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    Meta hid harms to children from VR products, whistleblowers allege

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    A group of six whistleblowers have come forward with allegations of a cover-up of harm to children on Meta’s virtual reality devices and apps. They say the social media company, which owns Facebook, Instagram, and offers a line of VR headsets and games, deleted or doctored internal safety research that showed children being exposed to grooming, sexual harassment and violence in its 3D realms.“Meta knew that underage children were using its products, but figured, ‘Hey, kids drive engagement,’ and it was making them cash,” Jason Sattizahn, one of the whistleblowers who worked on the company’s VR research, said in a statement. “Meta has compromised their internal teams to manipulate research and straight-up erase data that they don’t like.”Sattizahn and the other whistleblowers, all current or former Meta employees, have disclosed these findings and a trove of documents to Congress, according to the Washington Post, which first reported the allegations. Sattizahn and Cayce Savage, who was Meta’s lead researcher on youth user experience for VR, will appear before the US Senate judiciary subcommittee on privacy, technology and the law on Tuesday.Dani Lever, a Meta spokesperson, said the company has approved 180 studies related to its VR Reality Labs since 2022, which include research on youth safety and wellbeing.“These few examples are being stitched together to fit a predetermined and false narrative,” she said, adding that Meta has introduced features to its VR products to limit unwanted contact and supervision tools for parents.The whistleblower allegations made public on Monday claim that on Meta’s VR products, the company could have done more to ensure children’s safety. The whistleblowers say company managers instructed staff to avoid research that might show evidence of child harm in virtual reality.In one instance, a researcher was reportedly told to “swallow that ick”.In another instance, a researcher was allegedly told to delete information from an interview they had conducted with a German family, according to the Washington Post. During that interview, a teenage boy told the researcher that his brother, who was under the age of 10, had “frequently encountered strangers” in Meta’s VR and that “adults had sexually propositioned his little brother”.The allegations arise as a steady procession of former Meta employees have come forward to criticize the company for not doing enough to protect children from harm on its social media products. Lawmakers have also repeatedly grilled Meta executives for pushing content to youth that promotes bullying, drug abuse and self-harm.At one congressional hearing in January 2024, Republican senator Josh Hawley prodded Mark Zuckerberg, Meta’s chief executive, into publicly apologizing.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“I’m sorry for everything you have all been through,” Zuckerberg said at the time. “No one should go through the things that your families have suffered, and this is why we invest so much and we are going to continue doing industry-wide efforts to make sure no one has to go through the things your families have had to suffer.”Marsha Blackburn, a Republican senator from Tennessee, said the revelations about Meta’s VR products show Congress needs to pass legislation putting guardrails on social media companies.“Instead of heeding serious concerns about widespread child harm on their platforms, Meta silenced employees who dared to come forward, buried egregious evidence, and shamelessly used innocent kids as pawns to line their pockets,” Blackburn said. “These whistleblowers should be commended for having the courage to expose Meta’s disgusting web of lies.”The six whistleblowers are represented by the legal nonprofit Whistleblower Aid. They are scheduled to testify before the subcommittee on Tuesday.The current and former Meta employees have also filed a detailed disclosure to Congress, the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Federal Trade Commission. More

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      Trump plans to sign executive order to rename Pentagon to ‘Department of War’ – as it happened

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      Donald Trump plans to sign an executive order on Friday authorizing the US department of defense to refer to itself as to the “Department of War”, two people familiar with the matter told the Guardian on Thursday.The move, to use a name Trump called “much more appropriate” in remarks last week, would restore a name used until 1947, when Congress merged the previously independent war department and navy department with the air force into a single organization, known as the National Military Establishment. In 1949, Congress changed the name of the National Military Establishment to the Department of Defense, and made the army, navy and air force secretaries subordinate to a single, cabinet-level secretary of defense.A draft White House fact sheet on Trump’s rebranding initiative implicitly acknowledges that only Congress can formally change the department’s name, saying that the order would authorize the defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, to propose legislation that would make the change permanent. In the meantime, the order instructs Hegseth and the department to start using “Department of War” as a secondary title in official correspondence, public communications and executive branch documents. The order also authorizes Hegseth to refer to himself as the “secretary of war”.When Trump was asked by a reporter last week how he plans to rename the department, since that would require an act of Congress, Trump said: “We’re just going to do it. I’m sure Congress will go along, if we need that, I don’t think we even need that.”“It just to me, seems like a just a much more appropriate,” he added. “The other is, ‘defense’ is too defensive. And we want to be defensive, but we want to be offensive, too if we have to be. So, it just sounded to me better.”Trump’s embrace of the old name, which seems to put to rest longstanding claims that he was ever the “antiwar candidate” for the presidency, comes days after he ordered the military to carry out the extrajudicial killing of 11 suspected drug smugglers.During his 2015 campaign for the Republican presidential nomination, Trump himself rejected the perception that he was anti-war by proclaiming that he was, in fact, “much more militaristic” than even George W Bush.Four years earlier, when he was flirting with a run for the presidency against Barack Obama, Trump had demanded US military intervention in Libya.“I can’t believe what our country is doing,” Trump told viewers of his YouTube video blog on 28 February 2011, two weeks before the Obama administration got US security council authorization “to protect civilians” in Libya. “Gaddafi in Libya is killing thousands of people, nobody knows how bad it is, and we’re sitting around we have soldiers all have the Middle East, and we’re not bringing them in to stop this horrible carnage and that’s what it is: it’s a carnage.”Five months later, after the US-led air campaign had forced Gaddafi from power in Libya – and Trump had decided not to challenge Obama for the presidency – the star of The Apprentice posted another YouTube clip, complaining that the administration should have waited longer to aid the Libyan rebels, to force them to agree to surrender half of the country’s oil reserves.“What we should’ve done is we should’ve asked the rebels when they came to us – and they came to us, they were being routed by Qaddafi, they were being decimated – we should’ve said, ‘We’ll help you, but we want 50% of your oil,’” Trump had said. “They would’ve said, ‘How about 75%?’”This brings our live coverage of the second Trump administration to a close for the day, but we will return on Friday. Among the day’s developments:

      The health secretary, Robert F Kennedy Jr, fended off calls for his resignation and spread vaccine misinformation during a contentious Senate hearing.

      Susan Monarez, the ousted CDC director, rejected Kennedy’s claim that she had lied about having been pressured to rubber-stamp vaccine recommendations from a panel of his anti-vaccine allies, and offered to repeat her claim under oath.

      Donald Trump plans to sign an executive order on Friday authorizing the US Department of Defense to refer to itself as the “department of war”, two people familiar with the matter told the Guardian.

      Trump hosted an array of tech industry leaders for dinner in the White House state dinning room on Thursday night, including Mark Zuckerberg, Tim Cook, Bill Gates, Sam Altman and Sergey Brin, but his former first buddy, Elon Musk, was a notable absence.

      As Trump accuses Federal Reserve governor Lisa Cook of criminal mortgage fraud, for allegedly obtaining more than one mortgage on a home designated as her primary residence, at least three members of his cabinet have multiple primary-residence mortgages, ProPublica reports.

      The justice department has launched a criminal mortgage fraud inquiry into Federal Reserve governor Lisa Cook and issued grand jury subpoenas out of both Georgia and Michigan.

      New York’s attorney general moved to have the state’s highest court reinstate Trump’s staggering civil fraud penalty, appealing a lower court decision that slashed the potential half-billion dollar penalty to zero.
      As we reported earlier, during a contentious Senate hearing on Thursday, the health secretary, Robert F Kennedy Jr, was asked twice whether he agreed with Retsef Levi, an MIT professor the secretary appointed to the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP), who has said that mRNA Covid vaccines “cause serious harm including death, especially among young people”.Kennedy said that he did agree with that statement, which Levi made in a video he posted on his X account in 2023, and has pinned at the top to this day.“I am filming this video to share my strong conviction that at this point in time all Covid mRNA vaccination program[s] should stop immediately,” Levi said in the video, “because of the mounting and indisputable evidence that they cause unprecedented level[s] of harm, including the death of young people and children.”Levi, who is Israeli, cited what he called evidence for this conclusion based on his reading of statistics from Israel’s EMS during its vaccination program in 2021. But he offered no scientific or medical evidence to support his claim, which is a fringe view not shared by the overwhelming majority or vaccine experts and medical doctors.It is worth stressing that both of the senators who asked Kennedy about that expert’s claim – Michael Bennet, a Democratic senator, and Thom Tillis, a Republican senator – referred to the new vaccine advisory board member as “Dr Levi”. That might have led some viewers to assume that Levi is a medical doctor, but he is not. He is a professor at MIT’s school of management, with a doctorate in operations research and no expertise in the science of infectious diseases or vaccines.It is unclear how Levi’s background qualifies him for a position on a vaccine panel responsible for making vaccine recommendations and whose members are supposed to be “medical and public health experts”.Donald Trump hosted an array of tech industry leaders for dinner in the White House state dinning room on Thursday night, including Mark Zuckerberg, Tim Cook, Bill Gates, Sam Altman and Sergey Brin, but his former first buddy, Elon Musk, was a notable absence.The event, which was to have been held on the newly paved-over Rose Garden, until a forecast of thunderstorms forced the event indoors, began with televised words of praise for the president from several of the assembled tech leaders, and a brief series of questions from reporters.On his social network X, formerly known as Twitter, Musk responded to a question about why he was not at the White House by writing: “I was invited, but unfortunately could not attend. A representative of mine will be there.”Musk did not say who his representative was, but one of the guests was Jared Isaacman, a billionaire private astronaut who had been Musk’s pick to lead Nasa, until his nomination was withdrawn as Musk’s relations with Trump frayed.Donald Trump plans to sign an executive order on Friday authorizing the US department of defense to refer to itself as to the “Department of War”, two people familiar with the matter told the Guardian on Thursday.The move, to use a name Trump called “much more appropriate” in remarks last week, would restore a name used until 1947, when Congress merged the previously independent war department and navy department with the air force into a single organization, known as the National Military Establishment. In 1949, Congress changed the name of the National Military Establishment to the Department of Defense, and made the army, navy and air force secretaries subordinate to a single, cabinet-level secretary of defense.A draft White House fact sheet on Trump’s rebranding initiative implicitly acknowledges that only Congress can formally change the department’s name, saying that the order would authorize the defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, to propose legislation that would make the change permanent. In the meantime, the order instructs Hegseth and the department to start using “Department of War” as a secondary title in official correspondence, public communications and executive branch documents. The order also authorizes Hegseth to refer to himself as the “secretary of war”.When Trump was asked by a reporter last week how he plans to rename the department, since that would require an act of Congress, Trump said: “We’re just going to do it. I’m sure Congress will go along, if we need that, I don’t think we even need that.”“It just to me, seems like a just a much more appropriate,” he added. “The other is, ‘defense’ is too defensive. And we want to be defensive, but we want to be offensive, too if we have to be. So, it just sounded to me better.”Trump’s embrace of the old name, which seems to put to rest longstanding claims that he was ever the “antiwar candidate” for the presidency, comes days after he ordered the military to carry out the extrajudicial killing of 11 suspected drug smugglers.During his 2015 campaign for the Republican presidential nomination, Trump himself rejected the perception that he was anti-war by proclaiming that he was, in fact, “much more militaristic” than even George W Bush.Four years earlier, when he was flirting with a run for the presidency against Barack Obama, Trump had demanded US military intervention in Libya.“I can’t believe what our country is doing,” Trump told viewers of his YouTube video blog on 28 February 2011, two weeks before the Obama administration got US security council authorization “to protect civilians” in Libya. “Gaddafi in Libya is killing thousands of people, nobody knows how bad it is, and we’re sitting around we have soldiers all have the Middle East, and we’re not bringing them in to stop this horrible carnage and that’s what it is: it’s a carnage.”Five months later, after the US-led air campaign had forced Gaddafi from power in Libya – and Trump had decided not to challenge Obama for the presidency – the star of The Apprentice posted another YouTube clip, complaining that the administration should have waited longer to aid the Libyan rebels, to force them to agree to surrender half of the country’s oil reserves.“What we should’ve done is we should’ve asked the rebels when they came to us – and they came to us, they were being routed by Qaddafi, they were being decimated – we should’ve said, ‘We’ll help you, but we want 50% of your oil,’” Trump had said. “They would’ve said, ‘How about 75%?’”As Donald Trump accuses Federal Reserve governor Lisa Cook of criminal mortgage fraud, for allegedly obtaining more than one mortgage on a home designated her primary residence, at least three members of his cabinet have multiple primary-residence mortgages, ProPublica reports.Trump’s transportation secretary, Sean Duffy, his labor secretary, Lori Chavez-DeRemer, and his Environmental Protection Agency administrator, Lee Zeldin, all have primary-residence mortgages on at least two properties, according to financial disclosure forms, real estate records and publicly available mortgage data provided by Hunterbrook Media to ProPublica.Real estate experts told the non-profit investigative outlet that claiming primary residences on different mortgages at the same time is often legal and rarely prosecuted.But Trump has called for the prosecution of Cook, the Biden-nominated central banker, for allegedly having multiple primary-residence mortgages, and leveled the same charge against Adam Schiff, the Democratic senator who led his first impeachment, and Letitia James, the New York attorney general who brought a successful civil fraud case against Trump.Two days after an appeals court reinstated a Democratic member of Federal Trade Commission, ruling that her attempted firing by Donald Trump was unlikely to survive her legal challenge, the justice department asked the supreme court to let Trump remove her again as the legal battle continues.The commissioner, Rebecca Slaughter, posted an image of herself back at work on Thursday, with the caption: “Back at my desk, back online, and have already moved to reinstitute the Click to Cancel Rule. Hope a majority of the Commission will join me – all Americans deserve to be protected from abusive subscription traps.”The FTC’s “click-to-cancel” rule, which would have required businesses to make it easy for consumers to cancel unwanted subscriptions and memberships, was adopted in October after the agency received more than 16,000 comments from consumers enraged about having to jump through hoops to cancel their enrollments.Implementation of the rule was delayed by the FTC in May, two months after Trump removed Slaughter and another Democratic commissioner.A federal appeals court vacated the rule on procedural grounds in July, just days before it was set to go into effect. Seven Democratic senators wrote to the new FTC chair that month, urging him to have the commission fix the procedural flaws identified by the court and reissue the rule.Susan Monarez, the ousted CDC director, just rejected Robert F Kennedy Jr’s claim, during a contentious senate hearing on Thursday, that she had lied about having been pressured to rubber-stamp vaccine recommendations from a panel of his anti-vaccine allies.In an account of her firing published on the Wall Street Journal opinion page, Monarez wrote that, at a meeting with Kennedy on 25 August:
      I was told to preapprove the recommendations of a vaccine advisory panel newly filled with people who have publicly expressed antivaccine rhetoric. That panel’s next meeting is scheduled for Sept. 18-19. It is imperative that the panel’s recommendations aren’t rubber-stamped but instead are rigorously and scientifically reviewed before being accepted or rejected.
      When Kennedy was confronted with that accusation by Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat, at the Senate hearing, he denied that he gave Monarez that order.“No, I did not say that to her, Kennedy said. “And I never had a private meeting with her”, he added. “So there are witnesses to every meeting that we had, and all of those witnesses will say I never said that.”Kennedy was not asked if anyone else at the meeting did issue such an order to Monarez, which would be consistent with her account.Instead, Wyden asked Kennedy if Monarez was “lying today to the Wall Street Journal and the American people”.“Yes sir”, Kennedy replied.In a statement responding to Kennedy’s testimony, Monarez’s lawyers, Mark Zaid and Abbe Lowell, wrote: “Secretary Kennedy’s claims are false, and at times, patently ridiculous. Dr. Monarez stands by what she wrote in her op-ed in The Wall Street Journal, would repeat it all under oath and continues to support the vision she outlined at her confirmation hearing that science will control her decisions.”Senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren have already called for Monarez to be called to testify before the senate, which would be under oath.Hawaii announced today that it would join a new public health alliance formed by a trio of west coast states in response to the turmoil at the CDC.On Wednesday, the California governor Gavin Newsom announced that his state had partnered with Washington and Oregon to form the West Coast Health Alliance, which they said would provide residents with science-based immunization guidance as the nation’s top public health agency – and a slew of red states – roll back long-standing recommendations medical experts and researchers have credited with limiting the spread of infectious diseases.“By joining the West Coast Health Alliance, we’re giving Hawaii’s people the same consistent, evidence-based guidance they can trust to keep their families and neighbors safe,”Josh Green, theDemocratic governor of Hawaii, said in a statement.Green, an emergency room physician, said a science-driven approach was “critical as we all go forward into an era with severe threats from infectious diseases”.The Democratic governors of California, Oregon and Washington unveiled the new alliance on the same day that Florida’s Republican surgeon general said the state would end all vaccine mandates for schoolchildren.The justice department has launched a criminal mortgage fraud inquiry into Federal Reserve governor Lisa Cook and issued grand jury subpoenas out of both Georgia and Michigan, according to documents seen by Reuters and a source familiar with the matter.The investigation, which followed a criminal referral from Federal Housing Finance Agency director Bill Pulte, is being conducted by Ed Martin, who was tapped by attorney general Pam Bondi as a special assistant US attorney to assist with mortgage fraud investigations involving public officials, along with the US attorneys’ offices in the northern district of Georgia and the eastern district of Michigan, according to the person, who spoke anonymously since the matter is not public.Pulte, who was appointed by Trump, has accused Cook of committing fraud by listing more than one property as a primary residence when she applied for mortgages, potentially to secure lower interest rates. Cook owns properties in Michigan, Georgia and Massachusetts.Trump terminated Cook over Pulte’s allegations, prompting her to file a lawsuit challenging his effort to oust her. Cook’s lawyer, prominent Washington attorney Abbe Lowell, said the DoJ was scrambling to invent new justifications for Trump’s overreach in firing the Fed governor.“He wants cover, and they are providing it. The questions over how Governor Cook described her properties from time to time, which we have started to address in the pending case and will continue to do so, are not fraud, but it takes nothing for this DOJ to undertake a new politicized investigation, and they appear to have just done it again,” Lowell said.The case, which will likely end up before the supreme court, has ramifications for the Fed’s ability to set interest rate policy without regard to politicians’ wishes, widely seen as critical to any central bank’s ability to keep inflation under control.Trump has demanded that the US central bank cut rates immediately and aggressively, berating Fed chair Jerome Powell for his stewardship of monetary policy. The central bank is expected to deliver a rate cut at its 16-17 September meeting.In one of her recent legal filings challenging Trump’s actions, Cook said she listed mortgages on three properties on forms submitted to the White House and Senate in the vetting process for her appointment to the Fed in 2022. Any inconsistencies were known when she was confirmed and cannot give Trump grounds to fire her now.Cook is the third public official to be targeted in a criminal investigation over mortgage fraud allegations. Martin, who also presides over the “Weaponization Working Group” and serves as pardon attorney, is also pursuing criminal investigations into Democratic senator Adam Schiff as well as New York attorney general Letitia James.There are also grand juries convened in those two cases, which started prior to Martin’s new appointment as a special assistant US attorney, according to the source and documents seen by Reuters.The United States will phase out some security assistance for European countries near the border with Russia, two sources familiar with the matter have told Reuters.The plan comes in the broader context of Donald Trump’s so-called “America First” foreign policy, in which his administration has slashed foreign aid and is pushing European countries to cover more of the cost of their own security.The move, first reported by the Financial Times (paywall), comes as Russia’s war with Ukraine has heightened concerns in Europe about regional instability and the possibility of further aggression from Moscow. Key recipients of the funding include Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania.Congress has approved funding for the assistance plan, which comes under the Department of Defense, but only through the end of September 2026. Trump’s administration has not asked that the program be extended, according to the FT report and confirmed to Reuters by one of its sources.Asked for comment, a White House official referred to an order Trump signed shortly after beginning his second term in January.“On day one of his second term, President Trump signed an executive order to reevaluate and realign United States foreign aid,” the official said.“This action has been coordinated with European countries in line with the executive order and the president’s longstanding emphasis on ensuring Europe takes more responsibility for its own defense,” the official said.Senator Jeanne Shaheen, the top Democrat on the Senate foreign relations committee, called the decision misguided.“It makes no sense at all to undercut our allies’ defense readiness at the same time that we’re asking them to step up their own capabilities, and it puts American troops at risk when we slash the training of the allied soldiers they would fight alongside,” she said in a statement. More

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      in US Politics

      Trump set to host US tech leaders at Rose Garden – minus Elon Musk

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      When Donald Trump hosts leaders from the US’ biggest tech companies at a lavish Rose Garden dinner on Thursday night, there will be one notable absence. Elon Musk, once inseparable from Trump and a constant, contentious presence in the White House, will not be in attendance.The dinner, which will include Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, Microsoft’s Bill Gates, Apple’s Tim Cook and OpenAI’s Sam Altman, is exactly the type of event where Musk would have sat at Trump’s right hand only a few months ago. Instead, the Tesla CEO stated on his social media platform X that he was invited but could not make it. He said he planned to send a representative. He spent the day on X posting a familiar stream of attacks on immigration and trans people.The White House did not respond for comment on why Musk would not be at the dinner.Musk’s absence, even if voluntary, is a stark turnaround from when Trump repeatedly joked following the election that “Elon won’t go home, I can’t get rid of him.” The vacant seat highlights a divide that has emerged between the two men since their very public falling out earlier this year, one that has seen Musk’s influence over the government wane despite spending hundreds of millions of dollars to reelect Trump during the 2024 election.Musk’s omission from the list of attendees also echoes one of the seminal moments of his political evolution, another White House event. In 2022, then-president Joe Biden failed to invite the Tesla CEO to a summit on electric vehicles over concerns it would draw backlash from autoworkers unions. Musk, who had not yet publicly aligned himself with the Republican party, lashed out at the White House for the snub and declared that he would not vote for Biden. The move proved enormously costly for Democrats.The incident clearly stuck with Musk, who like Trump has shown a tendency to harbor longterm grudges. Even on the day of Trump’s Rose Garden dinner, he reserved his ire for Biden rather than Trump, retweeting a clip of himself from 2023 addressing Biden’s snub with the post “I try not to start fights, but I do finish them.”In the ensuing years, Musk has taken a hard turn to the political right. He has turned X into a bastion of far-right influencers, whom he frequently retweets to his over 200 million followers. He has promoted false theories about Democrats conspiring to get immigrants to illegally vote en masse and embraced far-right political parties around the world. He also became Trump’s most vocal and deep pocketed supporter, contributing nearly $300m to the reelection campaign and Republican causes.Musk’s support for Trump placed him in a position of immense power after the president’s inauguration as the tech mogul established and led the so-called “department of government efficiency’s” (Doge) sweeping dismantling of federal agencies. It also turned him into a prominent guest at political dinners and events, only a year after the British government did not invite him to a major tech summit as he made inflammatory anti-immigrant posts that claimed a “civil war” would take place in the UK.Since Musk and Trump’s relationship imploded in May over policy differences – Musk railed against Trump’s signature One Big Beautiful Bill – which then snowballed into Musk accusing Trump of being in the files pertaining to notorious sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, the xAI CEO has all but vanished from high-profile government events. Although Trump still praises Musk as a “genius”, he told reporters on Wednesday night that Musk has “got some problems” and the two have not been seen together since their public spat.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionAs Musk has feuded with Trump and ceded his place in the White House, however, rival tech moguls have grown closer with the administration and filled some of the vacuum. Earlier this month, Trump hosted Cook, the Apple CEO, at the White House, who gifted him a 24-karat gold souvenir. Meanwhile, Trump aides have discussed cutting Musk’s government contracts, according to the Wall Street Journal, only to find upon review that doing so would endanger too many key operations.If Musk were to attend Thursday’s dinner, it would create an awkward arrangement as he is suing two of the companies in attendance – Apple and OpenAI, helmed by his former collaborator and now nemesis Altman. As with Trump, Musk has also attacked Gates for his ties to Epstein after Gates accused him of “killing children” through Doge’s cuts to foreign aid. More

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      in US Politics

      Ice obtains access to Israeli-made spyware that can hack phones and encrypted apps

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      US immigration agents will have access to one of the world’s most sophisticated hacking tools after a decision by the Trump administration to move ahead with a contract with Paragon Solutions, a company founded in Israel which makes spyware that can be used to hack into any mobile phone – including encrypted applications.The Department of Homeland Security first entered into a contract with Paragon, now owned by a US firm, in late 2024, under the Biden administration. But the $2m contract was put on hold pending a compliance review to make sure it adhered to an executive order that restricts the US government’s use of spyware, Wired reported at the time.That pause has now been lifted, according to public procurement documents, which list US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) as the contracting agency.It means that one of the most powerful stealth cyberweapons ever created – which was produced outside the US – is now in the hands of an agency that has repeatedly been accused by civil and human rights groups of violating people’s due process rights.The story was first reported by the journalist Jack Poulson on his All-Source Intelligence Substack newsletter.Neither Paragon nor Ice immediately responded to a request for comment.When it is successfully deployed against a target, the hacking software – called Graphite – can hack into any phone. By essentially taking control of the mobile phone, the user – in this case, Ice – can not only track an individual’s whereabouts, read their messages, look at their photographs, but it can also open and read information held on encrypted applications, like WhatsApp or Signal. Spyware like Graphite can also be used as a listening device, through the manipulation of the phone’s recorder.An executive order signed by the Biden administration sought to establish some guardrails around the US government’s use of spyware. It said that the US “shall not make operational use of commercial spyware that poses significant counterintelligence or security risks to the United States government or significant risks of improper use by a foreign government or foreign person”. The Biden administration also took the extraordinary step of placing one of Paragon’s rival spyware makers, NSO Group, on a commerce department blacklist, saying the company had knowingly supplied foreign governments to “maliciously target” the phones of dissidents, human rights activists and journalists.Paragon has sought to differentiate itself from NSO Group. It has said that, unlike NSO – which previously sold its spyware to Saudi Arabia and other regimes – that it only does business with democracies. It has also said it has a no tolerance policy and will cut off government clients who use the spyware to target members of civil society, such as journalists. Paragon refuses to disclose who its clients are and has said it does not have insight into how its clients use the technology against targets.Spyware makers like Paragon and NSO have said their products are intended to be used to prevent crime and terrorist attacks. But both companies’ software has been used in the past to target innocent people, including individuals who have been perceived to be government enemies.John Scott-Railton, a senior research at the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto, who is one of the world’s leading experts on cases in which spyware like Graphite has been abused by governments, said in a statement that such tools “were designed for dictatorships, not democracies built on liberty and protection of individual rights”.“Invasive, secret hacking power is corrupting. That’s why there’s a growing pile of spyware scandals in democracies, including with Paragon’s Graphite,” he said, referring to a controversy in Italy that erupted late last year.Paragon broke off its ties to Italy after it was revealed that 90 people, including journalists and members of civil society, in two dozen countries, had been targeted with the spyware. The individuals who were targeted by the Italian government included human rights activists who have been critical of Italy’s dealings with Libya. Several journalists were also targeted, though it is still unclear who ordered those hacking attacks.The US government has in the past resisted using spyware technology made outside the US because of concerns that any company that sells technology to multiple government agencies around the world represents a potential security risk.“As long as the same mercenary spyware tech is going to multiple governments, there is a baked-in counterintelligence risk. Since all of them now know what secret surveillance tech the US is using, and would have special insights on how to detect it and track what the US is doing with it,” Scott-Railton said. “Short of Paragon cancelling all foreign contracts, I’m not sure how this goes away.”Nadine Farid Johnson, policy director at the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, which is dedicated to free speech advocacy, said news of the Ice contract compounded civil liberty concerns surrounding the “rapid and dramatic expansion of Ice’s budget and authority”. She also called on Congress to step in and limit the circumstances in which spyware could be deployed.“Spyware like Paragon’s Graphite poses a profound threat to free speech and privacy,” Farid Johnson said. “It has already been used against journalists, human rights advocates, and political dissidents around the world. The quiet lifting of the stop work order also raises the troubling prospect that parts of the executive branch are acting without adherence to the government’s own vetting requirements.” More

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      in US Politics

      How Elon Musk’s billionaire Doge lieutenant took over the US’s biggest MDMA company

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      View image in fullscreenMonths before Antonio Gracias took a leading role in the dismantling of the federal government by the “department of government efficiency” (Doge), he was at Burning Man.In the dusty Nevada desert, Gracias, a billionaire private equity investor and one of Elon Musk’s closest friends, attended Nova Heaven, a sunrise rave tribute to victims of the Hamas-led 7 October terrorist attack, and found himself dancing next to Rick Doblin – the US’s most prominent advocate for psychedelic drugs.As hundreds of burners shuffled their sandy feet to psytrance music, Gracias started up a conversation. He had a piece of business advice.Doblin, 71 with an avuncular smile and tranquil, confident demeanor, is the founder of the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (Maps), and has spent decades trying to legalize drugs such as MDMA, commonly known as ecstasy, for use in the treatment of trauma.Once mostly viewed as a party drug, medical researchers and advocates have seen promising results when using MDMA as a therapy aid. Gracias is a believer. He gave Maps $1m in 2020 and poured another $16m into funding psychedelics research at Harvard in 2023. Although his usual billionaire-casual attire would look more at home on Shark Tank than at a rave, he is part of a growing movement among Silicon Valley’s right wing that has become enamored with the potential – both therapeutic and commercial – of consciousness-altering drugs.Earlier that year, the pharmaceutical arm of Maps, a for-profit public benefit corporation called Lykos Therapeutics, had raised $100m as it awaited a Food and Drug Administration (FDA) decision on whether to allow MDMA for psychotherapy treatment of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Approval could turn Lykos into a multibillion-dollar pharma enterprise with exclusive US rights to sell the drug for therapeutic use for a period of six years.View image in fullscreenA few weeks before Burning Man, however, the FDA rejected the application over concerns about inadequate trial data. Doblin announced that he was exiting Lykos’s board, and the company laid off 75% of its staff. The business was in turmoil.On the playa – according to Doblin’s recounting of events – Gracias told him that the FDA’s rejection wasn’t his fault and blamed the company’s other leaders for the failure. Let Lykos go bust and start again with a clean slate, Gracias advised, before the two men parted ways in the desert.Weeks after their dancefloor meeting, Doblin reached out to Gracias with a proposition. The investors and board of Lykos were not going to let the company go bankrupt. Would Gracias consider launching a takeover bid and seizing operational control?As they corresponded about a potential plan, Doblin put Gracias in contact with the British hedge fund billionaire Christopher Hohn. By January, just before Gracias joined Doge, Gracias and Hohn were working on a takeover of Lykos.At the end of May, Lykos confirmed in a brief statement on its website that foundations owned by Gracias and Hohn had led a $50m Series B funding round that recapitalized the business. The sparse post included few details of the deal, and years of previous news releases from Lykos no longer appeared on the company’s website. In the following weeks, Lykos appointed a new CEO and chief medical officer and remade the board of directors. Gracias and Hohn are now in control of the most prominent MDMA therapy company in the US. Gracias, Doblin said, is taking a hands-on role in its operations.“It was the magic of Burning Man,” Doblin said. “I was sort of looking for a white knight that would come in and would be more focused on healing and on public benefit.”Gracias’s new leadership of Lykos comes at a pivotal moment for psychedelics treatment in the US. Top Trump administration health officials, such as the secretary for health and human services, Robert F Kennedy Jr, have said they are open to accelerating the use of psychedelic therapy while wealthy tech backers have moved to solidify control over the industry.But the takeover also highlights the ethical questions posed by Doge, even as its prominent leader, Musk, has left the government. Doge staffers like Gracias have received unprecedented access to US agencies, including their processes and staff. There have been few guardrails on their work, or the ways they leverage that access in their non-governmental lives. Just a few months ago, it was hard to imagine that an active government employee at an agency embedded across the government would assume control over a pharmaceutical company seeking FDA approval.“Maps and Gracias are going to try to seize the moment that we’re in,” said Ifetayo Harvey, a former Maps employee and executive director of the People of Color Psychedelic Collective. “I think the aim is to get MDMA-assisted psychotherapy approved by the FDA by any means necessary.”The Guardian reached out to Gracias via Lykos and his private equity firm with an interview request, a request for comment and a detailed list of questions. Neither Lykos nor the firm responded.Of drugs and DogeIn late July, a group of workers from the Service Employees International Union, the largest healthcare union in the US, marched down West Washington Boulevard in Chicago. They gathered outside the Valor Equity Partners investment firm, where Gracias is founder and CEO, to protest about his work with Doge, and what they see as its attacks on social security. At the front of the march, two demonstrators carried a banner with a message painted in bold white letters: “Antonio Gracias we will not forget your cruelty.”While Gracias was gaining control of Lykos, he had also been engaged in another power play, as a member of Doge, which shortly after Donald Trump’s inauguration had begun gutting federal agencies and seizing control over government databases.Gracias arrived at Doge as a longtime friend and business associate of Musk, with a relationship going back more than two decades. He was an early investor in Tesla through Valor Equity Partners, and was on the board of the automaker from 2007 until 2021. He still serves on the board of SpaceX, Musk’s rocket company, and is an investor in Neuralink, Musk’s brain chip venture. Valor has reportedly been in talks with lenders to raise $12bn for Musk’s xAI artificial intelligence firm. During Musk’s takeover and gutting of Twitter in 2022, Gracias acted as a mix of enforcer and proxy who tersely communicated Musk’s dictates to staff, according to the book Character Limit. Last year, he also contributed $1m to Musk’s America Pac effort to re-elect Trump.View image in fullscreenGracias and Musk’s ties go beyond business. The two men have gone on multiple personal and family vacations together, including a trip to the magician David Copperfield’s Bahamas island, according to a deposition Gracias gave in a 2023 court case. They have spent Christmas and other holidays together, and Gracias was a groomsman at the wedding of Musk’s brother Kimbal.Gracias and Musk have also taken illegal drugs together, witnesses told the Wall Street Journal. Multiple news outlets have reported that Musk has himself used MDMA and psilocybin mushrooms, as well as recreationally used ketamine. Musk has stated that he has used prescription ketamine to treat depression, and has vehemently denied reports of drug use impairing his abilities.As one of Musk’s most prominent staffers at Doge, Gracias began working at the Social Security Administration (SSA) and led a taskforce that involved accessing immigration data at the Department of Homeland Security. He appeared on stage alongside Musk in March to present misleading claims about immigrants and public benefits, and then in April on the All-In podcast promoted the conspiracy theory that Democrats were attempting to “import voters”, a favorite theory of Musk’s.Gracias claimed during his media appearances to be rooting out corruption at the SSA and specifically touted his efforts to uncover proof of immigrants illegally voting en masse. Yet the cases Gracias cited were hardly indicative of widespread malicious voter fraud, experts told NPR, such as a recently immigrated Ukrainian mother and daughter who told investigators they simply didn’t know they couldn’t vote.Gracias remained with Doge even after Musk’s very public breakup with Trump, with Politico reporting that he regularly visited the White House to meet with top officials such as the deputy chief of staff, Stephen Miller.Double-dipping with DogeGracias’s time in government ended in July, after his presence at Doge caught the attention of the AFL-CIO, the nation’s largest federation of unions. An AFL-CIO report in June raised questions about Gracias’s fiduciary responsibilities as CEO of Valor as the private equity firm manages retirement plans for public employees such as teachers and municipal workers.“We noted Antonio Gracias appeared to be moonlighting for Doge when he’s supposed to be running Valor for the benefit of those pension plans,” said Brandon Rees, deputy director of corporations and capital markets for the AFL-CIO.The report cited flight records, which the Guardian has viewed, that showed Valor’s private jet made 23 trips from the Washington DC region between January and April – suggesting Gracias was spending a large amount of time at Doge. In late July, the American Federation of Teachers sent a letter to nine public pension funds asking them to review the union’s investments with Valor, worth about $1.8bn.One week later, Gracias announced in a lengthy statement on X that he had already resigned from Doge on 4 July and denied claims he had abandoned his responsibilities.“I hope this is a moment where our compassion can be stronger than our anger,” he wrote.Valor Equity Partners did not respond to requests for comment on this article and a detailed set of questions.The pension fund controversy highlighted the ethical gray areas that Doge created, as some of its top staffers chose to pull double duty between public and private work. While Doge claimed to function with transparency, it has made public only a partial explanation of how its staffers accessed and used government data, as well as how their work may have informed their own future business endeavors. Doge’s broad mandate to reshape federal agencies allowed it to operate akin to a parallel government with little oversight or disclosure about its activities, ethics watchdogs and labor groups allege, and created larger concerns about what might constitute conflicts of interest for its staffers.“With the lack of transparency, it leaves us really grasping at what it even means to be Doge,” said Faith Williams, a policy director at the Project on Government Oversight, a non-profit watchdog group. “We have seen so many, if not outright conflicts of interest then potential for conflicts of interest, and if not outright corruption, potential for corruption.”That hazy dynamic raises questions about Gracias’s new leadership of Lykos, according to ethics experts, and what it might mean for a former Doge member to now be seeking regulatory approval. Although Gracias worked primarily with the SSA, Doge’s staffers have also been embedded in the FDA and fired employees reviewing clinical trials for Musk’s Neuralink.Government ethics rules generally prohibit federal employees from representing private enterprises to agencies while working in government. There are also rules limiting how former employees can represent private interests even after they have left the government, in an effort to prevent workers from trying to seek favor for a future regulatory decision.“You can’t be greasing the wheels and then say, ‘OK, now I’m going to quit and go pursue that approval,’” said Cynthia Brown, senior ethics counsel at the non-profit watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington.Doblin denied that Gracias’s role at Doge posed any conflict of interest, saying that the billionaire did not work with the FDA. Lykos did not respond to questions related to Gracias’s work at Doge.Ecstatic expectations – dashedBefore the FDA rejected Lykos’s application, the psychedelics world had been riding high, anticipating that MDMA would soon be approved and behind it a slew of other treatments. Venture capitalists, politicians and wellness-minded celebrities had descended on the industry with a fervor, attending events such as Maps’ annual psychedelics conference in Denver, Colorado, in droves. Recent years featured speakers including future NFL hall of fame quarterback Aaron Rodgers, former Texas governor Rick Perry and former senator Kyrsten Sinema.View image in fullscreenThe 2024 application was the zenith of Doblin’s four-decade campaign to legalize MDMA for therapy purposes, part of his goal to reach “net zero trauma by 2070”. He founded Maps in 1986 on the premise that psychedelic drugs, which the US has long designated as illegal schedule 1 substances with a high potential for abuse, could have beneficial therapeutic uses and had been unfairly vilified, much like cannabis. The idea has gained significant scientific support, with preliminary evidence from studies showing that MDMA therapy can reduce PTSD symptoms.Doblin has also suggested more grandiose and outre uses for MDMA therapy, such as conflict resolution between Israelis and Palestinians. Maps has meanwhile trained therapists in a wide range of countries, including conflict zones such as Ukraine, on how to conduct therapy with the drug.As Doblin sought out funding and support for Maps and Lykos over the past decade, former employees say he began looking to broader circles of investors. They included advocates for military veterans interested in treating PTSD, big names in corporate finance and, controversially, the Republican donor Rebekah Mercer.One method was to court investors with invitations to parties where drugs were being used, according to Harvey, the former Maps employee.“Definitely part of their fundraising strategy is ‘Meet rich people at Burning Man, do psychedelics with them and get Maps money,’” Harvey, who was Doblin’s executive assistant in 2015, said.Maps denied that it used drugs to as a means of drumming up investment.“MAPS conducts all fundraising activities with the highest integrity and maintains strict ethical boundaries in all donor relationships and fundraising activities. MAPS does not supply controlled substances at any events or gatherings, nor do we use substances as a fundraising tool or strategy,” Maps said in a statement.Doblin also told Business Insider last year that giving drugs to donors was “not common”.Psilocybin ValleyGracias’s takeover of Lykos adds to a constellation of venture capitalists and tech world elites who have invested heavily in psychedelics. Another major player alongside Lykos is Atai Life Sciences, which is testing a synthetic version of a drug secreted by a species of toad, and is backed by Peter Thiel’s VC firm.While the juxtaposition of investors known for companies such as Palantir or initiatives like Doge may seem incongruous with the wellness world’s pronouncements about psychedelics, it is actually a culmination of a symbiotic relationship that stretches back to at least the 1970s.“There’s been decades and decades of overlap between Silicon Valley and psychedelics,” said Brad Burge, founder of psychedelics PR firm Integration Communications and a former Maps marketing director. “It’s just new in this epoch to be seeing this level of funding from highly public people.”Gracias is not even the only member of Doge with ties to the psychedelics industry. Before joining the agency, Alexandra Beynon worked as head of engineering for her husband’s at-home ketamine therapy company Mindbloom. Dylan Beynon, who founded the company, posted on X that he had previously met with Gracias to talk about an investment with Mindbloom, although no partnership materialized.Nor is Gracias the only member of Musk’s orbit to have donated to Maps. The former Tesla and SpaceX board member Steve Jurvetson, who the Wall Street Journal reported attended parties and consumed drugs with Musk, has also donated $2.6m to Maps through a non-profit he founded with his wife. In 2012, the non-profit organization that Musk founded with his brother Kimbal also directly donated $10,000 to Maps. The money went to funding the Temple of Whollyness at Burning Man, a complex wooden art sculpture that tech money helped build before it was ceremoniously burned down.A bump from TrumpGracias’s takeover of Lykos comes at a fortuitous time for the psychedelics industry, with the Trump administration and Republican lawmakers embracing alternative drugs as part of the “Make America healthy again” movement. Although the Biden administration was also open to the use of psychedelics therapy, experts say, some top Trump health officials have gone further, calling for accelerating and re-evaluating the FDA review process.“This line of therapeutics has tremendous advantage if given in a clinical setting, and we are working very hard to make sure that that happens within 12 months,” Kennedy said during a House committee meeting in late June, adding that the FDA commissioner, Marty Makary, agreed that psychedelics were a promising treatment.Trump’s pick for surgeon general, Casey Means, has praised using psilocybin mushrooms for therapy as one of the most meaningful experiences of her life, much like Steve Jobs. Her brother Calley Means, one of Kennedy’s top advisers, meanwhile told Politico in June that the Republican party had become the “party of psychedelics research”.The new administration’s outlook is potentially good news for Lykos, which is still recovering after the FDA ruled that the clinical trials it published in 2021 and 2023 suffered from bias issues and did not meet standards. One concern from those reviewing the studies was the difficulty of a double-blind test, since it was obvious to participants who got MDMA and who did not.The FDA’s ruling required Lykos to conduct another phase 3 clinical trial, probably a years-long endeavor that could cost millions. The company sought to contest the findings, while some advocates, including Doblin, blamed the anti-corporate psychedelics group Psymposia, accusing it of influencing the FDA against approval. Psymposia denied it was the sole reason for the FDA rejection.“The FDA rejected Lykos for flawed science, not because of Psymposia, and the public still deserves better than pseudoscientific therapy,” Psymposia said in a statement. “Gracias’ willingness to back a company rejected for safety failures while pushing disinformation at Doge suggests a consistent disregard for facts in pursuit of profit.”Other researchers took a middle ground, believing that while MDMA therapy showed promise, it wasn’t ready for prime time.“It’s very possible that MDMA is a safe and effective treatment under the right conditions,” said Mason Marks, lead of the Project on Psychedelics Law and Regulation at Harvard Law School’s Petrie-Flom Center. “But I don’t think that was demonstrated adequately by the data, and there were a lot of question marks.”While Trump health officials project optimism, there is also wariness within the psychedelics industry that the new administration’s support for psychedelics therapy could risk politicizing the drugs or lead to a loosened scientific review of their safety and efficacy. Such a result could end up setting back the industry in the long run, some advocates argue.“If it’s politicized in that way, then what happens in the future when we have a differently politicized administration?” said Burge. “Are they going to be able to roll that back and cite that there wasn’t sufficient evidence, and that psychedelic therapies were only approved because this particular administration felt like doing so?”There’s little that would prevent the FDA under Kennedy and its new commissioner Makary from reversing the agency’s ruling against Lykos, Marks said. The FDA is not bound by its previous decision and has the power to request a less stringent follow-up trial, throw out its decision altogether or authorize a substance for emergency use. In June, the FDA also announced a Commissioner’s National Priority Voucher program that would allow qualifying drug developers to shorten the agency’s review time from 10 to 12 months to one to two months.“I can’t really speak on the negotiations with the FDA,” Doblin said. “I hope that instead of a phase 3 study that the FDA may determine, I believe, that the data we gathered was valid.”Any rollback of the ruling, even a partial one, could carry extraordinary benefits for Lykos and Gracias. More

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      Elon Musk’s Doge put sensitive social security data at risk, whistleblower says

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      Elon Musk’s so-called “department of government efficiency” (Doge) copied and uploaded sensitive Social Security Administration (SSA) data to a vulnerable cloud server, potentially risking the safety of hundreds of millions of Americans and violating federal privacy laws, according to a whistleblower complaint filed on Tuesday.The complaint from Charles Borges, the chief data officer at the SSA, alleges that Doge staffers effectively created a live copy of the entire country’s social security data from its numerical identification system database. The information is a goldmine for bad actors, the complaint alleges, and was placed on a server without independent oversight that only Doge officials could access.“These actions constitute violations of laws, rules, and regulations, abuse of authority, gross mismanagement, and creation of a substantial and specific threat to public health and safety,” the complaint states.The whistleblower complaint, first reported by the New York Times, is one of the most high-profile insider accounts of how Doge staffers have allegedly taken confidential government information and used it for their own ends, at great risk to the public. The database that Doge officials allegedly uploaded to the cloud contains highly personal information about hundreds of millions of US citizens and residents. It includes details such as names, place and date of birth, race and ethnicity, names of family members, phone numbers, addresses and social security numbers.The Social Security Administration denied that the sensitive data had been compromised and stated that it takes all whistleblower complaints seriously.“SSA stores all personal data in secure environments that have robust safeguards in place to protect vital information. The data referenced in the complaint is stored in a longstanding environment used by SSA and walled off from the internet,” an SSA spokesperson said. “We are not aware of any compromise to this environment and remain dedicated to protecting sensitive personal data.”The non-profit Government Accountability Project whistleblower organization is providing Borges legal counsel in the case and filed his complaint with the US Office of Special Counsel, as well as members of Congress. The complaint calls on lawmakers to swiftly take action to safeguard public data and provide more oversight.“Placing a live copy of Americans’ social security data in a cloud environment without independent oversight puts everyone with a social security number and their families at real risk of identity theft, interrupted benefits, and tax or medical fraud that can follow them for years,” said Andrea Meza, director of advocacy and strategy at the Government Accountability Project and the legal counsel on the case.Borges is a career civil servant and navy veteran who joined the SSA in late January, and was previously chief data officer for naval air systems command. His complaint alleges that he repeatedly raised concerns with his superiors about Doge officials improperly accessing data but that no action was taken.“Mr Borges spent weeks pressing for fixes inside SSA; when nothing changed, he used the protected channels federal whistleblower law provides,” Maza said. “We’re calling for immediate oversight and an independent audit to investigate these violations, prevent future problems, and restore required safeguards.”Lawmakers and ethics watchdog groups, as well as former and current federal employees, have long accused Doge of accessing government data with a wanton disregard for security protocols and transparency. A separate whistleblower disclosure in April raised concerns that Doge employees had potentially exposed sensitive National Labor Relations Board information, and alleged it appeared that Doge employees attempted to cover up documentation of what data they accessed.As Doge rapidly embedded its staffers across federal agencies earlier this year, it gained access to troves of information from a wide swath of government databases. Although reports have detailed how the agency is using some of that data to further the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown, there has not been a full accounting of why Doge has accessed the public’s data. More

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      White House launches official TikTok account after Trump vowed ban in 2020

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      The White House launched an official TikTok account on Tuesday, as Donald Trump continues to permit the Chinese-owned platform to operate in the US despite a law requiring its sale.“America we are BACK! What’s up TikTok?” read a caption on the account’s first post, a 27-second clip, on the popular video-sharing app.The account had about 4,500 followers an hour after posting the video. Trump’s personal account on TikTok meanwhile has 15.1 million followers, though his last post was on 5 November 2024 – election day.Trump has a soft spot for the popular app, crediting it with helping him gain support among young voters when he defeated Kamala Harris, his Democratic opponent, in the November 2024 presidential election.“The Trump administration is committed to communicating the historic successes President Trump has delivered to the American people with as many audiences and platforms as possible,” Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, said as the account went live.A federal law requiring TikTok’s sale or a ban on national security grounds was due to take effect the day before Trump’s inauguration on 20 January.But the Republican president, whose 2024 election campaign relied heavily on social media and who has said he is fond of TikTok, put the ban on pause.TikTok is a tremendously popular social media app with 170 million users in the US. ByteDance, TikTok’s parent company, said in April that it had been in discussion with the US government regarding a solution for the app. It added that any agreement “will be subject to approval under Chinese law”.In mid-June, Trump for the third time extended the deadline for the popular video-sharing app by another 90 days to find a non-Chinese buyer or be banned in the United States.That extension is due to expire in mid-September.The idea of banning TikTok originated with Trump in 2020, who said the Chinese-owned app posed a danger to national security. It quickly became a bipartisan issue and Congress overwhelmingly voted to ban the app last year, which faced a legal challenge but was ultimately affirmed by the supreme court. The original deadline for the TikTok ban was 19 January.Trump switched his stance on TikTok after joining the app while campaigning for president last year, amassing nearly 15 million followers and hosting the TikTok CEO, Shou Zi Chew, at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida. Chew also attended Trump’s inauguration.While Trump had long supported a ban or divestment, he reversed his position and vowed to defend the platform – which boasts almost 2 billion global users – after coming to believe it helped him win young voters’ support in the November election.Trump’s official account on X, formerly Twitter, has 108.5 million followers – though his favored social media outlet is Truth Social, which he owns, where he has 10.6 million followers.The official White House accounts on X and Instagram have 2.4 million and 9.3 million followers, respectively.Dara Kerr contributed reporting More

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      Nvidia and AMD reportedly agree to pay 15% of China chip sale revenues to US

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      Nvidia and AMD have agreed to give the US government 15% of their revenues from chip sales in China, under an unprecedented arrangement to obtain export licenses for the semiconductors, the Financial Times reported on Sunday.The revenue share applies to Nvidia’s H20 chips and AMD’s MI308 chips, the report said, citing a US official, noting that the Trump administration had yet to determine how to use the money.The chipmakers agreed to the quid pro quo arrangement as a condition for obtaining export licenses for the Chinese market that were granted last week, according to the unnamed official.According to export control experts, no US company has ever agreed to pay a portion of their revenues to obtain export licenses, the newspaper reported. But Donald Trump has encouraged firms, and countries, to make investments in the US to, in his words, “buy down” the tariff rates he imposes.Nvidia follows rules the US government sets for its participation in worldwide markets, an Nvidia spokesperson told Reuters in an emailed statement. “While we haven’t shipped H20 to China for months, we hope export control rules will let America compete in China and worldwide.”AMD did not immediately respond to a request for comment.The US commerce department started issuing licenses to Nvidia to export its H20 chips to China last week, removing a significant hurdle to the artificial intelligence bellwether’s access to a key market.The US in July reversed an April ban on the sale of the H20 chip to China. The company had tailored the microprocessor specially to the Chinese market to comply with the Biden-era AI chip export controls.Nvidia’s chips are a major driver of the AI boom, and in July the company became the first ever to have its market value surpass $4tn.Complications facing the company are not necessarily over, however, with growing scrutiny of Nvidia by Chinese authorities. Late last month China’s cyberspace watchdog summoned Nvidia to a meeting to discuss whether the chips had any “backdoor” security risks which would allow remote access or control. Nvidia said they did not.But Chinese state media has continued to raise concerns. In a commentary earlier this month, the People’s Daily said Nvidia must produce “convincing security proofs” to eliminate Chinese users’ worries over security risks in its chips and regain market trust. And On Sunday a state media account on Chinese social media platform WeChat said the H20 chips posed a security risk for China. The account, Yuyuan Tantian, claimed Nvidia chips could achieve functions including “remote shutdown” through a hardware “backdoor”. Nvidia has not responded.With Reuters More

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      Trump to announce Apple’s plan to invest $100bn in US manufacturing

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      Donald Trump on Wednesday is expected to celebrate a commitment by Apple to increase its investments in US manufacturing by an additional $100bn over the next four years.“Today’s announcement with Apple is another win for our manufacturing industry that will simultaneously help reshore the production of critical components to protect America’s economic and national security,” a White House spokesperson, Taylor Rogers, said.Apple’s plan to up its domestic investment comes as it seeks to avoid Trump’s threatened tariffs, which would increase the tech giant’s costs as it relies on a complex international supply chain to produce its iPhones. Apple’s CEO, Tim Cook, warned during an earnings call in May that the tariffs could cost the company up to $900m that fiscal quarter alone.Apple had previously said it intended to invest $500bn domestically, a figure it will now increase to $600bn. Apple also claimed that it would directly hire 20,000 US workers over the next four years.“Today, we’re proud to increase our investments across the United States to $600 billion over four years and launch our new American Manufacturing Program,” Cook said in a statement. “This includes new and expanded work with 10 companies across America. They produce components that are used in Apple products sold all over the world, and we’re grateful to the President for his support.”Trump in recent months has criticized the tech company and Cook for efforts to shift iPhone production to India to avoid the tariffs his Republican administration had planned for China. The same day as the White House announcement, Trump doubled US tariffs on India from 25% to 50%.While in Qatar earlier this year, Trump said there was “a little problem” with Apple and recalled a conversation with Cook in which he said he told the CEO: “I don’t want you building in India.”India has incurred Trump’s wrath, as the president signed an order on Wednesday to put an additional 25% tariff on the world’s most populous country for its use of Russian oil. The new import taxes to be imposed in 21 days could put the combined tariffs on Indian goods at 50%.Apple had attempted to get ahead of any tariffs on India in April by shipping as many as 1.5m iPhones from the country into the US, according to Reuters.The company has been uniquely threatened by Trump’s tariffs as iPhones include parts manufactured in dozens of countries and the devices themselves are largely assembled in China. Shifting production of the devices to the US would drastically increase the cost to the point that most analysts view an American-made iPhone as a pipe dream, leaving Apple to navigate the uncertainty surrounding Trump’s trade wars.As part of the Apple announcement, the investments will be about bringing more of its supply chain and advanced manufacturing to the US.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionApple’s new pledge comes just a few weeks after it forged a $500m deal with MP Materials, which runs the only rare earths mine in the US. That agreement will enable MP Materials to expand a factory in Texas to use recycled materials to produce magnets that make iPhones vibrate.Speaking on a recent investors call, Cook emphasized that “there’s a load of different things done in the United States”. As examples, he cited some of the iPhone components made in the US, such as the device’s glass display and module for identifying people’s faces and then indicated the company was gearing to expand its productions of other components in its home country.“We’re doing more in this country, and that’s on top of having roughly 19bn chips coming out of the US now, and we will do more,” Cook told analysts last week, without elaborating.Despite Apple’s struggles with looming tariffs and concern from investors over its lag in fully embracing artificial intelligence, the company’s latest earnings report showed that it made huge gains in iPhone sales and easily beat Wall Street’s expectations for its year-over-year revenue. Apple’s stock, which was down double digits so far this year, spiked upward over 5% on Wednesday following news of Trump’s announcement. More