TV News LIES

The long legal battle to erase the debts of nearly half a million federal student loan borrowers who say they were defrauded by their colleges is finally coming to an end, after a recent court ruling in a lawsuit that has spanned three presidential administrations.

The class-action suit, originally filed against the first Trump administration seven years ago, centered on a federal rule known as borrower defense. The rule is supposed to allow borrowers to petition the U.S. Education Department to erase their debts if a school has lied to them — about things like their job prospects, their credits' transferability or their likely salary after graduation.

During Trump's first term, thousands of borrowers who claimed they had been ripped off by predatory schools waited years to have their borrower defense claims reviewed. Finally, advocates sued, arguing that, under then-Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, the department had deliberately and illegally stopped processing claims and wrongfully denied others without considering the merits of their cases.

The suit has endured long enough to bear the names of three different education secretaries: from Sweet v. DeVos in 2019 to Sweet v. Cardona during the Biden administration, and now Sweet v. McMahon for Trump's second term.

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Amazon said this week that it received hundreds of millions of dollars in refunds from President Trump’s tariffs and pledged to return some of the profits to its customers.

This follows a Supreme Court decision earlier this year that many of the Trump administration’s tariffs were illegal, prompting the U.S. government to start a process to refund billions of dollars in import taxes to affected companies.

Brian Olsavsky, the chief financial officer of Amazon.com, Inc., said during a Thursday earnings call that the company is “participating in the tariff refund process” and received an amount of $600 million in its second financial quarter.

Olsavsky noted that the company worked on the front end to avoid tariff costs and noted that Amazon is “not the importer of record for the large majority of items sold in our store.”

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Gas prices are up almost a dollar a gallon since the day Donald Trump took office; mortgage rates just hit their highest level in nearly a year, and over the weekend a prominent economist said the Iran war is costing the average US household more than $1,200.

Americans are struggling through a deepening affordability crisis caused largely by Trump’s ill-fated war against Iran. They are in need of a boost, something to lift the spirits. Perhaps the president could give a speech, letting the people know that we are all in this together.

Or, he could give a speech announcing that the White House has just ordered 250 brand new Cadillac Escalades, giant SUVs which have a suggested retail price of more than $90,000 each and cost significantly more to customize for secure uses.

“We ordered 250 Escalades. That’s how we look sharp in those cavalcades, you know,” Trump said during a rambling, hour-long address at a General Motors facility in Michigan.

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House Democrat calls Trump's new tariffs 'an end-run around the Supreme Court and Congress', not an attempt to end forced labor.

As soon as the Trump administration announced its new tariffs on 85 countries, for supposedly failing to crack down on forced labor, the office of the US trade representative, Jamieson Greer, turned its official, government social media account into a political battering ram: posting past statements against forced labor from 15 senators and members of Congress of both parties, in a transparent attempt to head off their criticism of the new tariffs.

One of those lawmakers, congresswoman Linda Sánchez, a California Democrat, denounced the pretext for the new tariffs as a sham anyway.

“President Trump isn’t serious about combating forced labor. He’s trying to make an end-run around the Supreme Court and Congress to reimpose his illegal tariffs,” Sánchez wrote on social media.

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President Donald Trump took executive action on July 20 to impose a new 50% tariff on a wide range of imports from Canada in retaliation to what his administration called "discriminatory" Canadian trade practices in certain industries against the United States, according to administration officials.

The move, which risks further reigniting a trade war between Canada and the U.S., comes after Trump threatened tariffs against the country in response to smoke that entered the U.S. from raging wildfires in Canada. An administration official said Trump is exploring different tariff options for the wildfire response, however.

The sweeping tariffs, which go into effect in 30 days, apply to a range of Canadian imports ‒ from wine and dairy to hockey sticks to cement, an official said ‒ but do not extend to energy, potash, fish and critical minerals, among other exemptions. All other Canadian exports, including those singled out as tariff-free in the United States-Canada-Mexico agreement signed in 2019, are subject to the tariff.

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The board game Monopoly has always taught some important economic lessons: The benefits of owning real estate. The profit potential of railroad mergers. The value of a get-out-of-jail-free card.

Now a special edition of the board game is teaching a new lesson—about how hard it is to make things in the USA.

The game is being marketed by the WS Game Company, which produces most of its high-end board games in China, just like almost every other toy maker.

After getting hit with a seven-figure tariff bill last year, CEO Jonathan Silva decided to see if it was possible to produce a profitable board game in the United States.

He opted for a custom version of Monopoly, pegged to the country's 250th birthday. But the experiment almost didn't pass go. One big problem: No dice.

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