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      Federal Reserve set to cut interest rates – but still Trump won’t be happy

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      Stocks soared on Friday following the strongest signal yet that US the Federal Reserve is gearing up to start cutting interest rates again this fall. But how long can this celebration last?While Wall Street cheered the biggest headline from the speech by the Fed chair, Jerome Powell, at the annual Jackson Hole symposium in Wyoming, Powell also delivered a reality check on where interest rates could settle in the longer term.“We cannot say for certain where rates will settle out over the longer run, but their neutral level may now be higher than during the 2010s,” said Powell.In other words: even if the Fed does start cutting interest rates again this year, they may not fall back to their pre-pandemic levels. It’s a signal, despite the short-term optimism on potential rate cuts, that the Fed’s long-term outlook is more unstable.“Markets might be ahead of their skis on how aggressive the Fed is going to be in reducing interest rates, because the neutral rate might be higher than some believe,” Ryan Sweet, an economist at Oxford Economics, said.Higher rates means borrowing money for loans, such as mortgages, will be more expensive. The average 30-year fixed mortgage rate was just under 3% in 2021, when interest rates were near zero.Now the average mortgage rate is closer to 6.7%. Paired with home prices at near-record highs, elevated mortgages mean many Americans will continue to struggle to purchase a home.Although Trump has been pushing the Fed for months to decrease rates to 1%, claiming that Powell is “hurting the housing industry very badly”, it seems unlikely that rates will return to such a level any time soon.The Fed is trying to achieve a Goldilocks balance. Rates that are too high risk unemployment, while rates that are too low could mean higher inflation. Policymakers are searching for a “neutral” level, where everything is just right.Many economists believed the central bank was close to achieving this balance before Trump started his second term. In summer 2022, as inflation scaled its highest levels in a generation, the Fed started raising rates, at the risk of hurting the labor market, in an attempt to get inflation down to 2%.Rates rose to about 5.3% in less than two years, but the jobs market remained strong. Unemployment was still at historically low even as inflation came down. Although some economists had feared rapidly increasing rates would throw the US economy into a recession, instead the Fed appeared to achieve what is known as a “soft landing”.But things were thrown into a tailspin when Trump returned to office, armed with campaign promises to enact a full-blown trade war against the US’s key trading partners.The president has long argued that tariffs would boost American manufacturing and set the stage for better trade deals. “Tariffs don’t cause inflation. They cause success,” Trump declared back in January, acknowledging that there might be “some temporary, short-term disruption”.But so far, success has been limited. Economists doubt the policies will generate a manufacturing renaissance, and Trump’s trade war has inspired new commercial alliances that exclude the US.All the while, US consumers are starting to see higher prices due to Trump’s tariffs.At Jackson Hole on Friday, Powell said tariffs had started to push some prices up. In June and July, inflation was 2.7% – up 0.4 percentage points since April, when Trump first announced the bulk of his tariffs.This is still only a modest increase in price growth, but the bulk of the White House’s highest tariffs only went into effect in early August. Fed policymakers are waiting to see whether Trump’s aggressive trade strategy will cause a one-time shift in price levels – or if the effects will continue.The once strong labor market has grown sluggish. Though there are fewer job openings, there are also fewer people looking for jobs. Powell called it “a curious kind of balance” where “both the supply of and demand for workers” have slowed. He noted that the balance was unstable and could eventually tip over, prompting more layoffs and a rise in unemployment.This instability in the labor market has made Fed officials more open to a rate cut. Powell pointed to a slacking in consumer spending and weaker gross domestic product (GDP), which suggests an overall slowdown in economic activity.Although it set the stage for a rate cut as soon as next month, Powell’s speech was far from optimistic.“In this environment, distinguishing cyclical developments from trends, or structural developments is difficult,” he said. “Monetary policy can work to stabilise cyclical fluctuations but can do little to alter structural changes.”From Powell, who is typically diplomatic and reserved in his public statements, this seemed to be a careful warning: when executive policies destabilise the economy, the Fed can only do so much to limit the damage. More

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      John Bolton raid shows weaponization of FBI against Patel’s ‘gangsters’ list

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      When Kash Patel, the FBI director, faced senators during his confirmation hearings on 30 January, he bristled at suggestions that his 2023 book contained an “enemies list”. The appendix to Government Gangsters, which included a list of names for 60 people, was simply documentation of those who had “weaponized” the government, he insisted.Seven months later, that denial appears increasingly hollow. Friday’s FBI search of the former national security adviser John Bolton’s home and office, reportedly to find classified documents, marks the fifth investigation targeting people from Patel’s book.Bolton now joins a growing list of Trump critics from Patel’s roll the administration has targeted with what appear to be retaliatory federal investigations: James Comey, the former FBI director, John Brennan, the former CIA director, Miles Taylor, the ex-homeland security official and Lt Col Alexander Vindman. All five people, investigated in just seven months, were on Patel’s 60-name list.Typically, federal prosecutors open cases based on tips, evidence or ongoing criminal activity. They don’t work their way through the index of a political book. While there is no public evidence that the book itself or any outside group is directing investigations, the overlap appears more than coincidence. The Biden justice department definitively closed both civil and criminal proceedings against Bolton in 2021 over his memoir about his time in the Trump White House. Bringing that investigation back to life requires a deliberate decision to re-litigate an already settled matter.Bolton’s investigation, like those into the other four on Patel’s list, is unprecedented in how it is calculated to target a critic. The justice department acknowledged opening criminal investigations into Comey and Brennan over their 2016-2017 Russia investigation roles. Taylor faced presidential orders revoking his security clearance and demanding investigations into his anonymous anti-Trump writings. The DC interim US attorney pressed representative Eugene Vindman for business records tied to Ukraine aid, targeting the twin brother of Alexander Vindman, who testified against Trump during his first impeachment.When asked for details about the raids and the reasoning behind them, a spokesperson for the FBI did not answer directly.“The FBI is conducting court authorized activity in the area,” the spokesperson said in a statement. “There is no threat to public safety. We have no further comment.”The systematic nature of these investigations exposes the fundamental contradiction in the administration’s approach. Officials claim to be combating the “weaponization” of justice while at the same time weaponizing it against a pre-compiled list of critics.Notably, Patel’s targets are both “deep state” bureaucrats and former Trump allies. Along with Joe Biden, Kamala Harris and Hillary Clinton, they include Trump’s own former officials like the former defense secretary Mark Esper and Stephanie Grisham, the press secretary, a suggestion that the list features anyone who crossed or flipped on the president, regardless of their previous loyalty. Patel on Friday morning posted on social media that “NO ONE is above the law”.Trump’s reaction to the Bolton investigation undermines claims of prosecutorial independence. Asked about the raids, the president claimed ignorance while launching familiar attacks: Bolton was “sort of a lowlife” and “could be a very unpatriotic guy – we’re going to find out”, he told reporters on Friday.By systematically investigating critics while claiming to restore justice department integrity, the administration is creating an environment in which political opposition becomes presumed as evidence of criminal behavior.This marks another example of evolution from Trump’s first term, when efforts to weaponize federal law enforcement were often chaotic and ultimately unsuccessful. The current approach appears more disciplined, with Patel’s book providing targets and Bondi’s working group providing bureaucratic cover. More

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      Protests at Glacier as national parks reel from Trump cuts: ‘They’ve gutted staff, gutted funding’

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      Dozens of former rangers, park volunteers, and local residents protested at the gateway to Montana’s Glacier national park on Wednesday against the staff cuts and hiring freezes that have thrown many national parks into crisis, including Glacier.Current and former staffers and watchdog groups say the cuts have meant staff are not able to keep up the facilities and infrastructure. Some say the park has been left with inadequate infrastructure and too little staff to be able to respond to emergencies.Although it might look to visitors like operations in Glacier are normal, “it’s like walking down a Hollywood movie set where the front looks great but there’s nothing behind it,” said Sarah Lundstrum, Glacier program manager with the National Parks Conservation Association.The protesters held signs, chanted and waved at tourists during a visit to the park from the Congressional Western Caucus. Hosted by the Montana Republican congressman and former interior secretary Ryan Zinke, the caucus came to the park to showcase the success of the 2020 Great American Outdoors Act, which secured federal funding for protection and maintenance of public lands.Montana’s Republican senator Steve Daines championed that bill during Donald Trump’s first term, calling it “the greatest conservation win for Montana and the entire country in 50 years”. In May, Daines introduced the America the Beautiful Act to extend federal funding for projects to address crucial maintenance backlogs.But congressional support for funding projects in national parks comes at a jarring disconnect with the Trump administration’s slashing of jobs at national parks countrywide, including at Glacier, where an already overworked staff has been left with little to no bandwidth to implement projects.No congressional Republicans, including Daines or Zinke, have spoken up against the cuts and freezes, and all voted for the One Big Beautiful Bill Act that rescinded $276m from the National Park Service (NPS).“We’re supporting the park, but drawing attention to the fact our policymakers are grandstanding in a national park where behind the scenes they’ve gutted staff and gutted funding,” said Suzanne Hindler, one of the rally’s organizers. She said organizers specifically chose to hold the event outside the park to avoid adding more work for already overburdened park staff during peak tourist season.Hindler emphasized that funding for national parks was crucial. But without the staff to execute the work, new problems would arise with no one to fix them, she said.Jan Metzmaker, a longtime park employee who was on Glacier’s first all-women trail crew in the 1970s, said: “I can see the deterioration in the services and in the facilities.“They really need to put some money into those, because this place is crazy with people. It’s being loved to death. But there’s no way that they can do the maintenance and all the things that need to be done in the park now.”Visitation to national parks reached a record 331.9 million last year. But because of the Trump administration’s hiring freezes, terminations, and buyout and early retirement offers, US national parks have lost nearly a quarter of permanent staff, with seasonal hiring behind by nearly 8,000 positions. Further staff cuts, described as “deep and blunt” and “aggressive and swift” by National Parks Traveler, the multi-media outlet that covers the NPS, are held up in court but may still be forthcoming.In Glacier, which has seen a 7.5% increase in visitors from last year’s record high, the park is trying to operate with a 25% loss of staff. Vacancies span from chief ranger and fire positions, wildlife scientists, multiple environmental impact analysis positions, and emergency services, to mechanics, electricians, plumbers and IT positions.View image in fullscreenAfter the federal government canceled all national parks’ internet contracts this year, Lundstrum said, Glacier now uses StarLink, which some staffers say is spotty, goes down entirely, and often fails to connect park dispatch and 911 calls. There’s only one IT person remaining to address technical problems, those staffers, who asked to remain anonymous because they fear retaliation for speaking out, in a park that spans the Continental Divide, has no cell service, and regularly sees lost and injured hikers and encounters with wildlife, including the park’s dense population of grizzly bears.On top of that, said a current park employee who spoke on condition of anonymity, there are no longer enough staff to safely respond to emergencies. It’s only luck “that the park hasn’t had any big events this year”, they said. “In past years we’ve had big fires, major search-and-rescue operations, really critical injuries. It’s only a matter of time until there’s an event we can’t respond to appropriately and there’s a mass failure of a system.”And yet the interior secretary, Doug Burgum, issued an order in April requiring all parks to remain “open and accessible” despite the reduced staff. In Glacier, that might come at the cost of visitor and staff safety.The Department of the Interior did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the concerns the staffers and watchdog groups raised. The offices of Zinke and Daines also did not respond to a request for comment.The staffers say that remaining staff are doing “twice the job they used to”. Law enforcement are covering twice their previous area, maintenance workers are doing jobs they are not trained for, and outside recreation operators, such as Glacier Guides and Montana Raft, are emptying trash and cleaning bathrooms at river accesses to make up for the gaps. The mentality inside the park, said the employee, “is that if you’re the only one left, you’ll do whatever you can to help”.The Association of National Park Rangers reported that “amid federal budget cuts, some seasonal employees at Yosemite national park worked for as long as six weeks without pay in recent months as park supervisors struggled to manage hiring”.One of the rally attenders, a local woman named Kathy who asked not to be identified by her last name, is a volunteer with the Glacier National Park Association. “We do restoration, painting, backcountry patrol, visitor center, vehicle reservations. We want to do things, but unfortunately, we don’t have enough supervisors – rangers – to have volunteers.”“It feels like the government is setting us up to fail,” said the Glacier employee.Experts worry that Trump’s budget proposal to cut 36% of the national park budget, which could force the closure of up to 350 park units, is a deliberate attempt to sabotage the park system as an excuse to sell those lands for profit.“Hollowing out staffing, cutting budgets, changing priorities – all of that very much lends itself to the idea of essentially causing those agencies to fail at meeting their mandates, and that will lead to the call for privatization,” said Lundstrum. “Because if the government can’t manage that land, then obviously somebody else should, right? In documents like Project 2025, there are calls for the privatization of land, or the selloff of land.”Multiple sources say that morale among Glacier staff is low. “The civilian federal workforce used to be non-partisan, so you always felt like you could have your opinion – liberal or conservative – without fear of retribution,” said one employee. “And now the undertone is to stay under the radar. If you speak up and say, ‘this is wrong’, you pretty much have a target on your back.”One young mother who came to the rally with her two small sons asked not to be identified because her husband is a federal employee; just this month, the justice department fired an official whose husband developed a phone app that tracked Ice agents.“Having these two little guys is just a constant reminder of how much our world is changing, and the need to stand up for it. Everything could be gone in a blink,” the mother said.Glacier is also the national park poster child for climate change, as its namesake glaciers are predicted to be completely gone in the coming decades. Yet the administration, without any pushback from congressional Republicans, has cut and scrubbed climate science and reversed Biden-era initiatives to curb climate change.In his press release, Daines said he introduced the America the Beautiful Act “so that people can get outside and enjoy the natural beauty we’re lucky to have here in the US”, and that he was “proud” to “protect our outdoor way of life for generations to come”.Hildner said she was not fooled. She said: “To see capitalism as the driving force for managing lands, rather than conservation, is really terrifying: for myself, for what it means for future generations, and what it means for the planet. How do we as a public help the folks who’ve been elected to govern see what the real costs are?” More

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      Trump’s presidential philosophy is government by shakedown | Steven Greenhouse

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      Americans have long glorified their constitution and the rule of law. But Donald Trump’s volatile and vindictive presidency has increasingly replaced that philosophy with something very different – call it “governing by shakedown”.Trump has often violated federal law, and sometimes the constitution, as he has sought to throttle his targets – whether universities, law firms or US trading partners – in the hope that they will cry uncle and agree to his demands. This style of governance would make any caudillo proud. But it should make anyone who cares about the rule of law – and avoiding authoritarian rule – very worried.By threatening to cripple this university’s finances or that country’s exports, Trump has become the global emperor of shakedowns. It has been great for him and his ego. He dominates negotiations and news cycles, and his White House cheerleaders rush to proclaim victory whenever he reaches a deal with one of his targets.Claiming that many universities haven’t done enough to combat antisemitism, Trump has demanded that Harvard, Columbia, Brown and other schools submit to his rightwing vision. Furious that some law firms have hired people or filed lawsuits he didn’t like, Trump has taken unprecedented steps to attack them unless they submitted to his demands. Trump has wreaked havoc on global diplomacy and supply chains by threatening America’s trading partners with stratospherically high tariffs unless they reached trade deals with Washington.Far too many Americans – whether senators, the media or the public – fail to realize that Trump’s attacks on these institutions evidently violate the law. Federal district courts have ruled in four cases that Trump’s broadsides against law firms violate their free speech rights. The US court of international trade ruled that Trump’s across-the-board tariffs against dozens of countries were illegal, concluding that Congress hadn’t given him “unbounded authority” to slap tariffs on nearly every country. (The administration is appealing that ruling.)As for Trump cutting off billions in aid and research grants to universities because of their alleged failures in responding to antisemitism, many legal experts say his administration has plainly failed to comply with anti-discrimination laws that require the government to follow specific procedures before penalizing universities, such as giving schools an opportunity for a hearing. Moreover, federal law says the government can halt funding to only particular university programs where noncompliance has been found, and not, for instance, to scientific research far afield from that.Last week, Trump expanded his shakedown efforts. He told the chipmaker Nvidia that he would let it sell high-end AI computer chips to China only if it paid 15% of the revenue from those sales to the US treasury. Nvidia agreed, even though Trump’s demand was of dubious legality; the constitution prohibits the government from placing a tax on exports.Trump also threatened Brazil with a 50% tariff unless it stopped prosecuting its rightwing former president, Jair Bolsonaro, for allegedly seeking to overturn Brazil’s presidential election. When Brazil’s current president rejected that demand, saying that Trump shouldn’t be telling a sovereign democracy how to run its justice system, Trump imposed the 50% tariff. Trump’s move is an outrage because he’s seeking to strong-arm a longtime US ally over how to run its justice system and because, as Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon said, this is “far outside his legal authority”.Many lawyers voiced shock and dismay when the law firm Paul, Weiss, a litigation powerhouse, reached a deal with Trump instead of fighting him. Paul, Weiss promised to provide Trump with $40m in pro bono legal services after he sought to cripple the firm by suspending its security clearances and barring its lawyers from federal buildings. All told, nine law firms have reached deals with Trump, promising nearly $1bn in pro bono services . Some legal experts call these deals illegal – one Yale law professor said “a contract that you make with a gun to your head is not a contract”.Columbia has reached a $221m settlement with the Trump administration, while Brown reached a $50m deal. While denying any liability, Columbia vowed to “work on multiple fronts to combat” antisemitism and other “forms of hatred and intolerance at Columbia”. The university also pledged not to use “race, color, sex, or national origin” in hiring decisions and said its admissions policies would be merit-based and wouldn’t “unlawfully preference applicants based on race, color, or national origin”.Columbia officials hailed one part of the deal – the Trump administration agreed to unfreeze $1.3bn in funding. That freeze was devastating Columbia’s research programs.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionBut David Pozen, a constitutional law professor at Columbia, denounced the deal, saying it “gives legal form to an extortion scheme”. Pozen described it as the “first-ever cutoff of congressionally appropriated funds to a university, so as to punish that university and impel it to adopt sweeping reforms, without any pretense of following the congressionally mandated procedures”. Pozen slammed this deal-by-deal style of governance as “coercive”, “arbitrary”, “deeply susceptible” to “corruption” and “corrosive to the democratic order and to law itself”.We shouldn’t be shocked that Trump acts this way. He loves dealmaking and lording it over others and he has long paid scant heed to following the law. But we should be shocked by the way the two other supposedly co-equal branches of government, Congress and the supreme court, have behaved. They have essentially rolled over in the face of Trump’s ruling by shakedown.Republican lawmakers in Congress have cravenly sat on their hands while Trump has boosted inflation and sabotaged economic growth by forcing tariffs on more than 90 countries, notwithstanding the strict restrictions Congress set on when and how a president can impose tariffs. Republicans have vowed never to raise taxes, but let’s not fool ourselves: Trump’s tariffs are a regressive sales tax that hits non-affluent Americans hardest. Republican lawmakers have also been quiet as mice while Trump has used a wrecking ball to threaten leading universities – institutions that played a vital role in making the US a world leader in medicine and many other fields of research.The supreme court has been strangely, worrisomely silent while Trump rules by shakedown, even as many district court judges have shown plenty of spine, ruling, for instance, that Trump’s across-the-board tariffs and assaults on law firms are illegal. When the supreme court wants to move quickly, it often finds a way. It would be great if the court moved to protect the rule of law, universities and academic freedom from Trump’s shakedowns. The court could and should issue a ruling as soon as possible that Trump violated Title VI of the Civil Rights Act by egregiously failing to follow its requirements before freezing universities’ funding. Similarly, the court could greatly reduce the economic mayhem that Trump’s tariffs are causing by quickly upholding the US court of trade’s ruling that Trump has far overstepped his authority to impose tariffs. But the high court been shamefully passive, even submissive.Congress and the supreme court need to wake up, step up and lay down the law. They must stop Trump’s rule by shakedown, which far too often involves capricious, vindictive dealmaking and ignores our legal rules and standards. Americans need to realize that Trump’s style of governance is dangerously eroding our rule of law and democracy.

      Steven Greenhouse is a journalist and author, focusing on labor and the workplace, as well as economic and legal issues More

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      Canada finally faces a basic question: how do we defend ourselves? | Stephen Marche

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      The second Trump administration has been worse than Canada’s worst nightmare. The largest military force in the history of the world, across a largely undefended border, is suddenly under the command of a president who has called for our annexation. Canada could not be less prepared. The possibility of American aggression has been so remote, for so long, that the idea has not been seriously considered in living memory. Donald Trump has focused on economic rather than military pressure, but the new tone in Washington is finally forcing Canada to ask itself the most basic question: how do we defend ourselves?For most other countries in the world, self-defence is the key to national identity. Canada’s immense good fortune has been that we haven’t really needed a strong military to build our country. In the war of 1812, we were British, and the British kept us alive because we were British. There hasn’t been an attack on our homeland since. Confederation, the founding of the country, was the result of a political negotiation rather than a conquest or a violent independence movement. Our military was based on a fundamental assumption about our place in the world, and the nature of the world itself. Our place in the world was to contribute to the global order. The global order shared our fundamental values. Peacekeeping was more our style than defense.Recently, I’ve been working on Gloves Off, a podcast about how Canada can protect itself from any threat emanating from the US, and from every other country in the world now that the US is no longer our protector and guardian. The consensus from military and security experts is that we would be “a snack”.It is far from unusual for countries sliding toward authoritarianism, such as the the United States, to use foreign engagements to justify the suspension of their own laws. Trump has already started trumping up crazy excuses for anti-Canadian sentiment – a supposed flow of fentanyl over the border and other nonsense. His ambassador says Trump thinks our boycotts make us “nasty” to deal with.So what does Canada need to do to develop the capacity to defend itself?The good news is that Canada’s new reality is far from unique. In fact, it’s the historical norm. Finland is a potential model for us. It has lived its entire existence next to a belligerent country that is either expanding imperially or collapsing dangerously. The Finns do not have nuclear weapons. They are only 5.5 million people, next to Russia’s 143 million.Finland’s strategy is whole society defence. Matti Pesu, a senior research fellow at the Finnish Institute of International Affairs, and a reserve commander of an armoured personnel carrier, explained that whole society defence does not pretend to be able to overcome a potential Russian onslaught. “Power asymmetry is an absolutely essential factor in the Finnish security thinking,” he told me. “Given how much bigger Russia is, in order to thwart that potential threat, we need to mobilize broadly the resources available in society.”Because Finland is geared, throughout its national institutions, towards self-defence, its resistance to Russia is credible. The idea is not to match Russian military capacity, but to make the conquest of Finland not worth the trouble. “Full societal resources of a smaller nation can actually be enough to thwart the potential threat from a larger power because the costs for the larger power to invade could actually be much higher than the potential benefits it would gain from such an invasion,” Pesu explains. The more capable a country is of causing pain to occupiers, the less likely the occupation happens in the first place.Conscription is essential. The Finns can put a million soldiers in the field within 72 hours. But every facet of Finnish government, from the healthcare system to the national broadcaster, has a role in the security system, and knows its role in a possible military conflict. “A preparedness mindset permeates the whole society,” Pesu says. “From the state level all the way to an individual living somewhere in the country.”To rise to Finland’s level, Canada would need to reorchestrate its entire frame of reference. The prime minister, Mark Carney, has recently announced serious boosts to national military spending: 2% by the end of this year, rising to 5% at some point in the future. But the government has pushed its readiness targets back to 2032. And those are targets that align with our typical military practices: meeting our commitments to our alliances. That money sounds good on a theoretical level. But the Canadian military situation has not fundamentally altered. We have not reset our position.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe period we are entering is a period of deep chaos, of the weakening of international institutions, of multiple, interlocked collapses. Any reliance on international institutions and their restoration is a false hope. If Canada is to remain a stable democracy, we will have to find the stability in ourselves. A whole society defence would bolster us against the chaos that threatens us from every side and from within. In an era of splintering society, conscription is a force of unification, what Pesu calls “a strong democratic linkage”. Canada is a big country, with huge geographical and demographic diversity. We are as vulnerable as any other society to the informational chaos that is overtaking the world, to the incipient breakdown. A whole society defence would be a massive force for unification. It would establish, to Canadians at least, that there are crises we are going to face and we need to face them collectively. The thing about a whole society defence is that it determines that you are living in a whole society, a society that needs defending.Canada has no history of needing to defend itself. In fact, not needing a military is baked into our national identity – and that creates a psychological bind. To preserve who we are, we have to overcome one of our oldest tendencies, one of our best tendencies: our peace-loving nature, our idea of our country as an escape from history rather than its perpetrator or victim.And that leads to a very scary question: what will be the crisis that makes us realize that we need whole society defence? Let us hope it won’t be Canada’s last.

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

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      Federal judge orders closure of Trump’s ‘Alligator Alcatraz’ immigration jail

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      A federal judge in Miami late on Thursday ordered the closure of the Trump administration’s notorious “Alligator Alcatraz” immigration jail within 60 days, and ruled that no more detainees were to be brought to the facility while it was being wound down.The shock ruling by district court judge Kathleen Williams builds on a temporary restraining order she issued two weeks ago halting further construction work at the remote tented camp, which has attracted waves of criticism for harsh conditions, abuse of detainees and denial of due process as they await deportation.In her 82-page order, published in the US district court’s southern district of Florida on Friday, Williams determined the facility was causing severe and irreparable damage to the fragile Florida Everglades.She also noted that a plan to develop the site on which the jail was built into a massive tourist airport was rejected in the 1960s because of the harm it would have caused the the land and delicate ecosystem.“Since that time, every Florida governor, every Florida senator, and countless local and national political figures, including presidents, have publicly pledged their unequivocal support for the restoration, conservation, and protection of the Everglades,” she wrote.“This order does nothing more than uphold the basic requirements of legislation designed to fulfill those promises.”No further construction at the site can take place, she ruled, and there must be no further increase in the number of detainees currently held there, estimated to be about 700. After the 60-day period, all construction materials, fencing, generators and fixtures that made the site a detention camp must be removed.The ruling is a significant victory for a coalition of environmental groups and a native American tribe that sued the state of Florida and the federal government. Williams agreed that the hasty, eight-day construction of the jail at a disused airfield in late June damaged the sensitive wetlands of a national preserve and further imperiled federally protected species.“This is a landmark victory for the Everglades and countless Americans who believe this imperiled wilderness should be protected, not exploited,” said Eve Samples, executive director of Friends of the Everglades, one of the groups that filed the lawsuit.“It sends a clear message that environmental laws must be respected by leaders at the highest levels of our government, and there are consequences for ignoring them.”The alliance plans to hold a press conference on Friday morning to discuss the ruling in detail.Conversely, the ruling is a blow to the detention and deportation agenda of the Trump administration. The president touted the camp, which recently held as many as 1,400 detainees, as a jail for “some of the most vicious people on the planet”, although hundreds of those held there have no criminal record or active criminal proceedings against them.There was no immediate reaction to Williams’s ruling from the Florida department of emergency management, which operates the jail on behalf of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency (Ice), or from the Department of Homeland Security.But lawyers for the state told Williams in court last week that they would appeal any adversarial ruling, the Miami Herald reported.In addition, hundreds of detainees were moved from “Alligator Alcatraz” to other immigration facilities at the weekend in anticipation that Williams would order its closure, the outlet said.Ron DeSantis, Florida’s Republican governor, announced earlier this month that the state will soon open a second immigration jail at a disused prison near Gainesville to increase capacity. More

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      Supreme court allows Trump officials to cut research millions in anti-DEI push

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      The Trump administration can slash hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of research funding in its push to cut federal diversity, equity and inclusion efforts, the supreme court decided on Thursday.The split court lifted a judge’s order blocking $783m worth of cuts made by the National Institutes of Health to align with Donald Trump’s priorities.The court split 5-4 on the decision. Chief Justice John Roberts was among those who would not have allowed the cuts, along with the court’s three liberal justices. The high court did keep the Trump administration anti-DEI guidance on future funding blocked with a key vote from Justice Amy Coney Barrett, however.The decision marks the latest supreme court win for Trump and allows the administration to forge ahead with canceling hundreds of grants while the lawsuit continues to unfold. The plaintiffs, including states and public-health advocacy groups, have argued that the cuts will inflict “incalculable losses in public health and human life”.The justice department, meanwhile, has said funding decisions should not be “subject to judicial second-guessing” and efforts to promote policies referred to as DEI can “conceal insidious racial discrimination”.The lawsuit addresses only part of the estimated $12bn of NIH research projects that have been cut, but in its emergency appeal, the Trump administration also took aim at nearly two dozen other times judges have stood in the way of its funding cuts.Solicitor general D John Sauer said judges shouldn’t be considering those cases under an earlier supreme court decision that cleared the way for teacher-training program cuts that the administration also linked to DEI. He says they should go to federal claims court instead.Five conservative justices agreed, and Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote a short opinion in which he criticized lower-court judges for not adhering to earlier high court orders. “All these interventions should have been unnecessary,” Gorsuch wrote.The plaintiffs, 16 Democratic state attorneys general and public-health advocacy groups had unsuccessfully argued that research grants are fundamentally different from the teacher-training contracts and could not be sent to claims court.They said that defunding studies midway though halts research, ruins data already collected and ultimately harms the country’s potential for scientific breakthroughs by disrupting scientists’ work in the middle of their careers.Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote a lengthy dissent in which she criticized both the outcome and her colleagues’ willingness to continue allowing the administration to use the court’s emergency appeals process.“This is Calvinball jurisprudence with a twist. Calvinball has only one rule: there are no fixed rules. We seem to have two: that one, and this administration always wins,” she wrote, referring to the fictional game in the comic strip Calvin and Hobbes.In June, US district judge William Young in Massachusetts had ruled that the cancellations were arbitrary and discriminatory. “I’ve never seen government racial discrimination like this,” Young, an appointee of Republican president Ronald Reagan, said at a hearing.He later added: “Have we no shame?”An appeals court had left Young’s ruling in place. More

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      in US Politics

      Trump news at a glance: 55m US visa holders in potential limbo in fresh immigration crackdown

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      The Trump administration is reviewing the records of more than 55 million US visa holders for potential revocation or deportable violations of immigration rules, in a significant expansion of Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown.The state department said that all of the foreigners who now hold valid US visas are subject to “continuous vetting” for any indication that they could be ineligible for the document, including those already admitted into the country. Should such evidence come to light, the visa would be revoked and, if the visa holder were in the United States, they would be subject to deportation.Here are the key stories at a glance.Trump administration to review 55m US visa holders for potential rule violationsTrump officials will review records of more than 55 million US visa holders in the latest expansion on the US president’s immigration crackdown.It follows an announcement by the Trump administration on Tuesday that it will look for “anti-American” views, including on social media, when assessing the applications of people wanting to live in the United States.“The state department revokes visas any time there are indications of a potential ineligibility, which includes things like any indicators of overstays, criminal activity, threats to public safety, engaging in any form of terrorist activity, or providing support to a terrorist organization,” a department spokesperson said.Read the full storyCourt throws out $500m civil fraud penalty against Donald TrumpA New York appeals court has thrown out the massive civil fraud penalty against Donald Trump, ruling on Thursday in the state’s lawsuit accusing him of exaggerating his wealth.The decision, which was not unanimous, came seven months after the Republican returned to the White House. A panel of five judges in New York’s mid-level appellate division said the verdict, which stood to cost Trump more than $515m and rock his real estate empire, was “excessive”.Read the full storyPentagon asks civilian employees to aid Ice deportationsThe Pentagon is recruiting civilian employees to join Donald Trump’s mass deportation campaign and asking staff to sign up for deployments to immigration enforcement facilities across the United States.Read the full storyCalifornia moves closer to gerrymandered maps after key measures passCalifornia lawmakers on Thursday approved a sweeping redistricting proposal aimed at redrawing the state’s congressional boundaries and creating five potential new Democratic US House seats – a retaliatory strike against the gerrymandered maps Republicans in Texas are working to pass at the behest of Donald Trump.Read the full storyJD Vance previews defense of Trump’s bill for midterms in GeorgiaThe US vice-president, JD Vance, previewed in Georgia on Thursday the lines of attack candidates will use to defend the president’s signature One Big Beautiful Bill Act in the midterms next year, calling it “the biggest tax cut for families that this country has ever seen”.Read the full storyNew details emerge on Trump tariffs for EUWashington will not lower steep tariffs on European cars until Brussels has introduced legislation to reduce its own tariffs on US exports, maintaining pressure on the EU’s automotive industry.While the Trump administration has agreed to lower the current 27.5% US tariffs on European cars and car parts to 15%, details of a framework trade deal published on Thursday revealed the terms and conditions.Read the full storyTrump officials urge Fed to remove governor The Trump administration is ratcheting up pressure on the Federal Reserve to remove governor Lisa Cook, after the economist declared she had “no intention of being bullied” into stepping down.Read the full storyJudge rules ex-Trump lawyer unlawfully serving as US attorney in New JerseyA federal judge ruled on Thursday that Donald Trump’s former lawyer, Alina Habba, has been unlawfully serving as the top federal prosecutor in New Jersey.In his order disqualifying Habba from prosecuting three defendants who challenged her appointment, chief US district judge Matthew Brann wrote: “The Executive branch has perpetuated Alina Habba’s appointment to act as the United States Attorney for the District of New Jersey through a novel series of legal and personnel moves.”Read the full storyWhat else happened today:

      Donald Trump gave a speech to law enforcement at a park police HQ in Washington DC after announcing he would join federal officers and the military on the city’s streets as part of the forced takeover of the local police force.

      Trump intends to leave Russia and Ukraine to organize a meeting between their leaders without directly playing a role for now, according to administration officials familiar with the situation, taking a step back from the negotiations to end Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

      The president again called for the release of a former election clerk in Colorado who was convicted for her role in breaching election data in a quest to find fraud, threatening he would take “harsh measures” if she was not let out of prison.

      With Trump’s “big, beautiful bill” set to alter how families and students finance higher education starting in July 2026, a new survey suggests the majority of college students expect to be affected by the bill.
      Catching up? Here’s what happened on 20 August 2025. More