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      Trump policies could fuel illicit drug trade despite vow to curb fentanyl

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      Donald Trump’s policies could leave the US more vulnerable to dangerous synthetic drug trafficking from abroad, even as the administration has vowed to stop fentanyl from entering the country, former government officials say.This week, Trump imposed tariffs on Mexico, Canada and China, ostensibly as a tactic to stem the flow of illicit drugs into the US.Jim Crotty, the former Drug Enforcement Administration deputy chief of staff, called the approach “coercive” and said it has the potential to backfire. Federal funding cuts could also leave US borders more insecure, according to Enrique Roig, a former Department of State official who oversaw Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs (INL) portfolios and who has also worked with USAid.US overdose deaths began to decrease significantly for the first time in 2023, after rising for decades. But Crotty notes this progress is fragile.“We’re seeing this decrease in overdose deaths and everyone’s still trying to suss out exactly why. I don’t think now is the time that we want to stop any of those existing efforts because we know that at least some, or a combination of them, have been working,” Crotty said.Roig agreed: “All this has to be working together in concert.”Federal funding cuts could put the US behind when it comes to drug detection technology. The global drug supply has increasingly shifted towards highly potent synthetic substances such as fentanyl and newly emerging nitazenes. Often, these drugs arrive in the US in the form of powders or precursor chemicals that take up minimal space, and are difficult to detect by odor.Roig says advanced drug detection technology is therefore vital, but Trump’s federal funding and staff cuts mean less money for the latest technology and equipment, and fewer people to install it.Ram Ben Tzion, the CEO of Publican, which provides drug detection technology to government agencies outside the US, says cutting-edge methods detect suspicious shipments even before they get to the border. Publican uses large language models to flag shipments that “don’t make sense” and are likely to contain illicit substances. For example, his company once found fentanyl precursors in a shipment to a residential address in California. The shipment claimed to contain fashion items, but came from a Chinese construction company.Similarly, the UN Container Control Programme, which has historically received state department funding, helps authorities flag suspicious shipments before they reach their destination. This program has helped authorities around the world seize hundreds of tonnes of illicit drugs each year. Roig says federal funding cuts have stalled CCP’s implementation in Mexico, even though it’s a primary security target for Trump.Some of Trump’s measures are more showy than they are constructive, Crotty and Roig said. The designation of certain cartels as terrorist organizations “doesn’t do much of anything”.It’s symbolic, says Crotty, given that they were already designated transnational criminal organizations. Other measures are a harmful waste of money, according to Roig. Just this week, for instance, the administration suspended the use of military planes to deport immigrants, including those accused of drug related crimes, due to the extravagant cost.Roig says this measure was completely unnecessary, as “Ice already has its own fleet of airplanes” that are much cheaper.Crotty is concerned the aggression could backfire.“The Mexican people are protective of their culture and their sovereignty. If you push them too hard, could it do more harm than good?” he said.Mexico sent 10,000 troops to its US border to cooperate with Trump’s demands, but Crotty says “while in a vacuum that sounds like a whole lot”, Mexico’s border is vast, and drugs are often transported in “minute quantities”. So, the US needs Mexico’s cooperation when it comes to intelligence – otherwise “you’re not going to find the proverbial needle in the haystack”, Crotty said.Roig said that “it’s important that we do this in cooperation with Mexico and not alienate them,” adding that Trump’s aggressive stance toward China could harm the Biden administration’s progress negotiating with the Chinese government to cooperate on counternarcotics initiatives.Massive USAid cuts also threaten programs intended to curb the “root causes” of the drug trade, says Roig. Some USAid-funded programs simultaneously tackled drug smuggling and another one of Trump’s key issues, migration – as cartels that traffic drugs also traffic people.When Roig worked with USAid, he says he spent a lot of time on “community violence prevention efforts”, including programs to keep young people from joining international crime organizations and cartels. (Notably, the Trump administration has purged many websites describing USAid programs.)If the drug supply does increase, it could mean US overdoses begin to rise again as well. But Crotty is worried we won’t even know if that happens. Layoffs at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention could leave fewer people to track overdose deaths, and Trump’s attack on government data sharing could keep everyone in the dark.“​​ CDC maintains the overdose death dashboard. A lot of that stuff is data driven. Are they still going to have access to the data?” he said.The Guardian contacted INL and UNODC for comment. More

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      The pink protest at Trump’s speech shows the Democrats aren’t coming to save us

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      Pretty (pathetic) in pinkHappy International Women’s Day (IWD), everyone! I’ve got some good news and some bad news to mark the occasion.The bad news is that a legally defined sexual predator is leading the most powerful country on earth and we’re seeing a global backlash against women’s rights. “[I]nstead of mainstreaming equal rights, we are seeing the mainstreaming of misogyny,” the UN secretary-general, António Guterres, said in his IWD message.The good news, for those of us in the US at least, is that the Democrats have a plan to deal with all this. Or rather, they have wardrobe concepts of a plan. On Tuesday night, Donald Trump addressed a joint session of Congress at the US Capitol. Some members from the Democratic Women’s Caucus (DWC), including Nancy Pelosi, decided to protest by … wait for it … wearing pink.“Pink is a color of power and protest,” the New Mexico representative Teresa Leger Fernández, chair of the DWC, told Time. “It’s time to rev up the opposition and come at Trump loud and clear.”The pink outfits may have been loud but the message the Democrats were sending was far from clear. They couldn’t even coordinate their colour-coordinating protest: some lawmakers turned up wearing pink while others wore blue and yellow to support Ukraine and others wore black because it was a somber occasion.Still, I’ll give the DWC their due: their embarrassing stunt seems to have garnered at least one – possibly two – fans. One MSNBC columnist, for example, wrote that the “embrace of such a traditionally feminine color [pink] by women with considerable political power makes a stunning example of subversive dressing”.For the most part, however, the general reaction appears to have been that this was yet another stunning example of how spineless and performative the Democrats are. Forget bringing a knife to a gunfight – these people are bringing pink blazers to a fight for democracy. To be fair, there were a few other attempts at protest beyond a pink palette: the Texas representative Al Green heckled the president (and was later censured by some of his colleagues for doing so) and a few Democrats left the room during Trump’s speech. Still, if this is the “opposition”, then we are all doomed.Not to mention: even the pink blazers seemed a little too extreme for certain factions of the Democratic party. House Democratic leadership reportedly urged members not to mount protests and to show restraint during Trump’s address. They also chose the Michigan senator Elissa Slotkin to give the Democratic response to Trump’s speech. While Slotkin tends to be described as a sensible centrist voice by a lot of the media, she’s very Trump-adjacent. Slotkin is one of the Democratic senators who has voted with Trump the most often and, last June, was one of the 42 Democrats to vote with the GOP to sanction the international criminal court (ICC) over its seeking of arrest warrants for Benjamin Netanyahu and other Israeli leaders for destroying Gaza. Human rights advocacy groups have warned that attacking the ICC like this undermines international law and the ability to prosecute or prevent human rights violations across the world. It speaks volumes about the US media and political class that a senator standing against international law can be called a centrist.This whole episode also speaks volumes about the Democrats’ plan for the future: it’s growing increasingly clear that, instead of actually growing a spine and fighting to improve people’s lives, the Democratic party seems to think the smartest thing to do is quietly move to the right and do nothing while the Trump administration implodes. I won’t caution against this strategy myself. Instead, I’ll let Harry Truman do it. Back in 1952, Truman said: “The people don’t want a phony Democrat. If it’s a choice between a genuine Republican, and a Republican in Democratic clothing, the people will choose the genuine article, every time.”Anyway, the upshot of all of this is that the Democrats are not coming to save us. We must save ourselves. That means organizing within our local communities and learning lessons from activists outside our communities. It means being careful not to normalize creeping authoritarianism and it means recognizing the urgency of the moment. The warning signs are flashing red: we need to respond with a hell of a lot more than a pink wardrobe.Make atomic bombings straight again!DEI Derangement Syndrome has reached such a fever-pitch in the US that a picture of the Enola Gay aircraft that dropped an atomic bomb on Japan has been flagged for deletion at the Pentagon. Apparently, it only got the job because it was Gay.Can a clitoris be trained to read braille?The Vagina Museum addressed this very important question on Bluesky.One in eight women killed by men in the UK are over 70A landmark report by the Femicide Census looks at the deaths of 2,000 women killed by men in the UK over the last 15 years and found that the abuse of older women hasn’t had as much attention as it should. “We have to ask why we see the use of sexual and sustained violence against elderly women who are unknown to the much younger men who kill them,” the co-founder of the Femicide Census told the Guardian. “The misogynistic intent in these killings is clear.”Bacterial vaginosis (BV) may be sexually transmitted, research findsWhile this new study is small, its findings are a big deal because BV is super common – affecting up to a third of reproductive-aged women – and has long been considered as a “woman’s issue”. Treating a male partner for it, however, may reduce its recurrence.How astronaut Amanda Nguyen survived rape to fight for other victimsAfter being assaulted at age 22, Nguyen got a hospital bill for $4,863.79 for her rape kit and all the tests and medication that went along with it. She was also informed that it was standard practice for her rape kit to be destroyed after six months. “The statute of limitations is 15 years because it recognises that trauma takes time to process,” Nguyen told the Guardian in an interview. “It allows a victim to revisit that justice. But destroying the rape kit after six months prevents a survivor from being able to access vital evidence.” After her traumatic experience, Nguyen successfully fought for the right not to have your rape kit destroyed until the statute of limitations has expired, and the right not to have to pay for it to be carried out.Female doctors outnumber male peers in UK for first timeIt’s a significant milestone in what has traditionally been a male-dominated profession.There’s an Israeli TikTok trend mocking the suffering of Palestinian childrenThis is one of those things that would be front page of the New York Times if it were directed at Israelis but is getting relatively little attention because of how normalized the dehumanization of Palestinians is. It’s also just the latest in a series of social media trends mocking Palestinian suffering.Florida opens criminal investigation into Tate brothers“These guys have themselves publicly admitted to participating in what very much appears to be soliciting, trafficking, preying upon women around the world,” the state attorney general said.The week in pawtriarchyJane Fonda, a committed activist, has always fought the good fight. But she’s also apparently fought wildlife. The actor’s son recently told a Netflix podcast that Fonda once “pushed a bear out of her bedroom”. While that phrase may mean different things to different people, in this instance it was quite literal. Fonda apparently scared off a bear who had entered her grandson’s room and was sniffing the crib. Too bad nobody was there to snap a photo of the escapade – it would have been a real Kodiak moment. More

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      Will Trump put a Fox News host on the US supreme court? Mark Tushnet can’t rule it out

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      Should Donald Trump get the chance to nominate a new justice to the supreme court, to join the three rightwingers he installed in his first term, he might pick “the equivalent of Pete Hegseth”, Mark Tushnet said, referring to the Fox News host who is now US secretary of defense.“Trump as a person has his idiosyncrasies, I’ll put it that way,” Tushnet said, from Harvard, where he is William Nelson Cromwell professor of law, emeritus. “And … I have thought about potential Trump nominees, and actually, what comes to mind is the equivalent of Pete Hegseth: a Fox News legal commentator.”Justice Jeanine Pirro? It’s a thought. Perhaps future historians will debate “The Box of Wine that Saved Nine”. Perhaps not.“I wouldn’t rule it out,” Tushnet said, of his Fox News theory, if not of Pirro, per se. “I don’t think it’s highly likely, but given the way those things work, and given the idea that you want people who aren’t simply judges, it’s not a lunatic thought, I guess.”The reference to “people who aren’t simply judges” is to arguments laid out in Tushnet’s new book, Who Am I to Judge?, in which he makes his case against the prevalence of judicial theories, particularly originalism, to which conservatives adhere, and calls for a rethink of how justices are selected.Tushnet is a liberal voice. Provocatively, he writes that Amy Coney Barrett, the third Trump justice who in 2022 helped remove the federal right to abortion, at least has a hinterland different from most court picks, as a member of People of Praise, a hardline Catholic sect.“I think her involvement in that group has exposed her to a much wider range of human experience than John Roberts’s background, for example,” Tushnet said, referring to the chief justice who was a Reagan White House aide and a federal judge. “And so if you’re looking for people who have been exposed to human experience across the board, I think she’s a reasonable candidate for that.”View image in fullscreenConey Barrett cemented the 6-3 rightwing majority that has given Trump wins including rejecting attempts to exclude him from the ballot for inciting an insurrection and ruling that presidents have some legal immunity. Now, as Trump appears to imagine himself a king and oversees an authoritarian assault on the federal government, reading Tushnet and talking to him generates a sort of grim humor.Looking ahead, to when Trump’s executive orders might land before the justices, Tushnet suggests “the court will put … speed bumps in the way of the administration. They won’t say: ‘Absolutely you can’t do it,’ except the birthright citizenship order.”That order, signed on Trump’s first day back in power, seeks to end the right to citizenship for all children born on American soil and subject to US jurisdiction, as guaranteed under the 14th amendment since 1868.On 23 January, a federal judge said Trump’s order was so “blatantly unconstitutional” that it “boggled” his mind. Should it reach the supreme court, Tushnet can see the rightwing justices “saying: ‘Look, yeah, if you want to do this, we’re not saying you can, but if you want to do it, you got to get Congress to go along. You can’t just do it on your own.’ So that would be a speed bump.”That said, Tushnet sometimes thinks “about how in the US, there are these traffic-calming measures that are literally speed bumps but sometimes, if you go over too fast, you fly”. Trump, he said, has licensed rightwing justices to take decisions that “may not count as speed bumps if you fly off them”.Tushnet was happy to answer a question he thinks all supreme court nominees should be asked: what’s your favorite book and favorite movie?Tushnet’s favorites are Middlemarch by George Eliot and Heaven, a 2002 film directed by Tom Tykwer from a script co-written by Krzysztof Kieślowski. He wrote his book containing such questions, he said, “because I had this longstanding sense that the [supreme court] nomination process has gotten off the rails, mostly by focusing exclusively on judges as potential nominees, and secondarily by focusing on constitutional theory.“For the past 20 years, the court … has been dominated by people whose background was as judges or appellate advocates, and historically that was quite unusual. There are always some judges but there always had been people with much broader kinds of experience, including a former president, William H Taft [chief justice between 1921 and 1930], and several candidates for the presidency, including Charles Evans Hughes [1916], Earl Warren [a vice-presidential pick in 1948], senators like Hugo Black. And those people had disappeared from consideration for the court, and that seemed to be a bad idea.”Tushnet describes a “political reconstitution of the nomination process provoked in large measure by the Republican reaction to the Warren court”, which sat from 1953 to 1969, the era of great civil rights reforms.“I think their view was the Warren court was not composed of judges, they were politicians, some called them ‘politicians in robes’, and Republicans sort of thought the way to get away from the substantive jurisprudence of the Warren court was to put judges on the court, rather than people with what I call broad experience,” Tushnet said.One justice on the current court was not previously a judge: Elena Kagan, one of the three besieged liberals, was dean of Harvard Law School, then solicitor general under Barack Obama.Tushnet “went into the project thinking that I would find more great justices who had been a politician than I actually did. When I was teaching, I would do this thing about who the justices were who decided Brown v Board of Education”, the 1954 ruling that ended segregation in public schools, “and I think it’s fair to say that not one of them’s primary prior experience was as a judge, and like seven or eight of their prior primary experiences were as a politician. And if Brown v Board is the premier achievement of the supreme court, the fact that it was decided by a court primarily made up of politicians counts in favor of thinking about politicians when appointing to the court.”“Why not do it? For me, the main feature of having been a politician is not that you’ve taken stances aligned with one or another political party at the time, but that you’ve provided reasons in many different ways, you’ve grown up amongst people with a wide range of life experiences that you’ve had to think about, as a politician, in order to get their votes, in order to get your way,” he said.Tushnet’s ideal might be Charles Evans Hughes, an associate justice from 1910 to 1916 and chief justice between 1930 and 1941, but also governor of New York, Republican candidate for president and US secretary of state.On the page, Tushnet imagines asking Hughes a question – “What constitutional theories do you use?” – and getting an appealing answer: “I try to interpret the constitution to make it a suitable instrument for governance in today’s United States.”Tushnet says modern judges and justices should say the same, rather than reach for judicial theories. His new book is in part an answer to a demolition of originalism by Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of UC Berkeley law school: “I distinguish, I think, more clearly than other people have, including Erwin, between what I call academic originalism and judicial originalism.”Either form of originalism concerns working out what the founders meant when they wrote the constitution, then advocating its application to modern-day questions. Tushnet “think[s] a good chunk of academic originalism is not subject to many of the criticisms that Erwin levels. It’s not perfect but it’s an academic enterprise, and people work out difficulties, and there’s controversy within the camp and so on.View image in fullscreen“Judicial originalism is different because it has a couple of components. One is, we now know it’s quite selective. To get originalism into the TikTok decision, for example, you have to do an enormous amount of work. It’s not impossible, but it’s not an originalist opinion, fundamentally. So [justices are] selectively originalist, or, as my phrase is, opportunistically originalist. They use it when the sources that they’re presented with support conclusions they would want to reach anyway, and the adversary process at the supreme court isn’t a very good way of finding out what they say they’re trying to find out. And so as a judicial enterprise, originalism just doesn’t do what it purports to do.”To Tushnet, the late Antonin Scalia, an arch-conservative and originalist, is “the leading candidate to be placed on a list of great justices” of the past 50 years, “because of his influence and his contributions to the court.“But one bad contribution was his widely admired writing style. Now, writing styles change over time. And having read an enormous number of opinions of the 1930s, I know there’s an improvement in readability since the 1930s. But the idea that [opinions] become more readable, accessible and memorable by including Scalia-like zingers, short phrases that are quotable and memorable, seems to be just a mistake. But he’s very influential, and so people try to emulate him … Justice Kagan does it in a gentler way. I guess my inclination would be to say: ‘If you’re going to do it, do it the way Justice Kagan does, rather than the way Justice Scalia did.’”Tushnet agrees that some of Scalia’s pugilistic spirit seems to have passed into Samuel Alito, the arch-conservative author of the Dobbs v Jackson ruling, which removed abortion rights, if while shedding all vestiges of humor.In his book, Tushnet shows how Alito’s Dobbs ruling contained a clear mistake, the sort of thing that is largely down to the role clerks play in drafting opinions, as Tushnet once did for Thurgood Marshall, the first Black American justice.“Times were quite different then,” Tushnet said. “The year I was there, the court decided 150 cases. Now they’re deciding under 50 a year … the year I was there was the year Roe v Wade was decided [1973, establishing the right to abortion, now lost]. It had been resolved fundamentally the year before, so they were just cleaning things up, but we knew these were consequential decisions.”The court will soon have more consequential decisions to make. In the meantime, talk of a constitutional crisis, of a president defying the courts, grows increasingly heated.“My sense is that we’re not at the crisis point yet,” Tushnet said. “Like many administrations before it, the Trump administration is taking aggressive legal positions, which may or may not be vindicated. If they’re not vindicated, they’re muttering about what they’ll do. That’s happened before.“My favorite example is that in the 1930s, Franklin Roosevelt, while a major decision was pending, had his staff prepare two press releases, one saying: ‘Actually the court has upheld our position,’ the other saying: ‘The court mistakenly rejected our position, and we’re going to go ahead with it anyway.’ Now, they didn’t have to issue that press release, because the court went with the administration. But, you know, muttering about resistance is not historically unusual. Resisting would be quite, quite dramatic, but we’re not there yet.”

      Who Am I to Judge? is published by Yale University Press More

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      ‘Musk? He’s horrendous’: Martha Lane Fox on diversity, tech bros and International Women’s Day

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      As Elon Musk grinned in the Oval Office, one of Britain’s most influential tech investors looked on in horror. “He is absolutely horrendous. I have said it multiple times: I think it is horrifying what is happening,” says Martha Lane Fox.For the British peer and ex-Twitter board member, the sight of Musk holding forth from the bully pulpit of Donald Trump’s White House shows the Silicon Valley dream has gone sour.“The richest man in the world, who can stand there alongside the president, and kind of carte blanche make jokes about how he’s carving up people’s jobs in the government. Then he can be there with a chainsaw laughing on stage…“It is really, really alarming, and I find it extremely unpleasant at a values-based level – but also, just how can we be watching this in plain sight? It makes me feel very anxious. I think it is gross.”In an interview with the Observer to mark International Women’s Day, the president of the British Chambers of Commerce (BCC) warned the diversity pushback orchestrated by Trump and his tech bro acolytes will not only damage society, but also the economy at large.Since his return to the White House, the US president has shut down all federal diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives, while Musk’s “department of government efficiency” (Doge) is ripping up funding schemes.Some of the world’s biggest companies are following suit. Amid a wider pushback against everything from environmental targets to sustainable development, among the most prominent taking part are US finance and tech companies, including Goldman Sachs, Accenture and Amazon, while UK businesses such as GSK have also fallen in line.“He needs to be contained,” Lady Lane Fox says of Musk’s role in the rollback. “I find it extraordinary that the richest man in the world is trampling all over these things and that we still have kind of fanboying from the tech sector. It’s already been corrosive for society, and I would argue it is going to continue to be.”For businesses, she says the bottom line is that companies that take diversity seriously appeal to the widest possible employee talent pool and are better placed to target a broad range of customers. This, she adds, is about profit as much as social justice. However, she has a broader concern about the future.“The first thing, it’s financial. But the second thing, it’s about power and money – like everything, right?“If you’re looking at a sector like the digital sector, where there’s the growth in jobs, growth in opportunity – it is the growth sector in the economy. Yet you are not including a whole bunch of people in that. Then you are going to be creating inequality. Full stop. So it’s financial and it’s a question of social justice.”Given the close ties between Britain and the US, there is a view that where corporate America treads, the UK naturally follows. But there are signs that some UK businesses – and even the British operations of some US companies – are prepared to stand apart.The accountancy firm Deloitte instructed staff working on contracts for the US government to remove pronouns from their emails, while also announcing the end of its DEI programme. But its UK boss told staff its British operations remained “committed to [its] diversity goals”.“It feels as though global companies rooted in the US are making a politically motivated slight shift in emphasis and tilt, through to rowing back everything. And it does feel a bit more tempered here,” says Lane Fox.UK businesses have an opportunity to do something different, she says, which could bring financial benefits. “I think we’ll build more robust companies, attract talent and have a much better shot at building the most resilient companies of the future.”For almost three decades, Lane Fox has built a career – and multimillion-pound fortune – in tech. She made her first big money floating Lastminute.com, the online travel site co-founded alongside fellow Oxford graduate Brent Hoberman in 1998.View image in fullscreenShe joined the board of Twitter – now X – in 2016, landing herself a huge payday in Musk’s $44bn hostile takeover in 2022, before he dissolved the board and appointed himself the sole director.Seeing Musk in the Oval Office, parading his son X on his shoulders, made her question the gender divide. “Can you imagine if that was a woman? Can you imagine what that would look like? I mean, I just think the whole thing is really gross.”But while railing against Musk in a personal capacity, the BCC president does not suggest this approach is for everyone. “It is really tricky to navigate. You have a responsibility to your customers and your employees that might be different to our personal view sometimes.”Government regulation to enshrine diversity targets is also a bad idea, she says, preferring instead that companies report their progress. “Keeping it in the light, keeping up the reporting, is important – keeping up good investors, looking at the right metrics and investing in the right companies all helps.”However, not enough progress is being made. Analysis this week showed that worsening unemployment and workforce participation for women has pushed the UK behind Canada to its lowest global ranking for workplace equality among large economies in a decade.The gender pay gap has been declining slowly over time, but average pay is still 7% less for women than for men. It is a challenge Lane Fox is all too aware of. “Look at the data and it is really freaking depressing – and it is not moving,” she says.“What worries me is that it’s far too easy to find numbers that I thought we were moving on from.“In this week of International Women’s Day, we see representation at the executive level has gone back. I see progress on boards is still good at the FTSE 100 level, but bad at FTSE 250 and 350 level.“I know there will be people in the sector thinking: ‘Oh, here she goes again.’ That’s true of many women [that people think that]. But it is so important to keep making these arguments.” More

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      Trump fires two DoJ senior career officials including pardon attorney

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      Donald Trump’s administration on Friday fired at least two senior career officials at the US justice department, including the head of the office that handles presidential pardon requests, according to a social media post and sources familiar with the matter.Liz Oyer served as pardon attorney since 2022, a career justice department position. Oyer was fired “effective immediately,” according to a memo she shared on LinkedIn, which cited Trump’s executive authority under the US constitution.Oyer, who was appointed by Biden in 2022, posted on LinkedIn: “I’m sad to share that I was fired today from the job I have poured my heart and soul into for the last three years. I am so proud of the team we built in the Office of the Pardon Attorney, who will carry on our important work. I’m very grateful for the many extraordinary people I’ve had the opportunity to connect with on this journey. Thank you for your partnership, your support, and your belief in second chances.”Oyer’s former office reviews requests for clemency from people convicted of federal offenses and makes recommendations to the White House on whom the president should pardon.Oyer’s termination comes two weeks after Trump appointed Alice Marie Johnson as “pardon czar”, a role in which she will recommend people for presidential commutations.Bobak Talebian, the head of the justice department’s Office of Information Policy, which handles public records requests under the US Freedom of Information Act, was also fired, according to a source familiar with the matter.The moves mark the latest instance of the Trump administration removing or sidelining career justice department officials, who typically keep their positions across presidential administrations.A justice department spokesperson did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the moves.Trump-appointed officials previously reassigned several veteran national security and criminal prosecutors to a newly created immigration office. The top career ethics official left the justice department after facing a similar reassignment.About eight senior career FBI officials also were forced out before the confirmation of Trump-nominated FBI director Kash Patel by the Senate.Justice department leaders have generally not given reasons for the dismissals, but have broadly emphasized that career officials must be trusted to enforce Trump’s agenda.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionA union said on Friday the US Department of Labor reinstated about 120 employees who had been facing termination as part of the Trump administration’s mass firings of recently hired workers.The American Federation of Government Employees, the largest federal employee union, told Reuters that the probationary employees had been reinstated immediately and that the department was issuing letters telling them to report back to duty on Monday.Coral Murphy Marcos contributed to this report More

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      Trump administration briefing: defending Putin, Columbia cuts and Doge’s power over EPA spending

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      Donald Trump has said he finds it it “easier” to work with Russia than Ukraine and that Vladimir Putin was “doing what anybody would do” after Russia launched a massive missile and drone strike on Ukraine days after the US cut off vital intelligence and military aid to Kyiv.“I’m finding it more difficult, frankly, to deal with Ukraine. And they don’t have the cards,” Trump said in his latest attack on Kyiv. “In terms of getting a final settlement, it may be easier dealing with Russia.“I think he [Putin] wants to get it stopped and settled and I think he’s hitting them harder than he’s been hitting them, and I think probably anybody in that position would be doing that right now.”Trump says it is ‘easier’ to deal with Russia than Ukraine Donald Trump has said he finds it “easier” to work with Russia than Ukraine and that Putin “wants to end the war”, days after the US administration cut off military assistance and intelligence to Kyiv.Read the full storyTrump administration cancels $400m in funds to ColumbiaThe president’s administration announced it had canceled $400m in federal grants and contracts to Columbia University in New York because of what it alleges as the college’s repeated failure to protect students from antisemitic harassment.Read the full storyEPA: spending $50,000 or more must gain Doge approvalThe US Environmental Protection Agency issued new guidance directing that spending items greater than $50,000 now require approval from Elon Musk’s so-called “department of government efficiency”, even as Donald Trump began putting some distance between Musk’s reach and the power of government department heads – at least over job cuts.Read the full storyTrans women transferred to men’s prisonsTransgender women incarcerated in the US prison system have been transferred to men’s facilities under Donald Trump’s executive order, despite multiple court rulings blocking the president’s policy, according to civil rights lawyers and accounts from behind bars.Read the full storyUS job market grows but below expectationsThe US labor market continued to grow in February, even as threats of mass layoffs in the federal government and uncertainty around Donald Trump’s tariff policies rattle the US economy. Last month 151,000 jobs were added to the economy – but economists had been expecting 170,000 new jobs to be added.Read the full story26,000 images flagged for deletion in Trump DEI purgeReferences to a second world war Medal of Honor recipient, the Enola Gay aircraft that dropped an atomic bomb on Japan, and the first women to pass US marine infantry training are among the tens of thousands of photos and online posts marked for deletion at the Pentagon.Read the full storyWhat else happened today:

      The US economy faces a potential slowdown in consumer spending amid “heightened uncertainty about the economic outlook” among businesses, said Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell.

      The Trump administration has formally agreed to drop a landmark environmental justice case in Louisiana’s “Cancer Alley” region, marking a blow to clean air advocates in the region.

      The Trump administration has withdrawn the US from a global agreement under which the developed nations most responsible for the climate crisis pledged to partly compensate developing countries for irreversible harms caused by global heating.

      A court-appointed lawyer has advised a federal judge to let the Department of Justice drop corruption charges against New York city mayor Eric Adams but prevent prosecutors from ever reviving the case so it doesn’t hang over him “like the proverbial Sword of Damocles”. More

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      Trump to sign order barring student loan forgiveness for public servants engaged in ‘improper activities’ – as it happened

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      Donald Trump plans to today sign an executive order barring government and non-profit employees from a student loan forgiveness program if they engage in “improper activities”.The order affects the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program, under which employees of those organizations can have their federal student debt forgiven if they meet certain criteria. White House staff secretary Will Scharf said that the order will target employees of non-governmental organizations “that engage in illegal, or what we would consider to be improper activities, supporting, for example, illegal immigration or foreign terrorist organizations or otherwise law-breaking activities”.The order will direct the treasury and education departments to ensure that people involved in those activities are not eligible for the forgiveness.We will be wrapping the live blog for the 46th day of Trump’s second term.Here is a look at some of the day’s developments:

      The Trump administration announced that it had canceled $400m in federal grants and contracts to Columbia University in New York because of what it alleges is the college’s repeated failure to protect students from antisemitic harassment.

      The Trump administration fired the head of the US justice department office that handles presidential pardon requests, the official said in a social media post. Liz Oyer, who was appointed by Biden in 2022, said: “I’m sad to share that I was fired today from the job I have poured my heart and soul into for the last three years.”

      The Department of Homeland Security is ending the collective bargaining agreement covering tens of thousands of airport transportation security officers. The agency, led by secretary Kristi Noem, also said it will stop deducting union dues from employees’ paychecks, a major setback for the American Federation of Government Employees, which represents TSA screeners and relies on $15m in annual payments.

      The US Department of Agriculture has eliminated two committees that advise it on food safety. The USDA eliminated the national advisory committee on microbiological criteria for foods and the national advisory committee on meat and poultry inspection, a spokesperson told Reuters.

      About 4,000 defense department personnel received termination notices this week from their employers, a US official told ABC News. Last week, the department said that up to 5,400 employees could be affected in an initial round of job cuts.

      After the New York Times reported that Elon Musk and Marco Rubio had argued in front of Trump on Thursday, the president said “no clash” had happened. “No clash, I was there. You’re just a troublemaker and you’re not supposed to be asking that question, because we’re talking about the World Cup,” Trump said to a reporter.

      The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency is removing a previous requirement that banks had to get special approval before engaging in a range of cryptocurrency services. The government agency overseeing banks reaffirmed that US banks can legally offer certain cryptocurrency activities, like crypto-asset custody, certain stablecoin activities, and participation in independent node verification networks.

      Donald Trump held court in the Oval Office, where he again expressed sympathy for Russia, saying he found it “easier” to negotiate with them on achieving a ceasefire in Ukraine. Trump also threatened Russia with sanctions and tariffs if it did not sign on to a ceasefire.

      Trump cheered the latest employment numbers as proving the wisdom of his economic policies, and said he may soon target Canada with more tariffs to settle long-running disputes over their dairy and lumber industries.
      The so-called “department of government efficiency” is reviewing $1.6tn in social security payments, which includes data on individuals’ names, birthdates, and earnings, in an anti-fraud initiative that has raised concerns among advocates, ABC News reports. They fear that the Trump administration may begin denying benefits to vulnerable older Americans.Details of this initiative were confirmed in a recent letter to Congress by the acting social security administrator, Lee Dudek, and others officials.Along with reviewing sensitive data, Doge staff have been looking into the Social Security Administration’s telephone service, which many beneficiaries use to file initial claims.Trump administration to drop case against plant polluting Louisiana’s ‘Cancer Alley’Donald Trump’s administration has formally agreed to drop a landmark environmental justice case in Louisiana’s “Cancer Alley” region, marking a blow to clean-air advocates in the region and a win for the Japanese petrochemical giant at the centre of the litigation.Legal filings made public on Friday morning reveal that Trump’s Department of Justice agreed to dismiss a long-running lawsuit against the operators of a synthetic rubber plant in Reserve, Louisiana, which is allegedly largely responsible for some of the highest cancer risk rates in the US for the surrounding, majority-Black neighborhoods.The litigation was filed under the Biden administration in February 2023 in a bid to substantially curb the plant’s emissions of a pollutant named chloroprene, a likely human carcinogen. It had targeted both the current operator, the Japanese firm Denka, and its previous owner, the American chemical giant DuPont, and formed a central piece of the former administration’s Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) efforts to address environmental justice issues in disadvantaged communities. A trial had been due to start in April 2025 following lengthy delays.Community leaders in Reserve had expressed grave concerns about the case’s future following Trump’s return to the White House after the president moved to gut offices within the EPA and justice department responsible for civil rights and environmental justice.Read Oliver Laughland’s full report from New Orleans here:The US state department is conducting a review of all visa programs, a department spokesperson told CNN, following reports of a potential new travel ban. A US official told the news outlet that Afghanistan might be among the countries affected.The ban could take effect as early as next week, though the final decisions regarding the included countries and the timing remain uncertain, according to the official.On 20 January, Donald Trump issued an executive order directing cabinet members, including the secretary of state, to identify countries where vetting and screening processes are inadequate enough to justify a partial or full suspension of admissions.A former campaign fundraiser for the ex-US representative George Santos was sentenced Friday to one year and one day in prison for impersonating a high-ranking congressional aide while raising cash for the disgraced New York Republican.Sam Miele, speaking briefly in federal court on Long Island, apologized to everyone he had “let down”, including family and friends, the Associated Press reports.“What I did was wrong. Plain and simple,” Miele said, vowing he would never be involved with the criminal justice system again.Protesters demanding an in-person town hall from their western Michigan GOP representative chanted loudly Friday as honking drivers signaled support, the Associated Press reports.Hours later, the representative Bill Huizenga held a town hall – by phone. The disruption seen outside his Holland office earlier in the day was absent, as the controlled setting allowed for questions from people who wrote and called in.“I know this may not be satisfactory to some who would like to just create a scene and be, you know, be disruptive,” Huizenga said on the call. “But we know that this is extremely effective for reaching people.”Some Republicans have opted to hold telephone town halls after GOP leaders in recent days advised lawmakers to skip town halls, which have been filled with protesters decrying Donald Trump’s administration’s slashing of the federal government.The US Department of Labor has reinstated about 120 employees who had been facing termination as part of the Trump administration’s mass firings of recently hired workers, a union said on Friday.The American Federation of Government Employees, the largest federal employee union, told Reuters that the probationary employees had been reinstated immediately and that the department was issuing letters telling them to report back to duty on Monday.The New York representative Elise Stefanik praised Donald Trump’s decision to cancel $400m in federal grants and contracts to Columbia University because of what the administration alleges is the college’s repeated failure to protect students from antisemitic harassment. In a statement, Stefanik said:
      President Trump is delivering on his promise to hold universities like Columbia accountable by defunding them for failing to protect their Jewish communities,” said Stefanik in a statement sent over email. “I’m proud of my efforts on the Education Committee which led to the FORMER Columbia University President’s resignation and I applaud President Trump for ensuring that hardworking taxpayer dollars do not fund these cesspools of antisemitism.
      Here’s more context on the grant cancellations:The Trump administration fired the head of the US Justice Department office that handles presidential pardon requests, the official said in a social media post.Liz Oyer, who was appointed by Biden in 2022, posted on LinkedIn:
      I’m sad to share that I was fired today from the job I have poured my heart and soul into for the last three years. I am so proud of the team we built in the Office of the Pardon Attorney, who will carry on our important work. I’m very grateful for the many extraordinary people I’ve had the opportunity to connect with on this journey. Thank you for your partnership, your support, and your belief in second chances.
      A pardon attorney runs the process by which people apply for and receive clemency.Oyer’s termination comes two weeks after Donald Trump appointed Alice Marie Johnson as “pardon czar”, a role in which she will recommend people for presidential commutations.The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) announced Friday that it is ending the collective bargaining agreement covering tens of thousands of airport transportation security officers.The agency, led by secretary Kristi Noem, also said it will stop deducting union dues from employees’ paychecks, a major setback for the American Federation of Government Employees, which represents TSA screeners and relies on $15m in annual payments.“Thanks to Secretary Noem’s action, Transportation Security Officers will no longer lose their hard-earned dollars to a union that does not represent them,” reads a statement by a DHS spokesperson. “The Trump Administration is committed [to] returning to merit-based hiring and firing policies.”The US Department of Agriculture has eliminated two committees that advise it on food safety, the agency said on Friday.The USDA eliminated the national advisory committee on microbiological criteria for foods and the national advisory committee on meat and poultry inspection, a spokesperson told Reuters.These cuts raise concerns about government oversight of the food supply as the Trump administration seeks to downsize the federal bureaucracy and slash costs.The committees provided scientific advice to the USDA and other federal agencies on public health issues related to food safety, said the non-profit consumer advocacy group Consumer Reports.The Department of Veterans Affairs will allow crisis hotline responders to work remotely instead of in offices because of the lack of privacy, CNN reports.The VA granted a full exemption for the Veterans Crisis Line from Donald Trump’s executive order requiring federal employees to return to the office.The hotline staff no longer have their own office space because the buildings that housed the call center’s three national hubs – in Georgia, Kansas and New York – were all closed during the Covid pandemic. More

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      EPA issues guidance that spending of $50,000 or more must gain approval of Doge

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      The US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has issued new guidance directing that spending items greater than $50,000 now require approval from Elon Musk’s so-called “department of government efficiency” (Doge), even as Donald Trump began putting some distance between Musk’s reach and the power of government department heads – at least over job cuts.“Any assistance agreement, contract or interagency agreement transaction [valued at] $50,000 or greater must receive approval from an EPA DOGE team member,” the EPA guidance says, according to documents obtained by the Associated Press. The EPA did not respond to a request from the news agency on Friday for comment.Senator Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island, the top Democrat on the Senate environment and public works committee, called the new directive “troubling”, adding that it means agency actions, including routine contracts and grant awards, “now face unnecessary bureaucratic delays”.Whitehouse added that the involvement of Musk’s “unvetted, inexperienced team raises serious concerns about improper external influence on specialized agency decision-making”.The latest development came after Donald Trump on Thursday gave a clear sign of admitting that drastic government cuts spearheaded by his ally Musk have gone too far. The US president’s views after an explosive, closed-door cabinet confrontation involving Marco Rubio, the US secretary of state, exposed simmering anger over the billionaire entrepreneur’s key role, which Musk attended even though he is not a cabinet member.After weeks of turmoil in the federal bureaucracy wreaked by the Doge team, Trump issued a call for a “scalpel” rather than a “hatchet” to be applied to the task of reducing the federal bureaucracy.The president’s comment in a social media post followed a volatile encounter that saw Musk, the SpaceX and Tesla owner who has assumed a central role in Trump’s fledgling administration, face off against Rubio, whom he accused of “firing nobody”, according to the New York Times. Rubio, who had been furious over Musk’s role in shutting down the main US foreign assistance body, USAid – over which the secretary of state supposedly has control – hit back vigorously, according to the report.Thursday’s cabinet meeting was scheduled abruptly after howls of protest about the effects of Doge’s slashing of government agencies by the constituents of Republican members of Congress, including former military veterans, many of whom have been fired in a wave of indiscriminate cuts.“As the secretaries learn about, and understand, the people working for the various departments, they can be very precise as to who will remain, and who will go,” Trump posted on his Truth Social platform.“We say the ‘scalpel’ rather than the ‘hatchet.’ The combination of them, Elon, Doge, and other great people will be able to do things at a historic level.”Trump’s public call for discretion came after he told cabinet secretaries that they rather than Musk had the final say over whom to hire and fire.Musk conveyed a similar message in a meeting with senators on Capitol Hill on Thursday, claiming he was not to blame for the mass layoffs and giving them his phone number if they wanted to relay concerns.It contrasted starkly with the image he projected at last month’s CPAC conference, when he paraded on stage with a chainsaw to symbolise his ruthless approach to downsizing government agencies. He has openly boasted of feeding the now-gutted USAid “into the wood chipper”, while laying off its estimated 10,000-employee workforce.“Elon doesn’t fire people,” Richard Hudson, a Republican member of Congress from North Carolina, told reporters after a pizza dinner with Musk in the basement of the US Capitol on Thursday.“He doesn’t have hiring and firing authority. The president’s empowered him to go uncover this information, that’s it.”The attempt to downplay a role Musk in which has consistently sought the limelight follows questions from judges in the multiple court cases filed against Doge’s activities about who is leading the staff-culling crusade – and whether Musk himself has a direct role.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe administration has argued in legal filings that Musk, who has not been confirmed by Congress, is not the official head of Doge. But Trump undercut that in a prime-time address at the US Capitol on Tuesday by flatly suggesting that he is, a declaration that commentators said could directly affect pending court rulings.Numerous recently hired federal employees have been summarily fired before their probation period ended – when their posts would become harder to terminate because of legal protections.Carlos Gimenez, a Republican representative from Florida, said that the agencies rather than Musk had fired the probationers.“Some of the folks that were the probationary people, he didn’t fire them, they were actually supposedly fired by the agencies – and they messed up,” Gimenez said.The portrait of an impartial, hands-off Musk jarred with anecdotal on-the-ground evidence from agencies infiltrated by Doge operatives.On Thursday, federal marshals escorted members of Doge, along with Peter Marocco, director of the state department’s office of foreign assistance, into the Washington office of the US African Development Foundation (USADF), a day after staff had denied them access in what was seen as a David-versus-Goliath act of defiance by one of the smallest federal agencies.The entry resulted in a “traumatising scene”, employees told the Washington Post, and prompted a federal lawsuit by USADF’s president, Ward Brehm, challenging the authority of Trump, Marocco and Doge to close an agency that the president has deemed unnecessary.Further evidence of a de facto Doge takeover of government came in reports of its workers installing themselves in four separate rooms on the sixth floor of the General Service Administration’s building, “complete with beds from Ikea, lamps and dressers.”Politico said the agency was considering spending about $25,000 to install a washer and dryer on the premises, apparently to serve the resident Doge staff. Ethics experts warned that the arrangement could breach agency rules, the website reported.The Associated Press contributed reporting More