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      Trump is bullying Canada over ‘digital taxes’ and Canada caved | Joseph Stiglitz

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      Donald Trump’s announcement calling off trade talks with Canada over its digital tax – and that he would impose retaliatory tariffs – demonstrates, once again, not only the president’s ignorance of economics and willful disregard of international norms and the rule of law, but also his willingness to use brute power to get whatever he and the oligarchs who support him want.He was wrong in labeling the tax as outrageous and “a direct and blatant attack on our country”. It is actually an efficient tax, well designed to ensure that the technology companies – the profits of which benefit the tech oligarchs who have come to dominate US policy – pay their fair share of taxes.It is accordingly disappointing that Canada appears to have caved, even more so as the prime minister had stood up strongly against Trump’s demand for Canada to become the 51st state. Regrettably, others are giving in – New Zealand and India have reportedly retreated.Trump’s bullying tactics have been in evidence since he took office. In January he threatened to double taxes on Australian citizens and companies in the US if they went ahead with their planned digital levy.Why digital taxes?Because digital companies operate all over the globe, and generate revenue in countries where they do not have a physical presence, they avoid taxation by shifting revenue and profit around the world. Some of the most egregious examples include Google moving $17bn to Bermuda, Apple owing France 10 years of back taxes, and the Italian government’s recent investigation of Meta over whether the firm owes €938m in VAT payments. Apple was so successful in avoiding taxes in Europe that it is estimated that it paid in some years a tax of just 0.005% on its European profits. Of course, when the most profitable companies in the world don’t pay their fair share of taxes, it just shifts the burden on to others.As more and more activity occurs online, and often from services provided from abroad, countries are losing revenue from sales, employment and profits taxes. Just because an activity is provided digitally doesn’t mean it should not be taxed; indeed, economists argue that digital taxes are among the easiest to administer, precisely because there is a digital record. The idea of the digital service tax is to help countries recoup revenue by taxing any kind of digital service provided from anywhere in the world: online sales, digital advertising, data usage, e-commerce or streaming services. They might include consumption taxes on internet purchases. Indeed, more than 18 countries have such taxes and some 20 others have proposed them.When it looked like the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) would get a global agreement to raise corporate taxes, the agreement included a prohibition on digital taxes. Indeed, one of the reasons that the US was even willing to engage in these discussions on global taxation was to circumscribe others’ ability to impose such taxes. While that agreement was under discussion, the US government, influenced by its tech giants, strongly opposed these digital taxes and then US treasury secretary Janet Yellen spent a good deal of time calling up her counterparts and telling them not to impose them.But on 20 January, Trump issued an executive order saying that the agreement that had been negotiated over years and years “had no force or effect” in the US. As a result, more countries are now trying to decide whether to keep or adopt digital services taxes. Imposing them will incur the wrath of the US government and tech giants, but countries are well within their rights to do so. Indeed, there was a moratorium on levying digital taxes while there were some prospects of the OECD agreement going into effect; but with Trump, that prospect has all but disappeared, and that moratorium has come to end.Any country concerned with designing efficient, fair and easy-to-administer digital services duties should consider such taxes – indeed, they have the support not only of economists but of global civil society, including the Independent Commission on Reform of International Corporate Taxation (which I co-chair).skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionLong-established principles of international taxation hold that so long as a tax does not discriminate across countries – or corporations that are headquartered in different countries – which taxes a country imposes is a matter of national sovereignty. A country may be foolish, levying taxes that are not good for its economy, but so be it: that is a matter for the country to decide. In this case, the tax is actually good for the economy. What Trump has been doing has violated international norms in several ways: using the threat of tariffs or taxes against corporations headquartered in a country whose policy he dislikes, and walking away from what were supposed to be binding trade agreements, without even a pretense of using the mechanisms for dispute resolution embodied in those agreements.The question now: will countries cave in to these threats or can they stick together and collect the billions they are rightly owed? Make no mistake: what is at stake is more than money that will be collected. It is a matter of the rule of law, which Trump has trampled on so fiercely, both within the US and globally. The rule of law is essential not just for economic performance, but for social justice and democracy. And Canada’s capitulation to Trump’s unilateral move makes a mockery of the whole process by which international agreements are negotiated. Some were skeptical that the so-called “inclusive framework” was but a facade: others may have been at the table, but their voices were not heard. What has now happened verifies this: whatever the US wants, it gets.Canada should have stood up for its principles and national sovereignty, even in the face of such transparent bullying. The alternative now emerging is the law of the jungle, brute power and Canada becoming, de facto, the 51st US state.

      Joseph E Stiglitz is a Nobel laureate in economics, university professor at Columbia University and chief economist of the Roosevelt Institute

      Anya Schiffrin, senior lecturer at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs, and her student Philip L Crane contributed to this piece More

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      ‘They have promised retribution and retaliation’: the Washington lawyer Trump is targeting

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      Mark Zaid knew he would be targeted if Donald Trump won re-election.The lawyer, who specializes in national security cases, has long been on the US president’s bad side. He represented a whistleblower with knowledge of Trump’s plot to extort Ukraine during Trump’s first impeachment. He frequently talks to the media to critique Trump. His clients include a host of people who are suing the government.He has received a barrage of threats for being publicly anti-Trump. After Trump railed against him at a rally, a man emailed Zaid a death threat and was prosecuted for it, sentenced to a year in prison. Zaid’s social media pages still include calls for him to be tried for treason.It’s safe to say, he’s drawn the ire of Trumpworld.Still, seeing his name in a presidential memo in March alongside high-profile elected and appointed Republicans and Democratic officials, including a former president, surprised him. They seemed like way bigger fish.The memo revoked the security clearances of Joe Biden and his entire family, Hillary Clinton, Kamala Harris, Adam Kinzinger, Liz Cheney and a handful of others. The memo doesn’t detail why these clearances were revoked, simply saying that it was “no longer in the national interest” for these people to have any access to classified information.“I have no idea why I’m on that list,” Zaid told the Guardian. “The action against me, I get … It’s perfectly consistent with what I expected from him and his administration, but to have me included on that list and the order of our names, why? Why am I fourth, ahead of the president and vice-president?”Trump frequently promised retribution on the 2024 campaign trail. Once he was elected, he and his allies moved quickly to enact a revenge agenda, going after law firms, people who have criticized him, prosecutors who worked on January 6 cases, students who participated in protests, universities, and others who worked to undermine his agenda. The list is long and growing.Zaid had publicly said he was advising a “small number” of his clients to consider leaving the country around the time of Trump’s inauguration, in case they could be arrested, like those who have served as whistleblowers. “I’m taking him and his inner circle at their word. They have promised retribution and retaliation,” he told Politico last November.Now that he’s personally been targeted, he is fighting back. He sued the Trump administration over the revocation, arguing the order was unconstitutionally vague, that his and his clients’ rights to due process were violated and that it impedes first amendment rights to free speech and association and the right to petition the government for grievances.A judge heard oral arguments in the case on 27 June.The White House said the courts don’t have a role in deciding this issue. “The decision to grant any individual access to this nation’s secrets is a sensitive judgment call entrusted to the President,” White House spokesperson Harrison Fields said in a statement to the Guardian. “Weighing these factors and implementing such decisions are core executive powers, and reviewing the President’s clearance decisions falls well outside the judiciary’s authority.”Zaid said he filed the lawsuit to ensure due process and the rule of law are followed and to emphasize that the president is not a king. He wants his security clearance back, but he said he knows he’ll get it back at some point, whether through the courts or in a subsequent presidential administration.“I didn’t do anything. I’m caught up in this political, vindictive battle, so my hope is the lawsuit certainly will reinstate my clearance, but will also hold this administration accountable to the rule of law,” he said.Zaid makes his living in part on having access to sensitive materials. His clients – which include “current and former federal employees, military service members, and government contractors” – seek him out because of his expertise and sensitivity in cases where they need to share classified information with a trusted attorney. His clients and potential clients have lost their ability to use his services.His ongoing cases have been affected, too: after the memo was released, he received a letter from the Central Intelligence Agency’s general counsel that said not only could he not access any classified information going forward, but he also couldn’t “make use of classified information” in his current cases that involve the agency. That would prevent him from working on his Anomalous Health Incidents, or Havana Syndrome, cases.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionIn one case referenced in his lawsuit, he was denied access to an already-filed classified complaint for one of his clients.One of the lawyers representing Zaid, Norm Eisen, also had his security clearance revoked in the same memo. Zaid’s lawsuit is “a landmark case that will establish that, whatever the permissible grounds may be of taking away security clearances, it’s illegal to do them as an act of revenge, which is what happened here”, Eisen said.Eisen said his own inclusion on the list and the broader retaliation agenda have solidified his resolve – more of a “defrosting effect” than the chilling effect others have described after Trump’s attacks.“One thing that autocratic bullies everywhere start off with is attacking and threatening their enemies,” Eisen said. “So if you’re an American who loves your freedom, and we all do, you should understand these threats as part of a larger pattern. There’s no place for that in the United States. This kind of behavior is un-American.”In his lawsuit, Zaid has drawn attention to the political and personal nature of the Trump administration’s comments about him. Trump, during the 2019 impeachment, called Zaid a “sleazeball” and said he should be sued and maybe tried for treason, alluding to the a 2017 tweet in which Zaid said the “#coup has started” after officials tried to prevent some of Trump’s actions.The director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, who tweeted before the memo that Trump had directed her to revoke the clearance, told rightwing commentator Megyn Kelly that revoking clearances including Zaid’s was “fun”. Gabbard also issued a press release that described those who lost their clearances as people who “abused public trust for political purposes”.Zaid said he’s concerned about the chilling effect on the legal field after Trump’s repeated attacks on lawyers and firms.“I know a number of lawyers who I’ve tried to get involved with certain things where they just don’t want to run afoul of this administration because they know how vindictive they are,” he said. More

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      Did National Weather Service cuts lead to the Texas flood disaster? We don’t know | Rebecca Solnit

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      Why exactly so many people drowned in the terrible Independence Day floods that swept through Texas’s Hill Country will probably have multiple explanations that take a while to obtain. But it’s 2025, and people want answers immediately, and lots of people seized on stories blaming the National Weather Service (NWS).There were two opposing reasons to blame this vital government service. For local and state authorities, blaming a branch of the federal government was a way of avoiding culpability themselves. And for a whole lot of people who deplore the Trump/Doge cuts to federal services, including the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the National Weather Service, the idea that the NWS failed served to underscore how destructive those cuts are.Many of them found confirmation in a New York Times story that ran with the sub-headline: “Some experts say staff shortages might have complicated forecasters’ ability to coordinate responses with local emergency management officials.” Might have is not did. Complicated is not failed. It’s a speculative piece easily mistaken for a report, and its opening sentence is: “Crucial positions at the local offices of the National Weather Service were unfilled as severe rainfall inundated parts of Central Texas on Friday morning, prompting some experts to question whether staffing shortages made it harder for the forecasting agency to coordinate with local emergency managers as floodwaters rose.”A casual reader could come away thinking that staffing shortages had had consequences. But if you give the airily innuendo-packed sentence more attention, you might want to ask who exactly the anonymous experts were and whether there’s an answer to their questions. Did it actually make it harder, and did they actually manage to do this thing even though it was harder, or not? Did they coordinate with local emergency managers?The piece continues: “The staffing shortages suggested a separate problem, those former officials said,” and “suggested” sounds like we’re getting an interpretation of what these anonymous sources think might have happened or been likely to happen, rather than what actually did. Suggestions are not facts. Likelihoods are not actualities. Eventually we get to a named source: “A spokeswoman for the National Weather Service, Erica Grow Cei, did not answer questions from The New York Times about the Texas vacancies, including how long those positions had been open and whether those vacancies had contributed to the damage caused by the flooding.”In other words, there’s no answer to the suggestions and questions and intimations. Nevertheless, a lot of readers gathered the impression that this was not speculation aired by unnamed experts but confirmation that the NWS had failed. One prominent public figure with three quarters of a million BlueSky followers shared the New York Times piece with this note: “The United States government is no longer able to protect us from real hazards, such as flash floods, because it’s shifting funds to fake hazards, such as a non-existent immigrant crime wave.”If you read down a couple of dozen paragraphs in this New York Times piece, you get to the former NWS director of Congressional Affairs saying “that the local Weather Service offices appeared to have sent out the correct warnings. He said the challenge was getting people to receive those warnings, and then take action.” Nevertheless, the idea the NWS failed became so widespread that Wired magazine published a report specifically to counter it: “Some local and state officials have said that insufficient forecasts from the National Weather Service caught the region off guard. That claim has been amplified by pundits across social media, who say that cuts to the NWS and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, its parent organization, inevitably led to the failure in Texas.”They link to the pundit with almost a million followers, who had posted on Twitter: “Now TX officials are blaming a faulty forecast by NWS for the deadly impact of a storm.” Those officials are, but why would we believe them? Wired continues: “But meteorologists who spoke to Wired say that the NWS accurately predicted the risk of flooding in Texas and could not have foreseen the extreme severity of the storm.” With that, we’re onto another piece of the picture: the difference between accurately predicting a risk and knowing exactly how severe it will be.Climate change, which some reports mentioned and others did not, is both a contributing factor for specific weather disasters and a reason why the future will not necessarily look like the past. For both fires and floods, the old rules about how fast they’ll move and how big they’ll get have expired. Hotter air holds more moisture, and that can and does lead to more torrential downpours and worse flooding. On the other hand, as local newspaper the Kerrville Daily Times reported, Kerr county has a history of extremely heavy rainfall leading to rapid river rise and devastating floods.The Washington Post had a better assessment of what went right and what went wrong: “But even as weather forecasts began to hint at the potential for heavy rain on Thursday, the response exposed a disconnect: few, including local authorities, prepared for anything but their normal Fourth of July. When the precipitation intensified in the early morning hours Friday, many people failed to receive or respond to flood warnings at riverside campsites and cabins that were known to be in the floodplain.” The county, in this report, did not send its first cell-phone alert until Sunday, while “most cellphone alerts were coming from the National Weather Service’s Austin/San Antonio station. But some alerts about life-threatening flooding didn’t come until the predawn hours, and to areas where cellular reception may have been spotty.”It seems like the National Weather Service did its duty despite the cuts, but more are coming. Fossil Free Memo reports: “Just days before the flood, Texas Senator Ted Cruz helped pass the so-called Big Beautiful Bill, a sweeping fossil fuel giveaway that also slashed $200 million from Noaa’s weather forecasting and public alert programs. The money was meant to improve early warnings for exactly the kind of fast-moving, deadly flooding that just hit his own state. The cuts weren’t in the House version. Cruz added them in the Senate, behind closed doors, as chair of the committee that oversees Noaa.” The impact of cuts to vital services is going to degrade everyday life and add to the dangers we face, and as far as politicians like Ted Cruz are concerned, that’s the plan. It will be important to connect cause and effect, when there is a connection.The desire to have an explanation, and the desire for that explanation to be tidy and aligned with one’s politics, easily becomes a willingness to accept what fits. But knowing we don’t know, knowing the answers are not yet in, or there are multiple causes, being careful even with the sources that tell us what we want to hear: all this equipment to survive the information onslaughts of this moment. We all need to be careful about how we get information and reach conclusions – both the practical information about climate catastrophes and weather disasters and the journalism that reports on it. Both the weather and the news require vigilance.

      Rebecca Solnit is a Guardian US columnist More

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      Deadly floods could be new normal as Trump guts federal agencies, experts warn

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      The deadly Texas floods could signal a new norm in the US, as Donald Trump and his allies dismantle crucial federal agencies that help states prepare and respond to extreme weather and other hazards, experts warn.More than 100 are dead and dozens more remain missing after flash floods in the parched area known as Texas Hill Country swept away entire holiday camps and homes on Friday night – in what appears to have been another unremarkable storm that stalled before dumping huge quantities of rain over a short period of time, a phenomena that has becoming increasingly common as the planet warms.It remains unclear why the early warning system failed to result in the timely evacuation of Camp Mystic, where 700 girls were camped on a known flood plain on the Guadalupe River, but there is mounting concern that the chaos and cuts instigated by Trump and his billionaire donor Elon Musk at the National Weather Service (NWS) and Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema) may have contributed to the death toll.“This is the exact kind of storm that meteorologists, climate scientists, emergency management experts have been talking about and warning about for decades at this point, and there’s absolutely no reason that this won’t happen in other parts of the country. This is what happens when you let climate change run unabated and break apart the emergency management system – without investing in that system at the local and state level,” said Samantha Montano, professor of emergency management at Massachusetts Maritime Academy.“It takes a lot of money, expertise and time to eliminate risk and make sure that agencies are prepared to respond when a flood situation like in Texas happens. And if you eliminate those preparedness efforts, if you fire the people who do that work, then the response will not be effective.”Fema was created in 1979 by Jimmy Carter – precisely because states were struggling to cope with major disasters – and works closely with state and local government agencies to provide resources, coordination, technical expertise, leadership and communication with the public when they cannot cope alone.Upon returning to the White House, Trump immediately began threatening to disband Fema, belittling the agency amid its ongoing efforts to help communities devastated by the Los Angeles wildfires and Hurricane Helene, the category 4 storm that left at least 230 people dead in southern Appalachia.The threats were followed by a pledge to dismantle Fema at the end of the 2025 hurricane season, without offering any clear plan about what would come next. The cuts are part of the administration’s unsubstantiated claims that the states and private enterprises are capable and best positioned to provide most federal services including weather forecasting, scientific research and emergency management.Reports suggest that more than a third of Fema’s permanent full-time workforce has been fired or accepted buyouts, including some of its most experienced and knowledgeable leaders who coordinate disaster responses – which can involve multiple federal agencies for months or years.Emergency management and the weather service work hand in hand. At the NWS, more than 600 people have already been laid off or taken early retirement, leading to offices across storm and flood-prone areas of the US to be short of meteorologists and round-the-clock staffing cover. The agency has also had to scale back routine weather monitoring.Two senior meteorologists at the San Antonio NWS office, which is responsible for forecasting in the Hill Country region, were among the casualties of Musk’s buyouts and layoffs. This included the warning coordination meteorologist, who is usually responsible for liaising with local emergency managers to help translate NWS forecasts into likely impacts that inform local actions such as warnings and evacuation orders.But Trump said it was unlikely the staff cuts to the NWS will be reversed, even in the wake of the Texas floods. “I would think not,” the president said on Sunday about a possible reversal. “This was a thing that happened in seconds. Nobody expected it. Nobody saw it. Very talented people are there, they didn’t see it.”Accuweather, the popular commercial weather forecasting services, relies on the NWS for much of its foundational meteorological data and forecasts. Fema often steps in to cover emergency accommodation and reconstruction costs for Americans without adequate insurance and/or the means to rebuild.Reports suggest NWS weather balloons, which assess storm risk by measuring wind speed, humidity, temperature and other conditions that satellites may not detect, have been canceled in recent weeks from Nebraska to Florida due to staff shortages. At the busiest time for storm predictions, deadly heatwaves and wildfires, weather service staffing is down by more than 10% and, for the first time in almost half a century, some forecasting offices no longer have 24/7 cover.In May, the NWS office in eastern Kentucky scrambled to cover the overnight forecast as severe storms moved through the region, triggering multiple tornadoes that eventually killed 28 people.Despite such threats, the Republican budget bill signed by Trump last week cuts $150m in funding to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa) to help improve future weather forecasts and also shrinks the amount of money to the National Science Foundation, the premier federal agency supporting basic science and engineering research, by 56% next year.The 2026 budget makes significant cuts to Noaa including terminating the Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research, which in essence could be the end of the efforts to improve warnings for events like the Texas floods, warned Alan Gerard, former head of the Warning Research and Development Division of the Noaa National Severe Storms Laboratory, speaking on DemocracyNow! on Monday.NSF funded research has played a pivotal role in developing early warning systems for all sorts of hazards, but more work is urgently needed to improve local accuracy and community acceptability amid the growing threats due to global heating. There is no other funding source capable of filling this gap.“The Hill Country is a desert area with big rivers which have had historic major floods and that are prone to flash flooding – but like most of rural America do not have gauge systems. Without gauges, the warnings don’t come early enough, and with flash floods every 15 minutes can save lives. This is something we can do better,” said Ryan Thigpen, a flood scientist trying to improve early warning systems in Appalachia .Texas senator Ted Cruz has called for “a better system of warnings to get kids out of harm’s way” in the wake of the disaster, even though he inserted language into the “big beautiful” bill to slash Noaa’s weather forecasting upgrades. Local officials, too, have sought to distract attention away from Trump’s cuts – and their support for his plans – but the lack of leadership at Fema is impossible to ignore especially as Trump plans to visit the area with the secretary of homeland security, Kristi Noem, on Friday.David Richardson, the acting administrator of Fema, has not traveled to Texas. Richardson, a former US marine with no emergency management experience prior to his appointment in May, is most notable for his warning to agency staff to not oppose Trump’s plan for Fema or “I will run right over you.”“A lot of key people at Fema who worked there for years, decades in many cases, and hold the expertise that is needed to be able to actually move the resources of the agency, are gone. Fema is so depleted, it’s unclear if they are even capable of launching a huge response right now,” said Montano, author of Disasterology: Dispatches from the Frontlines of the Climate Crisis.“It’s not the same level as during [hurricane] Helene but there’s already a lot of inaccurate information out there, and Fema is no longer a trusted voice – we haven’t heard from the administrator, only secretary of homeland security Kristi Noem, which is very unusual. We’re almost at the point where we can say no one’s home at Fema… there is no trusted voice,” Montano added. The turmoil at the federal agencies tasked with predicting and responding to disaster comes as the threat from extreme weather grows due to the human-caused climate crisis. The Texas floods occurred in a warmer, more moisture-laden atmosphere than in the past, with one analysis finding that climate change has made conditions 7% wetter and 1.5C hotter than they would’ve been otherwise.“We have added a lot of carbon to the atmosphere, and that extra carbon traps energy in the climate system,” said Andrew Dessler, a climate scientist at Texas A&M University. “Because of this extra energy, every weather event we see now carries some influence from climate change. The only question is how big that influence is.”Meanwhile on Monday the White House described the deadly Texas floods as “an act of God”. More

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      Trump news at a glance: tariff threats draw muted reaction from Asian allies amid hopes deals can be reached

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      Donald Trump’s new tariff rates of as much as 40% for 14 countries have drawn muted responses from the hardest hit Asian countries who are hoping to renegotiate them before they come into effect next month.Japan, South Korea, Malaysia, Kazakhstan and Tunisia were handed the lowest tariff rate of 25% while Laos and Myanmar – both facing high rates of poverty – were hit with the highest at 40%.Trump posted copies of his tariff letters to each of the countries on his social media site and press secretary Karoline Leavitt said more letters would be sent later this week.Japanese prime minister Shigeru Ishiba said some progress had been made on avoiding higher tariffs of up to 35% that Trump had suggested recently, while South Korea’s industry ministry said it planned to intensify US trade talks by 1 August to “reach a mutually beneficial result”.South Africa’s president, Cyril Ramaphosa, said the 30% US tariff rate was unjustified given that 77% of US goods entered South Africa with no tariffs.Here is more on the tariffs and other key US politics news of the day:Trump delays tariff hikes but sets new rates for some countries The US president revealed plans to step up his trade wars on Monday but delayed tariff hikes on goods from key economies until next month, amid widespread confusion over his controversial economic strategy.Trump announced countries including Japan, South Korea and South Africa would face tariffs of up to 40% as part of a fresh wave of levies to kick in on 1 August. No increases will take place on Wednesday, however, after he extended a previous pause.Read the full storyNetanyahu nominates Trump for Nobel prize at meeting set to focus on GazaBenjamin Netanyahu told Donald Trump that he would nominate him for the Nobel peace prize on Monday, as the two leaders met for the first time since the US launched strikes on Iran’s nuclear program as part of a short-lived war between Israel and Iran.Trump was expected to press Netanyahu to agree to a ceasefire in Israel’s war against Hamas in Gaza amid an outcry over the humanitarian cost of an offensive that has led to nearly 60,000 deaths.Read the full storyPregnant doctor denied Covid vaccine sues Trump administrationA pregnant physician who was denied a Covid-19 vaccine is suing the Trump administration alongside a group of leading doctors’ associations, charging that the administration sought to “desensitize the public to anti-vaccine and anti-science rhetoric”, according to their attorney.Read the full storyDeportation protections for people from Honduras and Nicaragua endThe Trump administration has ended temporary protections for people from Honduras and Nicaragua in the latest phase of its effort to expel undocumented people from the US.The Department of Homeland Security announced it would end temporary protected status for an estimated 72,000 Hondurans and 4,000 Nicaraguans in moves that will come into effect in about 60 days. Citizens of the two Central American nations were accorded the status after Hurricane Mitch in 1998, which left 10,000 dead after it ripped through the region.Read the full storyPlanned Parenthood sues over funding cuts in Trump billPlanned Parenthood sued the Trump administration on Monday over a provision in Trump’s sweeping domestic policy bill that would strip funding from health centers operated by the reproductive healthcare and abortion provider.In a complaint filed in Boston federal court, Planned Parenthood said the provision was unconstitutional and its clear purpose was to prevent its nearly 600 health centers from receiving Medicaid reimbursements.Read the full storyJeffrey Epstein died by suicide, review confirmsA review of files held by the US government on the financier Jeffrey Epstein has said there is no secret client list to be released, and confirmed his August 2019 death by suicide while in federal custody, both of which contradict conspiracy theories.Read the full storyAnalysis: cruelty is the point at ‘Alligator Alcatraz’After the cruelty, the mockery. As the first detainees were being hauled into Donald Trump’s controversial migrant jail in the inhospitable wetlands of the Florida Everglades last week, his supporters were indulging in some parallel retail therapy.“Surrounded by swamps & pythons, it’s a one-way ticket to regret,” the Florida Republican party’s official X account crowed, hawking its new range of Alligator Alcatraz-themed shirts and hats. “Grab our merch to support tough-on-crime borders! Limited supply – get yours before the gators do!”Read the full storyWhat else happened today:

      Mexican prosecutors accuse boxer Julio César Chávez Jr of being a henchman for the Sinaloa drugs cartel and say he used his skills to pummel rival gang members “like a punchbag” before his recent arrest in the US.

      Donald Trump has issued his strongest defence to date of Brazil’s former president Jair Bolsonaro, claiming the far-right leader is the victim of a “witch-hunt” in his home country.
      Catching up? Here’s what happened on 6 July 2025. More

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      Trump’s big beautiful betrayal – podcast

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      On 4 July – as Americans celebrated their country’s independence – Donald Trump signed into law his sweeping tax and spending bill.Trump’s ‘Big Beautiful Bill’, as he and fellow Republicans call it, is a sprawling piece of legislation covering everything from tax cuts to border walls to repealing environmental protections, the Guardian US’s chief reporter, Ed Pilkington, explains.But for a president who normally rules by executive order, the act perhaps tells us better than anything so far what he wants to achieve in office. ‘It enshrines what Trump wants to do in his second term,’ says Pilkington.Most controversially, it includes enormous tax breaks for the country’s super-wealthy, while making swingeing cuts to social welfare programmes used by its poor. More than 10 million US citizens are expected to lose access to Medicaid – despite Trump’s continued insistence since coming into office that he would not touch the service.So, asks Michael Safi, why is Trump doing it? And will it cost him the support of the millions of poorer Americans, who came out to vote for him last year? More

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      Pregnant doctor denied Covid-19 vaccine sues Trump administration

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      A pregnant physician who was denied a Covid-19 vaccine is suing the Trump administration alongside a group of leading doctors associations, charging that the administration sought to “desensitize the public to anti-vaccine and anti-science rhetoric”, according to their attorney.The lawsuit specifically takes aim at health secretary Robert F Kennedy’s unilateral decision to recommend against Covid-19 vaccines for pregnant women and healthy children.Kennedy’s announcement circumvented expert scientific review panels and flouted studies showing pregnant women are at heightened risk from the virus, and made it more difficult for some to get the vaccine.“This administration is an existential threat to vaccination in America, and those in charge are only just getting started,” said Richard H Hughes IV, partner at Epstein Becker Green and lead counsel for the plaintiffs in a statement.The American Academy of Pediatrics, American College of Physicians and American Public Health Association are among a list of leading physicians associations named as plaintiffs in the lawsuit.“If left unchecked, secretary Kennedy will accomplish his goal of ridding the United States of vaccines, which would unleash a wave of preventable harm on our nation’s children,” said Hughes. “The professional associations for pediatricians, internal medicine physicians, infectious disease physicians, high-risk pregnancy physicians, and public health professionals will not stand idly by as our system of prevention is dismantled. This ends now.”In late May, Kennedy announced that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) would no longer recommend Covid-19 vaccines for healthy children or pregnant women. The announcement, made on social media, contradicted a raft of evidence showing pregnant women and infants are at especially high-risk from the disease, including from the administration’s own scientific leaders.In June, Kennedy went further by firing all 17 sitting members of a key vaccine advisory panel to the CDC. The advisory panel is a key link in the vaccine distribution pipeline, helping to develop recommendations insurers use when determining which vaccines to cover.That panel met for the first time in late June. Members announced they would review both the childhood vaccine schedule and any vaccines that had not been formally reviewed in seven years. They also recommended against a long-vilified vaccine preservative, in spite of a lack of evidence of harm.The news comes amid the largest annual measles case count in 33 years, and amid reports of more parents seeking early vaccination for their children, fearing vaccines will go into shortage or no longer be covered by insurance. More

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      Planned Parenthood sues Trump administration over funding cuts in big bill

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      Planned Parenthood sued the Trump administration on Monday over a provision in Donald Trump’s sweeping domestic policy bill that would strip funding from health centers operated by the reproductive healthcare and abortion provider.In a complaint filed in Boston federal court, Planned Parenthood said the provision was unconstitutional, and its clear purpose is to prevent its nearly 600 health centers from receiving Medicaid reimbursements.Planned Parenthood said that would have “catastrophic consequences”, given that the health centers serve more than 1 million patients annually through Medicaid, the US government’s insurance program for low-income people. More than 80 million people use Medicaid.“The true design of the Defund Provision is simply to express disapproval of, attack, and punish Planned Parenthood, which plays a particularly prominent role in the public debate over abortion,” Planned Parenthood said in its lawsuit.The lawsuit continued: “Stripping away this patient volume and reimbursements for care provided will result in the elimination of services, laying off staff and health center closures. The public health consequences for Medicaid patients and non-Medicaid patients alike will be dire and compounding.”The organization has estimated that the defunding could force roughly 200 Planned Parenthood clinics to shutter. Blue states, which are home to more people on Medicaid, would probably see a disproportionate number of closures.Since it is illegal to use Medicaid to pay for most abortions, Planned Parenthood clinics rely on the insurance program to reimburse them for providing services like birth control, STI tests and cancer screenings. But if blue-state clinics are forced to close, people will no longer be able to seek abortions at those clinics – a possibility that has led some abortion rights supporters, including Planned Parenthood, to call the Trump bill’s provision a “backdoor abortion ban”. Planned Parenthood provides an estimated 38% of US abortions.“We’re facing a reality of the impact on shutting down almost half of abortion-providing health centers,” Alexis McGill Johnson, Planned Parenthood Federation of Americas’s CEO, told the Guardian last week. “It does feel existential. Not just for Planned Parenthood, but for communities that are relying on access to this care.”Planned Parenthood’s lawsuit asks the courts to declare the Trump bill’s provision unconstitutional on numerous grounds, or to at least preserve Medicaid funding for Planned Parenthood clinics that do not provide abortions. The reproductive health giant suggests in the lawsuit that Congress did not understand its structure when it passed the provision. The Planned Parenthood technically consists of a mothership group, Planned Parenthood Federation of America, and nearly 50 regional affiliate groups that operate as independent entities.Medicaid is overseen by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, part of the US Department of Health and Human Services. That agency did not immediately respond to requests for comment.Planned Parenthood is being buffeted by intense financial headwinds. This spring, the Trump administration froze tens of millions of dollars earmarked for family planning providers who participate in Title X, the nation’s largest family planning program. Although several of those providers have since had their funding restored, a Planned Parenthood spokesperson said last week their affiliates had not received funding.The US supreme court also ruled in late June in favor of South Carolina in a case involving the state’s attempt to kick Planned Parenthood out of its state Medicaid reimbursement program. Red states may see that ruling as a blessing to their own efforts to defund Planned Parenthood.Even if Planned Parenthood’s Monday lawsuit succeeds, the organization will probably have to grapple with the consequences of that supreme court ruling for years to come. More