Trump orders US chip designers to stop selling to China – Financial Times The Trump administration has ordered US firms that offer software used to design semiconductors to stop selling their services to Chinese groups, the Financial Times (paywall) reports, citing several people familiar with the move.
Electronic design automation groups, which include Cadence, Synopsys and Siemens EDA, were told by the commerce department to stop supplying their tech, the report added.
The Bureau of Industry and Security issued the directive to the companies, according to people cited in the FT report.
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Justice department targets California for allowing transgender girls to compete in high school sports Donald Trump’s justice department announced on Wednesday that it is opening an investigation into allegations that the state of California, education officials and a school district “are engaging in a pattern or practice of discrimination on the basis of sex” by allowing transgender girls to compete in high school sports.
The department said in a press release that a state law allowing transgender athletes to compete might violate Title IX, the federal law that prohibits sex discrimination at schools.
California’a attorney general, Rob Bonta, the state’s superintendent of public instruction, Tony Thurmond, the Jurupa Unified School District, and the California Interscholastic Federation, which governs high schools sports, were all sent letters of legal notice about the investigation.
The department said that it had also “filed a statement of interest in federal court in support of a lawsuit filed by and on behalf of girls’ athletes to advance the appropriate interpretation of Title IX to ensure equal educational opportunities and prevent discrimination based on sex in federally funded schools and athletic programs”.
The announcement came one day after the president, reacting to a trans athlete’s success in a high school meet, posted on his social media platform that California “continues to ILLEGALLY allow” trans girls to compete in high school tournaments.
“Please be hereby advised that large scale Federal Funding will be held back, maybe permanently, if the Executive Order on this subject matter is not adhered to” the president added. This was not the first time that Trump has mistakenly referred to his own executive orders as if they have the force of federal law, which they do not.
The justice department does, however, have the ability to charge states with violations of laws previously passed by congress.
“Title IX exists to protect women and girls in education” Harmeet Dhillon, the new assistant attorney general for Civil Rights, said in a statement. “It is perverse to allow males to compete against girls, invade their private spaces, and take their trophies”, added Dhillon, a Republican operative from California who finished second in the race to be chair of the Republican National Committee in 2023.
Trump commutes sentence of Larry Hoover, a former Chicago gang leader
Léonie Chao-Fong
Donald Trump has commuted the sentence of Larry Hoover, a former Chicago gang leader who had been serving multiple life sentences for more than five decades.
Hoover, 74, is the co-founder of Gangster Disciples, a gang described in court documents as “large and vicious” that sold “great quantities of cocaine, heroin, and other drugs in Chicago”.
He was convicted in 1973 for ordering the killing of a 19-year-old neighborhood drug dealer and given a sentence of 150 to 200 years.
In 1997, he was given six life sentences after being found guilty of federal drug conspiracy, extortion, money laundering and continuing to engage in a criminal enterprise.
He has been serving out his sentence at ADX Florence prison facility in Fremont county, Colorado.
The commutation, first reported by Notus, was confirmed by a White House official.
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Trump pardons Michael Grimm, Staten Island Republican who menaced reporter Although the White House has yet to release the details, multiple reports say that Donald Trump’s pardon spree for political supporters has accelerated on Wednesday.
As first reported by NY1, the New York cable news channel, Trump has pardoned Michael Grimm, a Republican who represented Staten Island and parts of Brooklyn in Congress from 2011 to 2015.
Grimm, a former Marine and FBI agent, resigned from Congress after a tax fraud conviction.
He went on to work as a commentator on the pro-Trump cable news outlet Newsmax, and has recently dedicated his social media feed to praising Trump and his aides. “Who else thinks Stephen Miller is awesome!!? Reply with a [heart]!!” Grimm wrote on X above a portrait of Miller earlier this month.
During his stint in Congress, Grimm was perhaps best known for threatening to throw an NY1 reporter off a balcony in the Capitol after the reporter asked him to address an investigation into his campaign finances.
“Let me be clear to you. If you ever do that to me again, I’ll throw you off this fucking balcony,” he told the reporter, Michael Scotto, during the exchange, which was captured on video.
When the reporter pushed back, telling the then representative that it was a valid question, Grimm responded: “No. No. You’re not man enough. You’re not man enough. I’ll break you in half. Like a boy.”
In 2014, then representative Michael Grimm of Staten Island threatened NY1 political reporter Michael Scotto. Last year, Grimm was paralyzed from the chest down after being thrown from a horse during a polo tournament.
Trump pardons reality TV stars Julie and Todd Chrisley, who were convicted of bank fraud Donald Trump signed pardons for reality TV stars Julie and Todd Chrisley, who have been serving federal prison sentences since being convicted three years ago of bank fraud and tax evasion.
Savannah Chrisley, the couple’s daughter, posted an image on Instagram of what appeared to be Trump displaying the two signed pardons in the Oval Office.
A vocal Trump supporter, she endorsed Trump in a speech at the Republican national convention last year. Although she has called the case against her parents politically motivated, they were indicted in 2019 by BJay Pak, a US attorney nominated by Trump.
Trump’s pardons mean the couple best known for the TV series Chrisley Knows Best would be freed from federal prison. Todd Chrisley, 57, was incarcerated at a minimum-security prison camp in Pensacola, Florida. Julie Chrisley, 52, was imprisoned at a facility in Lexington, Kentucky.
In a post on X thanking the new US pardon attorney, the Republican operative Ed Martin, Savannah Chrisley wrote that her parents “are home”.
Prosecutors at the couple’s 2022 trial said the Chrisleys spent lavishly on high-priced cars, designer clothes, real estate and travel after taking out fraudulent bank loans worth millions of dollars and hiding their earnings from tax authorities.
The White House released video of Trump calling Savannah Chrisley to tell her that he was pardoning her parents on Tuesday, and saying they had been “given a pretty harsh treatment based on what I’m hearing”.
Federal judge rules effort to deport Mahmoud Khalil likely unconstitutional A federal judge in New Jersey said on Wednesday that the Trump administration’s bid to deport Columbia University student and pro-Palestinian activist Mahmoud Khalil is likely unconstitutional.
The US district judge Michael Farbiarz in Newark, New Jersey, said he will issue a further order with next steps later on Wednesday, Reuters reports. Khalil is currently in immigration detention in Louisiana.
Nico Perrino of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression called it a “mixed ruling” on Khalil’s motion for a preliminary injunction, because the judge wrote that he “is likely to succeed on his First Amendment claim, but likely to lose on a residency application issue. For that reason, the judge denied the request for a preliminary injunction, pending further briefing on the First Amendment issue.”
Elon Musk tried to block Sam Altman’s big AI deal in the Middle East but Trump approved it anyway – WSJ While OpenAI led a group of US tech giants who won a deal last week to build one of the world’s largest AI data centers in Abu Dhabi, behind the scenes Elon Musk worked hard to try to derail the deal if it didn’t include his own AI startup, people familiar with the matter have told the Wall Street Journal.
According to some of the people, “on a call with officials at UAE AI firm G42, Musk warned those assembled that their plan had no chance of Trump signing off on it unless Musk’s company xAI was included in the deal”, writes the WSJ.
The report goes on: “Musk had learned just before Trump’s mid-May tour of three Gulf countries that OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman was going to be on the trip and that a deal in the UAE was in the works, and grew angry about it, according to White House officials. He then said he would also join the trip, and appeared alongside Trump in Saudi Arabia.
“After Musk’s complaints, Trump and US officials reviewed the deal terms and decided to move forward. The White House officials said Musk didn’t want a deal that seemed to benefit Altman. Aides discussed how to best calm Musk down, one of the officials said, because Trump and David Sacks, the president’s AI and crypto adviser, wanted to announce the deal before the end of the president’s trip to the Middle East.”
Elon Musk in the Oval Office on 21 May. Photograph: Kevin Lamarque/Reuters Federal judge bars Trump administration from killing New York congestion pricing program A federal judge has blocked the US transportation department from withholding federal funding from New York as the Trump administration seeks to kill Manhattan’s congestion pricing program.
The US district judge Lewis Liman, who a day earlier issued a temporary restraining order, issued a preliminary injunction preventing the federal government from withholding approval of or funding for New York projects.
Liman said in his 109-page opinion that the transportation department had “challenged Plaintiffs to a game of chicken”, saying New York could either kill the program or “else may brace for impact and prepare to suffer the effects” of government compliance measures.
The day so far
Donald Trump nominated Emil Bove, his former personal attorney who previously defended him in the hush-money case and now holds a senior position in the justice department, to serve as a federal appeals judge. Trump in a post on his social media platform Truth Social said he is nominating Bove, who serves as principal associate deputy attorney general, to serve as a judge on the Philadelphia-based third US circuit court of appeals. If confirmed by the Senate, this would be a lifetime appointment.
The Trump administration ordered US firms that offer software used to design semiconductors to stop selling their services to Chinese groups, the Financial Times (paywall) reports, citing several people familiar with the move.
Marco Rubio announced that the US will refuse visas to foreign officials who block Americans’ social media posts, as Donald Trump’s administration wages a new battle over “free speech”. The US secretary of state said he was acting against “flagrant censorship actions” overseas against US tech firms.
Trump said he will be negotiating his “big, beautiful” tax bill after Elon Musk criticized it. Musk publicly criticised the bill, saying the president’s spending plan undermines cost-cutting efforts that the tech billionaire spearheaded at Doge. Trump later said he will be negotiating the tax bill and is not happy with certain parts of it, and added that it “needs to get a lot of support … a lot of votes” in Congress.
The White House intends to send Congress a small spending package next week intended to formalize cuts made by Musk’s Doge team targeting federal spending, Politico reports.
Trump said Vladimir Putin may be intentionally delaying negotiations on a ceasefire in the war in Ukraine and expressed disappointment at continued Russian bombings. “We’re going to find out whether or not he’s tapping us along or not, and if he is, we’ll respond a little differently,” he said of Putin.
Trump said Harvard University should have a 15% cap on the number of foreign students it admits and that the Ivy League school needs to show the administration their current list of students from other countries. “Harvard has got to behave themselves,” he said. “Harvard is treating our country with great disrespect and all they’re doing is getting in deeper and deeper.”
Trump says he warned Benjamin Netanyahu last week not to take actions that could disrupt nuclear talks with Iran. “I told him this would be inappropriate to do right now because we’re very close to a solution now. That could change at any moment,” Trump said.
The White House deputy chief of staff, Stephen Miller, and the homeland security secretary, Kristi Noem, demanded that immigration agents seek to arrest 3,000 people a day, two sources familiar with a tense meeting at Ice headquarters last week have told Axios.
Termination notices are expected to go out to all remaining Voice of America employees this week, Politico reports. Those terminations would affect the 800 remaining workers at the embattled news network, after nearly 600 VOA contractors were dismissed by the Trump administration earlier this month. Employees have been advised by management to expect termination notices in the coming days. According to Politico’s report, the notices will probably mean the shutting down of the international broadcasting network.
Gen Michael Langley, the most senior American general overseeing the United States’ military presence in Africa, said that the US is currently reviewing the future of its armed presence on the continent. He also called on African countries to urge their ambassadors in Washington to let Trump officials know if they wish the US presence to be maintained.
A state department intelligence program that linked government analysts with outside experts has been quietly closed, part of the latest chapter of Trump’s disengagement with the broader academic and research community.
The Trump administration said it had agreed to end the US transportation department’s consideration of race or gender when awarding billions of dollars in federal highway and transit project funding set aside for disadvantaged small businesses.
China’s wariness of bitcoin should encourage the US to embrace the world’s largest cryptocurrency and build on its strategic advantage in the digital asset, JD Vance said in the keynote address to the Bitcoin conference in Las Vegas.
Finally, Trump’s big, beautiful, new (and don’t forget, free!) plane from the government of Qatar has arrived in the US – but the president says it’s too big. He called the new jet a “beautiful, big, magnificent, free airplane for the United States air force”, before adding: “Frankly, it’s much too big.” Nonetheless it’s currently being “re-fitted for military standard”, Trump said, to what cost he didn’t know.
Trump orders US chip designers to stop selling to China – Financial Times The Trump administration has ordered US firms that offer software used to design semiconductors to stop selling their services to Chinese groups, the Financial Times (paywall) reports, citing several people familiar with the move.
Electronic design automation groups, which include Cadence, Synopsys and Siemens EDA, were told by the commerce department to stop supplying their tech, the report added.
The Bureau of Industry and Security issued the directive to the companies, according to people cited in the FT report.
Trump nominates former personal attorney Emil Bove to serve as third circuit appeals court judge Donald Trump has nominated Emil Bove, his former personal attorney who previously defended him in a criminal case stemming from hush money paid to an adult film star and now holds a senior position in the justice department, to serve as a federal appeals judge.
Trump in a post on his social media platform Truth Social said he is nominating Bove, who serves as principal associate deputy attorney general, to serve as a judge on the Philadelphia-based third US circuit court of appeals.
“He will end the Weaponization of Justice, restore the Rule of Law, and do anything else that is necessary to, MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN,” Trump wrote. “Emil Bove will never let you down!”
The New York Times first reported (paywall) last week that Trump was considering nominating Bove for a vacancy on the US court of appeals for the third circuit based in New Jersey. If confirmed by the Senate, this would be a lifetime appointment.
The announcement brings to six the number of judicial nominees the president has announced in his second term in office and the second for one of the 13 federal appeals courts that sit below the supreme court.
Trump is expected to have the chance to make more than 100 judicial nominations over the next four years, adding to the conservative stamp he made on the judiciary with 234 appointments during his first term.
Bove, a former federal prosecutor, represented Trump at his criminal trial in Manhattan last year alongside Todd Blanche, who is currently deputy attorney general. Trump was convicted on charges stemming from hush money paid to an adult film star, but is appealing.
During the early weeks of the Trump administration, before Blanche was confirmed for his position, Bove served as acting deputy attorney general.
Emil Bove in Manhattan criminal court during Trump’s sentencing in the hush-money case on 10 January. Photograph: Jeenah Moon/AP Earlier, we reported that Marco Rubio had announced that the US will refuse visas to foreign officials who block Americans’ social media posts, as Donald Trump’s administration wages a new battle over “free speech”.
The US secretary of state – who has rescinded visas for activists who criticize Israel and ramped up screening of foreign students’ social media – said he was acting against “flagrant censorship actions” overseas against US tech firms.
He did not publicly name any official who would be denied a visa under the new policy, but he did mention Europe and Latin America in his post on X:
Foreigners who work to undermine the rights of Americans should not enjoy the privilege of traveling to our country. Whether in Latin America, Europe, or elsewhere, the days of passive treatment for those who work to undermine the rights of Americans are over.
Also earlier, I wrote that the Trump administration has been scrutinizing European legislation to regulate digital services and increasing pressure on the EU to roll such efforts back as part of tariff negotiations, claiming it amounts to a kind of digital censorship. The administration has also sharply criticized Germany and Britain for restricting what their governments term hate and abusive speech.
Agence France-Presse has more on the Latin American dimension of Rubio’s announcement, reporting that last week he suggested to US lawmakers that he was planning sanctions against a Brazilian supreme court judge, Alexandre de Moraes, who has battled X owner and Trump ally Elon Musk over alleged disinformation.
Social media regulation has become a rallying cry for many in the US on the right since Trump was suspended from Twitter, now X, and Facebook, on safety grounds after his supporters attacked the US Capitol following his defeat in the 2020 election to Joe Biden.
In Brazil, where supporters of Trump ally Jair Bolsonaro similarly stormed the presidential palace, congress and the supreme court in 2023 after Bolsonaro’s election loss, Moraes has said he is seeking to protect democracy through his judicial power.
Moraes temporarily blocked X across Brazil until it complied with his order to remove accounts accused of spreading disinformation.
More recently, he ordered a suspension of Rumble, a video-sharing platform popular with conservative and far-right voices over its refusal to block the account of a user based in the United States who was wanted for spreading disinformation.
Germany – whose foreign minister met today with Rubio – restricts online hate speech and misinformation, saying it has learned a lesson from its Nazi past and will ostracize extremists.
JD Vance says US should use bitcoin to its advantage in rivalry with China China’s wariness of bitcoin should encourage the US to embrace the world’s largest cryptocurrency and build on its strategic advantage in the digital asset, JD Vance said earlier today in comments reported by Reuters.
As the White House pushes for an overhaul of crypto policy, the vice-president said bitcoin will be a strategically important asset for the United States over the next decade.
Speaking at the Bitcoin Conference in Las Vegas, Vance applauded Donald Trump’s executive order in March that created a strategic bitcoin reserve with tokens already owned by the government.
Crypto trading and mining has been banned in China since 2021. “The People’s Republic of China doesn’t like bitcoin. Well, we should be asking ourselves, why is that? Why is our biggest adversary such an opponent of bitcoin, and if the communist Republic of China is leaning away from bitcoin, then maybe the United States ought to be leaning into bitcoin,” he said.
Digital assets have enjoyed a resurgence under Trump, who courted cash from the crypto industry on the campaign trail by pledging to be a “crypto president”.
In his first week in office, Trump ordered the creation of a cryptocurrency working group to propose digital asset regulations. In March, he hosted a group of crypto executives at the White House.
Congress is considering legislation to create a regulatory framework for stablecoins, a type of cryptocurrency pegged to the US dollar. The crypto industry has lobbied lawmakers to pass legislation creating new rules for digital assets and spent more than $119m backing pro-crypto congressional candidates in last year’s elections.
JD Vance speaks at the Bitcoin Conference at the Venetian in Las Vegas. Photograph: Caroline Brehman/EPA US agrees to end use of race and gender in awarding highway and transit contracts The Trump administration said it has agreed to end the US transportation department’s consideration of race or gender when awarding billions of dollars in federal highway and transit project funding set aside for disadvantaged small businesses, Reuters reports.
A judge in September in Kentucky ruled that a federal program enacted in 1983 that treats businesses owned by racial minorities and women as presumptively disadvantaged and eligible for such funding violated the US constitution’s equal protection guarantees.
The transportation department said in a court filing that it agreed the “program’s use of race- and sex-based presumptions is unconstitutional”.
The department previously defended the policy as seeking to remedy past discrimination but said it has reevaluated its position in light of factors including the supreme court’s decision in 2023 in an affirmative action case.
US district judge Gregory Van Tatenhove in Frankfort, Kentucky, an appointee of Republican former president George W Bush, said the federal government cannot classify people in ways that violate the principles of equal protection in the US constitution.
He relied in part on a ruling last year by the US supreme court
that effectively prohibited affirmative action policies long used in college admissions to raise the number of black, hispanic and other underrepresented minority students on American campuses.
The program was reauthorized in 2021 through then-president Joe Biden’s signature Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, which set aside more than $37bn for that purpose.
Trump administration closes state department’s office of analytic outreach Joseph Gedeon
A state department intelligence program that linked government analysts with outside experts has been quietly closed, part of the latest chapter of Donald Trump’s disengagement with the broader academic and research community.
The office of analytic outreach, part of the department’s bureau of intelligence and research, held its final event on 22 May before closing permanently, according to an internal email seen by the Guardian, as part of Marco Rubio’s sweeping reorganization that will cut 15% of domestic staff and shutter 132 of the department’s 734 offices and bureaus.
“I am devastated we are not allowed to continue,” program officer Greg Otey wrote in the email. “We have experienced staggering growth in demand over the last few years with events now regularly drawing audiences of over 200 analysts and policymakers from across the federal government.”
The closure comes as the Trump administration targets programs it claims do not align with presidential priorities or that “represent radical causes”.
The shutdown eliminates another mechanism to enlist external expertise into government analysis, with the program serving as the intelligence community’s lead for connecting government leaders with academic experts, thinktanks and research institutions on foreign policy. It organized briefings for newly confirmed ambassadors and arranged analytic exchanges designed to inform executive branch policymakers.
The shuttering of the program also reflects broader tensions within the Trump administration over the role of outside expertise in government decision-making. The US health secretary, Robert F Kennedy Jr, threatened yesterday to ban government scientists from publishing in leading medical journals, calling the Lancet, the New England Journal of Medicine and Jama “corrupt” and pledging to create state-run alternatives instead.
The state department did not respond to a request for comment.
Gifted Qatar plane is in the US and is ‘being refitted’, says Trump, adding ‘it’s much too big’ Trump brings up his “beautiful, big, magnificent, free airplane for the United States air force”, adding “frankly, it’s much too big”.
Asked if it’s going to be Air Force One, Trump says it’s in the US and “is being refitted for military standard”. He admits he doesn’t know how much the refitting will cost but guesses “a hell of a lot less than building a new one”. He again blames Boeing delays to replacing the current one for him needing a new plane.
The United States formally accepted the Boeing 747-8 luxury jetliner – worth an estimated $400m – last week as a gift from the Qatari government and tasked the air force with upgrading it to be used as Air Force One.
NPR reported last week that the air force is “currently preparing to award a contract to modify a Boeing 747 aircraft for an executive airlift”, according to an air force spokesperson who said said further details about the contract are classified.
The White House claimed the plane was a gift to the Department of Defense and not a personal gift to Trump, and would go through the legal protocols required when something is given to the government. Trump has said he would not use it after leaving office but it would leave the air force as he has said he would like to keep it in his presidential library.
Trump hesitant to impose new sanctions on Russia for fear of ‘screwing up’ a deal Asked why he hasn’t imposed new sanctions on Russia, Trump says: “I think I’m close to getting a deal [to end the war], I don’t want to screw it up by doing that.”
“I’m a lot tougher than the people you’re talking about,” he adds. “But you have to know when to use that.”
Trump says he would sit down with both Volodymyr Zelenskyy and Vladimir Putin “if it’s necessary” to end the war.
At this point … we’re working on President Putin and we’ll see where we are … I don’t like what’s happening.