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      Trump to continue Biden’s court defense of abortion drug mifepristone

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      Donald Trump’s administration on Monday pushed forward in defending US rules easing access to the abortion drug mifepristone from a legal challenge that began during Democratic former president Joe Biden’s administration.The US Department of Justice in a brief filed in Texas federal court urged a judge to dismiss the lawsuit by three Republican-led states on procedural grounds.While the filing does not discuss the merits of the states’ case, it suggests the Trump administration is in no rush to drop the government’s defense of mifepristone, used in more than 60% of US abortions.Missouri, Kansas and Idaho claim the US Food and Drug Administration acted improperly when it eased restrictions on mifepristone, including by allowing it to be prescribed by telemedicine and dispensed by mail.The justice department and the office of Missouri’s attorney general, Andrew Bailey, did not immediately respond to requests for comment.Trump said while campaigning last year that he did not plan to ban or restrict access to mifepristone. Robert F Kennedy Jr, the health and human services secretary, told Fox News in February that Trump has asked for a study on the safety of abortion pills and has not made a decision on whether to tighten restrictions on them.Last year, the US supreme court rejected a bid by anti-abortion groups and doctors to restrict access to the drug, finding that they lacked legal standing to challenge the FDA regulations.Those plaintiffs dropped their case after the high court ruling, but US district judge Matthew Kacsmaryk, a Trump appointee, allowed the states to intervene and continue to pursue the lawsuit.The US justice department moved to dismiss their claims days before Trump took office in January.In Monday’s filing, government lawyers repeated their arguments that Texas is not the proper venue for the lawsuit and that the states lack standing to sue because they are not being harmed by the challenged regulations.“Regardless of the merits of the States’ claims, the States cannot proceed in this Court,” they wrote.The three states are challenging FDA actions that loosened restrictions on the drug in 2016 and 2021, including allowing for medication abortions at up to 10 weeks of pregnancy instead of seven, and for mail delivery of the drug without first seeing a clinician in person. The original plaintiffs initially had sought to reverse FDA approval of mifepristone, but that aspect was rebuffed by a lower court.The Republican-led states have argued they have standing to sue because their Medicaid health insurance programs will likely have to pay to treat patients who have suffered complications from using mifepristone.They have also said they should be allowed to remain in Texas even without the original plaintiffs because it would be inefficient to send the case to another court after two years of litigation. More

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      Top Democrat calls for investigation into ‘chaotic’ Newark airport delays

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      One of America’s most important airports continued to be hit by delays and cancellations on Monday as the Senate’s top Democrat called for an investigation into the chaotic crisis.The problems at Newark, a busy airport in New Jersey that acts as one of the main hubs for New York City and the surrounding region, have persisted since last week, causing serious issues for tens of thousands of travelers.Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer, who is from New York, called for an investigation into the “chaos” that the Federal Aviation Authority says has been sparked by an air traffic controller shortage and thick cloud cover.“To say that there is just minor turbulence at Newark airport and the FAA would be the understatement of the year. We’re here because the FAA is really a mess. This mess needs a real forensic look, a deep look into it,” Schumer said. “So today I am demanding a full inspector general investigation as to what went on.”Schumer added: “The chaos at Newark very well could be a harbinger if issues like these aren’t fixed, and if the FAA can’t get real solutions off the ground.”Other politicians joined in.New Jersey’s Democratic governor, Phil Murphy, called the delays “completely and utterly unacceptable” in a post on X, and said he knows US transportation secretary Sean Duffy is “committed” to hiring more air traffic controllers.United Airlines CEO Scott Kirby said in a letter to customers over the weekend that the technology used to manage planes at the New Jersey airport failed more than once in recent days.The flight delays, cancellations and diversions that the equipment problems caused were compounded when more than one-fifth of Newark’s traffic controllers “walked off the job”, Kirby said.Faulting the FAA’s alleged failure to address “long-simmering” challenges related to the air-traffic control system, United cut 35 daily flights from its Newark schedule starting on Saturday.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionDuffy, the transportation secretary, last week announced a program to recruit new controllers and give existing ones incentives not to retire.The National Air Traffic Controllers Association, a workers’ union, said at the time that those moves could help address staffing shortages, but it also said the system is “long overdue for technology and infrastructure upgrades”.Meanwhile, the US army is pausing helicopter flights near a Washington DC airport after two commercial planes had to abort landings last week because of an army Black Hawk helicopter that was flying to the Pentagon.The commander of the 12th Aviation Battalion directed the unit to pause helicopter flight operations around Ronald Reagan Washington national airport following Thursday’s close calls, two Army officials confirmed to the Associated Press on Monday. The pause comes after 67 people died in January when a passenger jet collided in midair with a Black Hawk helicopter at Reagan airport.Thursday’s close call involved a Delta Air Lines Airbus A319 and a Republic Airways Embraer E170, according to the National Transportation Safety Board. More

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      Loyalty matters most in race to become Trump’s next national security adviser

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      The race is officially on to become Donald Trump’s next national security adviser – but in this White House, the personalities and egos surrounding the president can matter far more than the titles they hold.Speaking from Air Force One on Sunday evening, Trump suggested secretary of state Marco Rubio could continue to double-hat as the interim national security adviser. But he also praised Stephen Miller, whom he said was “at the top of the totem pole” for the appointment and said he was in effect already doing the job.“I think he sort of indirectly already has that job … because he has a lot to say about a lot of things,” Trump said of Miller on board Air Force One. “He’s a very valued person in the administration, Stephen Miller.”Rubio will have around six months to test drive the dual roles. “A lot of people say it really works in with what Marco is doing,” he said. “But we have a lot of people. I’m going to be naming somebody.”The two men represent distinct wings of Trump’s Republican support: Rubio is a former rival who has tried to shapeshift into a Maga Republican, preserving his role in the Trump administration and potentially setting up a 2028 presidential run. Miller is a rightwing ideologue who has staked out a reputation as the administration’s driving hawk on immigration and a Trump enforcer among his top aides.The fact that two men with such disparate backgrounds could both vie for the position indicates how the president relies more on the personalities around him than the positions they hold.Mike Waltz was always the odd man out – a hawk who reportedly conspired with Benjamin Netanyahu on options to bomb Iran, and perhaps more importantly failed to jell with key Trump aides like chief of staff Susie Wiles. Then there was Signalgate, when Waltz accidentally added the Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg into a top-level group chat discussing strikes against Yemen’s Houthis.The country’s national security adviser is tasked with briefing the president and coordinating discussions among the key foreign policy and national security advisers. While Henry Kissinger famously served as secretary of state and national security adviser for two years during the Vietnam war, that was 50 years ago and there are doubts that Rubio can both travel the world as the US’s top diplomat and also fulfill a role where he should be attached to Trump’s hip at the White House.“If Rubio is going to maintain his role as secretary of state, there is absolutely no way for him to do both jobs sustainably,” said Edward Price, a former senior adviser to secretary of state Antony Blinken who also served on the national security council. “2025 is not 1975 [when Henry Kissinger served in both roles] in terms of the issues that the foreign policy establishment has to deal with and running a department of 80,000 people and being the nation’s top diplomat should be more than a 24/7 job.“If it’s not, you’re you’re not doing it right,” he said.The role of national security adviser “really can’t be performed by someone who’s also got a cabinet department to run”, said John Bolton, Trump’s former national security adviser during his first term, in a CNN interview.Miller is among the most ardent members of the Maga wing of Trump’s coterie. While he mainly focuses on domestic issues – in particular curating the government’s aggressive anti-immigration policy – he has also matched the president’s skepticism of Ukraine and his pro-Israel policies as well, particularly regarding the crackdown on anti-war protestors in the United States.But more importantly, he has proven himself as a powerful enforcer in the administration.The leaked transcripts of the Signal chats among top officials showed that Miller effectively cut off a discussion of whether or not the timing was right to strike the Houthis in Yemen by citing the desires of the president. “As I heard it, the president was clear: green light, but we soon make clear to Egypt and Europe what we expect in return,” he wrote, prompting defense secretary Pete Hegseth to respond: “Agree.”Many took that to signal his weight in the administration. “I think that Signal chat is exhibit A,” said Price. “He goes in there and speaks on an issue that, as homeland security Adviser and deputy chief of staff, really shouldn’t be clearly within his purview.” He said “the president has spoken, and this is what he said, and this is what we’re going to do. And everyone sort of got in line, and, you know, it’s clear that he’s the power center of this White House.”That matters far less than policy bonafides, of which Miller has few when it comes to US foreign policy. “Miller’s a very bright person, no one should underestimate him,” said Bolton. “If he were to become national security adviser, you would have a clear merging of the homeland and national security adviser jobs … but it’s hard to see what [he] would contribute to discussions on national nuclear weapons strategy.” More

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      TeleMessage app used by Mike Waltz suspends service over suspected hack

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      The communications app used by Mike Waltz, Donald Trump’s former national security adviser, says it is temporarily suspending services following a reported hack that exposed some of its potentially sensitive messages.Oregon-based Smarsh, which runs the TeleMessage app, said in an email to Reuters that it was “investigating a potential security incident” and was suspending all its services “out of an abundance of caution”.A Reuters photograph showed Waltz using TeleMessage, an unofficial version of the popular encrypted messaging app Signal, on his phone during a cabinet meeting on Wednesday.Waltz was ousted the following day and Trump named his secretary of state, Marco Rubio, to take on Waltz’s job on an interim basis. At the same time, Trump said he would nominate Waltz to be the US ambassador to the United Nations.The move capped weeks of controversy over Waltz’s creation of a Signal group to share real-time updates on US military action in Yemen. That chat drew particular attention because Waltz, or someone using his account, accidentally added a prominent US journalist to the group.Concerns over the security of Waltz’s communications were further heightened, when it was reported on Sunday that a hacker had broken into TeleMessage’s back-end infrastructure and intercepted some of its users’ messages.Tech news site 404 Media said the hacker provided them with stolen material, some of which the news site was able to independently verify.Smarsh did not immediately respond to a request by Reuters for more detail about the breach.Reuters contributed to this report More

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      Trump administration offers $1,000 to undocumented immigrants to leave US

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      The Trump administration has announced a new program offering a $1,000 payment to people in the US without immigration status as an incentive to return to their home country voluntarily.The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) outlined the initiative on Monday, pledging “financial and travel assistance” to undocumented immigrants who agree to leave the country using an app called CBP Home.That is a version of the app devised in the Biden administration called CBPOne that gave people approaching the US-Mexico border without official arrangements a strictly limited channel to request asylum in the US and enter legally when issued an appointment. Donald Trump shut that down upon inauguration, as vowed, stranding many, and later changed its name and function so that CBP Home is a tool to exit the US, not enter.The agency claimed that the $1,000 payment would be issued only after the individual has returned to their home country and it has been confirmed through the app. DHS made the announcement in a news release emphasizing many of the terms, some legally questionable, favored by the administration in its hardline anti-immigration policy, such as “illegal alien” and “self-deport”.“If you are here illegally, self-deportation is the best, safest and most cost-effective way to leave the United States to avoid arrest,” said Kristi Noem, the DHS secretary.In the news release, DHS stated that one individual had already participated in the program, receiving a plane ticket for a flight from Chicago to Honduras, and “additional tickets have already been booked for this week and the following week”.The department estimates that even with the cost of the stipend, the program “will decrease the costs of a deportation by around 70%”.Currently, the DHS claims, the average cost to arrest, detain and deport someone from the US is $17,121.The agency also stated in the announcement that individuals who use the CBP Home app to declare their intent to leave the US will be “deprioritized for detention and removal ahead of their departure as long as they demonstrate they are making meaningful strides in completing that departure”.The DHS further claimed that participation in the program “may help preserve the option” for an individual to re-enter the US “legally in the future”.On Monday afternoon, Trump pushed similar claims, telling reporters from the Oval Office: “We’re going to work with them so that maybe someday, with a little work, they can come back in if they’re good people.”But critics sounded the alarm.“It is an incredibly cruel bit of deception for DHS to be telling people that if they leave they ‘will maintain the ability to return to the US legally in the future’,” said Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, a senior fellow at the American Immigration Council, in a social media post. “Many people who might see this as an option would be put in a WORSE OFF legal position. So this is a TRAP.”The new initiative, centered on the Trump administration’s concept of “self-deportation” – which is the notion that conditions in the US can be made so unbearable for undocumented immigrants that they will choose to leave – is their latest action to crack down on immigration. More

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      Democratic-led states sue Trump for blocking wind energy projects

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      A coalition of Democratic state attorneys general sued on Monday in an attempt to block Donald Trump’s move to suspend leasing and permitting of new wind projects, saying it threatens to cripple the wind industry and a key source of clean energy.Seventeen states and the District of Columbia argued, in a lawsuit filed in federal court in Boston, that the decision by the Republican president’s administration to indefinitely pause all federal wind-energy approvals was unlawful and must be blocked.Trump announced the pause on his first day back in office on 20 January when he directed his administration to halt offshore wind lease sales and stop the issuance of permits, leases and loans for both onshore and offshore wind projects.“This administration is devastating one of our nation’s fastest-growing sources of clean, reliable and affordable energy,” the New York attorney general, Letitia James, a Democrat, said in a statement.The lawsuit seeks a court order declaring the indefinite pause unlawful and barring the agencies including the US Departments of Commerce and Interior and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) from implementing Trump’s directive.The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.Meanwhile, attorneys general in 19 states and DC are challenging cuts to the US Health and Human Services (HHS) agency, saying the Trump administration’s massive restructuring has destroyed life-saving programs and left states to pick up the bill for mounting health crises, the Associated Press reported.The lawsuit was filed in federal court in Rhode Island on Monday, the New York attorney general said.The health secretary, Robert F Kennedy Jr, restructured the agency in March, eliminating more than 10,000 employees and collapsing 28 agencies under the sprawling HHS umbrella into 15, the attorneys general said. An additional 10,000 employees had already been let go by the Trump’s administration, according to the lawsuit, and combined the cuts stripped 25% of the HHS workforce. More

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      The Guardian view on Trump’s shock therapy: warehouse and transport workers are the first victims of a class war | Editorial

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      The White House, eager to win a trade war it barely understands, has yanked the emergency brake on China-US trade without checking who’s inside the vehicle. Donald Trump’s early April trade decree has taken a month to hit the economy – that’s how long Chinese containers need to reach Los Angeles. And on cue, US pacific ports registered a 45% drop in container bookings this week from China. When warehouses fall quiet and trucks idle in California, the silence will creep eastward. Unemployment will surely tick upwards.Even if Washington reverses course by the end of May, and Beijing plays nice, the best-case scenario is delayed damage. Some goods are being rerouted to avoid charges, but you can’t reboot global logistics overnight. This isn’t strategic decoupling – it’s economic self-harm. By the time the Trump administration notices, it will be too late. The consequences of the US president’s rash tactics will reverberate through Main Street. Mr Trump offers a flippant excuse: blame 11-year-olds with too many dolls – not his own tariffs – for rising hardship.US gross domestic product just shrank for the first time in three years – despite Mr Trump’s promise of a “golden era”. His tariffs are steering the world toward a downturn. Even the International Monetary Fund (IMF) knows it. According to its latest modelling, the fund now sees the probability of global growth falling below 2%, a threshold widely seen as equivalent to a global recession, as approaching one in four. That’s double the risk it estimated six months ago. Escalating US tariffs, says the IMF, are the main reason behind the darkening skies.What does this mean for the world? Below 2% global growth, much of the per capita gains vanish. Most of what’s left is soaked up by expanding giants in Asia and Africa – places with the people and industrial catch-up capacity to grow even in a weakened global economy. The UK does not have this. Britain is an ageing, post-industrial economy in a productivity slump without the momentum of demographics or the slack of underdevelopment. That’s why Labour can’t afford to sit back. Rising living standards and real economic security require government to invest, build and redistribute – because the market alone won’t.Commentators still blindly cling to David Ricardo’s 1817 theory of comparative advantage – as if today’s global capitalism mirrors Georgian England’s trade in wine and cloth. It doesn’t. Ricardo assumed nations specialise based on domestic costs. But in a world of mobile capital, it’s companies that specialise, not countries. That’s what the economist Dani Rodrik warned in the late 1990s: free capital flows undermine comparative advantage. Development now depends not on obeying trade patterns, but on shaping them – through industrial policy.But Maga protectionism isn’t rebuilding US industry – it’s shock therapy. Mr Trump engineers a trade crisis to hike prices, kill off “uncompetitive” firms and clear the way for a leaner, capital-heavy economy. Meanwhile, tax cuts hand America’s oligarchic tendency even more power to reshape markets in its image. Mr Trump’s narrative promises a revival for US workers – particularly the unionised holdouts in places such as Detroit – but what they will get is higher costs, stagnant wages and patriotic slogans. This isn’t industrial policy. It’s class politics disguised as economic nationalism – a controlled demolition of what remains of US labour’s bargaining power, sold as a populist renaissance.Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here. More

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      Trump says Biden caused the economic downturn. That’s malarkey | Steven Greenhouse

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      While Donald Trump delusionally asserts that “we’re celebrating the most successful first 100 days of any administration in American history”, last week’s economic news emphatically refutes that. Trump’s commerce department reported on Wednesday that the US economy – in a sharp and dismaying reversal – shrank in the first quarter of this year.That of course is when Trump returned to the White House, but Trump, true to form, denied that he was in any way responsible for the surprisingly bad economic news. Trump, who has spent his life blaming others and refusing to admit mistakes, was quick to blame Joe Biden for the downturn. The nation’s gross domestic product declined at a 0.3% annual rate in the quarter, after adjusting for inflation.At Wednesday’s cabinet meeting – where cabinet secretaries sounded like North Korean officials obsequiously extolling Kim Jong-un – Trump noted the bad first-quarter report and said: “This is Biden, and you can even say the next quarter is sort of Biden.” Later in the day in a speech to corporate executives, Trump continued to try to dodge responsibility, saying: “This is Biden’s economy.”Even the very careful New York Times said that Trump was full of it. The Times wrote that Trump “blamed his predecessor for handing him a bad economy, despite data showing that growth was strong when he took office”.When Biden left office, many economists had glowing words about the economy. “President Trump is inheriting an economy that is about as good as it ever gets,” said Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Analytics. “The US economy is the envy of the rest of the world, as it is the only significant economy that is growing more quickly post-pandemic than pre-pandemic.”With regard to the bad first-quarter GDP report, economists overwhelmingly agree that there was one overriding cause, and that cause was not Joe Biden. Rather, it was the huge uncertainty and fears stirred by the prospect of Trump’s tariffs. Eager to stock up on foreign goods before Trump imposed his wave of tariffs, US businesses rushed to increase their imports, and according to the formula used to calculate GDP, soaring imports have a downward effect on economic growth.Like the boy who would never admit he broke the cookie jar, Trump refused to admit that his tariffs had anything to do with the first-quarter downturn. For Trump, truth is a distant galaxy. It’s a foreign enemy that he is forever trying to repel. He stubbornly refuses to admit that the economy was in strong shape when he took office, just as he shamelessly refuses to admit that “MS-13” was Photoshopped on to the knuckles of Kilmar Ábrego García, an immigrant who was wrongly deported to a brutal prison in El Salvador. Far too often, Trump seems allergic to the truth. During an interview with Terry Moran of ABC News, he brazenly insisted that Moran accept Trump’s falsehood about Ábrego García, telling him: “Why don’t you just say: ‘Yes, he does’” have MS-13 tattooed on his knuckles.It’s as delusional for Trump to claim that “we inherited from the last administration an economic catastrophe”, as he did in a speech to a joint session of Congress in March, as it is for him to insist that Ábrego García’s knuckles say “MS-13”.When Biden left office, no economists were forecasting a recession anytime soon – that’s why Wednesday’s report that the economy shrank in the first quarter was such a surprising reversal. During last year’s fourth quarter, Biden’s last full quarter in office, the nation’s GDP grew at a solid 2.4% rate. Indeed, ever since the Covid-19 pandemic ended, economic growth in the US was considerably stronger than in Britain, Germany, France, Japan and other G7 nations. Several weeks before election day, the Economist magazine ran headlines saying the US economy was “the envy of the world” and had “left other rich countries in the dust”.When Biden’s term ended, the jobless rate was a low 4.0%. Not only that, during Biden’s four years, the average unemployment rate was lower than for any president since the 1960s. Trump won over many voters by attacking high inflation under Biden – and it was a serious problem – but by the time Biden left office, inflation had slid to just 2.9%, far below its 9% peak in 2022 and nearly down to the Federal Reserve’s inflation goal.As part of his economic disinformation efforts, Trump has repeatedly said that job growth was a disaster under Biden. Sorry, Donald, that’s a lie. The fact is that during Biden’s four years, the US added 16.6 million jobs, more than during any four-year term of any previous president. (Trump will never tell you this, but during his first term, the nation lost 2.7 million jobs overall, making his first-term presidency the first presidency since Herbert Hoover’s to suffer an overall loss in jobs. The pandemic was largely responsible for that.)As part of his never-ending effort to dodge responsibility, Trump blamed Biden for the stock market’s recent troubles. During Trump’s first 100 days, the S&P 500 fell 7%, making it the market’s worst beginning to a presidential term since Gerald Ford took office in 1974 after Richard Nixon resigned due to the Watergate scandal.Devious as ever, Trump posted on Truth Social on Wednesday: “This is Biden’s Stock Market, not Trump’s. I didn’t take over until January 20th.” What Trump failed to say was that the stock market didn’t begin to plunge until 2 April, when he announced his steep, worldwide “liberation day” tariffs. That was more than two months after Biden left office – so it’s absurd for Trump to blame him for that decline. And don’t expect Trump to ever acknowledge that Wall Street soared during Biden’s four years. The Dow Jones Industrial Average climbed 39% and the S&P 500 soared by 55.7%, including a 28% jump during 2024.Jared Bernstein, who was chair of the council of economic advisers under Biden, said on MSNBC on Thursday that it was ludicrous for Trump to blame Biden for the first-quarter downturn. “I have never seen a more direct connection to what we’re seeing in the economy and stock market to the action of one person, which is to President Trump and his trade war,” Bernstein said.Many economists warn that the US economy may sink further in the second quarter due to Trump’s tariffs as some supply chains break down, some imports dry up, prices rise on many goods and many consumers and business pull back on spending due to all the uncertainty and anxiety.John Kasich, a Republican and former governor of Ohio, sneered at Trump’s efforts to weasel out of responsibility. “You can’t blame Biden,” he said. “It’s like saying the dog ate my homework.”

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