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    Trump under fire for likening himself to Napoleon amid attacks on judges

    Critics rounded on Donald Trump on Sunday for likening himself to Napoleon in a “dictatorial” social media post echoing the French emperor’s assertion that “he who saves his country does not violate any laws”.The post came at the end of another tumultuous week early in Trump’s second presidency, during which acolytes questioned the legitimacy of judges making a succession of rulings to stall his administration’s aggressive seizure or dismantling of federal institutions and budgets.His defiance of some of those orders, including one ordering a restoration of funding to bodies such as the National Institutes of Health, has led to several of the president’s opponents declaring a constitutional crisis.“He is the most lawless president in US history,” Robert Reich, a former US secretary of labor, wrote on Wednesday in the Guardian.“This is bonkers. In our system of government, it’s up to the courts to determine whether the president is using his power ‘legitimately’, not the president.”Trump laid out his position in the tweet posted on Saturday afternoon, after a round of golf at his Florida resort. The quote, as internet sleuths soon discovered, is a version of a phrase attributed to Napoleon “Celui qui sauve sa patrie ne viole aucune loi,” translated as: “who saves his country violates no law”.Another version appeared in the 1970 movie Waterloo, starring Rod Steiger as the dictator who rode roughshod over the French constitution to declare himself emperor and pursue world domination before his comeuppance at the pivotal 1815 battle from which the film’s title is derived.Senior Democrats led the criticism of Trump. The Virginia US senator Tim Kaine, Hillary Clinton’s running mate in the 2016 presidential election that Trump won, told Fox News Sunday that occupation of the White House was not a mandate to ignore the courts.“The president has authority, but the president also has to follow the law,” he said.“There’s this law that, you know, the Empowerment Act, that says once Congress has appropriated dollars for a particular purpose the president is not allowed to say: ‘Yeah, I don’t like that. I’m going to spend this money, but not that money.’“That’s why, so far, there’s a whole lot of lawsuits that have been successful. They’ll go through appeals courts, but a lot of the president’s extreme executive actions that hurt folks are being challenged in court right now.”According to the Associated Press, the administration is facing at least 70 lawsuits nationwide covering actions from the attempted elimination of birthright citizenship to the freezing of federal grants and funds – and the accessing of sensitive computer systems and data by unofficial entities.Trump’s wrecking ball approach since his 20 January inauguration continued this week with deeper infiltration by Elon Musk’s so-called “department of government efficiency” (Doge) into federal institutions – and the latest firings of vast numbers of employees.On Sunday, Bloomberg reported a wave of new dismissals at health department agencies including the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.Other agencies where the workforce has, or will be, slashed include the homeland security department, the Food and Drug Administration, US Forest Service and National Park Service, the US Agency for International Development (USAid), and the Department of Education.Critics believe that a hollowing out of many essential taxpayer-funded services, especially in healthcare, support for veterans, and military and defense expenditure, will come with a lucrative corresponding financial windfall for private companies, including those owned by Musk.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionMusk, the world’s richest man and Trump acolyte, who has been awarded the status of “special government employee”, has called on the administration to “delete entire agencies”, which it could not legally do without the sanction of Congress that created them.“I don’t like the fact that Donald Trump is shutting the government down as we speak,” Kaine told Fox.“He says he wants to shut down the Department of Education, shrink USAid staff down to 250 people. That is a shutdown unauthorized by Congress, against the law.“My outrage is about who they’re hurting. I don’t like unelected officials, those Doge guys, posting classified information on their website. You shouldn’t let people run rampage through offices that have classified information.”More turmoil came with the administration’s decision to ban Associated Press journalists from the Oval Office and Air Force One for refusing to comply with Trump’s executive order attempting to rename the Gulf of Mexico as the “Gulf of America”.The White House sought to justify the punitive move by insisting that it was “a lawful geographic name change”. The AP pointed out that the agency served an international audience, and while it recognized Trump’s order, it would continue referring to the body of water by its globally accepted name.In a statement, Axios said the right of news organizations to report how they saw fit was “a bedrock of a free press and durable democracy”. Nonetheless, it also said it would use the name Gulf of America because “our audience is mostly US-based compared to other publishers with international audiences”.The Atlantic’s view was that it was a spat the AP should have avoided. “To cave now would be to surrender on the constitutional issue. But this is a fight that Trump is clearly happy to have, especially to the extent that it draws attention away from his more egregious affronts to the public interest and the rule of law,” it said.Meanwhile, economic headwinds continue to mount for the fledgling Trump administration as it prepares to impose new tariffs on trading partners that analysts predict will lead to an international trade war and job losses. Inflation rose to 3% in January, according to government figures, despite Trump promising during election campaigning that prices “will come down, and they’ll come down fast”.By Thursday, the message had changed. “Prices could go up somewhat short-term,” Trump said as he laid out his tariffs plan, before promising they would go down again at some point. More

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    MLK’s family fear new batch of assassination files will have FBI ‘smears’

    The family of Martin Luther King Jr has expressed concern over Donald Trump’s executive order to release records surrounding the civil rights leader’s assassination, saying the president’s mandate could revive efforts to discredit the revered activist with the public.Speaking to Axios, a friend of the King family said: “We know J Edgar Hoover tried to destroy Dr King’s legacy, and the family doesn’t want that effort to prevail,” referring to the late former FBI director and his agency’s years-long surveillance of King as well his associates.In addition to covert surveillance, the FBI threatened King in other ways – including by sending King’s wife, Coretta, a tape of King allegedly having an extramarital affair, as well as a note encouraging him to kill himself for the sake of the civil rights movement.The latest remarks from the King family friend follow an executive order signed by Trump in January, the first month of his second presidency, that ordered the release of thousands of classified federal documents on King’s 1968 assassination.He ordered a similar release of classified federal documents pertaining to the 1963 and 1968 assassinations of President John F Kennedy and Senator Robert F Kennedy.Respectively, the Kennedy brothers were the uncle and father of Trump’s newly appointed health and human services director, Robert F Kennedy Jr.“Their families and the American people deserve transparency and truth,” Trump’s executive order said. “It is in the national interest to finally release all records related to these assassinations without delay.”Trump in January boasted to reporters: “Everything will be revealed.”After Trump’s order, King’s family released a statement, saying: “For us, the assassination of our father is a deeply personal family loss that we have endured over the last 56 years. We hope to be provided the opportunity to review the files as a family prior to its public release.”However, according to a White House official speaking to Axios, the Trump administration refused that request from King’s family, though it claimed the refusal did not stem from “animus toward the family”.Speaking to the outlet, a second source who spoke with one of King’s two surviving adult children said that “there are deep concerns” within the family over the ordered release.“They know the right wing wants to smear Dr King, and one way to do it is by putting these smears in the public under the guise of transparency. If there are assassination records, release those. But smears are not assassination records,” the source told Axios.King dedicated his life’s work to advancing civil rights across the United States before assassin James Earl Ray fatally shot him at the Lorraine motel in Memphis, Tennessee, on 4 April 1968.A 2020 documentary by US film-maker Sam Pollard titled MLK/FBI explores the agency’s pursuit of King via state-sanctioned surveillance. More

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    JD Vance and those threats from within | Letters

    Among the justified furore around America’s new position in the world, one part at least triggers a bit of nostalgia (JD Vance stuns Munich conference with blistering attack on Europe’s leaders, 14 February). JD Vance’s description of the “threat from within” brings back memories of Margaret Thatcher’s designation of those who disagreed with her as “the enemy within”. I still have a badge with that somewhere. Maybe it’s time I dusted it off.Steve TownsleyCowbridge, Vale of Glamorgan As JD Vance lectures European leaders about freedom of speech, Louisiana is banning health officials from promoting vaccinations and libraries across the US are having to purge their shelves of any books that make mention of subjects that Republicans dislike. No hypocrisy there, then?Tony GreenIpswich, Suffolk Britain thought it had a special relationship with the US. Seems we got dumped on Valentine’s Day.Emma TaitLondon Your report (‘Guess who’s back?’: the inside story of Nigel Farage’s quest for power, 15 February) confirmed what I already suspected: Reform is basically a party run by millionaires, for the benefit of millionaires, with a good dollop of nativism added to the mix.Alan PavelinChislehurst, Kent Re remarks in school reports (Letters, 14 February), my favourite is from around 1971, courtesy of a great history teacher: “Intelligent answers, a mastery of the facts would help.” I’m sure CP Scott would have agreed with him.Kevin McGillPrestwood, Buckinghamshire More

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    ‘The US is ready to hand Russia a win’: newspapers on Europe’s Trump shock

    This year’s Munich security conference exposed the chasm in core values separating the Trump administration from most Europeans and sparked deep alarm at US efforts to control the Ukraine peace process and exclude European governments from it.Here is what some of the main European and US newspapers had to say about it.Le MondeThrough JD Vance, its vice-president, the US has “declared ideological war on Europe”,wrote Sylvie Kauffmann for the French title. If Vladimir Putin turned on the US in a famous 2007 speech at the conference, in 2025 it was the US that turned on Europe.In a “virulent diatribe against European democracies he accused of stifling freedom of speech and religion”, Vance said the greatest threat to the continent was not Russia or China but Europe’s own retreat from some of its “most fundamental values”.Worse, his relative silence on “the topic Europe most wanted to hear him on”, Russia’s all-out invasion of Ukraine, “prolongs the incomprehension and confusion over Trump’s initiative aimed at ending the war”, Kauffmann said.“A thick fog now surrounds Washington’s intentions; between the public statements of Vance and the US defence secretary, Pete Hegseth, and the various interviews followed by denials, contradictory positions have multiplied,” she said.New York TimesThe US administration had done nothing less than “offer what may be a preview under Mr Trump of a redefinition of a transatlantic relationship built on postwar bonds of stability between allied governments”, the paper said.It too reminded readers of Putin’s 2007 speech in which the Russian president “demanded the rollback of American influence and a new balance of power in Europe more suitable to Moscow”, adding that he “didn’t get what he wanted – then”.Now, top Trump officials had “made one thing clear: Putin has found an American administration that might help him realise his dream”. The comments raised fears the US may now “align with Russia and either assail Europe or abandon it altogether”.Such a shift, the paper said, would amount to “a previously unthinkable victory far more momentous for [Putin] than any objectives in Ukraine”.Süddeutsche ZeitungCommentator Daniel Brössler said in the Munich-based Süddeutsche Zeitung that Vance had not come to the German city to give “a friendly wake-up call”, but as “an arsonist”. The US vice-president’s mission was “the triumph of rightwing populism – with the backing of America’s billionaire chief Elon Musk”.His silence on security policy was because “work has already begun on a deal with Putin at the expense of Ukraine, but also of Europe … This much is clear: Trump will make the deal, and the Europeans will have to pay and secure peace militarily.”Europe, Brössler said, was being attacked “by Putin, who has come a good deal closer to his goal of revising the European order in recent days. And by Trump, who no longer even recognises common interests – and certainly not common values.”On the one hand, the US “is demanding Europe finally become capable of defending itself against Russia. On the other, it is backing Putin’s henchmen and appeasers”, from Hungary’s prime minister, Viktor Orbán, to the Alternative für Deutschland co-leader Alice Weidel.The continent, he said, “will have to rise above itself”. Editorialist Detlef Essinger said Vance had deployed “a trick that populists and authoritarians have used for years … The principle is: accuse others of exactly everything that you do yourself.”This “confuses them. It puts you on the offensive, and your opponents on the defensive. It gives you sovereignty over the terms. And a debate is not won by the person who has the better arguments, but by the person who owns the terms.”The Kyiv Independent“The US administration is ready to hand Russia a win in its brutal war against Ukraine. That’s the only conclusion we can make,” the paper said in a blunt editorial. The words and acts of Trump and his team go “beyond appeasement”.But, it added, while the US may be “the biggest and richest ally Ukraine has”, it is far from the only one: “That means all eyes are on you, Europe. The real decision on whether Russia wins the war doesn’t actually sit with Trump now – it’s with Europe.”Europe’s leaders, if they are “real leaders of their nations and not political opportunists, need to recognise the urgency of the situation, and act now. After all, if the US is out and Ukraine falls, Europe will be left to face Russia one on one.”Russia, the paper said, “is not at war with Ukraine, it’s at war with the west. And if a significant part of the west deserts, the rest needs to make sure to show up for battle.” Nobody, it said, wanted the war to end more than Ukrainians do.“But we understand that any compromise with Russia won’t be the end of the war. There can’t be a compromise in this war. Russia wins – the west loses. The west wins – Russia loses. Europe, the time is now.” More

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    Zelenskyy says Russia will ‘wage war on Nato’ if US support for Ukraine wanes

    Volodymyr Zelenskyy on Sunday predicted Russia would “wage war against Nato” if the US stepped back from its support of Ukraine – and that he had seen intelligence suggesting that the Russian dictator, Vladimir Putin, was building up troops for a possible military invasion of another European country.The Ukrainian president made the claim on the NBC show Meet the Press in a wide-ranging interview ahead of an emergency summit of European leaders in Paris to discuss Russia’s war on Ukraine – and peace talks between US and Russian officials in Saudi Arabia.“It can happen in summer, maybe in the beginning, maybe in the end of summer. I do not know when he prepares it,” Zelenskyy said. “But it will happen. And at that moment, knowing that he did not succeed in occupying us, we do not know where he will go.”Zelenskyy added that he believed Putin’s next targets could be Poland and Lithuania – which were occupied during the second world war by Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union – “because we believe that [Russian president] Putin will wage war against Nato”, the international military alliance formally known as the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.Zelenskyy said he had viewed documents indicating that Putin was “preparing to train 150,000 people” in Belarus, a staunch ally of Moscow – and that he had shared that intelligence with allies.The Russian leader, Zelenskyy said, wanted to “show it for the world that it is just training” and would claim “that these are exercises that are always ongoing” in Belarus.“But it’s not truth,” Zelenskyy said. “From such point, he began the occupation [of Ukraine] three years ago. Full-scale war he began from some symbolic trainings. The missiles the first night flew from Belarus, and the invasion came from Belarus.”Zelenskyy insisted he still had trust in Donald Trump’s ability to negotiate with Russia after beginning his second US presidency in January. But Zelenskyy said he would not accept any peace agreement that excluded Ukraine from the negotiating table. He also said that some of the “messages” coming from the US in recent days, such as Vice-President JD Vance’s speech in Munich denouncing European leaders, and Trump’s comment that Ukraine “may be Russian some day”, were “a disappointment”.In a recent exclusive interview with the Guardian, Zelenskyy stressed that Europe could not guarantee Ukraine’s security without US help – and he returned to the theme in his Meet the Press interview.“There is no leader in the world who can really make a deal with Putin without us about us,” he said, speaking in English.“Of course, the US can have a lot of decisions, economical partnerships, etc. We’re not happy with it, but they can have [them] with [the] Russians. But not about this war without us.“There are messages, which, you know, make disappointment for a lot of leaders of Europe, because they also feel sometimes that they are out of decisions.“They have to be in unity with the US otherwise, not only [can the] US lose Europe as a strategic partner, Europe also can lose the US.”His comments mirrored the alarm of European leaders at the US’s backpedalling over support for Ukraine, and Trump’s cozying up to Putin in a recent phone call, which many have portrayed as a capitulation.In advance of Vance’s divisive speech at the Munich Security Conference, European powers including Britain, France and Germany said there could be no lasting peace in Ukraine without their participation in peace talks.After it, some, including the German chancellor, Olaf Scholz, took Vance to task for his comments questioning the future of the decades-old US-European alliance. Scholz also accused the US of “unacceptable interference” in its upcoming election after praise from Vance and the billionaire Elon Musk, Trump’s “special government employee”, for the far-right nationalist party AfD.Zelenskyy, who in Munich on Saturday called for the formation of an armed forces of Europe, told NBC that any weakening of US support for Europe or Nato would open the door to Putin’s plans for a territory grab.“What is he waiting for? For a weakening of Nato by, for instance, policy of the US, that the US will think to take its military from Europe,” he said.“Yes, Putin thinks of that. But I will believe that the US will not take its forces, its contingents from Europe, because that will severely weaken Nato and the European continent. Putin definitely counts on that, and the fact that we receive information that he will think of the invasion against former Soviet republics.“The risk that Russia will occupy Europe is 100%, not all Europe, they will begin [with] those countries who are our friends, small countries who’ve been in the USSR, in the Soviet Union. Forgive me, but today these are Nato countries.” More

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    Trump’s comments on Canada prompt surge of patriotism – in a Canadian way

    A lone figure takes to the stage, a giant maple leaf flag rippling on a screen behind him as he gingerly approaches the microphone.“I’m not a lumberjack, or a fur trader,” he tells the crowd. “I have a prime minister, not a president. I speak English and French, not American. And I pronounce it ‘about’ – not ‘a boot’.”The crowd, indifferent at first, grows increasingly enthusiastic as the man works his way through a catalogue of Canadian stereotypes, passing from diffidence to defiance before the climactic cry: “Canada is the second largest landmass! The first nation of hockey! And the best part of North America! My name is Joe! And I am Canadian!”The ad, for Molson Canadian beer, was immensely popular when it aired in 2000. And now, with Canada’s identity and sovereignty under threat, it has roared back into the public consciousness.In recent weeks, Canadian patriotism has surged in response to Donald Trump’s suggestion that the US could annex its northern neighbour. His threats have prompted an outpouring of disbelief and defiance, but – in a very Canadian way – they has also revived questions over the complexities of national identity.View image in fullscreenTrump began his campaign of diplomatic trolling before he had even assumed office, questioning Canada’s viability as a nation, suggesting that it could become the 51st American state, and deriding the prime minister, Justin Trudeau, as a “governor”.In response, Canadians have taken to acts of patriotism, small and large: one pilot flew his small plane in the shape of a maple leaf; sports fans have booed US teams; hats insisting “Canada is not for sale” have gone viral; consumers have pledged to buy only Canadian-made products – a pledge skewered in a viral sketch in which one shopper berates another for buying American ketchup.“What the hell are you doing?” he asked “We’re in a trade war, you traitor!”“It’s been absolutely crazy and overwhelming,” said Dylan Lobo, who runs MadeInCa, a website that catalogues products made in-country. “We’re struggling to keep up with all the listings. People are really frustrated and they want to find a way to support Canadian and buy Canadian.”Politicians, aware of a looming election, have wrapped themselves in the flag. And in a show of bipartisan unity, five former prime ministers have called for Canadian unity.“We all agree on one thing: Canada, the true north, strong and free, the best country in the world, is worth celebrating and fighting for,” the leaders wrote in a statement.A recent poll found pro-Canadian sentiment has surged in recent weeks – with the biggest leap towards patriotism found in francophone Quebec, a region historically ambivalent towards federal patriotism.View image in fullscreenThe shift marks a dramatic rebound from 2020, when the divisive policies of the coronavirus pandemic shifted how many Canadians viewed the flag – especially after the maple leaf was appropriated by the by far-right Freedom Convoy protests in Ottawa.At the same time, new stress has been put on Canadian national identity amid growing recognition of the historical injustices perpetrated against Indigenous peoples. Statues of monarchs and founding statesmen have been pulled down, and buildings renamed amid a heated national discussion about the legacy of colonial rule.“Trump’s comments on annexation have certainly awakened something in people,” said Wilfred King, the chief of Gull Bay First Nation. “But I think we also need to remember on both side of the border, that Indigenous people in Canada are the only ones that can really speak about true sovereignty in this country.”Unlike in other colonial conquests, King said, the Crown made alliances with Indigenous peoples in what is now Canada. “There was no surrender to outside forces.”“When crisis and conflict came, we answered the call. Indigenous people volunteered more than any other group to fight alongside their allies in both world wars,” said King, whose father served in the second world war. “When they returned home, they were marginalized. They saw what it was like to be betrayed by a friend.”And so the fraught nature of Canada’s relationship with the US is jarringly familiar to the country’s first peoples. “They’re only feeling what we’ve been feeling for the last 175 years. It’s how the government has treated First Nations in Canada.”View image in fullscreenFor Jeff Douglas, who played Joe Canada in popular the 2000 ad campaign, the recent surge of nationalism has brought mixed feelings.“Patriotism wasn’t something that ever really resonated with me and I was very ignorant about the totality of Canadian history when we made the ad,” he said.Douglas, who later became an acclaimed radio host for the CBC, says decades spent meeting different groups across the country has deepened his understanding of Canada’s complicated, and dark, history.“I think that we can still be proud. We just have to be aware – and then being aware of the wrongs of the past and the continuing wrongs in the present doesn’t mean that we can’t be proud to be Canadian. Pride in being Canadian cannot come at the cost of that awareness,” he said.And while he says a “blind” shift towards patriotism doesn’t serve the broader goals of fixing injustices, it also reflects the “dynamic” nature of people’s relationship with their country.“There are going to be times where you’re going to need to just say, ‘We need to be strong and face forward if that’s what the country needs to get through the existential threat we’re facing,’” he said.Douglas is hopeful the current fixation on buttressing Canadian identity in the face of threats to the country will serve a broader purpose.“My love of the country, or rather the people of the country, is a love of what we potentially could achieve, and it is richer when I understand the complexity of where we’ve been and where we are. We can grow. But it’s important to remember that you can love something that’s imperfect.” More

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    Parents are desperate to protect kids on social media. Why did the US let a safety bill die?

    When Congress adjourned for the holidays in December, a landmark bill meant to overhaul how tech companies protect their youngest users had officially failed to pass. Introduced in 2022, the Kids Online Safety act (Kosa) was meant to be a huge reckoning for big tech. Instead, despite sailing through the Senate with a 91-to-3 vote in July, the bill languished and died in the House.Kosa had been passionately championed by families who said their children had fallen victim to the harmful policies of social media platforms and advocates who said a bill reining in the unchecked power of big tech was long overdue. They are bitterly disappointed that a strong chance to check big tech failed because of congressional apathy. But human rights organizations had argued that the legislation could have led to unintended consequences affecting freedom of speech online.What is the Kids Online Safety act?Kosa was introduced nearly three years ago in the aftermath of bombshell revelations by the former Facebook employee Frances Haugen about the scope and severity of social media platforms’ effects on young users. It would have mandated that platforms like Instagram and TikTok address online dangers affecting children through design changes and allowing young users to opt out of algorithmic recommendations.“This is a basic product-liability bill,” said Alix Fraser, director of Issue One’s Council for Responsible Social Media. “It’s complicated, because the internet is complicated and social media is complicated, but it is essentially just an effort to create a basic product-liability standard for these companies.”A central – and controversial – component of the bill was its “duty of care” clause, which declared that companies have “a duty to act in the best interests of minors using their platforms” and would be open to interpretation by regulators. It also would have required that platforms implement measures to reduce harm by establishing “safeguards for minors”.Critics argued that a lack of clear guidance on what constitutes harmful content might prompt companies to filter content more aggressively, leading to unintended consequences for freedom of speech. Sensitive but important topics such as gun violence and racial justice could be viewed as potentially harmful and subsequently be filtered out by the companies themselves. These censorship concerns were particularly pronounced for the LGBTQ+ community, which, opponents of Kosa said, could be disproportionately affected by conservative regulators, reducing access to vital resources.“With Kosa, we saw a really well-intentioned but ultimately vague bill requiring online services to take unspecified action to keep kids safe, which was going to lead to several bad outcomes for children, and all marginalized users,” said Aliya Bhatia, a policy analyst at the Center for Democracy and Technology, which opposed the legislation and which receives money from tech donors including Amazon, Google and Microsoft.Kosa’s complicated historyWhen the bill was first introduced, more than 90 human rights organizations signed a letter in opposition, underscoring these and other concerns. In response to such criticism, the bill’s authors issued revisions in February 2024 – most notably, shifting the enforcement of its “duty of care” provision from state attorneys general to the Federal Trade Commission. Following these changes, a number of organizations including Glaad, the Human Rights Campaign and the Trevor Project withdrew opposition, stating that the revisions “significantly mitigate the risk of [Kosa] being misused to suppress LGBTQ+ resources or stifle young people’s access to online communities”.But other civil rights groups maintained their opposition, including the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), the ACLU and Fight for the Future, calling Kosa a “censorship bill” that would harm vulnerable users and freedom of speech at large. They argued the duty-of-care provision could just as easily be weaponized by a conservative FTC chair against LGBTQ+ youth as by state attorneys general. These concerns have been reflected in Trump’s FTC chair appointment of the Republican Andrew Ferguson, who said in leaked statements he planned to use his role to “fight back against the trans agenda”.Concerns around how Ferguson will manage online content is “exactly what LGBTQ youth in this fight have written and called Congress about hundreds of times over the last couple of years”, said Sarah Philips of Fight for the Future. “The situation that they were fearful of has come to fruition, and anyone ignoring that is really just putting their heads in the sand.”Opponents say that even with Kosa’s failure to pass, a chilling effect has already materialized with regards to what content is available on certain platforms. A recent report in User Mag found that hashtags for LGBTQ+-related topics were being categorized as “sensitive content” and restricted from search. Legislation like Kosa does not take into account the complexities of the online landscape, said Bhatia, of the Center for Democracy and Technology, and is likely to lead platforms to pre-emptively censor content to avoid litigation.“Children’s safety occupies an interesting paradoxical positioning in tech policy, where at once children are vulnerable actors on the internet, but also at the same time benefit greatly from the internet,” she said. “Using the blunt instrument of policy to protect them can often lead to outcomes that don’t really take this into account.”Proponents attribute the backlash to Kosa to aggressive lobbying from the tech industry, though two of the top opponents – Fight for the Future and EFF – are not supported by large tech donors. Meanwhile, major tech companies are split on Kosa, with X, Snap, Microsoft and Pinterest outwardly supporting the bill and Meta and Google quietly opposing it.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“Kosa was an extremely robust piece of legislation, but what is more robust is the power of big tech,” Fraser said, of Issue One. “They hired every lobbyist in town to take it down, and they were successful in that.”Fraser added that advocates were disappointed in Kosa failing to pass but “won’t rest until federal legislation is passed to protect kids online and the tech sector is held accountable for its actions”.Kosa’s potential revivalAside from Ferguson as FTC chair, it is unclear what exactly the new Trump administration and the shifting makeup of Congress mean for the future of Kosa. Though Trump has not directly indicated his views on Kosa, several people in his close circle have expressed support following last-minute amendments to the bill in 2024 facilitated by Elon Musk’s X.The congressional death of Kosa may seem like the end of a winding and controversial path, but advocates on both sides of the fight say it’s too soon to write the legislation’s obituary.“We should not expect Kosa to disappear quietly,” said Prem M Trivedi, policy director at the Open Technology Institute, which opposes Kosa. “Whether we are going to see it introduced again or different incarnations of it, more broadly the focus on kid’s online safety is going to continue.”Richard Blumenthal, the senator who co-authored the bill with Senator Marsha Blackburn, has promised to reintroduce it in the upcoming congressional session, and other advocates for the bill also say they will not give up.“I’ve worked with a lot of these parents who have been willing to recount the worst day of their lives time and time again, in front of lawmakers, in front of staffers, in front of the press, because they know that something has to change,” said Fraser. “They’re not going to stop.” More

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    Forget Trump’s tariffs, the president’s bond market threat is worse | Heather Stewart

    When Donald Trump gave an in-flight press conference en route to the Super Bowl last week, it generated a flurry of news, from the fresh threat of steel tariffs to the declaration of “Gulf of America Day”.Much less remarked upon was a throwaway comment about the US’s financial obligations, which underlined the fact that tariffs are far from the only way in which Trump is jeopardising economic stability.“We’re even looking at Treasuries,” the president told reporters. “There could be a problem … It could be that a lot of those things don’t count. In other words, that some of that stuff that we’re finding is very fraudulent, therefore maybe we have less debt than we thought.”The suggestion was that opening up the US Treasury’s data to Elon Musk’s “department of government efficiency” team had identified a money-saving wheeze: why not walk away from some of America’s debt obligations – a “selective default”, as economists call it.Like so many of the serially erratic president’s pronouncements, this one had to be “walked back”, as the Americans call it. Kevin Hassett, his economic adviser, stressed the next day that Trump was referring to other payments that the US Treasury had been making, not its $36tn (£28.6tn) in debt obligations. Hassett suggested the Treasury “had been “sending money out without flagging what it was for”.Yet just entertain for a moment the idea that a US administration might decide it could unilaterally default on even a small portion of its debts. The result would be catastrophic. Because of the dollar’s status as the world’s reserve currency, the yield on US Treasuries – US government bonds – is perhaps the most important benchmark in global financial markets.If investors suddenly began demanding a higher yield – in effect the interest rate – as insurance against the risk they would not get their money back, the effects would ripple through the trillions of dollars of other assets worldwide priced with reference to supposedly super-safe Treasuries.Hassett made clear this is absolutely not an outcome the saner elements of Trump’s administration were aiming for. Indeed, the treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, has said the president wants to bring down the yield on 10-year US government borrowing costs.Yet as a result of Musk’s crazed takeover of the financial plumbing of the state, the US is already welching on its obligations – moral and financial – all over the world.Every day seems to bring fresh examples: health clinics in the developing world being closed because of the dismantling of USAid; researchers whose projects funded by the National Institutes of Health have been put on hold.Officials from the city administration in New York have even claimed the government in effect dipped into the city’s bank account to claw back $80m in federal grants that had already been made.This fast-track austerity is ostensibly aimed at improving the government’s balance sheet – putting the US through “the private equity wringer”, as Wired’s Brian Barrett put it last week.But the Musk/Trump takeover simultaneously risks shattering confidence in US institutions, in a way that is liable to have long-lasting and unpredictable consequences.Five former treasury secretaries warned in an extraordinary New York Times editorial last week of the risks of letting Musk loose on the nation’s financial system.“Any hint of the selective suspension of congressionally authorised payments will be a breach of trust and ultimately, a form of default. And our credibility, once lost, will prove difficult to regain,” they said.Musk has faced legal action and is targeting arms of government with which he has a particular beef, meaning the chances of anything that looks like a formal default remain low.View image in fullscreenBut the whole performance – as exemplified by a rambling Oval Office briefing involving Trump, Musk and his son X (who has the same name as the social media platform formerly known as Twitter) – screams “political risk”, as analysts would call it if it was happening elsewhere in the world.It would not be surprising if efforts to spur the development of alternative global reserve currencies and payments structures – such as those proposed by nations in the global south – are given added impetus by the shenanigans in Washington.The sheer insularity of the Trump administration’s approach was illustrated on Friday when Bessent – supposedly one of the more sensible figures in the administration – said: “The US has a strong dollar policy, but because we have a strong dollar policy it doesn’t mean that other countries get to have a weak currency policy.”In the short term, the most immediate impact of Trump’s plans on the global economy is likely to be via his long-trailed tariffs plan, which will throw sand in the wheels of the international trading system.All of this is likely to dampen growth, and if trade analysts are right that Trump’s latest idea of “reciprocity”, based on each country’s existing tariff and VAT rates, is the opening bid in a negotiation, it may be weeks or even months before any clarity emerges.Given this corrosive uncertainty, markets have so far been remarkably quiescent in the face of Trump’s wayward trade policy, and appear to be relatively unconcerned about Musk’s slash-and-burn mission, for now.They have been putting their faith in the mighty US consumer, and the economy’s powerful and innovative tech sector, to feed the narrative of US “exceptionalism”.But every week of the Trump/Musk show in Washington surely increases the threat of a structural shift in how investors view the US economy – which would ultimately be felt around the world. 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