Thousands of Harvard students in crimson-fringed gowns celebrated their graduation Thursday, as a judge extended a temporary block on Donald Trump’s bid to prevent the prestigious university from enrolling international scholars.Trump has made Harvard the central target of his campaign against elite US universities, which he has also threatened with funding freezes over what he says is liberal bias and anti-Semitism.Judge Allison Burroughs said she would later issue a preliminary injunction that “gives some protection” to international students while the sides argue over the legality of Trump’s stance.”Our students are terrified and we’re (already) having people transfer” to other universities, Harvard’s lawyer Ian Gershengorn said during the hearing in Boston. In an eleventh-hour filing ahead of the hearing, the Trump administration issued a formal notice of intent to withdraw Harvard’s ability to enroll foreign students — kickstarting the process.The filing gave Harvard 30 days to produce evidence showing why it should not be blocked from hosting and enrolling foreign students — who make up 27 percent of Harvard’s student body.Burroughs had already temporarily paused the policy, extending that pause Thursday pending the new injunction.She said she would seek to determine whether the actions of Trump’s officials had “a retaliatory motive.”A law professor present in the packed court said the Trump administration was prolonging the suffering of students.”Harvard is in this purgatory. What is an international student to do?” said the Harvard Law School graduate, who declined to be named.- ‘Pride and approval’ -There also remained “this specter of other actions” the government could take to block Harvard having international students, she added.The Ivy League institution has continually drawn Trump’s ire while publicly rejecting his administration’s repeated demands to give up control of recruitment, curricula and research choices.”Harvard is treating our country with great disrespect, and all they’re doing is getting in deeper and deeper,” Trump said Wednesday.Harvard president Alan Garber got a huge cheer Thursday when he mentioned international students attending the graduation with their families, saying it was “as it should be” — but Garber did not mention the Trump fight directly. He received a standing ovation, which one student told AFP was “revealing of the community’s pride and approval.”Garber has led the legal fightback in US academia after Trump targeted several prestigious universities — including Columbia, which made sweeping concessions to the administration, hoping to claw back $400 million of withdrawn federal grants.He has acknowledged that Harvard does have issues with anti-Semitism and that it has struggled to ensure that a variety of views can be safely heard on campus.Graduating student Uzma Farheen, from India, obtained a Master of public health and said the day was one of “love for the global community.””We stand united to powerfully represent what Harvard stands for — truth, integrity, and inclusion,” she told AFP.Ahead of the ceremony, at which stage and screen star Rita Moreno was awarded an honorary degree, members of the Harvard band in crimson blazers filed through the narrow streets of Cambridge.In front of a huge stage, hundreds of students assembled to hear speeches, including one entirely in Latin, in a grassy precinct that was closed off to the public for security.Many students from the Harvard Kennedy School of Government carried inflatable plastic globes at the ceremony to symbolize the international makeup of the school’s student body.”In the last two months it’s been very difficult, I’ve been feeling a lot of vulnerability,” said one such student, Lorena Mejia, 36, who graduated with a Master in Public Administration and proudly wore robes identifying her as a Colombian.

At least four of the studies cited in a flagship White House report on children’s health do not exist, authors listed in the document told AFP Thursday, casting doubt on the paper outlining US Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s agenda.The highly anticipated “Make America Healthy Again” (MAHA) report was released on May 22 by the presidential commission tasked with assessing drivers of childhood chronic disease.But it includes broken citation links and credits authors with papers they say they did not write.White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt described the mishaps as “formatting issues” during a press briefing Thursday and said the report will be updated to address them.”It does not negate the substance of the report,” said Leavitt, who expressed confidence in Kennedy and his team, and insisted that their work was “backed on good science.”The errors were first reported Thursday by NOTUS, a US digital news website affiliated with the nonprofit Allbritton Journalism Institute.Noah Kreski, a Columbia University researcher listed as an author of a paper on adolescent anxiety and depression during the Covid-19 pandemic, told AFP the citation is “not one of our studies” and “doesn’t appear to be a study that exists at all.”The citation includes a link that purports to send users to an article in the peer-reviewed medical journal JAMA, but which is broken. Jim Michalski, a spokesman for JAMA Network, said it “was not published in JAMA Pediatrics or in any JAMA Network journal.”Columbia University epidemiologist Katherine Keyes, who was also listed as an author of the supposed JAMA study, told AFP she does research on the topic but does not know where the statistics credited to her came from, and that she “did not write that paper.””I would be happy to send this information to the MAHA committee to correct the report, although I have not yet received information on where to reach them.”- ‘Totally fabricated’ -Guohua Li, another Columbia University professor apparently named in the citation, said the reference is “totally fabricated” and that he does not even know Kreski.AFP also spoke with Harold Farber, pediatrics professor at Baylor College of Medicine, who said the paper attributed to him “does not exist” nor had he ever collaborated with the co-authors credited in the MAHA report.Similarly, Brian McNeill, spokesperson for Virginia Commonwealth University, confirmed that professor Robert Findling did not author a paper the report says he wrote about advertising of psychotropic medications for youth.A fourth paper on ADHD medication was also not published in the journal Pediatrics in 2008 as claimed in the MAHA report, according to Alex Hulvalchick, media relations specialist for the journal’s publisher, the American Academy of Pediatrics.- ‘Rife with misinformation’ -The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) declined to comment, referring AFP’s questions to the White House.At her briefing, Leavitt declined to answer how the report was produced and whether artificial intelligence tools may have been used to craft it, directing those questions back to HHS.The Democratic National Committee blasted the report as “rife with misinformation” in a Thursday press release, saying Kennedy’s agency “is justifying its policy priorities with studies and sources that do not exist.”Kennedy was approved as health secretary earlier this year despite widespread alarm from the medical community over his history of promoting vaccine misinformation and denying scientific facts. Since taking office, he has ordered the National Institutes of Health to probe the causes of autism — a condition he has long falsely tied to the measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccine.The report’s chronic disease references appear to nod to that same disproven theory, discredited by numerous studies since the idea first aired in a late 1990s paper based on falsified data.It also criticizes the “over-medicalization” of children, citing surging prescriptions of psychiatric drugs and antibiotics, and blaming “corporate capture” for skewing scientific research.

The White House on Thursday blasted a federal court’s decision to block many of President Donald Trump’s sweeping tariffs — and said it could take the matter to the Supreme Court.Since returning to the presidency in January, Trump has moved to reconfigure US trade ties with the world while using tariffs to force foreign governments to the negotiating table.But the stop-start rollout of levies, impacting both allies and adversaries, has roiled markets and snarled supply chains.The three-judge Court of International Trade ruled Wednesday that Trump had overstepped his authority, and barred most of the tariffs announced since he took office.The court gave the administration 10 days to complete the process of halting affected tariffs.The White House called the ruling “blatantly wrong,” filing an appeal and expressing confidence that the decision would be overturned.White House spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt told reporters that the judges “brazenly abused their judicial power to usurp the authority of President Trump.”In a court filing, the Justice Department called for an immediate administrative halt on the decision pending the appeal, saying the administration plans to seek emergency relief from the Supreme Court as soon as Friday.Leavitt said the Supreme Court “must put an end” to the tariff challenge, though stressing that Trump has other legal means to impose levies.- ‘Nothing’s really changed’ -Trump’s trade advisor Peter Navarro said on Bloomberg Television: “Nothing’s really changed.”Kevin Hassett, director of the National Economic Council, told Fox Business that although officials have other options that would “take a couple of months” to implement, they are not planning to pursue these right now.He insisted that “hiccups” sparked by the decisions of “activist judges” would not affect negotiations with other trading partners, adding that three deals are close to finalization.Trump’s import levies — aimed at punishing economies that sell more to the United States than they buy — have roiled global markets.The president has argued that trade deficits and the threat posed by drug smuggling constituted a “national emergency” that justified the widespread tariffs — which the court ruled against.- China: ‘cancel the wrongful’ tariffs -Trump unveiled sweeping import duties on nearly all trading partners in April, at a baseline 10 percent — plus steeper levies on dozens of economies including China and the EU, which have since been paused.The US court’s ruling also quashes duties that Trump imposed on Canada, Mexico and China separately using emergency powers.But it leaves intact 25 percent duties on imported autos, steel and aluminum.Beijing — which was hit by additional 145 percent tariffs before they were temporarily reduced to make space for negotiations — reacted to the court ruling by saying Washington should scrap the levies.”China urges the United States to heed the rational voices from the international community and domestic stakeholders and fully cancel the wrongful unilateral tariff measures,” said commerce ministry spokeswoman He Yongqian.Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney said his government welcomed the court decision, but warned trade ties were still “profoundly and adversely threatened” by sector-specific levies.Asian markets rallied Thursday but US indexes were mixed and Europe closed slightly down.- ‘Extraordinary threat’ -The federal trade court was ruling in two separate cases — brought by businesses and a coalition of state governments — arguing that the president had violated Congress’s power of the purse.The judges said the cases rested on whether the International Emergency Economic Powers Act of 1977 (IEEPA) delegates such powers to the president “in the form of authority to impose unlimited tariffs on goods from nearly every country in the world.”The judges stated that any interpretation of the IEEPA that “delegates unlimited tariff authority is unconstitutional.”Analysts at London-based research group Capital Economics said the case may end up with the Supreme Court, but would likely not mark the end of the tariff war.burs-bys/sst

A US judge on Thursday sentenced a former Goldman Sachs banker central to the 1MDB scandal to two years in prison after prosecutors argued for leniency due to his cooperation.Timothy Leissner, a key architect of the massive bribery and kickback scheme involving a Malaysian sovereign wealth fund, will begin serving a 24-month sentence in September, according to a spokesman for the US Department of Justice.Leissner, who previously pleaded guilty to US bribery and money laundering counts, faced a maximum sentence of 25 years. The 1MDB conspiracy involved billions of dollars that were raised to support energy and infrastructure projects but were instead pilfered or used to purchase yachts, jewelry and other luxury items.The case resulted in “the only criminal case filed against Goldman Sachs in its 156-year history,” the firm said in a filing to the court that endorsed a tough sentence.But prosecutors argued for leniency, citing Leissner’s “extraordinary” assistance to the probe after federal agents ambushed the defendant in June 2018 after he deplaned an international flight in Washington.The government’s brief cited “marathon meetings” with Leissner in which he turned over electronic devices and “displayed remarkable recall and spoke with precision about what he knew about the scheme,” which included repeatedly lying to colleagues at Goldman about his actions, the Justice Department said.Leissner testified against Ng Chong Hwa, or “Roger Ng,” another former Goldman banker, at a New York trial in February 2022. Ng has been sentenced to 10 years after being found guilty, but has yet to begin his sentence, the Justice Department said.Leissner also provided details that led to US charges against Low Taek Jho, a Malaysian financier known as “Jho Low” who remains at large.In a letter to the court, Leissner, 55, called his crime “terrible” and expressed regret at time lost with children and ageing parents.”I have had to publicly face the fact that I helped steal billions of dollars not just from individuals, but from an entire nation,” Leissner said.But Goldman Sachs dismissed Leissner’s cooperation.”Whatever personal and professional consequences Mr. Leissner may himself have experienced in recent years, those consequences are a natural and direct result of his brazen and audacious criminal conduct, not his cooperation,” Goldman said.