A US federal court has blocked President Donald Trump’s sweeping tariffs, in a major blow to a key component of his economic policies.
The Court of International Trade ruled that an emergency law invoked by the White House did not give the president unilateral authority to impose tariffs on nearly every country.
The Manhattan-based court said the US Constitution gave Congress exclusive powers to regulate commerce with other nations and this was not superseded by the president’s remit to safeguard the economy.
The Trump administration lodged an appeal within minutes of the ruling.
Democrats desperately want to control the U.S. House of Representatives after the 2026 midterm elections. However, their plan to wield power will likely doom their political future, but could give Republicans a golden opportunity.
An expert political strategist has issued a stark warning to the Democrats about their midterm prospects. If their plan succeeds, it would mean short-term gain but long-term pain for the embattled party.
Most Americans assume the United States is the world’s unrivaled nuclear superpower. The truth is, America’s nuclear stockpile has shrunk significantly. Meanwhile, China is building nuclear weapons at a rapid pace, and arms experts believe the world’s security is now at serious risk due to the communist regime’s expansionist schemes.
Since the end of the Cold War, the United States has dramatically reduced the number of nuclear weapons it has deployed or in storage. That arsenal today is roughly 85 percent smaller than at the height of the nuclear arms race with the Soviet Union, and the number of operational nukes is tiny compared to 40 years ago.
America’s nuclear stockpile has fallen to levels not seen since the 1960s, while China has embarked on an unprecedented nuclear buildup.
Last week, a plane landed: 59 Afrikaners, mostly farmers, mostly white. Trump called it a genocide. MSNBC called it racism.
Turning away the persecuted because they’re the wrong color is not justice; it’s betrayal.
Just like that, we were off. Cue the outrage cycle, fearmongering chyrons, left-wing think pieces, and Twitter threads from soft-palmed theologians who wouldn’t recognize a plow if it hit them in the face. “This isn’t what Christianity looks like,” they screamed.
But that’s precisely the problem. Trump’s version of Christianity doesn’t look the way they want it to. It doesn’t speak in nonprofit euphemisms, hold committee meetings on climate equity, sing hymns to intersectionality, or check in with the Episcopal diocese before making moral decisions.
It does something far more offensive: It acts on behalf of people the professional Christian class has decided no longer count. In other words, white, rural, conservative Christians who don’t fit the preapproved narrative.
Trump Tariffs Are Authorized By Emergency Powers Act– thefederalist.com Source Link Excerpt:
You can buy a set of three pads of legal paper, “proudly made in the U.S.A.” by TOPS, for $16.64 (that is, $5.55 per pad). Or go to Simplified and get an imported two-pad set, currently marked down to $22 ($11 a pad).
Simplified is not confident customers are willing to pay much more for its products, so when President Donald Trump put tariffs on China, it went to court to object.
The case was filed in U.S. District Court in the Northern District of Florida, Pensacola Division, on April 3 by Emily Ley Paper, Inc., an upscale stationery website doing business under the name Simplified.
The Trump administration asked to move the case to the U.S. Court of International Trade (CIT). The outcome of that request could make this case an easy win for Trump once the CIT reviews the transfer order.
A bill to add “an understanding of communist regimes and ideologies” to the Texas social studies curriculum passed in the state’s legislature Wednesday. It now heads to Gov. Greg Abbott’s (R-TX) desk to be signed into law.
It passed in the House 112-20 on Wednesday, after passing in the Senate in March. If the bill is signed into law, the Texas State Board of Education will revise its Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills curriculum for grades 4-12 beginning in the 2026-2027 school year.
Texas Senate Bill 24 was authored by Texas state Sen. Donna Campbell, and highly regarded by Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, who said the prioritization of the curriculum amendment was necessary “so history does not repeat itself.”
While Patrick’s statement when the bill was passed in the Texas Senate in March labeled it as bipartisan, several democratic lawmakers, such as state Reps. Vikki Goodwin and Jon Rosenthal, tried to get the bill amended to include the dangers of fascism, specifically Nazism, as well.
A new study has shown that community trust in Australian and New Zealand scientists is the highest in the developed world, and the authors say – surprisingly – it might be because local politics doesn’t get in the way.
Not everyone agrees.
The survey results were posted yesterday. The study of 70,000 respondents compares public trust in climate scientists and scientists in general across 68 countries.
It reveals that on average, participants reported moderately high levels of trust in climate scientists, with trust levels being slightly lower than in scientists in general.
“Overall, this trust gap was larger among participants who identified as politically conservative or right-leaning, but there was considerable variation across countries,” the report concludes.
President Donald Trump, who seeks to prevent the Islamic Republic of Iran from developing a nuclear weapon, wants to secure a new nuclear agreement with that country. Trump’s motive is honorable. Difficult diplomacy is preferable to military strikes on Iran. But numerous complications stand in the president’s way, and perhaps none of these complications is more significant than the growing threat of Iranian terrorist attacks.
Yes, formalizing a viable Iran nuclear agreement represents a big challenge in and of itself. For one, Iran has engaged in more than two decades of deceptive conduct via its covert research of nuclear warheads. Any deal would thus need to ensure prompt inspection access to any sites suspected of being used to conduct illicit nuclear weapons research. The 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action had woefully inadequate safeguards in this regard.
Another difficulty arises in the Trump administration’s new insistence that Iran suspend all nuclear enrichment, even at very low purity levels, in return for any deal. This demand conflicts with Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s belief that his Islamic Republic should be allowed to engage in some enrichment as a matter of honor. Khamenei might well regard the risks of U.S. military action as less concerning than the loss of prestige and regime confidence that would go with suspending all enrichment activities. Allowing Iran to maintain its nuclear facilities, albeit in a nonoperational status, might allow the regime to save face. But probably not.
Russian forces in Ukraine are suffering casualties at more than 400,000 per year — enough to pack the house at the world’s four largest stadiums. Losses like these have been fuel for simultaneous talk of inevitable Russian defeat or victory in the public conversation.
What should we make of this talk? Can Russian forces sustain similar losses in its ongoing war in Ukraine and rebuild to fight another day? The likely answer is “yes,” and it speaks to Russian President Vladimir Putin’s approach toward negotiations to end the war. In refusing to agree to an unconditional ceasefire and skipping the latest peace talks in Turkey, Putin is playing for time — because time appears to be on his side.
While Russia could run out of quality recruits, force replenishment through 2024 was far more successful than many predicted. In April of that year, NATO Supreme Allied Commander in Europe Gen. Christopher Cavoli observed that “Russia is reconstituting that force far faster than our initial estimates suggested. The army is actually now larger — by 15 percent — than it was when it invaded Ukraine.” Whether Russia can maintain its ability to reconstitute and even grow its forces as its war in Ukraine progresses remains uncertain. More certain is its advantage over Ukraine in terms of total population, with nearly four times as many people and roughly 18.9 million males aged 20–39 relative to Ukraine’s fewer than five million males of that age. Russia can lose three times as many troops as Ukraine and still suffer less in relative terms.
Until Democrats start naming names and apologizing for their reckless, craven conduct as it relates to Joe Biden, I don’t want to hear another word about Pete Hegseth’s Signal chats.
It was fine timing to get news over the weekend that the former president, a well established dotard, has an advanced and aggressive form of prostate cancer that has reached his bones. There’s a strong likelihood that Biden was diagnosed with some stage of the disease before he was even elected president, and he almost certainly had it while in office. Yet the public knew nothing until Sunday.
Prayers up for Biden, but this is an appalling scandal. And it comes just as the dying news media are finally acknowledging that, yeah, Biden’s brain was rapidly browning over as he sat in the Oval Office, where he was losing track of space and time as the commander of the United States military, the point person for nuclear war.
Recall that now-Republican Rep. Ronnie Jackson, when he was serving as Donald Trump’s first-term White House physician in 2018, rendered a medical summary on the president that more or less described Trump as in good health, if a little overweight and in need of some exercise. The dying media questioned him for an hour at a press conference. They were sure that Jackson was deceiving the public by not divulging some mental affliction that would have affirmed their feverish desire to see Trump removed from office by way of the 25th Amendment.
Toddlers may swiftly master the meaning of the word “no”, but many artificial intelligence models struggle to do so. They show a high fail rate when it comes to understanding commands that contain negation words such as “no” and “not”.
That could mean medical AI models failing to realise that there is a big difference between an X-ray image labelled as showing “signs of pneumonia” and one labelled as showing “no signs of pneumonia” – with potentially catastrophic consequences if physicians rely on AI…
Vice President JD Vance called Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts’s comment that the role of the judiciary branch is to check both the executive and legislative branches of government “profoundly wrong.”
Speaking withNew York Times columnist Ross Douthat, Vance was asked about court cases that have hampered the Trump administration’s deportation efforts.
“I saw an interview with Chief Justice Roberts recently where he said the role of the court is to check the excesses of the executive,” Vance said. “I thought that was a profoundly wrong sentiment.”
Chief Justice John Roberts said earlier this month that the high court’s role is to “check the excesses of Congress or the executive” as an independent and coequal branch of government.
Vance disagrees.
“That’s one-half of his job,” Vance said on Douthat’s podcast. “The other half of his job is to check the excesses of his own branch.”
It’s a sad day in America when the chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court ignores the basic framework of the Constitution he’s supposed to interpret.
That’s what happened on Wednesday, when Chief Justice John Roberts took it upon himself to subtly thumb his nose at President Trump and conservatives during a rare sit-down interview in his hometown of Buffalo, New York. In addition to rebuking calls to impeach activist lower court judges for overstepping the confines of the Constitution, the chief justice had this to say about the subject of “judicial independence”:
In our Constitution … the judiciary is a co-equal branch of government, separate from the others, with the authority to interpret the Constitution as law and strike down, obviously, acts of Congress or acts of the president. That innovation doesn’t work if … the judiciary’s not independent. Its job is to, obviously, decide cases, but in the course of that, check the excesses of Congress or of the executive. And that does require a degree of independence.
Last year, companies began to pull back from promoting their Diversity Equity Inclusion efforts and social justice activists blamed the incoming Trump administration. It has been a violation of federal law to discriminate for 60 years so to moderates it seemed odd to add a layer of discrimination in hiring, even one deemed positive. And they never considered it may have instead been done at all due to pressure from the previous administration.The backlash was entirely predictable, but in both cases it was on the fringes. For no benefit, corporate CEOs were ignoring the ‘stay out of it unless your customers are dominated by it’ mantra.
In the 1930s, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer(MGM) studio head Louis B. Mayer was asked why he was not capitalizing on the horror movie craze, “Frankenstein”, etc. that had made Universal so much money. He replied, ‘Why sell two tickets when I can sell four?’ In their case he meant family movies rather than just those for adults but if your product is for both Republicans and Democrats, cheese or booze, it is wise to alienate neither by telling the world you support Hamas terrorists or DOGE or anything else.
More than 100 million people could die if India and Pakistan began a devastating nuclear war, experts have warned.
An academic journal published in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists found tens of millions of people would perish “immediately” should tensions between the two countries result in nuclear weapons being used – while huge plumes of dust released into the Earth’s atmosphere could trigger famines that would affect “billions” around the world. It comes after India launched a barrage of ballistic missiles and drones into Pakistan early on Wednesday, killing at least 26 people. Pakistan described the strikes as an “act of war”, and claimed it shot down several Indian fighter jets in retaliation.
India fired missiles at Pakistan overnight in what it described as an anti-terror operation
Tensions have soared between the nuclear-armed neighbours over a deadly attack on tourists in the Indian-controlled portion of Kashmir, which India says was carried out by terror groups based in Pakistan.
“Both the Executive and the Judiciary have an obligation to follow the law.”
Those thirteen words, penned by Justice Samuel Alito on Holy Saturday, represent the first admission by the judiciary that courts too can wrongly flout the law.
Justice Alito’s stark acknowledgement concluded his bullet-point evisceration of the Supreme Court’s “unprecedented” command that President Trump not remove a “putative class of detainees” under the Alien Enemies Act. The Supreme Court had entered that order shortly after midnight after the American Civil Liberties Union (“ACLU”) filed an emergency application asking alternatively for an emergency injunction, an immediate administrative injunction, a writ of mandamus, or a stay of removal, to prevent the Trump Administration from removing Venezuelans to El Salvador pursuant to the Alien Enemies Act.
The ACLU’s scattershot request for relief from the Supreme Court came a mere two days after they sued the Trump Administration in a federal court in Texas — and before that court or the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals had an opportunity to rule on the request for an injunction barring the removal of any more aliens to El Salvador.