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      Trump signs Take It Down Act to combat fake images and online exploitation

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      President Donald Trump on Monday signed into law the Take It Down Act, a measure that imposes penalties for online sexual exploitation that first lady Melania Trump helped usher through Congress, and he had her sign it, too, despite what sounded like a mild objection on her part.“C’mon, sign it anyway,” the president told his wife. “She deserves to sign it.”After she added her signature, the president showed the document bearing both of their names to the audience at the signing ceremony in the White House Rose Garden.Melania Trump’s signature is merely symbolic because first ladies are not elected and have no formal role in the signing of legislation.In March, Melania Trump used her first public appearance since resuming the role of first lady to travel to Capitol Hill to lobby House members to pass the bill following its approval by the Senate.At a signing ceremony, she called the new law a “national victory” that will help protect children from online exploitation, including through the use of artificial intelligence to make fake images.“AI and social media are the digital candy for the next generation, sweet addictive and engineered to have an impact on the cognitive development of our children,” she said. “But unlike sugar, these new technologies can be weaponized, shape beliefs and, sadly, affect emotions and even be deadly.”The president said the proliferation of images made using AI means that “countless women have been harassed with deepfakes and other explicit images distributed against their will”. He said what’s happening is “just so horribly wrong”.“Today, we’re making it totally illegal,” Trump said.The bill makes it a federal crime to “knowingly publish” or threaten to publish intimate images without a person’s consent, including AI-created “deepfakes”. Websites and social media companies will be required to remove such material within 48 hours after a victim requests it. The platforms must also take steps to delete duplicate content.Many states have already banned the dissemination of sexually explicit deepfakes or “revenge porn”, but the Take It Down Act is a rare example of federal regulators imposing on internet companies.The bill, sponsored by Senator Ted Cruz and Congresswoman Maria Elvira Salazar, both Republicans, received overwhelming bipartisan support in Congress, passing the House in April by a 409-2 vote and clearing the Senate by unanimous consent.But the measure isn’t without critics. Free speech advocates and digital rights groups say the bill is too broad and could lead to censorship of legitimate images, including legal pornography and LGBTQ content. Others say it could allow the government to monitor private communications and undermine due process.The first lady appeared at a Capitol Hill roundtable with lawmakers and young women who had explicit images of them put online, saying it was “heartbreaking” to see what teenagers and especially girls go through after this happens to them. She also included a victim among her guests for the president’s address to a joint session of Congress the day after that meeting.After the House passed the bill, Melania Trump said the bipartisan vote was a “powerful statement that we stand united in protecting the dignity, privacy and safety of our children”.Her advocacy for the bill is a continuation of the Be Best campaign she started in the president’s first term, focusing on children’s well-being, social media use and opioid abuse.In his speech to Congress in March, the president said he looked forward to signing the bill.“And I’m going to use that bill for myself, too, if you don’t mind,” he said, adding, that there’s nobody who “gets treated worse than I do online. Nobody.” More

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      As key Israel allies threaten action over Gaza catastrophe, Washington is largely unmoved

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      As Israel orders Palestinians to evacuate Khan Younis in advance of what it calls an “unprecedented attack” on Gaza, much of Washington remains largely unmoved, even as Canada and European countries threaten “concrete actions” if Israel does not scale back its offensive.Despite reports of growing pressure from the Trump administration to increase aid into Gaza, where widespread famine looms, the White House continues to publicly back Israel. National security council spokesperson James Hewitt told the Guardian in an email: “Hamas has rejected repeated ceasefire proposals, and therefore bears sole responsibility for this conflict,” maintaining the policy stance inherited from the previous Biden administration despite mounting evidence of humanitarian catastrophe.The Israeli military on Monday instructed residents of southern Gaza’s Khan Younis to “evacuate immediately” as it prepares to “destroy the capabilities of terrorist organizations” – signalling plans for intensified bombardment in a war that has already claimed more than 53,000 Palestinian lives, according to Gaza’s health ministry.Despite Israeli promises to “flatten” Gaza, opposition from Congress – and mainstream Democrats more broadly – has been largely muted. While the besieged territory faces what the World Health Organization (Who) calls “one of the world’s worst hunger crises”, more than three dozen members of Congress from both parties recently appeared in an American Israel Public Affairs Committee (Aipac) video in celebration of Israel’s 77th birthday. In New York, leading mayoral candidate Andrew Cuomo held up an Israeli flag in the city’s annual Israel Day Parade on Sunday.This political genuflection comes as a March Gallup poll shows American support for Israel has dropped to 46% – its lowest point in 25 years – while sympathy for Palestinians has risen to a record 33%. Democrats reported sympathizing with Palestinians over Israelis by a three-to-one ratio.On a recent episode of The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, Senator Bernie Sanders blamed Washington’s reluctance to change course on the financial muscle of lobbying groups. “If you speak up on that issue, you’ll have super Pacs like Aipac going after you,” Sanders said, noting Aipac’s record $14.5m campaign to unseat Democratic representative Jamaal Bowman after he accused Israel of genocide.A small contingent of progressive lawmakers continue to voice opposition despite being largely iced out from public discourse in Washington. Representative Delia Ramirez of Illinois condemned the “lethal, unaccountable, extremist duo” of Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and Donald Trump. “Americans have said they do not want to be complicit in their barbaric campaigns. It is time for us in Congress to exercise our power and take action. Not one more cent, not one more bomb, not one more excuse,” she told the Guardian.Representative Ilhan Omar similarly decried the latest chapter of the lopsided war on Gaza, calling it “another unconscionable moral stain”.“Despite the fanfare of Donald Trump’s trip [to the Middle East last weak], they’re not closer to a ceasefire,” Omar said. “It is deeply shameful that innocent civilians are continuing to pay the price.”Vermont senator Peter Welch recently led 29 Senate colleagues in introducing a resolution calling on the Trump administration to end the blockade of humanitarian aid. “It’s been over two months since the Israeli government has been using its power to withhold food, medicine, lifesaving cancer treatments, dialysis systems, formula, and more from starving and suffering families across Gaza,” he said.Resolutions, however, are symbolic gestures meant to publicize opinions and do not have the force of law.While the lawmakers voice their concerns, their impact on policy remains limited, representing the growing disconnect between Washington policymakers and public sentiment. That the grassroots movement for Palestinian rights in the US has grown more subdued – in large part due to an aggressive crackdown by the Trump administration against the universities that were host to last year’s protests – may take some of the pressure off for them to act.One insider familiar with discussions between the US and Israel told the Washington Post that the Americans have been hitting Israel with a tougher stance over the last few weeks. Haaretz has also reported growing pressure by the US on Israel to agree to a framework for a temporary ceasefire.“Trump’s people are letting Israel know: ‘We will abandon you if you do not end this war,’” the insider said. Trump and JD Vance both skipped over Israel on recent trips abroad, widely interpreted as a snub of Netanyahu.Netanyahu has announced the resumption of “minimal” humanitarian aid into Gaza, and the UN said on Monday that nine aid trucks were authorised to enter Gaza, a “drop in the ocean” given the scale of desperation.Whether US voices calling for change in US policy and a wind-down of the catastrophic war are just shouting in the void, may become clearer in the coming days. More

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      The Guardian view on Romania’s presidential election upset: a vote for stability and the west | Editorial

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      As Romanians voted on Sunday in arguably the most consequential election in the country’s post-communist history, Hungary’s prime minister, Viktor Orbán, will have been preparing to welcome a fellow disruptor to the European stage. The first round of a controversially re-run presidential contest had been handsomely won by George Simion, a Eurosceptic ultranationalist who views Donald Trump as a “natural ally” and opposes military aid to Ukraine. On the back of a 20-point lead, Mr Simion, a 38-year-old former football ultra with a taste for violent rhetoric, was so confident of winning that he made a confrontational visit to Brussels in the last days of his campaign.Those expectations were confounded in remarkable fashion at the weekend. In a dramatic reversal of fortunes, Nicușor Dan, the centrist mayor of Bucharest, benefited from the highest voter turnout in 30 years to triumph comfortably. One of the first foreign leaders to congratulate Mr Dan was a relieved Volodymyr Zelenskyy, who, in Hungary and Slovakia, already has to contend with two Putin-friendly governments on Ukraine’s western border.First and foremost, the stability promised by Mr Dan’s victory is good news for Romania, which has been in political turmoil since the original presidential election was cancelled amid allegations of Russian interference. Having made his name as a politically independent anti-corruption campaigner, he must now attempt to unite a deeply polarised country in which inequality, graft and poor public services have proved to be, as elsewhere, a launchpad for far-right populist insurgents.More broadly, the size of the second-round turnout – which included a huge diaspora vote – suggests that hitching a ride on the Trump bandwagon is as liable to motivate a mainstream backlash in Europe as generate Maga-style momentum. Given the global volatility unleashed by Mr Trump’s reckless, bullying style, and the dark shadow cast over eastern Europe by Vladimir Putin’s geopolitical ambitions, the strategic attractions of hugging the EU and Nato close are more readily apparent than they used to be. Handed the opportunity to turn east, a substantial majority of Romanian voters looked west.Elsewhere though, on a “super Sunday” of three European elections, outcomes were more ambivalent and less uplifting from a progressive perspective. The centre also held in Poland, where the liberal mayor of Warsaw, Rafał Trzaskowski, narrowly won the first round of another crucial presidential election, ahead of the nationalist historian Karol Nawrocki. But the high combined vote for hard- and far-right candidates suggests that result may be reversed in two weeks’ time. One and a half years after Donald Tusk was given a prime ministerial mandate to bring Poland back into the European mainstream, Eurosceptic ultranationalism remains a force to be reckoned with.In Portugal, a snap election triggered by the centre-right governing party saw it retain power, but was notable mainly for the record number of votes cast for the far-right Chega party. Postal ballots could yet propel Chega to second place, ahead of the Socialist party, after a dismal night for the Portuguese left.Mr Dan’s famous victory was undoubtedly the story of the night, confounding a narrative of an inexorable rightwards shift in central and eastern Europe. But amid an ongoing cost of living crisis, and as mainstream parties echo far-right agendas on migration, the politics of Europe continue to feel anxious, polarised and alarmingly unpredictable.

      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 once condemned Qatar. How things have changed | Mohamad Bazzi

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      On his tour of the Middle East last week, Donald Trump was treated like royalty by the leaders of the wealthiest countries in the Arab world. The US president was feted in gilded ballrooms, his motorcade was flanked by dozens of men riding white Arabian horses and he was awarded an elaborate gold medal necklace. The leaders of Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates went out of their way to show Trump that they respect him more than his predecessor, Joe Biden.While Trump frequently praised Saudi and UAE leaders during his first term, he was highly critical of Qatar, a small emirate that is rich in natural gas but usually overshadowed by its two larger and more powerful neighbors. In June 2017, Trump said Qatar “has historically been a funder of terrorism at a very high level” and he supported a blockade against the country, led by Saudi Arabia and the UAE. Qatar’s neighbors accused it of financing terrorism by supporting the Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas, and being too cozy with Iran. The blockade, which disrupted the lives of thousands of people across the Persian Gulf, stretched until early 2021.Today, Qatar has emerged as the unlikely success story of Trump’s first state visit of his second term. It was no accident that the Qatari royal family recently offered to donate a $400m luxury jet – a “palace in the sky” Boeing 747 – that the president could use as Air Force One for the rest of his term. The plane’s ownership would then be transferred to Trump’s presidential library, meaning he would be able to continue using the jet after he leaves office. Despite the administration’s convoluted effort to frame this as a donation from Qatar to the US government, it would in effect be a gift for Trump’s personal benefit.It’s yet another way that Trump is using the presidency to enrich himself and his family business, which has ongoing deals for Trump-branded real estate projects and golf resorts worth billions of dollars in the three wealthy Gulf petrostates that Trump visited last week. So far, neither Congress nor US courts have tried to sanction Trump over the US constitution’s foreign emoluments clause, which forbids the president from accepting gifts or payments from a foreign government without congressional approval.Qatar seems to have won Trump’s respect with its lavish gift and a charm offensive built around its role as a global mediator that is able to bring enemies together. During the first Trump administration, Qatar brokered a peace agreement between the US and Taliban leaders, which was supposed to lead to a phased withdrawal of American troops from Afghanistan. During the Biden administration, Qatar hosted indirect talks for a prisoner swap between Iran and the US, which included unblocking $6bn in frozen Iranian oil funds – an agreement that Washington later rescinded.But Qatar’s most high-stakes mediation role has been to serve as the main conduit for negotiations between Israel and Hamas, after the October 2023 Hamas attack and Israel’s devastating war on Gaza. The Qataris helped broker a one-week ceasefire in November 2023, and a two-month truce that started this past January and collapsed in March.Yet since the emirate emerged as a primary mediator in Gaza, politicians in both the US and Israel ratcheted up their attacks on Qatar. They accused its leaders of supporting terrorism by hosting members of Hamas’s political leadership in Doha, the Qatari capital, where several settled after they were forced out of Damascus for turning against the Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, who was facing a popular uprising. Throughout the stalled Gaza negotiations, several members of Congress demanded that the Biden administration pressure Qatar to close the Hamas offices and expel its leaders. The Qataris resisted those demands and consistently pointed out that Barack Obama’s administration had asked Qatar in 2012 to establish an indirect channel that would allow the US to communicate with Hamas.After news broke of Qatar’s plan to donate the luxury jet to Trump, some figures in the president’s Maga movement revived complaints about the emirate’s support for Hamas and other Islamist groups. “We cannot accept a $400 million ‘gift’ from jihadists in suits,” Laura Loomer, a far-right activist who last month convinced Trump to fire six White House national security staffers, wrote on X. She added: “I say that as someone who would take a bullet for Trump. I’m so disappointed.”But most of the Republicans in Congress who had urged Biden to punish Qatar for its support of Hamas have so far stayed quiet about Trump’s decision to accept the $400m plane and cozy up to Qatar’s rulers. That’s partly an indication of how Trump has successfully banished or ignored many hawkish Republicans and neoconservatives during his second term, preferring to negotiate with Iran and other US adversaries. Qatar’s role as a mediator that can resolve regional conflicts is particularly attractive to Trump, who sees himself as the ultimate dealmaker.In this term, Trump has surrounded himself with longtime friends as top advisers, including Steve Witkoff, a billionaire real estate developer who is serving as the president’s Middle East envoy and all-around troubleshooter. Witkoff has been publicly praising Qatar’s leaders for their mediation efforts with Hamas since he took office in January – and the envoy’s praise is clearly resonating with Trump, who has dramatically changed his approach toward Qatar. “They’re good, decent people,” Witkoff said of the Qataris during an interview in March with Tucker Carlson, the rightwing media host and Maga figure. “What they want is a mediation that’s effective, that gets to a peace goal. And why? Because they’re a small nation and they want to be acknowledged as a peacemaker.”Witkoff’s comments echoed the strategy of Qatar’s ruler, the 44-year-old Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad al-Thani, who took power in 2013 when his father abdicated the throne. The emir has tried to position Qatar as a force in global geopolitics not just for prestige, but also as a way to ensure his ruling family’s survival amid sometimes aggressive neighbors. (Those neighbors, especially Saudi Arabia and the UAE, have tried to impose their own foreign policy directives on Qatar, as they did during the blockade that Trump supported in his first term.) Qatar still walks a tightrope of proving itself crucial to the US and western powers by being one of the world’s largest and most reliable suppliers of liquified natural gas, and also maintaining ties with non-state groups such as Hamas, Hezbollah and the Taliban.Qatar has tried to hedge its bets by positioning itself to play an outsize role as a dealmaker, one that a country of its size would not normally take on. That policy began under the current emir’s father, who launched the state-owned Al Jazeera satellite network in 1996 as part of Qatar’s soft-power campaign to increase its influence in the Middle East. And while Qatar directly funded Islamist groups soon after the 2011 Arab uprisings in Syria, Libya and Egypt, the emirate’s leaders became more cautious in recent years and shifted toward cementing their role as global negotiators.For decades, Qatari leaders have also worked to solidify a military alliance with the US. After the attacks of 11 September 2001, they allowed Washington to use Al-Udeid Air Base outside Doha to launch air strikes against Afghanistan. Qatar later invested $8bn to upgrade the base, which has become the largest US military installation in the Middle East, housing up to 10,000 troops. On Thursday, as Trump wrapped up his visit to Qatar, he delivered a meandering, campaign-style speech to US troops stationed at the base. He bragged about economic agreements he had signed with Qatari leaders the previous day, which the White House valued at more than $243bn.Trump also expounded on the value of Qatar’s loyalty: “I don’t think our friendship has ever been stronger than it is right now.” Earlier on Thursday, he praised Qatar’s emir and told a meeting of business leaders: “We are going to protect you.”For Trump, who sees all diplomacy as transactional, that is the ultimate favor he can bestow: US protection for a foreign leader who is trying to resolve regional conflicts – and also happened to offer the president an extravagant gift.

      Mohamad Bazzi is the director of the Hagop Kevorkian Center for Near Eastern Studies and a journalism professor at New York University More

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      in US Politics

      Trump to speak to Putin and Zelenskyy about Ukraine ceasefire – US politics live

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      The Kremlin said that Russian president Vladimir Putin will hold a call with US president Donald Trump at 5pm Moscow time (10am EDT) on Monday, state news agency RIA reported.RIA cited Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov as saying that the two leaders’ discussion of Ukraine would take into account the results of talks between Russia and Ukraine in Istanbul last week.Hello and welcome to the US politics live blog. I’m Tom Ambrose and I will be bringing you all the latest news throughout the next few hours.Donald Trump is due to speak to both Vladimir Putin and Volodymyr Zelenskyy in an effort to stop what he called the “bloodbath” war in Ukraine.Trump, posting on his Truth Social account on Saturday, wrote that he will speak to Putin on Monday morning. “THE SUBJECTS OF THE CALL WILL BE, STOPPING THE ‘BLOODBATH’ THAT IS KILLING, ON AVERAGE, MORE THAN 5000 RUSSIAN AND UKRAINIAN SOLDIERS A WEEK, AND TRADE,” Trump wrote, in his customary all-capitalized prose. The president has repeatedly cited a death toll for the conflict that is much higher than any official figures, or estimates based on an open-source investigation, without explaining why.Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov confirmed to a state-run Russian news agency that preparations were under way for a call between the US and Russian presidents.Trump’s call with the Russian president will be followed by a separate conversation with Zelenskyy, Ukraine’s leader, and Nato leaders as part of the US effort to end the war that has raged since the full-scale Russian invasion in 2022. “HOPEFULLY IT WILL BE A PRODUCTIVE DAY, A CEASEFIRE WILL TAKE PLACE, AND THIS VERY VIOLENT WAR, A WAR THAT SHOULD HAVE NEVER HAPPENED, WILL END,” Trump wrote.It’s unclear what kind of progress Trump will be able to spur, if any, in the peace process. Russia and Ukraine have just concluded mostly fruitless talks, the first of their kind since the start of the war, in Istanbul. Ukraine said it was ready for a ceasefire but was faced by “unacceptable” demands from Russia.In other news:

      Donald Trump’s acceptance of a $400m Boeing jet from Qatar is the “definition of corruption”, a top Democrat said on Sunday, as several senior Republicans joined in a bipartisan fusillade of criticism and concern over the luxury gift. Chris Murphy, a Democratic senator for Connecticut, condemned the “flying grift” on NBC as he assailed the president’s trip to several Gulf states this week that included a stop in Qatar.

      As Trump wages a blunt attack on major law firms and the justice department, some lawyers are starting their own law firms and challenging the administration’s effort to cut funding and punish civil servants. The decision to start the firms come as the judiciary has emerged as a major bulwark against the Trump administration.

      The US retail company Walmart will “eat some of the tariffs” in line with Trump’s demands, the president’s treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, has insisted, claiming he received the assurance in a personal phone call with the company’s chief executive, Doug McMillon. Walmart said last week it had no alternative to raising prices for consumers beginning later this month because it could not absorb the cost of the president’s tariffs on international trade.

      A proposed rule change making it easier to fire civil servants deemed to be “intentionally subverting presidential directives” could pave the way for the White House to fire statisticians employed to produce objective data on the economy but whose figures prove politically inconvenient, experts warn. With Trump under pressure to explain shrinking gross domestic product (GDP) figures amid economists’ warnings that tariffs could trigger a recession, the administration could use new employment rules to pressure workers into “cooking the books”.

      Former US president Joe Biden has been diagnosed with an “aggressive form” of prostate cancer that has spread to his bones, his office announced on Sunday, and he and his family are considering options for treatment. Donald Trump expressed concern on behalf of himself and first lady Melania Trump.

      US government debt may come under more pressure this week after the credit rating agency Moody’s stripped the US of its top-notch triple-A rating. More

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      Cooking the books? Fears Trump could target statisticians if data disappoints

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      Summarizing his befuddlement with numbers, Mark Twain observed that there were “lies, damned lies and statistics”.The acerbic phrase later become so deeply embedded in popular consciousness that it once formed the title to an episode of The West Wing, NBC’s portrayal of a fictitious US president played by Martin Sheen.Now professional economists and number-crunchers fear the aphorism could become a White House theme in real life. Buffeted by global markets and public opinion – both of which show a wary skepticism of Donald Trump’s affinity for trade wars – the president may be about to turn his renowned hostility to truths at odds with what he believes towards public servants charged with producing accurate information.A proposed rule change making it easier to fire civil servants deemed to be “intentionally subverting presidential directives” could pave the way for the White House to fire statisticians employed to produce objective data on the economy but whose figures prove politically inconvenient, experts warn.Statistics released by agencies such as the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) and the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) are used by the Federal Reserve Bank to set inflation policy and interest rates. They also form the basis on which businesses and investors take decisions.The US’s global reputation as a stable economic power and a reliable partner goes hand-in-hand with its long history of producing accurate data, dating back to the establishment of the BLS in 1884. Interfere with the latter and you risk sacrificing the former, experts warn.But with Trump under pressure to explain shrinking gross domestic product (GDP) figures amid economists’ warnings that tariffs could trigger a recession, the administration could use new employment rules to pressure workers into “cooking the books”.“There are a number of changes to the civil service that make it much easier for the administration to try to interfere with the activities of the statistical agencies and that worries me,” said Erica Groshen, a specialist in government statistics at Cornell University.While acknowledging that there is as yet “no evidence” the Trump administration has done so, Groshen, a former commissioner at the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), fears a new rule proposed last month by the White House’s office of personnel management threatens the future integrity of federal agencies’ figures.The change, based on an executive order signed by Trump on 20 January immediately after his inauguration, would reclassify about 50,000 as-yet-unspecified permanent civil servant positions to “policy/career” category, thus enabling their removal for “poor performance or misconduct”.The precise roles to be so redefined have yet to be revealed but Groshen fears statistic specialists will be in the administration’s crosshairs.“Bureau of Labor Statistics’ leaders could be fired for releasing or planning to release jobs or inflation statistics unfavorable to the president’s policy agenda,” she wrote in a briefing paper that urges organizations dependent on BLS figures to submit comments criticizing the proposal.“By making it easier to remove employees if a president determines that they are interfering with his or her policies, it increases the potential for passivity or political loyalty to be prioritized over expertise and experience.”Trump regularly cast doubt on the accuracy of economic data when in opposition – calling positive BLS jobs figures during the Obama and Biden administrations “fake” but hailing them as accurate when they painted a rosy picture of the economy during his first presidency.Last month, when GDP figures showed an economic contraction during the first 100 days – partly fueled by tariffs – Trump put the blame on Biden.“We had numbers that, despite what we were handed, we turned them around and we were getting them really turned around,” he told reporters.The commerce secretary, Howard Lutnick – who has direct responsibility over many of the statistical agencies – has suggested changing the way GDP is calculated in a way that might provide more upbeat figures but which would mark a departure from established practice and international standards.Diluting data agencies’ impartiality risks adding the US to the category of countries which have had the veracity of their economic statistics openly doubted, critics say. Groshen cited Argentina, whose official inflation figures were rejected as false by the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and Greece, where government statisticians were said to have miraculously made inflation and disqualifyingly high budget deficits “disappear” to enable it to join the European Union’s single currency, the euro, in the late 1990s.The sleight of hand had dire consequences. The 2008 global financial crash propelled the country’s economy into a tail-spin, forcing it to seek huge loans from the IMF and the EU, which were only given on condition of harsh austerity measures and cuts to public services.Popular anger over the conditions in Greece destabilised establishment political parties and led to a rise in support for radical and populist alternatives, including the leftwing Syriza, which won power in 2015. Frequent elections and changes of government since have raised concerns about the health of the country’s democracy.The IMF also censured Argentina and threatened it with expulsion in 2013 after officials were found to have been grossly understating the inflation rate for the previous six years.Argentina – historically one of the IMF’s biggest borrowers – did not receive another loan from the organisation until 2018. That loan, followed by another in 2022, failed to stabilise the country’s economy and in 2023, Javier Milei, a far-right candidate and professed admirer of Trump, was elected president pledging drastic spending cuts to address its chronic economic problems.Last month saw the fund agree to another $20bn bailout for Milei’s government.Despite these baleful precedents, the Trump administration’s sensitivity to economic figures indicating a tariff-driven slowdown creates a potential spur to follow a similar path, argued Erasmus Kersting, an economics professor at Villanova University.“I would say that there’s definitely an incentive to cook the books, but I don’t think that it is going to be very easy or feasible to do,” he said, citing the US’s long tradition of producing accurate economic figures.“The Bureau of Economic Analysis would essentially need to be silenced or defunded and replaced with some other statistical agency, which would then result in different figures. The same would be true of the Bureau of Labor statistics.”Accurate and unbiased figures are crucial in helping the Federal Reserve form sound policy, Kersting said. In their absence, Trump might have more scope to attack the Fed’s chair, Jerome Powell, who he has already accused of “playing politics” by not bowing to his demand to cut interest rates.Kitty Richards, a former treasury and White House official under the Biden and Obama administrations, said data collection had been impaired by Elon Musk’s attacks on federal agencies under the auspices of the unofficial “department of government efficiency,” or Doge.“We should view attacks on government data collection as hand in glove with attacks on journalism,” said Richards, now a senior fellow at Groundwork Collaborative, a thinktank. “Undermining data collection and casting doubt on data that is released is part of a program of undermining the public’s ability to learn the truth.”Even a temporary interruption of the US’s established data-collecting capacity would be a “real tragedy” and lead to a permanent loss of knowledge, she said. “You can’t go back and fix it. If you have a data series stretching back 50 years, then it gets cut for two or three years, you no longer have that 50-year data series. You’ve lost knowledge forever.”Greshen, who is calling on users of government statistics to object to the proposed civil service changes before a 30-day window expires on 23 May, said the fate of US democracy could hinge on the continued production of accurate figures.“In a democracy, you want to be feeding people the right information so they will make the right choices. But if the goal is to destroy democracy, you’d want to control the statistics to fit your story … you want to be promoting your own version of reality.” More

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      This pause in the trade war will be brief. Small businesses, plan accordingly

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      Donald Trump’s massive Chinese tariffs are on pause. The media debated. Wall Street rejoiced. Many of my clients breathed a sigh of relief. Big retailers jumped for joy. But for how long?For starters, the tariffs that weren’t paused – a 10% levy on all Chinese goods, plus a bonus 20% tax that somehow relates to fentanyl, are still in place. When you take into consideration existing tariffs on steel from previous Trump and Biden administrations, the effective tariff rate on Chinese goods is actually closer to 40%, according to an analysis done by the Wall Street Journal.That’s a big number. Maybe that won’t deter people from buying underwear at Target. But for companies that rely on steel and aluminum, semiconductors, synthetic fabrics, plastics, minerals, coatings and solvents as well as certain bearings, motors, pumps and parts, a 30-40% hike is a major impact on their margins, which will affect their spending and investments. Ultimately, the costs of the end products that use these materials will also rise as companies simply pass them down.Just as important, Trump’s animosity towards China – unfounded or not – isn’t going to just magically disappear. He’s called the Chinese cheaters, polluters and thieves. And his past actions – particularly in his first administration – do not bode well for a quick resolution to this issue.In 2018, the Trump administration not only imposed onerous tariffs on China but also issued some very harsh requirements to address trading issues with its closest economic rival.There were specific quotas set to limit our trade deficit. There were demands made to reduce the Chinese requirement forcing American companies to share or transfer technology with their Chinese counterparts. There were rules aimed at stopping the alleged (ha, ha) stealing of data and intellectual property by the Chinese.The problem is that none of this happened. What happened – shortly after the negotiations started – was Covid. And then 2020 and a new administration. But don’t think that Trump won’t raise these issues again. He will, and when this happens we’ll be back to the same place we started: excessive tariffs and a trade war with China.That doesn’t mean that businesses are completely stuck. Many – those that have the funds – are using the tariff suspension to buy up products from China like it’s a fire sale at Costco on Black Friday. Others are contracting with bonded warehouses and storage facilities in free-trade zones to accept products that are temporarily tariff-free, hoping that when they pull materials from these storage units those rates will have come down.I have clients who are aggressively searching for alternative suppliers. I have others who are bringing their assembly and manufacturing back to the US. Those that aren’t able to make these kinds of investments are trying to work out how and how much they can change pricing and what the market will take. A few have already created special line items on their invoices to separate out the tariff charge in an effort to say: “Hey, don’t blame me for this stuff!”My smartest clients started doing this stuff the day after Trump was elected. They listened to what he’d said during the previous couple of years. They read the writing on the wall. Now they’re ahead of the game. Good for them.Companies that didn’t do this – especially small businesses that have fewer resources and are more reliant on just a supplier or two – are in trouble, particularly if they buy from China. For any business still reliant on Chinese suppliers and markets, this pause isn’t going to last as long as you think. There will be a lot more coming in this trade war – and let’s hope it doesn’t turn into an actual war. The outlook is precarious and risky. Trump is volatile and emotional and has a history of knocking China. Plan accordingly. More

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      Trump to talk to Putin on Monday about Ukraine ceasefire proposal and trade

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      Donald Trump has said that he will speak to both Vladimir Putin and Volodymyr Zelenskyy in an effort to stop what he called the “bloodbath” war in Ukraine, in a barrage of new social media posts that included baseless conspiracy theories and a demand that Walmart not raise prices for customers because of tariffs he has imposed.Trump, posting on his Truth Social account on Saturday, wrote that he will speak to Putin on Monday morning. “THE SUBJECTS OF THE CALL WILL BE, STOPPING THE ‘BLOODBATH’ THAT IS KILLING, ON AVERAGE, MORE THAN 5000 RUSSIAN AND UKRAINIAN SOLDIERS A WEEK, AND TRADE,” Trump wrote, in his customary all-capitalized prose.Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov confirmed to a state-run Russian news agency that preparations were under way for a call between the US and Russian presidents.Trump’s call with the Russian president will be followed by a separate conversation with Zelenskyy, Ukraine’s leader, and Nato leaders as part of the US effort to end the war that has raged since the full-scale Russian invasion in 2022. “HOPEFULLY IT WILL BE A PRODUCTIVE DAY, A CEASEFIRE WILL TAKE PLACE, AND THIS VERY VIOLENT WAR, A WAR THAT SHOULD HAVE NEVER HAPPENED, WILL END,” Trump wrote.Russia and Ukraine have just concluded mostly fruitless talks, the first of their kind since the start of the war, in Istanbul. Ukraine said it was ready for a ceasefire but was faced by “unacceptable” demands from Russia, which attempted to fully invade its neighbor and has occupied the eastern flank of the country.It’s unclear what kind of progress Trump will be able to spur, if any, in the peace process. The US president has been heavily critical of Ukraine, freezing military aid and having an infamous argument with Zelenskyy at the White House in full view of the media, before appearing to soften after a face-to-face conversation at the funeral of Pope Francis in the Vatican.Trump had offered to travel to Turkey for the talks after his trip to the Middle East last week if Putin would also attend, and urged Zelenskyy to go, but Putin sent a team of low-level negotiators instead.Trump’s ire with Ukraine’s president does not seem to have abated, however, with the president telling Fox News on Friday he is upset with what the country has done with the aid handed to it by the US. “What bothered me, I hated to see the way it was, you know, excuse me, pissed away,” he said.“I think he’s the greatest salesman in the world. Far better than me,” Trump said of the Ukrainian president. “Where is all this money going?”In a social media post of his own, Zelenskyy mourned the death of nine civilians in “a Russian drone strike on an ordinary passenger bus”. He added: “Yesterday, as on any other day of this war, there was an opportunity to cease fire. Ukraine has long been offering this – a full and unconditional ceasefire in order to save lives. Russia retains nothing but the ability to continue killing.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionMarco Rubio, the US secretary of state, reported on social media that he had spoken to his Russian counterpart, Sergei Lavrov, and told him that “the death and destruction must stop”. Rubio added on X, formerly Twitter, that the US “has presented a strong peace plan and we welcome the Prisoner of War exchange agreement reached in Istanbul. Let’s not miss this huge opportunity. The time for ending this war is now.”In a separate Truth Social post on Saturday, Trump complained about the impact of tariffs he has imposed, after Walmart, among other retailers, warned it will have to raise prices for Americans in response.“Walmart should STOP trying to blame Tariffs as the reason for raising prices throughout the chain,” Trump posted, adding that the company should “‘EAT THE TARIFFS,’ and not charge valued customers ANYTHING. I’ll be watching, and so will your customers!!!”A further post from Trump featured a video of an evidence-free conspiracy theory that not only implied that Bill and Hillary Clinton were guilty of murder but also that Seth Rich, a Democratic staffer, was the source of Clinton campaign emails released by WikiLeaks in 2016. (Special counsel Robert Mueller indicted 12 Russian government hackers for hacking the email accounts of people close to Clinton in 2016 and delivering the hacked emails to WikiLeaks.) Rich was murdered in 2016 and his death provoked a slew of lies and wild conspiracy theories, fueled by Trump and other sources. Rich’s family reached a confidential settlement with Fox News in 2020 over the peddling of these lies. More