The lawsuit filed late Tuesday in US district court in Washington describes the lengths that institute staff resorted to, including calling the police, in an effort to prevent Doge representatives and others working with the Republican administration from accessing the headquarters near the state department.An executive order last month from Donald Trump targeted the institute and three other agencies for large-scale reductions. The thinktank, which seeks to prevent and resolve conflicts, was created and funded by Congress in 1984. Board members are nominated by the president and must be confirmed by the Senate.Among the board members who filed suit is the former US ambassador to Russia John Sullivan, who was nominated to the ambassadorial role in Trump’s first term and continued to serve as ambassador under Joe Biden before being picked by Biden for the board.The lawsuit accuses the White House of illegal firings by email and said the remaining board members – the defense secretary, Pete Hegseth; the secretary of state, Marco Rubio; and the National Defense University president, Peter Garvin; – also ousted the institute’s president, George Moose.In his place, the three appointed Kenneth Jackson, an administrator with the US Agency for International Development, according to the lawsuit.In a response, government lawyers raised questions about who controlled the institute and whether the non-profit could sue the administration. It also referenced other recent court rulings about how much power the president has to remove the leaders of independent agencies.Doge staff tried multiple times to access the building Monday before successfully getting in, partly with police assistance.The institute’s staff had first called the police around 3pm Monday to report trespassing, according to the lawsuit. But the Metropolitan police department said in a statement that the institute’s acting president – seemingly a reference to Jackson – told them at around 4pm that he was being refused access to the building and there were “unauthorized individuals” inside.“Eventually, all the unauthorized individuals inside of the building complied with the acting USIP President’s request and left the building without further incident,” police said.The lawsuit says the institute’s lawyer told Doge representatives multiple times that the executive branch has no authority over the non-profit.A White House spokesperson, Anna Kelly, said: “Rogue bureaucrats will not be allowed to hold agencies hostage. The Trump administration will enforce the President’s executive authority and ensure his agencies remain accountable to the American people.”The legal action is the latest challenging the Trump administration’s efforts to dismantle US foreign assistance agencies, reduce the size of the federal government and exert control over entities created by Congress.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionA federal judge ruled Tuesday that cuts to USAid likely violated the constitution, and blocked Doge staff from making further cuts.To the top Democrats on the foreign affairs committees in Congress – the New York representative Gregory Meeks and the New Hampshire senator Jeanne Shaheen – the “hostile takeover” of the institute was one more sign that Trump and Musk want “to recklessly dismantle historic US institutions piece by piece”.The leaders of two of the other agencies listed in Trump’s February executive order – the Inter-American Foundation, which invests in businesses in Latin America and the Caribbean, and the US African Development Foundation – also have sued the administration to undo or pause the removal of most of their staff and cancellation of most of their contracts.A federal judge ruled last week that it would be legal to remove most contracts and staff from the US-Africa agency, which invested millions of dollars in African small businesses.But the judge also ordered the government to prepare Doge staff to explain which steps they were taking to maintain the agency at “the minimum presence and function required by law”. More

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      The US government has sent Columbia University a ransom note | Sheldon Pollock

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      On 15 March, Columbia University received what can only be described as the most dangerous letter in the history of higher education in America. The sender was the United States government. Like a ransom note, the government letter insists that Columbia comply with a list of Trump administration demands in order to even have a chance at recovering the $400m in federal funding for scientific research that the government canceled on 7 March.Oddly, one of the specific targets identified in the letter was Columbia’s Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies (Mesaas), a small humanities department devoted to studying the languages, cultures and history of those regions. The government demanded the Mesaas department be put into “receivership” – basically, be taken over by the University – as a precondition to further negotiations.The battle against the authoritarianism taking hold in Washington now appears to turn in part on the fate of Mesaas.Why Mesaas?The Trump campaign to destroy the independence of American higher education began when an obscure federal agency, the General Services Administration (GSA), in collaboration with the Departments of Health & Human Services and Education, coordinated the extraordinary move to rescind $400m in federal funding for scientific research at Columbia, since Columbia “has fundamentally failed to protect American students and faculty from antisemitic violence and harassment”.After threatening some 60 other universities with the same fate, on 13 March the government sent their ransom note to Columbia alone. Their conditions were to be met within seven days, and not in return for the release of the funds, but merely as “preconditions”. Further demands would then be presented for “formal negotiation” – which would not be an actual negotiation, because the GSA would continue to hold back the university’s money, like a mobster.The preconditions concern mainly the policing of student protest on campus. Their imposition likely violates both federal law and the US constitution, as Columbia law faculty have made clear. But in a startling and equally unlawful move the Government took another hostage in its letter: Mesaas. For a period of five years, Columbia must place the department in academic receivership. The university was given the same seven-day ultimatum by which to specify “a full plan, with date-certain deliverables” for enforcing the receivership.This is an unparalleled attempt to seize control over people and ideas in an American university. Universities do find it necessary sometimes to place an academic department in receivership, typically when the department’s self-governance breaks down. Normally the administration will appoint as chair a member of another department, for one academic year. Mesaas’s current self-governance is outstanding, and there have been no problems in all the years that that I chaired the department.For the United States government itself to intervene directly in faculty governance – specifying the extraordinary five-year period, and with “deliverables” on whose performance the future funding of the entire university might depend – is without precedent in the history of American higher education.Why has the government chosen to single out this department?The answer is clear: because its faculty have not voiced steadfast support for the state of Israel in their scholarship. The US government stands almost alone in the world in its unwavering ideological and financial support for the violence of the state of Israel against the people of Palestine. Most recently it has provided the consent, the justification and the arms for Israel’s destruction of Gaza. (Just this week, the destruction was relaunched, to condemnation from around the world but not from Washington, which alone gave its support.)In contrast, academic research by prominent scholars in the field of Middle Eastern studies, including those in Mesaas, has reflected deeply on the complexity of the situation and has long since questioned the versions of history and racial ideas fueling Israel’s actions. Mesaas professors ask hard but entirely legitimate questions about Israel – and our government wants to ban that.The Mesaas department played no role in organizing student protests for Gaza. But Washington has decided that in addition to dictating how a university should govern political protest, it should control how the University governs academic research –intensifying a broad attack on research on the Middle East across US universities.With its demands to essentially seize control of Mesaas, the federal government is undermining two fundamental principles of the American university: the right of academic departments to self-government and the freedom of members of the faculty to express their views, without fear, both as authorities in their fields of inquiry and as private individuals.Columbia is required to decide by Thursday 20 March how to respond to this ransom note, with the government threatening to cut off two of the university’s fingers: academic freedom and faculty governance. If the Columbia administration capitulates, it will mark the beginning of its own destruction and that of the American university as such – precisely what the American Enterprise Institute, which supplied the template for the note, has called for.The courts have so far paused more than 40 of the administration’s initiatives, though it remains unclear if the mob boss will obey. So long as we do have a functional judicial system, however, Columbia’s answer to Trump can only be: see you in court.

      Sheldon Pollock FBA is the Arvind Raghunathan professor emeritus of South Asian studies at Columbia University and former chair of the Mesaas department. He currently has no role in department or university administration and writes only in a personal capacity. More

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      What does Maga-land look like? Let me show you America’s unbeautiful suburban sprawl | Alexander Hurst

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      In 1941 Dorothy Thompson, an American journalist who reported from Germany in the lead-up to the second world war, wrote an essay for Harper’s about the personality types most likely to be attracted to Nazism, headlined “Who Goes Nazi?” “Those who haven’t anything in them to tell them what they like and what they don’t – whether it is breeding, or happiness, or wisdom, or a code, however old-fashioned or however modern, go Nazi,” Thompson wrote.Talia Lavin, a US writer, recently gave Thompson’s idea an update on Substack with an essay of her own: “Who Goes Maga?”The essay has since been taken down (I’m not sure why), but in it Lavin reimagined Thompson’s original dinner party setting, with various archetypes in attendance, offering in one or two paragraphs a brief but empathetic explanation for why each person has or has not “gone Maga”.Eventually arriving at Mr I, an academic and a frequent traveller to France with family money, Lavin wrote: “Nonetheless, he will never go Maga and would spend his days in exile even if he got cut off from the family purse … because … he is a true devotee of beauty.” He finds in Maga “a hatred of things that are beautiful and strange, as all the things he loves are. Power holds no attraction for him, only beauty.”Of course, power often tries to use aesthetics, and its own definition of beauty, to further its own purposes. Fascists and authoritarians are deeply aware of the ability of art to propagate ideas or oppose them. From architecture to rallies, Hitler and Mussolini favoured a type of massiveness, an imposing nature and uniformity to evoke a sense of the imperial eternal. Soviet aesthetics – though meant to be futurist rather than focused on a glorified past – also fell back on the idea of massiveness and uniformity to subjugate the individual and elevate the state. And, of course, all three authoritarian regimes repressed art, artists and aesthetics that were dissident.Trumpism, too, has an aesthetic. Allow me to pretentiously, subjectively, declare it not beautiful. The aesthetic of Trumpism is sprawl – which had already infected the United States long before the Maga movement metastasised.Last September I drove nearly 2,000 miles in the US with a French friend, Guillaume, zigzagging our way from DC to New Orleans and tracing, in part, the footsteps of Alexis de Tocqueville. (“It might be our last opportunity to observe democracy in America,” I had said to him.) Through his non-American eyes, I saw even more poignantly the ways the physical manifestation of Hannah Arendt’s “atomisation” are scarred into the suburban and rural US landscape itself.Like fish in water, I wonder if Americans are even aware of how they swim in it. The hours-long stretches of chain stores in single-storey, flat-topped buildings. The cluster of gas stations, with functionally and aesthetically similar convenience stores selling rows and rows of sugary food and drinks. The big box chain stores, some of them matryoshka dolls that house other chains within – rectangular islands of stuff surrounded by parking lots leading to other little islands of fast food, also surrounded by parking lots, filled with rows and rows of the most enormous pickup trucks imaginable.And then, just as it starts to dwindle, another on-ramp/off-ramp, and the whole shebang starts all over again, until you’ve cycled through all of the possible chain permutations and you begin to repeat. Wherever there is grass, it will be impeccably mowed.No matter where you are in America’s 3.8m sq miles, with its 340 million inhabitants, the sprawl will have followed the same driving logic as the chains it hosts – an utterly nondescript, completely indistinguishable look, feel and experience. Somehow, there is always still traffic on these six-lane roads, a trailing line of enormous vehicles that require parking lots that spill out like muffin tops, and with double-wide parking spaces. Everything about sprawl slumps outwards, like warmed jelly that can no longer hold its shape. There is no height except for the height of the signs advertising the chains; those rise several storeys into the sky, enough to be visible from the highway.View image in fullscreenSomewhere along the line, the American Dream became to live alone, surrounded by all of this, rather than living in connection with other people.In somewhat cryptic lines, the poet Keats put forward a nexus that goes beyond the subjective nature of what we, individually, find aesthetically pleasing. “Beauty is truth, truth beauty. That is all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know,” he wrote. He was hardly the only one to interrogate the two at the same time. Plato and Plotinus sought to link beauty to an equally ineffable truth that lingered somewhere beyond our material reality; Kant, too, placed beauty beyond taste, as a disinterested thing that radiated outward. In theology, Saint Augustine and Hans Urs Von Balthasar draw the two back to the same divine origin, as critical components to any human attempt to understand the transcendent.And if that’s all too mystical for you, the British theoretical physicist Tom McLeish argues: “As indications of the road forward rather than destinations achieved, beautiful experiments and theoretical ideas can, and even must, be celebrated, their aesthetic appeal unashamedly enjoyed.”I would add a third vector to the one between beauty and truth: art, which in his 1934 book, Art As Experience, John Dewey sees as something that is inherent in the everyday experience of life rather than something necessarily pushed into museums. As long as that living is authentic. “Experience in the degree in which it is experience is heightened vitality,” writes Dewey.Perhaps there is something authentic to suburban sprawl when experienced as spectator and anthropologist. But as everyday life, sprawl is deadening, ugly, fake. Devoid of art, beauty and truth alike. The United States has long bought into the idea that freedom is endless expansion. But slouching across land simply because it is there uplifts neither the land nor the people on it. In this instance in particular, abundance did a disservice to the US by drawing it into an absence of experience. What surprise that a moribund ideology would take root in physical spaces that radiate the peculiar desolation of too much?Given the number of artists, photographers, cinematographers and architects who have been willing to serve nefarious political movements, it would be simplistic for me to claim that artists are somehow immune to them. But art is an attempt to capture – and convey – something true about the world, and the human emotional experience of it. When the rational world has committed itself to a path that leads to destruction, perhaps those dedicated to beauty can, with what Keats called a “negative capability” to perceive truth, bring us back to both.

      Alexander Hurst is a Guardian Europe correspondent More

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      Trump signs order to shift disaster preparations from Fema to state and local governments

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      Donald Trump on Tuesday signed an executive order that seeks to shift responsibility for disaster preparations to state and local governments, deepening the president’s drive to overhaul the Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema).The order, first previewed by the White House on 10 March, calls for a review of all infrastructure, continuity and preparedness and response policies to update and simplify federal approaches.It said “common sense” investments by state and local governments to address risks ranging from wildfires to hurricanes and cyber attacks would enhance national security, but did not detail what they were or how they would be funded.“Preparedness is most effectively owned and managed at the state, local, and even individual levels, supported by a competent, accessible, and efficient federal government,” the order said. “When states are empowered to make smart infrastructure choices, taxpayers benefit.”The order calls for revising critical infrastructure policy to better reflect assessed risks instead of an “all-hazards approach”, the White House said in a fact sheet on the order.It creates a “National Risk Register” to identify, describe and measure risk to US national infrastructure and streamlines federal functions to help states work with Washington more easily.Trump in January ordered a review of Fema that stopped short of shuttering the country’s lead disaster response agency and a White House official said the latest order was not aimed at closing Fema.Rob Moore, the director of the flooding solutions team at the Natural Resources Defense Council, accused the Trump administration of systematically weakening US disaster readiness.“From day one, the Trump administration has been eroding the nation’s capacity to plan for, respond to, and recover from disasters,” Moore told Reuters.“They’ve overseen the dismissal of 1,000 Fema staff – who won’t be there to respond to a flood or wildfire – and are withholding funding from local and state governments who are doing risk reduction projects and more.“Shana Udvardy, a senior researcher at the Union of Concerned Scientists, said she was concerned the order marked “another dangerous step” that would leave communities with fewer resources to prepare for future disasters.“The executive order shifts most of the responsibility for disaster preparedness to state and local governments, asking them to make more expensive infrastructure investments without outlining the federal role in that,” she said. More

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      Trump releases thousands of pages on John F Kennedy assassination

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      The Trump administration on Tuesday released thousands of pages of files concerning the assassination of John F Kennedy, the 35th president who was shot dead in Dallas, Texas, in November 1963.“So people have been waiting decades for this,” Donald Trump told reporters on Monday while visiting the Kennedy Center, “and I’ve instructed my people that are responsible, lots of different people, put together by [director of national intelligence] Tulsi Gabbard, and that’s going to be released tomorrow.”Experts doubted the new trove of information will change the underlying facts of the case, that Lee Harvey Oswald opened fire at Kennedy from a window at a school book deposit warehouse as the presidential motorcade passed by Dealey Plaza in Dallas.The digital documents included PDFs of memos, including one with the heading “secret” that was a typed account with handwritten notes of a 1964 interview by a Warren Commission researcher who questioned Lee Wigren, a CIA employee, about inconsistencies in material provided to the commission by the state department and the CIA about marriages between Soviet women and American men.The documents also included references to various conspiracy theories suggesting that Oswald left the Soviet Union in 1962 intent on assassinating the popular young president.Department of Defense documents from 1963 covered the cold war of the early 1960s and the US involvement in Latin America, trying to thwart Cuban leader Fidel Castro’s support of communist forces in other countries.The documents suggest that Castro would not go so far as to provoke a war with the United States or escalate to the point “that would seriously and immediately endanger the Castro regime”.“It appears more likely that Castro might intensify his support of subversive forces in Latin America,” the document reads.Trump signed an order shortly after taking office in January related to the release, prompting the US Federal Bureau of Investigation to find thousands of new documents related to the Kennedy assassination in Dallas.“President Trump is ushering in a new era of maximum transparency,” Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, said in a post on X.ABC News reported that Trump’s announcement prompted an all-night scramble at the justice department.John F Kennedy was killed during a motorcade through Dallas on 22 November 1963. Oswald was killed two days later by Jack Ruby, a Dallas nightclub owner.Ever since, Kennedy’s death has been the subject of immense scholarship, cultural commentary and spiraling conspiracy theories.Files have been released before, including three releases in 2017, when Trump was first in power. One document released then was a 1975 CIA memo that said a thorough search of records showed Oswald was not in any way connected to the intelligence agency, as posited by numerous authors and hobbyists.Trump’s latest JFK files release comes weeks after the death at 93 of Clint Hill, a Secret Service agent who leapt onto Kennedy’s car, a moment of history famously captured on film by Abraham Zapruder, a home movie enthusiast.Trump survived an assassination attempt of his own in Pennsylvania last year, during a campaign event. In office, he has also promised to release files on the assassinations of Kennedy’s brother, the US attorney general and New York senator Robert F Kennedy, and the civil rights leader Martin Luther King, both in 1968.Robert F Kennedy’s son, Robert F Kennedy Jr, is now US health secretary. He has voiced conspiracy theories, including saying he thinks his father was probably killed by the CIA and his uncle, the president, certainly was.King’s family has expressed the fear that genuine FBI attempts to smear him will again be brought to the light.Last month, directed by Trump, the US justice department released files about Jeffrey Epstein, the financier, convicted sex offender and Trump associate who killed himself in prison in New York in 2019. Aggressively touted and targeted to rightwing social media influencers, the release proved a damp squib.On Monday, Larry Sabato, the director of the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia and the author of a book on Kennedy, told Reuters: “People expecting big things are almost certain to be disappointed” by the new files release.Reuters contributed reporting More

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      Trump administration briefing: nearly 25,000 fired workers to be rehired; USAid shutdown likely violated constitution

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      Donald Trump’s presidential administration in court filings has for the first time acknowledged that it fired nearly 25,000 recently hired workers – and said agencies were working to bring all of them back after a judge ruled that their terminations were likely illegal.The filings made in Baltimore’s federal courthouse late Monday include statements from officials at 18 agencies, all of whom said the reinstated probationary workers were being placed on administrative leave at least temporarily.The mass firings, part of Trump’s broader purge of the federal workforce carried out by the so-called “department of government efficiency” (Doge) led by billionaire businessman Elon Musk, were widely reported. But the court filings are the first full accounting of the terminations by the administration.Here are the key US politics story from Monday:Trump administration rehiring nearly 25,000 fired workers after court orderIn the filings late Monday, agency officials said they had either reinstated all of the fired employees or were working to do so – but warned that bringing back large numbers of workers had imposed significant burdens and caused confusion and turmoil.The officials also noted that an appeals court ruling reversing Bredar’s order would allow agencies to again fire the workers, subjecting them to multiple changes in their employment status in a matter of weeks.Read the full storyChief justice rebukes Trump for call to impeach judge hearing deportation caseJohn Roberts, the chief justice of the US supreme court, delivered a rare rebuke on Tuesday of Donald Trump after the US president demanded the impeachment of a federal judge who had issued an adverse ruling against the administration blocking the deportation of hundreds of alleged Venezuelan gang members.Read the full storyMusk and Doge’s USAid shutdown likely violated US constitution, judge rulesA federal judge on Tuesday ruled that Elon Musk and the so-called “department of government efficiency” (Doge) likely violated the US constitution by shutting down USAid, ordering the Trump administration to reverse some of the actions it took to dismantle the agency.Read the full storyVladimir Putin agrees to 30-day halt to attacks on Ukraine’s energy gridVladimir Putin has agreed to a limited ceasefire that would stop Russia targeting Ukraine’s energy infrastructure after a high-stakes phone call with Donald Trump.But the Russian leader declined to commit to a 30-day full ceasefire, a plan pitched by Trump that Ukraine agreed to last week, denting the US president’s hope of bringing a quick end to hostilities.Read the full story‘I am a political prisoner’: Mahmoud Khalil says he’s being targeted for political beliefsIn his first public remarks since being detained by federal immigration authorities, Palestinian activist and recent Columbia graduate, Mahmoud Khalil, spoke out against the conditions facing immigrants in US detention and said he was being targeted by the Trump administration for his political beliefs.“I am a political prisoner,” he said in a statement provided exclusively to the Guardian.Read the full storyTrump waging ‘sickening’ psychological war, deported Venezuelan’s lawyer saysA lawyer for one of the Venezuelan immigrants sent from the US to a notorious mega prison in El Salvador has accused the Trump administration of waging a “sickening” campaign of psychological warfare against asylum seekers and migrants.Read the full storyTrump fires FTC’s only two Democrats Donald Trump fired the two Democratic commissioners on the US Federal Trade Commission on Tuesday, further blurring the lines of bipartisanship at regulatory agencies. The fired commissioners are confirmed to be Alvaro Bedoya and Rebecca Kelly Slaughter. Bedoya confirmed his firing in a post on social media.“I’m a Commissioner at the Federal Trade Commission. The President just illegally fired me,” he wrote. “The FTC is an independent agency founded 111 years ago to fight fraudsters and monopolists, our staff is unafraid of the Martin Shkrelis and Jeff Bezos of the world. They take them to court and they win.“Now, the President wants the FTC to be a lap dog for his golfing buddies.”Read the full storyDemocrat vows to ‘stop Doge’s illegal power grab’ at non-profit peace instituteA senior Democratic congressman vowed to “stop Doge’s illegal power grab” after operatives from Elon Musk’s so-called “department of government efficiency” gained entry to the US Institute of Peace in Washington – an independent organization established by Congress – and forced out its leaders.Read the full storyWhite House sparks uncertainty over fate of two major California national monumentsThe White House is fueling speculation over plans to eliminate two large national monuments in California established by former president Joe Biden. Questions about the monuments’ status arose on 15 March when a White House fact sheet dated 14 March removed references to them.Read the full storyTesla stake is no longer Elon Musk’s most valuable asset amid stock market sell-offElon Musk’s vast stake in Tesla is no longer his most valuable asset as the electric car company continues to endure a sharp stock market sell-off. His SpaceX stake is worth an estimated $147bn, about $20bn more than his shares in Tesla after the carmaker’s shares halved since December.Tesla has come under stark pressure on the market since Donald Trump’s inauguration, as it became clear that much of Musk’s attention is on his work at the so-called “department of government efficiency” (Doge), and the new administration’s tariff policies injected uncertainty into the economy.Read the full storyWhat else happened today:

      Trump escalated his rhetoric against the judicial branch, saying that a federal judge who attempted to block his deportation of suspected Venezuelan gang members should be impeached.

      Despite the rhetoric, impeaching and removing federal judges is exceedingly rare, and Republicans don’t appear to have the votes in the Senate.

      Claudia Sheinbaum, Mexico’s president, asked the Trump administration not to deport their citizens to a third country, or detain them in Guantánamo Bay.

      More documents related to the assassination of John F Kennedy Jr should be released today, Trump told reporters on Monday. More

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      US judge blocks Trump’s ban on trans people serving in the military

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      A federal judge blocked Donald Trump’s executive order banning transgender people from military service on Tuesday.US district judge Ana Reyes in Washington DC ruled that the president’s order to exclude transgender troops from military service likely violates their constitutional rights.She delayed her order by three days to give the administration time to appeal.“The court knows that this opinion will lead to heated public debate and appeals. In a healthy democracy, both are positive outcomes,” Reyes wrote. “We should all agree, however, that every person who has answered the call to serve deserves our gratitude and respect.”The White House didn’t immediately respond to a message seeking comment.Army reserves 2nd Lt Nicolas Talbott, one of 14 transgender active-duty service members named as plaintiffs in the lawsuit, said he was holding his breath as he waited to find out if he would be separated from the military next week.“This is such a sigh of relief,” he said. “This is all I’ve ever wanted to do. This is my dream job, and I finally have it. And I was so terrified that I was about to lose it.”The judge issued a preliminary injunction requested by attorneys for six transgender people who are active-duty service members and two others seeking to join the military.On 27 January, Trump signed an executive order that claims the sexual identity of transgender service members “conflicts with a soldier’s commitment to an honorable, truthful, and disciplined lifestyle, even in one’s personal life” and is harmful to military readiness.In response to the order, Pete Hegseth, the defense secretary, issued a policy that presumptively disqualifies people with gender dysphoria from military service. Gender dysphoria is the distress that a person feels because their assigned gender and gender identity don’t match. The medical condition has been linked to depression and suicidal thoughts.Plaintiffs’ attorneys contend Trump’s order violates transgender people’s rights to equal protection under the fifth amendment.Government lawyers argue that military officials have broad discretion to decide how to assign and deploy service members without judicial interference.Reyes said she did not take lightly her decision to issue an injunction blocking Trump’s order, noting: “Judicial overreach is no less pernicious than executive overreach.” But, she said, it was also the responsibility of each branch of government to provide checks and balances for the others, and the court “therefore must act to uphold the equal protection rights that the military defends every day”.Thousands of transgender people serve in the military, but they represent less than 1% of the total number of active-duty service members.In 2016, a defense department policy permitted transgender people to serve openly in the military. During Trump’s first term in the White House, the Republican issued a directive to ban transgender service members. The supreme court allowed the ban to take effect. Former president Joe Biden, a Democrat, scrapped it when he took office.Hegseth’s 26 February policy says service members or applicants for military service who have “a current diagnosis or history of, or exhibit symptoms consistent with, gender dysphoria are incompatible with the high mental and physical standards necessary for military service”.The plaintiffs who sued to block Trump’s order include an army reserves platoon leader from Pennsylvania, an army major who was awarded a Bronze Star for service in Afghanistan, and a Sailor of the Year award winner serving in the navy.“The cruel irony is that thousands of transgender servicemembers have sacrificed – some risking their lives – to ensure for others the very equal protection rights the military ban seeks to deny them,” Reyes wrote.Their attorneys, from the National Center for Lesbian Rights and GLAD Law, said transgender troops “seek nothing more than the opportunity to continue dedicating their lives to defending the Nation”.“Yet these accomplished servicemembers are now subject to an order that says they must be separated from the military based on a characteristic that has no bearing on their proven ability to do the job,” the plaintiffs’ attorneys wrote. “This is a stark and reckless reversal of policy that denigrates honorable transgender servicemembers, disrupts unit cohesion, and weakens our military.” More