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      Outcry as US agriculture department to cut salaries and relocate staff

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      Thousands of employees at the US Department of Agriculture will be forced to take salary cuts and relocate out of the Washington DC area, as part of a major restructuring that experts warn will further weaken support for American farmers and complicate wildfire response.In a memorandum issued on Thursday, the agriculture secretary, Brooke Rollins, outlined the “key pillars” behind the department’s reorganization, focused on reducing its financial footprint, removing resources from the capital, eliminating management and consolidating workforces responsible for a range of functions, including freedom of information requests, tribal relations, grants and human resources.More than half of employees working in the Washington DC area will be relocated to five locations – Raleigh, North Carolina; Kansas City, Missouri; Indianapolis, Indiana; Fort Collins, Colorado; and Salt Lake City, Utah. Several key USDA offices will be shuttered in the capital region.The move follows wide-ranging and often chaotic cuts to staff and services being implemented under Trump 2.0, as the administration seeks to dismantle the federal government and fund tax cuts for the wealthy including the president’s billionaire donors.“President Trump was elected to make real change in Washington, and we are doing just that by moving our key services outside the Beltway and into great American cities across the country,” Rollins said in the statement. “We will do so through a transparent and commonsense process that preserves USDA’s critical health and public safety services the American public relies on.”In a video call, Rollins informed USDA staff that they would be advised about new assignments – and homes – over the next few months.View image in fullscreenMore than 90% of the department’s almost 100,000 employees are already based in county and regional offices, including at regional research institutions, farm loan offices and conservation facilities. The reorganization will leave only 2,000 of the current 4,600 USDA staff in the Beltway.The department will also eliminate or scale down regional offices, combining them into “hub locations to the greatest extent possible”, according to the memo.Rollins said that the changes would help the USDA better serve its “core constituents” of farmers, ranchers and US producers, focus on the administration’s priorities and eliminate management layers and bureaucracy.But experts warned that the latest cuts and consolidation of key departments focused on civil rights and small and disadvantaged businesses will further hamstring the agency, which is already reelingThe latest upheaval follows widespread cuts to Biden era agricultural programs, research grants and staff across the country, which along with Trump’s tariff chaos and deepening climate chaos has caused panic among many farmers.In a written statement, Amy Klobuchar, the Democratic ranking member of the Senate agriculture, nutrition and forestry committee, condemned the plan as a “half-baked proposal” and called for USDA officials to appear before Congress.“A reorganization of this scale will impact USDA’s ability to provide critical services to Americans and undermine the agency’s trusted expertise that farmers and families count on … we must have an immediate hearing before more damage is done.”“Today’s move further guts the government’s ability to protect public health, the environment and food safety. The real-world consequences will be severe, directly affecting people’s lives,” said Rebecca Wolf, senior policy analyst at Food & Water Watch Senior Food, a non-profit research and advocacy group.The reorganization is at least partly a cost-cutting measure, according to Rollins, and the relocated staff could see significant salary reductions due to lower rates paid outside the capital due to difference in the cost of living.But details were scant on how the plan will unfold, especially when it comes to management and administration of firefighters at the US Forest Service, an agency housed within the USDA. The USFS, which employs the bulk of the nation’s largest firefighting force, is facing severe staffing shortages, a Guardian investigation found this week, as wildfires rage across the country.Rollins emphasized that the plan will ensure continued support for fire operations and other activities critical to the department’s mission, but there are concerns that further workforce cuts and administrative focus lost to the reorganization during the peak of fire season could have disastrous effects.As fire risks sharply rise, crews have already begun to feel the impacts from previous cuts to budgets and workers at the agency that support wildfire mitigation and response. The programs incentivized by the Trump administration to sharply shrink the federal government rely on voluntary resignations and early retirements, which undercut the agency’s potential to make strategic decisions about its workforce.Roughly 1,400 workers with fire qualifications signed on for the programs, leaving holes on teams that play crucial roles in emergency response, especially during the busiest times of the season. Acknowledging the need to backfill these positions, Rollins called for some to return to active duty through the end of the season – only 65 have been reinstated, according to a department spokesperson.The Forest Service will also see its nine regional offices phased out over the next year and all research stations will be consolidated into one, housed in Fort Collins, Colorado.Experts were struggling to make sense of the announcement, and shared concerns about how another layer of change could cause more chaos and disorganization as fire risks continue to surge.“Until we know more specifically about the fire program it’s hard to determine what some of the outcomes of this could be,” said Riva Duncan, a retired USFS fire officer and vice-president of the Grassroots Wildland Firefighters advocacy group. Duncan added that the consolidation of USFS research stations could be problematic because each does fire research and has a focus specific to the landscapes where the station is housed.“This is another example of decisions being made by people who haven’t bothered to learn or understand the work,” she said.It is also unclear if the reorganization is designed to align with plans from the Trump administration to combine federal firefighters into a single agency, under the Department of the Interior. Those plans were left in limbo on Tuesday, after the House appropriations committee determined “changes in budgetary and management structure spark concerns about impacted agencies’ abilities to consistently meet critical performance benchmarks”.A Government Accountability Office (GAO) study was ordered to evaluate the feasibility of the plan, and the House of Representatives adjourned for its August recess on Wednesday, delaying any budget votes until at least September.More than 15,300 employees have already left the USDA since Trump took office, opting for buyouts and early retirement through the administration’s deferred resignation plan. Similar staff-cutting measures have been implemented across the federal government, overseen by the so-called department of government efficiency, the quasi-government agency created by the billionaire Trump donor Elon Musk.“This is less a reorganization and more a dismantling. This mass relocation will be costly. It will also result in the mass resignation of staff, which means a major loss of capacity at USDA,” said Ben Lilliston, director of rural strategies and climate change at the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy (IATP).“Contrary to the secretary’s statement, the USDA is already understaffed. There was no effort to get input from Congress, the public or farmers about this reorganization.”A similar USDA relocation program during the first Trump term led to a smaller, less efficient, less experienced and less diverse workforce, according to the GAO, the bipartisan federal government watchdog.The USDA workforce grew 8% during the Biden administration, while salaries rose 15%, largely on temporary funding, the department said on Thursday, as Rollins confirmed that the cuts would continue.“This reorganization is another step of the department’s process of reducing its workforce,” Rollins wrote in the memo, noting that programs to incentivize early retirements and voluntary resignations will continue to reduce the staff numbers further. More

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      Trump cracks down on homelessness with executive order enabling local governments

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      The federal government is seeking to crack down on homelessness in the US, with Donald Trump issuing an executive order to push local governments to remove unhoused people from the streets.The order the US president signed on Thursday will seek the “reversal of federal or state judicial precedents and the termination of consent decrees” that restrict local governments’ ability to respond to the crisis, and redirect funds to support rehabilitation and treatment. The order aims to “restore public order”, saying “endemic vagrancy, disorderly behavior, sudden confrontations, and violent attacks have made our cities unsafe”, according to the order.The action comes as the homelessness crisis in the US has significantly worsened in recent years driven by a widespread shortage of affordable housing. Last year, a single-day count, which is a rough estimate, recorded more than 770,000 people experiencing homelessness across the country, the highest figure ever documented.Cities and states have adopted an increasingly punitive approach to homelessness, seeking to push people out of parks and city streets, even when there is no shelter available. The supreme court ruled last year that cities can impose fines and even jail time for unhoused people for sleeping outside after local governments argued some protections for unhoused people prevented them from taking action to reduce homelessness.Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, told USA Today, which first reported on the executive order, that the president was “delivering on his commitment to Make America Safe Again” and end homelessness.“By removing vagrant criminals from our streets and redirecting resources toward substance abuse programs, the Trump Administration will ensure that Americans feel safe in their own communities and that individuals suffering from addiction or mental health struggles are able to get the help they need,” she said.The president’s order comes after last year’s US supreme court ruling, which was one of the most consequential legal decisions on homelessness in decades in the US.That ruling held that it is not “cruel and unusual punishment” to criminalize camping when there is no shelter available. The case originated in Grants Pass, Oregon, a city that was defending its efforts to prosecute people for sleeping in public.Unhoused people in the US have long faced crackdowns and sweeps, with policies and police practices that result in law enforcement harassment, tickets or jail time. But the ruling supercharged those kinds of aggressive responses, emboldening cities and states to punish encampment residents who have no other options for shelter.In a report last month, the American Civil Liberties Union found that cities across the US have introduced more than 320 bills criminalizing unhoused people, the majority of which have passed. The crackdowns have taken place in Democratic- and Republican-run states alike.Advocates for unhoused people’s rights have long argued that criminalization only exacerbates the housing crisis, shuffling people in and out of jail or from one neighborhood to the next, as they lose their belongings and connections to providers, fall further into debt and wind up in increasingly unsafe conditions.During his campaign last year, Trump used dark rhetoric to talk about the humanitarian crisis, threatening to force people into “tent cities”, raising fears that some of the poorest, most vulnerable Americans could end up in remote locations in settings that resemble concentration camps. More

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      Colorado clerks voice alarm at murky ‘official’ push to access voting machines

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      Steve Schleiker, the Republican county clerk in El Paso county, Colorado, got home from work on 16 July when he got a text message from a number he didn’t recognize with a pressing request.The person sending the message introduced himself to Schleiker as Jeff Small, a political consultant with the 76 Group who had formerly served as Representative Lauren Boebert’s chief of staff. He said he was working with the White House and was looking for Republican clerks in Democratic states they could partner with on election integrity. Small wanted to speak soon, Schleiker said, because there was going to be a meeting the next morning between the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the Department of Justice.Schleiker spoke with Small that evening, and says Small connected him with an official at the DHS for a follow-up conversation. The official asked if Schleiker would be willing to allow the federal government to access the county’s election equipment and see if there were any gaps in the county’s network, Schleiker said.Schleiker was shocked by the request.“I was an absolute no,” he said. “That is absolutely against the law, it’s a felony. And two, it also violates the constitution with states’ rights.”At least 10 clerks in Colorado received similar queries from Small, which come as the justice department has shifted its focus from protecting voting rights to investigating voter fraud and election irregularities, and has ramped up requests for information to states about how they keep ineligible voters off the rolls.Justin Grantham, the clerk and recorder in Fremont county, said he also received a phone call from Small asking about the possibility of a third party coming in to access voting equipment.Small had mentioned he was working with the White House on implementing Donald Trump’s 25 March executive order on elections. A provision in the measure instructs the homeland security secretary to assess the security of voting equipment “to the extent they are connected to, or integrated into, the Internet and report on the risk of such systems being compromised through malicious software and unauthorized intrusions into the system”.View image in fullscreen“This is the first time ever I’ve received a request of that nature,” Grantham said, adding that he told Small he didn’t believe the president could issue an executive order dealing with elections. “I’m not willing to let anybody come into my office like that.”Matt Crane, the executive director of the Colorado county clerks association, said Small’s requests set off alarm bells. Allowing unauthorized access to voting equipment is a felony in the state. Several clerks and experts said they had never received such a request before. The requests were first reported by the Washington Post.Crane, who consulted for the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (Cisa), the part of the DHS that handled election security from 2019 until 2025, said he had never heard of the federal government trying to access voting machines.“At no point would anybody from Cisa ever even ask to get hands on voting systems,” he said. “The optics are bad. If something goes wrong, people could say it was Cisa.”Crane, who held an emergency conference call with clerks last week to discuss the outreach, said all of the officials who were contacted were Republicans using voting equipment from Dominion Voting Systems.Bobbie Gross, the Mesa county clerk and recorder, said someone identifying themselves as Small called her office not asking about access to the machines, but with an even more unusual request. They wanted to know who the county’s project manager at Dominion was in 2020 and 2021. “This is not public information and the request was denied,” she said.Small referred a request for comment to a lawyer, Suzanne Taheri. Taheri said Small had not contacted the Mesa county clerk’s office.“The person that identified themself to Clerk Gross’ office as Jeff Small was definitely an impersonator as Jeff never reached out to anyone from Mesa County on this matter and the call log confirms that,” she said in a statement.The interest in Dominion is significant. Tina Peters, the former Mesa county clerk who espoused unfounded conspiracy theory claims about Dominion, was sentenced to nine years in prison last year for tampering with election equipment after the 2020 election. Trump has called for Peters to be freed and the justice department has tried to assist with getting her case overturned. The justice department also sent Colorado a broad request for election records dating back to the 2020 election last month that some speculated is related to the Peters case. Earlier this month, a Colorado man was also arrested after allegedly throwing a molotov cocktail-type device through the window of a room that houses voting equipment at the county clerk’s office.The request also comes as the justice department reportedly asked officials to explore whether election officials who fail to secure election equipment can be criminally charged.Small had reached out to counties on a volunteer basis while on paternity leave from his job at the 76 Group to assist with implementing the executive order, Taheri said in a statement.“Jeff supported efforts by allies in the administration to encourage Colorado election officials to participate in President Trump’s election security executive order,” she said. “The notion that local clerks supporting the implementation of the president’s executive order is somehow inappropriate is preposterous.”“Colorado audits voting machines all the time, under explicit procedures outlined under state and federal law. The executive order that Jeff reached out on would comply with these same laws and to suggest otherwise is dishonest.”The Colorado secretary of state, Jena Griswold, the state’s top election official, said that defense was “completely misleading and dishonest”.“Of course election equipment is certified, both to state and federal standards. The federal standard certification of election systems is done in a secure environment by experts. It’s not done by consultants or representatives of the federal government accessing voting equipment on the ground,” said Griswold, a Democrat. “That’s not how any of this works.”The Department of Homeland Security distanced itself from Small.“Jeff Small does not speak for the Department of Homeland Security. He does not have any role with DHS and has never been formally authorized to do any official business for the department,” a spokesperson for the agency said in a statement.Crane said he had reached out to local election officials in other states, but no one else had received similar requests.“You start to wonder: ‘Is this more than verifying our systems are secure?’” More

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      Consent decrees force schools to desegregate. The Trump administration is striking them down

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      In late April, the Department of Justice announced that it was ending a decades-long consent decree in Plaquemines parish, Louisiana, in a school district that has been under a desegregation order since the Johnson administration in the 1960s.The Plaquemines parish desegregation order, one of more than 130 such orders nationwide, was in place to ensure that the school district, which initially refused to integrate, followed the law. Many consent decrees of the era are still in existence because school districts are not in compliance with the law.Some experts, including former justice department employees, say the change in direction for the department could be worrying.These orders “provide students with really important protections against discrimination”, said Shaheena Simons, who was the chief of the educational opportunities section of the civil rights division at the justice department for nearly a decade. “They require school districts to continue to actively work to eliminate all the remaining vestiges of the state-mandated segregation system. That means that students have protections in terms of what schools they’re assigned to, in terms of the facilities and equipment in the schools that they attend. They have protection from discrimination in terms of barriers to accessing advanced programs, gifted programs. And it means that a court is there to protect them and to enforce their rights when they’re violated and to ensure that school districts are continuing to actively desegregate.”The justice department ended the Plaquemines parish desegregation order in an unusual process, one that some fear will be replicated elsewhere. The case was dismissed through a “joint stipulated dismissal”. Previously, courts have followed a specific process for ending similar cases, one in which school districts prove that they are complying with the court orders. That did not happen this time. Instead, the Louisiana state attorney general’s office worked with the justice department in reaching the dismissal.“I’m not aware of anyone, any case, that has [ended] that way before,” said Deuel Ross, the deputy director of litigation of the Legal Defense Fund (LDF); the LDF was not specifically involved with the Plaquemines parish case. “The government as a plaintiff who represents the American people, the people of that parish, has an obligation to make sure that the district has done everything that it’s supposed to have done to comply with the federal court order in the case before it gets released, and the court itself has its own independent obligation to confirm that there’s no vestiges of discrimination left in the school district that are traceable to either present or past discrimination.”Despite the district not proving that it is compliant with the order, the justice department has celebrated the end of the consent decree.“No longer will the Plaquemines Parish School Board have to devote precious local resources over an integration issue that ended two generations ago,” Harmeet K Dhillon, assistant attorney general of the justice department’s civil rights division, said in a statement announcing the decision. “This is a prime example of neglect by past administrations, and we’re now getting America refocused on our bright future.”But focusing on the age of the case implies that it was obsolete, according to Simons, who is now the senior adviser of programs and strategist at the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law. “The administration is trying to paint these cases as ancient history and no longer relevant.”In 1966, the Johnson administration sued school districts across the country, particularly in the south, that refused to comply with desegregation demands. At the time, Plaquemines parish was led by Leander Perez, a staunch segregationist and white supremacist.Perez had played a large role in trying to keep nearby New Orleans from desegregating, and once that effort failed, he invited 1,000 white students from the Ninth Ward to enroll in Plaquemines parish schools. By 1960, nearly 600 had accepted the offer. Perez was excommunicated by Archbishop Joseph Francis Rummel for ignoring his warning to stop trying to prevent schools run by the archdiocese of New Orleans from integrating.Perez attempted to close the public schools in Plaquemines parish, and instead open all-white private academies, or, segregation academies, which became a feature of the post-integration south. An estimated 300 segregation academies, which, as private schools, are not governed by the same rules and regulations as public schools, are still in operation and majority white.Students and teachers working in school districts today might be decades removed from the people who led the push for desegregation in their districts, but they still benefit from the protections that were long ago put in place. Without court oversight, school districts that were already begrudgingly complying might have no incentive to continue to do so.According to the Century Foundation, as of 2020, 185 districts and charters consider race and/or socioeconomic status in their student assignment or admissions policies, while 722 districts and charters are subject to a legal desegregation order or voluntary agreement. The justice department currently has about 135 desegregation cases on its docket, the majority of which are in Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and Georgia.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“Separate but equal doesn’t work,” said Johnathan Smith, former deputy assistant attorney general in the civil rights division at the justice department. “The reality is that students of color do better when they are in integrated classrooms … We know that the amount of resources that are devoted to schools are greater when there are a higher number of white students. So to have students attend majority-minority school districts means that they’re going to be shut out, whether that’s from AP classes, whether that’s from extracurricular activities. All the activities that make it possible for students to fully achieve occur when you have more integrated classrooms.”“Public education isn’t just about education for the sake of education,” he added. “It’s about preparing people to be citizens of our democracy and to be fully engaged in our democratic institutions. When you have students that are being shut out from quality public education, the impact is not just on those communities. It’s on our democracy writ large.”Smith, the current chief of staff and general counsel for the National Center for Youth Law, said that the decision “signals utter contempt for communities of color by the administration, and a lack of awareness of the history of segregation that has plagued our nation’s schools”.“Even though we are 71 years after the Brown v Board [of Education] decision, schools of this country remain more segregated today than they were back in 1954,” he said. “The fact that the administration is kind of wholeheartedly ending these types of consent decrees is troubling, particularly when they’re not doing the research and investigation to determine whether or not these decrees really should be ended at this point.”Smith said that the decision in the Plaquemines parish case may be a “slippery slope” in which other school districts begin reaching out to the Trump administration.“The impact they can have across the country and particularly across the south is pretty huge,” he said. “I worry that we’re going to see more and more of these decrees falling and more and more of these districts remaining segregated without any real opportunity to address that.” More

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      Trump push to ban birthright citizenship unconstitutional, US court rules

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      Donald Trump’s effort to repeal birthright citizenship has hit another a stumbling block, with a federal appeals court in San Francisco declaring the president’s attempt unconstitutional.The three-judge ruling panel in the 9th US circuit court of appeals echoed a district court in New Hampshire that blocked the executive order earlier this month.“The district court correctly concluded that the executive order’s proposed interpretation, denying citizenship to many persons born in the United States, is unconstitutional. We fully agree,” the verdict said.The case is now one stop further on the long road to the US supreme court.Trump’s executive order banning birthright citizenship was signed just hours after the president took office on 20 January and was immediately challenged in a spread of courts across the country. It has faced a tumultuous legal battle ever since. Birthright citizenship is a legal principle that allows nearly everyone born on US soil to become a US citizen.In under a month since the executive order’s filing, multiple judges across the country have filed injunctions blocking the order.Trump’s administration then took to the supreme court to fight the injunctions. In a major decision, the US supreme court ruled that injunctions by the lower courts were exceeding their given authority, effectively transforming the mechanics of the US justice system. The verdict did not address the legality of the birthright citizenship ban itself.A loophole was left, however, for those looking to fight the executive order – class action lawsuits. In opposition to the executive order, New Hampshire judge Joseph LaPlante recognized babies across the US as a class that would be affected by the lawsuit and said depriving them of citizenship constituted irreparable harm.Birthright citizenship was embedded in the US constitution’s 14th amendment in 1868, overturning the infamous 1857 Dred Scott decision and giving citizenship to formerly enslaved Americans. It was strengthened in 1898 in the Wong Ark case, which upheld the citizenship of American-born Wong Kim Ark in the face of the Chinese Exclusion Act. Indigenous Americans were historically excluded from birthright citizenship, which changed with the Indian Citizenship Act of 1924.Long a fringe issue in rightwing circles, the effort to repeal birthright citizenship was brought back into Congress in 1991 and has appeared regularly since. Trump’s executive order, constitutional or not, marks its furthest foray into the mainstream.At time of writing the Trump administration was yet to comment on the ruling. More

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      Trump news at a glance: White House claims ‘fake news’ as president faces fresh Epstein claims

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      Donald Trump is facing a widening crisis amid a report claiming that his name appears in US justice department files about Jeffrey Epstein as Congress subpoenas testimony from Epstein accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell.The White House sought to downplay the relationship between the US president and the disgraced financier while Trump’s spokesperson denied an account in the Wall Street Journal that the president was told in May by attorney general Pam Bondi that he is named in the Epstein files. The report says the president was told that many other high profile figures were also named and states that being mentioned in the records isn’t a sign of wrongdoing.“The fact is that the president kicked him out of his club for being a creep,” spokesperson Steven Cheung said. “This is nothing more than a continuation of the fake news stories concocted by the Democrats and the liberal media.”A federal judge, meanwhile, denied a justice department request to unseal grand jury transcripts related to Epstein.Here’s more on these and the day’s other key Trump administration stories:Trump’s name reported to feature in Epstein filesAttorney general Pam Bondi has pushed back against a report claiming that Donald Trump’s name appears “multiple times” in US justice department files about Jeffrey Epstein, saying that “nothing in the files warranted further investigation or prosecution”.“As part of our routine briefing, we made the president aware of the findings,” Bondi and her deputy said in a statement.White House spokesperson Steven Cheung said in an emailed statement: “The fact is that the President kicked him out of his club for being a creep. This is nothing more than a continuation of the fake news stories concocted by the Democrats and the liberal media.”Read the full storyJudge rejects Trump bid to unseal Epstein jury transcriptsA US federal judge has denied a justice department request to unseal grand jury transcripts related to a criminal investigation of Epstein, the late sex offender and financier, in south Florida from the mid-2000s.The move on Wednesday is the first ruling in the Trump administration’s series of attempts to release more information after the justice department announced it would not be releasing any additional files related to the Epstein case, despite earlier promises from Trump and Bondi.Read the full storyEU and US near trade dealThe European Union and the US are close to a trade deal that would place 15% tariffs on most imports from the bloc, it has emerged.The tariff rate would apply to most goods, with some exceptions for products including aircraft and medical devices, according to diplomats with knowledge of the talks.Read the full storyTrump signs three executive orders targeting ‘woke’ AI modelsDonald Trump on Wednesday signed a trio of executive orders that he vowed would turn the United States into an “AI export powerhouse”, including a directive targeting what the White House described as “woke” artificial intelligence models.A second order Trump signed on Wednesday calls for deregulating AI development, increasing the building of datacentres and removing environmental protections that could hamper their construction.Read the full storyColumbia to pay Trump administration more than $220mColumbia University announced a much-anticipated deal with the Trump administration to pay a fine worth more than $220m, in an agreement meant to bring a resolution to the threat of massive funding cuts to the school, but certain to rankle critics given the extraordinary concessions made by the Ivy League university.Read the full storyTrump administration investigating Harvard’s visa programThe state department is opening an investigation into Harvard University’s eligibility as a sponsor for the exchange visitor program, the latest salvo in the Trump administration’s pressure campaign on the university over alleged failures to combat campus antisemitism and inadequate support of Israel.Read the full storyExclusive: Advisers abandon effort to find Hegseth new chief of staffDonald Trump’s advisers have abandoned an effort to find a new chief of staff to the defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, allowing senior adviser Ricky Buria to continue performing the duties in an acting role despite once viewing him as a liability, according to people familiar with the matter.Read the full storyWhat else happened today:

      Robert F Kennedy Jr will formally require vaccine makers to remove thimerosal, an ingredient that has been the target of anti-vaccine campaigns, from vaccines.

      French president Emmanuel Macron and his wife, Brigitte Macron, are suing the rightwing commentator Candace Owens for defamation.

      The acting director of Fema defended his agency’s handling of recent deadly floods in Texas, claiming the response was a “model” for “how disasters should be handled”.
      Catching up? Here’s what happened on 22 July 2025. More

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      Trump signs executive orders targeting ‘woke’ AI models and regulation

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      Donald Trump on Wednesday signed a trio of executive orders that he vowed would turn the United States into an “AI export powerhouse”, including one targeting what the White House described as “woke” artificial intelligence models.During remarks at an AI summit in Washington, Trump decried “woke Marxist lunacy in the AI models”, before signing the orders on stage at the Mellon Auditorium.“Once and for all, we are getting rid of woke. Is that OK?” Trump said, drawing loud applause from the audience of AI industry leaders. He then asserted that his predecessor, Joe Biden, had “established toxic diversity, equity and inclusion ideology as a guiding principle of American AI development”.“So you immediately knew that was the end of your development,” he said, eliciting laughter.The new order requires any artificial intelligence company receiving federal funding to maintain politically neutral AI models free of “ideological dogmas such as DEI” – putting pressure on an industry increasingly seeking to partner with government agencies. It is part of the Trump administration’s broader anti-diversity campaign that has also targeted federal agencies, academic institutions and the military.While the directive emphasizes that the federal government “should be hesitant to regulate the functionality of AI models in the private marketplace”, it asserts that public procurement carries “the obligation not to procure models that sacrifice truthfulness and accuracy to ideological agendas”. The metrics of what make an AI model politically biased are contentious and open to interpretation, however, and therefore may allow the administration to use the order to target companies at its discretion.The other orders were aimed at expediting federal permitting for datacentre infrastructure and promoting the export of American AI models. The executive actions coincide with the Trump administration’s release of a broader, 24-page “AI action plan” that seeks to cement the US’s “global dominance” in artificial intelligence as well as expand the use of AI in the federal government.“Winning this competition will be a test of our capacities unlike anything since the dawn of the space age,” Trump declared, adding: “We need US technology companies to be all-in for America. We want you to put America first.”Earlier on Wednesday, the White House unveiled its long-promised “action plan”, titled “Winning the Race”, that was announced shortly after Trump took office and repealed a Biden administration order on AI that mandated some safeguards and standards on the technology. It outlines the White House’s vision for governing artificial intelligence in the US, vowing to speed up the development of the fast-growing technology by removing “red tape and onerous regulation”.During his remarks, Trump also proposed a more nominal change. “I can’t stand it,” he said, referring to the use of the word “artificial”. “I don’t even like the name, you know? I don’t like anything that’s artificial. So could we straighten that out, please? We should change the name. I actually mean that.”“It’s not artificial. It’s genius,” he added.A second order Trump signed on Wednesday calls for deregulating AI development, increasing the building of datacentres and removing environmental protections that could hamper their construction.Datacentres that house the servers for AI models require immense amounts of water and energy to function, as well as produce greenhouse gas emissions. Environmental groups have warned about harmful increases to air and noise pollution as tech companies build more facilities, while a number of local communities have pushed back against their construction.In addition to easing permitting laws and emphasizing the need for more energy infrastructure, both measures that tech companies have lobbied for, Trump’s order also frames the AI race as a contest for geopolitical dominance. China has invested billions into the manufacturing of AI chips and datacentres to become a competitor in the industry, while Chinese companies such as Deepseek have released AI models that rival Silicon Valley’s output.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionWhile Trump’s plan seeks to address fears of China as an AI superpower, the Trump administration’s move against “woke” AI echoes longstanding conservative grievances against tech companies, which Republicans have accused of possessing liberal biases and suppressing rightwing ideology. As generative AI has become more prominent in recent years, that criticism has shifted from concerns over internet search results or anti-misinformation policies into anger against AI chatbots and image generators.One of the biggest critics of perceived liberal bias in AI is Elon Musk, who has vowed to make his xAI company and its Grok chatbot “anti-woke”. Although Musk and Donald Trump are still locked in a feud after their public falling out last month, Musk may stand to benefit from Trump’s order given his emphasis on controlling AI’s political outputs.Musk has consistently criticized AI models, including his own, for failing to generate what he sees as sufficiently conservative views. He has claimed that xAI has reworked Grok to eliminate liberal bias, and the chatbot has occasionally posted white supremacist and antisemitic content. In May, Grok affirmed white supremacist conspiracies that a “white genocide” was taking place in South Africa and said it was “instructed by my creators” to do so. Earlier this month, Grok also posted pro-Nazi ideology and rape fantasies while identifying itself as “MechaHitler” until the company was forced to intervene.Despite Grok’s promotion of Nazism, xAI was among several AI companies that the Department of Defense awarded with up to $200m contracts this month to develop tools for the government. OpenAI, Anthropic and Google, all of which have their own proprietary AI models, were the other recipients.Conservatives have singled out incidents such as Google’s Gemini image generator inaccurately producing racially diverse depictions of historical figures such as German second world war soldiers as proof of liberal bias. AI experts have meanwhile long warned about problems of racial and gender bias in the creation of artificial intelligence models, which are trained on content such as social media posts, news articles and other forms of media that may contain stereotypes or discriminatory material that gets incorporated into these tools. Researchers have found that these biases have persisted despite advancements in AI, with models often replicating existing social prejudices in their outputs.Conflict over biases in AI have also led to turmoil in the industry. In 2020, the co-lead of Google’s “ethical AI” team Timnit Gebru said she was fired after she expressed concerns of biases being built into the company’s AI models and a broader lack of diversity efforts at the company. Google said she resigned. More

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      Columbia announces deal to pay Trump administration more than $220m

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      Columbia University announced a much-anticipated deal with the Trump administration to pay more than $220m, an agreement meant to bring a resolution to the threat of massive funding cuts to the school, but certain to rankle critics given the extraordinary concessions made by the Ivy League university.Under the agreement, the school will pay a $200m settlement over three years to the federal government, the university said. It will also pay $21m to settle investigations brought by the US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.“This agreement marks an important step forward after a period of sustained federal scrutiny and institutional uncertainty,” acting university president Claire Shipman said.The administration pulled the funding because of what it described as the university’s failure to squelch antisemitism on campus during the Israel-Gaza war that began in October 2023.Columbia first agreed to a series of demands laid out by the Republican administration, including overhauling the university’s student disciplinary process and adopting a new definition of antisemitism.Wednesday’s agreement codifies those reforms, Shipman said.On Tuesday, the university announced that it had disciplined more than 70 students for participating in a May protest against the war in Gaza.The deal is the first between a university and a presidential administration that has described higher education institutions as “the enemy” and launched an unprecedented campaign to reshape them. The government has withheld billions in grants and contracts from schools in an effort to force university administrators to abide by a sweeping list of demands.The news comes the same week that Harvard University appeared in federal court to argue that the Trump administration illegally cut $2.6bn in funding over what it described as similar, politically motivated attempts to reshape higher education.Harvard is the first – and so far only – university to sue.In April, the administration also threatened to freeze $510m in grants to Brown University, citing similar motives, and has raised the prospect of cutting funding to Cornell, Northwestern, the University of Pennsylvania and Princeton.In exchange for Columbia’s concessions, the White House will reinstate $400m in federal funding it had stripped from the university earlier this year over allegations that it allowed antisemitism to fester on campus.Researchers estimate that Columbia was likely facing another $1.2bn in frozen funding from the National Institutes of Health. After the Trump administration cut the original $400m from the top research university, the lead funder of scientific research also terminated or froze unspent dollars previously awarded to Columbia.In a June statement to alumni, Shipman said the university was in “danger of reaching a tipping point in terms of preserving our research excellence and the work we do for humanity”.While the Trump administration is likely to hail the agreement as a victory in its battle against universities, the deal fell short of some of the most restrictive measures the administration had sought, like a legally binding consent decree and an overhaul of Columbia’s governance structure.Earlier this month, the university announced a host of new measures to further combat antisemitism on campus, including the adoption of the controversial International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition and additional antisemitism training. The measures add to several similar ones introduced as the university has come under mounting criticism over the last two years by students, alumni and lawmakers who accused it of failing to stop pro-Palestinian protests on campus that they deemed antisemitic.The deal, which settles a bevy of open civil rights investigations into the university, will be overseen by an independent monitor agreed to by both sides and who will report to the government on its progress every six months. More