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WASHINGTON — President Trump said Friday that he’s placing an additional 100% tax on Chinese imports starting on Nov. 1 or sooner, potentially escalating tariff rates close to levels that in April fanned fears of a steep recession and financial market chaos.

The president said on his social media site that he is imposing these new tariffs because of export controls placed on rare earth elements by China. The new tariffs built on an earlier post Friday on Truth Social in which Trump said that “there seems to be no reason” to meet with Chinese leader Xi Jinping as part of an upcoming trip to South Korea.

Trump said that “starting November 1st, 2025 (or sooner, depending on any further actions or changes taken by China), the United States of America will impose a Tariff of 100% on China, over and above any Tariff that they are currently paying.”

The announcement after financial markets closed on Friday risked throwing the global economy into turmoil. Not only would the global trade war instigated by Trump be rekindled at dangerous levels, but import taxes being heaped on top of the 30% already being levied on Chinese goods could, by the administration’s past statements, cause trade to break down between the U.S. and China.

While Trump’s wording was definitive, he is also famously known for backing down from threats, such that some investors began engaging in what The Financial Times called the “TACO” trade, which stands for “Trump Always Chickens Out.” The prospect of tariffs this large could compound the president’s own political worries inside the U.S., potentially pushing up inflation at a moment when the job market appears fragile and the drags from a government shutdown are starting to compound into layoffs of federal workers.

The president also said that the U.S. government would respond to China by putting its own export controls “on any and all critical software” from American firms.

It’s possible that this could amount to either posturing by the United States for eventual negotiations or a retaliatory step that could foster new fears about the stability of the global economy.

The United States and China have been jostling for advantage in trade talks, after the import taxes announced earlier this year triggered a trade war between the world’s two largest economies. Both nations agreed to ratchet down tariffs after negotiations in Switzerland and the United Kingdom, yet tensions remain as China has continued to restrict America’s access to the difficult-to-mine rare earths needed for a wide array of U.S. technologies.

Trump did not formally cancel the meeting with Xi, so much as indicating that it might not happen as part of a trip at the end of the month in Asia. The trip was scheduled to include a stop in Malaysia, which is hosting the Association of Southeast Asian Nations summit; a stop in Japan; and a visit to South Korea, where he was slated to meet with Xi ahead of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit.

“I was to meet President Xi in two weeks, at APEC, in South Korea, but now there seems to be no reason to do so,” Trump posted.

Trump’s threat shattered a monthslong calm on Wall Street, and the S&P 500 tumbled 2.7% on worries about the rising tensions between the world’s largest economies. It was the market’s worst day since April when the president last bandied about import taxes this high. Still, the stock market closed before the president spelled out the terms of his threat.

China’s new restrictions

On Thursday, the Chinese government restricted access to the rare earths ahead of the scheduled Trump-Xi meeting. Beijing would require foreign companies to get special approval for shipping the metallic elements abroad. It also announced permitting requirements on exports of technologies used in the mining, smelting and recycling of rare earths, adding that any export requests for products used in military goods would be rejected.

Trump said that China is “becoming very hostile” and that it’s holding the world “captive” by restricting access to the metals and magnets used in electronics, computer chips, lasers, jet engines and other technologies.

The Chinese Embassy in Washington did not immediately respond to an Associated Press request for comment.

Sun Yun, director of the China program at the Stimson Center, said Beijing reacted to U.S. sanctions of Chinese companies this week and the upcoming port fees targeting China-related vessels but said there’s room for deescalation to keep the leaders’ meeting alive. “It is a disproportional reaction,” Sun said. “Beijing feels that deescalation will have to be mutual as well. There is room for maneuver, especially on the implementation.”

The U.S. president said the move on rare earths was “especially inappropriate” given the announcement of a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas in Gaza so that the remaining hostages from Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attack can be released. He raised the possibility without evidence that China was trying to steal the moment from him for his role in the ceasefire, saying on social media, “I wonder if that timing was coincidental?”

There is already a backlog of export license applications from Beijing’s previous round of export controls on rare earth elements, and the latest announcements “add further complexity to the global supply chain of rare earth elements,” the European Union Chamber of Commerce in China said in a statement.

Gracelin Baskaran, director of the Critical Minerals Security Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C., said China signaled it is open to negotiations, but it also holds leverage because to dominates the market for rare earths with 70% of the mining and 93% of the production of permanent magnets made from them that are crucial to high-tech products and the military.

“These restrictions undermine our ability to develop our industrial base at a time when we need to. And then second, it’s a powerful negotiating tool,” she said. And these restrictions can hurt efforts to strengthen the U.S. military in the midst of global tensions because rare earths are needed.

Trump’s trade war

The outbreak of a tariff-fueled trade war between the U.S. and China initially caused the world economy to shudder over the possibility of global commerce collapsing. Trump imposed tariffs totaling 145% on Chinese goods, with China responding with import taxes of 125% on American products.

The taxes were so high as to effectively be a blockade on trade between the countries. That led to negotiations that reduced the tariff charged by the U.S. government to 30% and the rate imposed by China to 10% so that further talks could take place. The relief those lower rates provided could now disappear with the new import taxes Trump threatened, likely raising the stakes not only of whether Trump and Xi meet but how any disputes are resolved.

Differences continue over America’s access to rare earths from China, U.S. restrictions on China’s ability to import advanced computer chips, sales of American-grown soybeans and a series of tit-for-tat port fees being levied by both countries starting on Tuesday.

Nebraska Republican Rep. Don Bacon said “China has not been a fair-trade partner for years,” but the Trump administration should have anticipated China’s restrictions on rare earths and refusal to buy American soybeans in response to the tariffs.

How analysts see moves by U.S. and China

Wendy Cutler, senior vice president of the Asia Society Policy Institute, said Trump’s post shows the fragility of the détente between the two countries and it’s unclear whether the two sides are willing to de-escalate to save the bilateral meeting.

Cole McFaul, a research fellow at Georgetown University’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology, said that Trump appeared in his post to be readying for talks on the possibility that China had overplayed its hand. By contrast, China sees itself as having come out ahead when the two countries have engaged in talks.

“From Beijing’s point of view, they’re in a moment where they’re feeling a lot of confidence about their ability to handle the Trump administration,” McFaul said. “Their impression is they’ve come to the negotiating table and extracted key concessions.”

Craig Singleton, senior director of the China program at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a think tank, said Trump’s post could “mark the beginning of the end of the tariff truce” that had lowered the tax rates charged by both countries.

It’s still unclear how Trump intends to follow through on his threats and how China plans to respond.

“But the risk is clear: Mutually assured disruption between the two sides is no longer a metaphor,” Singleton said. “Both sides are reaching for their economic weapons at the same time, and neither seems willing to back down.”

Boak and Tang write for the Associated Press. AP writers Stan Choe in New York and Josh Funk in Omaha, Neb., contributed to the report.

WASHINGTON — Supreme Court justices like to talk about the Constitution’s separation of powers and how it limits the exercise of official authority.

But Chief Justice John G. Roberts and his conservative colleagues have given no sign so far they will check President Trump’s one-man governance by executive order.

To the contrary, the conservative justices have repeatedly ruled for Trump on fast-track appeals and overturned federal judges who said the president had exceeded his authority.

The court’s new term opens on Monday, and the justices will begin hearing arguments.

But those regularly scheduled cases have been overshadowed by Trump’s relentless drive to remake the government, to punish his political enemies, including universities, law firms, TV networks and prominent Democrats, and to send troops to patrol U.S. cities.

The overriding question has become: Are there any legal limits on the president’s power? The Supreme Court itself has raised the doubts.

A year ago, as Trump ran to reclaim the White House, the justices blocked a felony criminal indictment against him related to his role in the Jan. 6, 2021, mob attack on the Capitol as Congress met to certify Trump’s defeat in the 2020 election, for which Trump was impeached.

Led by Roberts, the court ruled for Trump and declared for the first time that presidents were immune from being prosecuted for their official actions in the White House.

Not surprisingly, Trump saw this as a “BIG WIN” and proof there is no legal check on his power.

This year, Trump’s lawyers have confidently gone to Supreme Court with emergency appeals when lower-court judges have stood in their way. With few exceptions, they have won, often over dissents from the court’s three liberal Democrats.

Many court scholars say they are disappointed but not surprised by the court’s response so far to Trump’s aggressive use of executive power.

The Supreme Court “has been a rubber stamp approving Trump’s actions,” said UC Berkeley law Dean Erwin Chemerinsky. “I hope very much that the court will be a check on Trump. There isn’t any other. But so far, it has not played that role.”

Roberts “had been seen as a Republican but not a Trump Republican. But he doesn’t seem interested or willing to put any limits on him,” said UCLA law professor Adam Winkler. “Maybe they think they’re saving their credibility for when it really counts.”

Acting on his own, Trump moved quickly to reshape the federal government. He ordered cuts in spending and staffing at federal agencies and fired inspectors general and officials of independent agencies who had fixed terms set by Congress. He stepped up arrests and deportations of immigrants who are here illegally.

But the court’s decisions on those fronts are in keeping with the long-standing views of the conservatives on the bench.

Long before Trump ran for office, Roberts had argued that the Constitution gives the president broad executive authority to control federal agencies, including the power to fire officials who disagree with him.

The court’s conservatives also think the president has the authority to enforce — or not enforce — immigration laws.

That’s also why many legal experts think the year ahead will provide a better test of the Supreme Court and Trump’s challenge to the constitutional order.

“Overall, my reaction is that it’s too soon to tell,” said William Baude, a University of Chicago law professor and a former clerk for Roberts. “In the next year, we will likely see decisions about tariffs, birthright citizenship, alien enemies and perhaps more, and we’ll know a lot more.”

In early September, Trump administration lawyers rushed the tariffs case to the Supreme Court because they believed it was better to lose sooner rather than later.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said the government could face up to a $1-trillion problem if the court delayed a decision until next summer and then ruled the tariffs were illegal.

“Unwinding them could cause significant disruption,” he told the court.

The Constitution says tariffs, taxes and raising revenue are matters for Congress to decide. Through most of American history, tariffs funded much of the federal government. That began to change after 1913 when the 16th Amendment was adopted to authorize “taxes on incomes.”

Trump has said he would like to return to an earlier era when import taxes funded the government.

“I always say ‘tariffs’ is the most beautiful word to me in the dictionary,” he said at a rally after his inauguration in January. “Because tariffs are going to make us rich as hell. It’s going to bring our country’s businesses back that left us.”

While he could have gone to the Republican-controlled Congress to get approval, he imposed several rounds of large and worldwide tariffs acting on his own.

Several small businesses sued and described the tariffs as “the largest peacetime tax increase in American history.”

As for legal justification, the president’s lawyers pointed to the International Emergency Economic Powers Act of 1977. It authorizes the president to “deal with any unusual or extraordinary threat … to the national security, foreign policy or economy of the United States.”

The law did not mention tariffs, taxes or duties but said the president could “regulate” the “importation” of products.

Trump administration lawyers argue that the “power to ‘regulate importation’ plainly encompasses the power to impose tariffs.” They also say the court should defer to the president because tariffs involve foreign affairs and national security.

They said the president invoked the tariffs not to raise revenue but to “rectify America’s country-killing trade deficits and to stem the flood of fentanyl and other lethal drugs across our borders.”

In response to lawsuits from small businesses and several states, judges who handle international trade cases ruled the tariffs were illegal. However, they agreed to keep them in place to allow for appeals.

Their opinion relied in part on recent Supreme Court’s decisions which struck down potentially far-reaching regulations from Democratic presidents on climate change, student loan debt and COVID-19 vaccine requirements. In each of the decisions, Roberts said Congress had not clearly authorized the disputed regulations.

Citing that principle, the federal circuit court said it “seems unlikely that Congress intended to … grant the president unlimited authority to impose tariffs.”

Trump said that decision, if allowed to stand, “could literally destroy the United States of America.” The court agreed to hear arguments in the tariffs case on Nov. 5.

A victory for Trump would be “viewed as a dramatic expansion of presidential power,” said Washington attorney Stephanie Connor, who works on tariff cases. Trump and future presidents could sidestep Congress to impose tariffs simply by citing an emergency, she said.

But the decision itself may have a limited impact because the administration has announced new tariffs last week that were based on other national security laws.

Last month, Trump administration lawyers asked the Supreme Court to rule during the upcoming term on the birthright citizenship promised by the 14th Amendment of 1868.

They did not seek a fast-track ruling, however. Instead, they said the court should grant review and hear arguments on the regular schedule early next year. If so, a decision would be handed down by late June.

The amendment says: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof are citizens of the United States.”

And in the past, both Congress and the Supreme Court have agreed that rule applies broadly to all children who are born here, except if their parents are foreign ambassadors or diplomats who are not subject to U.S. laws.

But Trump Solicitor Gen. D. John Sauer said that interpretation is mistaken. He said the post-Civil War amendment was “adopted to grant citizenship to freed slaves and their children, not to the children of illegal aliens, birth tourists and temporary visitors.”

Judges in three regions of the country have rejected Trump’s limits on the citizenship rule and blocked it from taking effect nationwide while the litigation continues.

Athens, Greece – Greece has drawn criticism and concern from rights groups and a United Nations office after passing what it considers to be the European Union’s strictest refugee deportation policy earlier this month.

The law was put to use on September 12, when three Turkish citizens were convicted of illegal residence and handed stiff jail sentences. Two men were given two years of imprisonment and fines of 5,000 euros ($5,870), while the third, aged 19, the youngest of the group, was handed a 10-month prison sentence.

Athens plans to test-drive the law through a likely minefield of legal challenges in the coming months. Humanitarian organisations say the measure unfairly includes children and stigmatises refugees and migrants as criminals.

Greek Minister for Migration and Asylum Thanos Plevris told Parliament on September 2 that the law was “the strictest returns policy in the whole EU” and claimed there was “a lot of interest from European countries, especially EU members, to adopt this law as a law that will force an illegal migrant to return”.

Rights groups, which are gearing up to challenge the legislation, say it far outshoots a draft Returns Regulation the European Commission wants to make binding on all member states by June 2026.

The new law has shortened deadlines and raised penalties for unauthorised residence.

For example, rejected asylum applicants will be fitted with ankle monitors and given just two weeks to remove themselves voluntarily. If they do not, they face, like the two Turkish nationals, a 5,000-euro ($5,870) fine and between two and five years of confinement in closed camps.

Children, more than a fifth of arrivals this year, are not exempt. If people wish to appeal, they have to do it in four days.

“We always claim that it’s not legal to put children in detention,” said Federica Toscano from Save the Children. The law is “not aligned with the [UN] Convention on the Rights of the Child”, and is “absolutely challengeable”.

The Greek Ombudsman, an independent authority monitoring public services, also objected to the law’s maximum reprieve of 60 days, down from 120, so children can complete their school year.

The Ombudsman suggested the law sets out to prove the proposition that all undocumented people are criminals.

Ankle monitors, it said, which are not mentioned in the draft Returns Regulation, “deepen the view of migrants as criminals and put their treatment on a par with that reserved for indictees, convicts and prisoners on leave”.

“Refugees are entitled to effective access to international protection without punishment for violating migration policy,” says the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). Under the Geneva Convention, “the quest for asylum … is not a criminal offence, but a human right”.

The EU approves about 45 percent of asylum applications on average.

Of the remainder, 90 percent end up staying on European soil because there is no effective policy to return them, say European officials.

“Without a returns policy, no migration policy has any meaning,” said Greece’s then-migration minister, Makis Voridis, presenting the new proposals in Parliament’s European Affairs Committee on May 15.

Irregular entry into the country has been raised to a felony. Anyone arriving without documents can be detained for two years, up from 18 months.

A provision that legalises anyone after seven years of undocumented residence is being abolished.

Greece’s predicament

Plevris has defended the hardened law, arguing that Greece guards external EU borders.

“It’s easy to defend borders when there’s three or four countries people have to cross to get to you. Compare us to other first reception countries,” he said.

Since 2015, Greece has been the arrival point of 46 percent of more than 2.8 million undocumented people entering Europe, according to UNHCR.

Many have moved on to other EU member states, but because of EU rules, rejected asylum seekers or asylum recipients who lose their protected status would be returned to their country of arrival in the EU for deportation.

Greek officials admit they do not expect refugees and migrants to spend five years in detention. The draconian rules, they say, are designed to force them to return voluntarily once they are convicted.

That is because it is legally difficult to deport anyone forcibly.

The law has a second aim – to deter what Greece views as so-called economic migrants travelling to Europe when there are Geneva Convention signatories closer to home.

“It’s a massive programme that costs a lot of money and involves a whole web of private actors. So I think that would be pretty difficult to set up,” said Hope Barker, who works for the Global Strategic Communications Council, a nongovernmental group seeking to influence environmental and migration policy.

Greece’s Union of Administrative Judges objected that the law did not define flight risk, leaving incarceration decisions to the discretion of the police. The law “needs to provide a comprehensive list of criteria, not an indicative one”, it said.

The Council of Bar Associations of Greece also weighed in with objections to tightened deadlines for appeal and the criminalisation of undocumented entry.

“Danger to life and limb vastly outranks whatever law is broken by entering Greece illegally,” it said.

The EU’s guinea pig?

Repeatedly, these bodies pointed out, the new law violates the existing EU Returns Regulation, which dates back to 2008, but observers of EU migration policy say the European Commission is deliberately allowing Greece to push the boundaries.

“Greece has become something of a testing ground for many EU measures, especially on the Greek islands,” Amnesty International’s Olivia Sundberg told Al Jazeera, citing the Closed Controlled Access Centres built to house thousands of asylum seekers.

“In a lot of ways, Greece is a place that has tested things out before they became EU law, and if they worked well, they were carried over into [EU] directives,” she said.

The EU is now looking for ways to implement returns.

“There is this whole push for what they call ‘innovative solutions’,” said Barker. “So one of these is obviously return hubs in third countries, another is getting people to sign up to voluntary returns,” she told Al Jazeera.

Italy has been testing third-country hubs through a deal with Albania, but Italian courts have ordered some of the asylum seekers sent there for processing returned to Italy.

Greece’s law casts a wider net, suggesting returnees should seek protection in any safe country closer to their country of origin.

But Greece’s Ombudsman has objected to this.

Passing the burden “allows a return process to a country the returnee doesn’t come from, or hasn’t passed through and has no connection to, except that it is geographically close to his country of origin. In this case, it’s no longer a ‘returns’ procedure but a ‘displacement’ procedure”, the Ombudsman said.

Some observers say Europe is in danger of falling short of its own human rights charter.

“Migration is becoming a rule of law issue rather than an implementation of law issue,” said Amnesty’s Sundberg.

Others point out that Europe is an ageing continent in need of more workers to sustain its tax base and social security systems in the coming decades.

“How are we going to create an environment of reception of the people we need, when we take this type of measure?” asked Lefteris Papayiannakis, who heads the Greek Council for Refugees, a legal aid charity. “If you can’t attract them, what’s your next move?”

Besides, he said, the measures exude desperation.

“You’re creating an impression now that you’re not in control. But if we compare the situation now with 2015, or the [flight of] Ukrainians in 2022, it’s a completely different situation,” Papayiannakis said.

“How can you justify being up in arms now about a very small number of migrants compared to the number … you’re going to need?”

Palestinian activist Saeed Taji Farouky, of Defend Our Juries, says UK free speech is under threat after dawn raids on activist Paddy Friend and others. He warns that peaceful campaigners face terror charges over holding Zoom calls.

NEW YORK — In the days since the fatal shooting of conservative activist Charlie Kirk, workers in a variety of industries have been fired for their comments on his death.

It’s hardly the first time workers have lost their jobs over things they say publicly — including in social media posts. In the U.S., laws can vary across states, but overall, there’s very few legal protections for employees who are punished for speech made in or out of private workplaces.

“Most people think they have a right to free speech … but that doesn’t necessarily apply in the workplace,” said Vanessa Matsis-McCready, associate general counsel and vice president of HR Services for Engage PEO. “Most employees in the private sector do not have any protections for that type of speech at work.”

Add to that the prevalence of social media, which has made it increasingly common to track employees’ conduct outside of work or for internet users to publish information about them with the intent of harming or harassing them.

Employers have leeway

Protections for workers vary from one state to the next. In New York, if an employee is participating in a weekend political protest, but not associating themselves with the organization that employs them, their employer cannot fire them for that activity when they return to work. But if that same employee is at a company event on a weekend and talks about their political viewpoints in a way that makes others feel unsafe or the target of discrimination or harassment, then they could face consequences at work, Matsis-McCready said.

Most of the U.S. defaults to “at-will” employment law — which essentially means employers can choose to hire and fire as they see fit, including over employees’ speech.

“The 1st Amendment does not apply in private workplaces to protect employees’ speech,” said Andrew Kragie, an attorney who specializes in employment and labor law at Maynard Nexsen. “It actually does protect employers’ right to make decisions about employees, based on employees’ speech.”

Kragie said there are “pockets of protection” around the U.S. under various state laws, such as statutes that forbid punishing workers for their political views. But the interpretation of how that gets enforced changes, he notes, making the waters murky.

Steven T. Collis, a law professor at the University of Texas at Austin and faculty director of the school’s Bech-Loughlin First Amendment Center, also points to some state laws that say employers can’t fire their workers for “legal off-duty conduct.” But there’s often an exception for conduct seen as disruptive to an employer’s business or reputation, which could be grounds to fire someone over public comments or social media posts.

“In this scenario, if somebody feels like one of their employees has done something that suggests they are glorifying or celebrating a murder, an employer might still be able to fire them even with one of those laws on the books,” Collis said.

For public employees, including school teachers, postal workers and elected officials, the process is a bit different. That’s because the 1st Amendment plays a unique role when the government is the employer, Collis explains — and the Supreme Court has ruled that if an employee is acting in a private capacity but speaking on a matter of public concern, they’re protected.

However, that has yet to stop the public sector from restricting speech in the aftermath of Kirk’s death. For instance, leaders at the Pentagon unveiled a “zero tolerance” policy for any posts or comments from troops deemed to be making light of or celebrating the killing of Kirk.

The policy, announced by the Defense Department’s top spokesman, Sean Parnell, on social media Thursday, came hours after numerous conservative military influencers and activists began forwarding posts they considered problematic to Parnell and his boss, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth.

“It is unacceptable for military personnel and Department of War civilians to celebrate or mock the assassination of a fellow American,” Parnell wrote Thursday, referring to the Department of Defense by the name adopted recently by President Trump.

A surge of political debate

The ubiquity of social media is making it easier than ever to share opinions about politics and major news events as they’re unfolding. But posting on social media leaves a record, and in times of escalating political polarization, those declarations can be seen as damaging to the reputation of an individual or their employer.

“People don’t realize when they’re on social media, it is the town square,” said Amy Dufrane, chief executive of the Human Resource Certification Institute. “They’re not having a private conversation with the neighbor over the fence. They’re really broadcasting their views.”

Political debates are certainly not limited to social media and are increasingly making their way into the workplace as well.

“The gamification of the way we communicate in the workplace — Slack and Teams, chat and all these things — they’re very similar to how you might interact on Instagram or other social media, so I do think that makes it feel a little less formal and somebody might be more inclined to take a step and say, ‘Oh, I can’t believe this happened,’” Matsis-McCready said.

Many employers unprepared

In the tense, divided climate in the United States at the moment, many human resource professionals have expressed that they’re unprepared to address politically charged discussions in the workplace, according to the Human Resource Certification Institute. But those conversations are going to happen, so employers need to set policies about what is acceptable or unacceptable workplace conduct, Dufrane said.

“HR has got to really drill down and make sure that they’re super clear on their policies and practices and communicating to their employees on what are their responsibilities as an employee of the organization,” Dufrane said.

Many employers are reviewing their policies on political speech and providing training about what appropriate conduct looks like, both inside and outside the organization, she said. And the brutal nature of Kirk’s killing may have led some of them to react more strongly in the days since his death.

“Because of the violent nature of what some political discussion is now about, I think there is a real concern from employers that they want to keep the workplace safe and that they’re being extra vigilant about anything that could be viewed as a threat, which is their duty,” Matsis-McCreedy said.

Employees can also be seen as ambassadors of a company’s brand, and their political speech can dilute that brand and hurt its reputation, depending on what is being said and how it is being received. That is leading more companies to act on what employees are saying online, she said.

“Some of the individuals that had posted and their posts went viral, all of a sudden the phone lines of their employers were just nonstop calls complaining,” Matsis-McCready said.

Still, experts such as Collis don’t anticipate a significant change in how employers monitor their workers’ speech — noting that online activity has been in the spotlight for at least the last 15 years.

“Employers are already — and have been for a very long time — vetting employees based on what they’re posting on social media,” he said.

Bussewitz and Grantham-Philips write for the Associated Press. AP writer Konstantin Toropin in Washington contributed to this report.

WASHINGTON — President Trump’s emergency order over the nation’s capital, which federalized its police force and launched a surge of law enforcement into the city, is set to expire overnight Wednesday after Congress failed to extend it.

But the clash between Republicans and the heavily Democratic district over its autonomy was only set to intensify, with a House committee beginning to debate 13 bills that would wrest away even more of the city’s control if approved.

Mayor Muriel Bowser’s office said the order expires at midnight. The National Guard and some other federal agencies will continue their deployment and it’s not clear when that might end.

Trump’s takeover of Washington’s policing and Wednesday’s discussions in the House underscore how interlinked the capital is with the federal government and how much the city’s capacity to govern is beholden to federal decisions.

Trump’s order federalized the local police force

For the last 30 days, the city’s local Metropolitan Police Department has been under the control of the president for use in what he described as a crime-fighting initiative.

Local police joined hundreds of federal law enforcement officers and agents on sweeps and roundups and other police operations. About 2,000 members of the National Guard from D.C. as well as seven states were also part of the surge of law enforcement.

Crime has dropped during the surge, according to figures from the White House and the local police department, but data also showed crime was falling in the lead up to the federal takeover.

Congress, satisfied by steps that Bowser has taken to ensure that the cooperation with the city will continue, decided not to extend the emergency, returning the police to district control.

But Bowser, who has walked a tightrope in collaborating with Trump in an effort to protect the city’s home rule, must now pivot to a Congress that has jurisdiction over the city. The next order of business is a series of proposals that will be debated Wednesday by the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform.

Some of the House bills focus on law enforcement

Thirteen of the bills call for repealing or changing D.C. laws. Some provisions in play would remove the district’s elected attorney general, who recently asked a judge to intervene in the takeover. Others would allow the president to appoint someone to the position.

There is also a move to lower the age of trying juveniles to 14 from 16 for certain crimes, and one to change the bail system and remove methods the council can use to extend emergency bills.

Even if the bills pass the committee and House, the question is whether they can get through the filibuster-proof Senate. D.C. activists have already begun lobbying Senate Democrats.

Bowser urged the leaders of the House Oversight Committee to reject those proposals.

She argued that a bill sponsored by Rep. Paul Gosar, a member of the conservative House Freedom Caucus, would “make the District less efficient, competitive, and responsive.” She said she looks forward to working with the committee to build a “productive partnership” that “respects the will of D.C. residents and honors the principles of home rule.”

Republican Rep. Ron Estes and several Republican colleagues said they want their constituents to feel safe visiting the capital, and noted the recent murder of an intern who worked in Estes’ office. “We want to make sure that we have a capital that Americans are proud of,” Estes said.

Members of the Republican Study Committee in the House held a news conference Sept. 2 praising Trump’s intervention and supporting codifying his executive order.

“Congress has a clear constitutional authority over D.C., and we will use it without hesitation to continue making D.C. safe and great again,” said Rep. August Pfluger, chairman of that committee.

D.C. mayor says the bills challenge the city’s autonomy

Bowser said the bills are an affront to the city’s autonomy and said “laws affecting the district should be made by the district.”

The district is granted autonomy through a limited home rule agreement passed in 1973 but federal political leaders retain significant control over local affairs, including the approval of the budget and laws passed by the D.C council.

Bowser has said repeatedly that statehood, a nonstarter for Republicans in Congress, is the only solution.

Fields and Askarinam write for the Associated Press. AP reporter Ashraf Khalil contributed to this report.

Aug. 27 (UPI) — The federal government signed-off on the latest round of COVID-19 vaccines, but new limits were set on which Americans can get them after U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. fulfilled many of his promises to reshape U.S. vaccine policy.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration on Wednesday ended its authorization for the broad use of COVID-19 shots, clearing them only for patients at higher risk of severe illness, and those age 65 and older — or younger adults with at least one underlying health condition who would qualify.

“The emergency use authorizations for Covid vaccines, once used to justify broad mandates on the general public during the Biden administration, are now rescinded,” Kennedy stated early Wednesday afternoon in a post on X.

Kennedy said the American people “demanded science, safety and common sense,” and he claimed this new framework “delivers all three.”

But this new action is likely to complicate access, observers say, and prompts questions on insurance plan coverage.

According to Kennedy, vaccine shots still will be available for patients but only after they consult with a doctor.

On Wednesday, both Moderna and Pfizer confirmed its vaccines were approved for use in adults age 65 and older and those age 5 through 64 with at least one underlying condition.

However, it remains to be seen how easily it can be obtained for patients without higher risk health factors.

Previous U.S. vaccine policy suggested an annual COVID-19 shot for people age 6 months and older.

The American Academy of Pediatrics, the nation’s leading pediatrics association, recently recommended children as young as 6 months old be inoculated against COVID-19 in a departure with Trump administration guidelines.

The COVID-19 vaccine shots must be voted on by a panel of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Earlier this year Kennedy, a known skeptic of long-used and effective vaccines, gutted the CDC panel and named widely-known vaccine critics to sit in place.

On Wednesday the chief of America’s Frontline Doctors, a right-wing group known to spread false and unsubstantiated claims, cheered Kennedy’s actions on the U.S. coronavirus vaccine policy switch.

“Mandates are dead. Freedom wins,” Dr. Simone Gold, AFD’s president, said on social media.

However, a noted television medical analyst offered advice to those still on the fence on getting another COVID-19 shot.

“If you want to know if you or members of your family should get vaccinated, my recommendation is to solicit advice from your doctor, not the federal government,” Dr. Jonathan Reiner, a professor at the D.C.-based George Washington School of Medicine & Health Sciences and its director of Cardiac Catheterization Laboratories, stated on X.

Minutes after Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth trumpeted plans to “flood” Washington with National Guard members, a senior U.S. military official took the stand in federal court in California to defend the controversial deployment of troops to Los Angeles.

The move during protests this summer has since become the model for President Trump’s increasing use of the military to police American streets.

But the trial, which opened Monday in San Francisco, turns on the argument by California that troops called up by Trump have been illegally engaged in civilian law enforcement.

“The military in Southern California are so tied in with ICE and other law enforcement agencies that they are practically indistinguishable,” California Deputy Atty. Gen. Meghan Strong told the court Tuesday.

“Los Angeles is just the beginning,” the deputy attorney general said. “President Trump has hinted at sending troops even farther, naming Baltimore and even Oakland here in the Bay Area as his next potential targets.”

Senior U.S. District Judge Charles R. Breyer said in court that Hegseth’s statements Monday could tip the scales in favor of the state, which must show the law is likely to be violated again so long as troops remain.

But the White House hasn’t let the pending case stall its agenda. Nor have Trump officials been fazed by a judge’s order restricting so-called roving patrols used by federal agents to indiscriminately sweep up suspected immigrants.

After Border Patrol agents last week sprang from a Penske moving truck and snatched up workers at a Westlake Home Depot — appearing to openly defy the court’s order — some attorneys warned the rule of law is crumbling in plain sight.

“It is just breathtaking,” said Mark Rosenbaum of Public Counsel, part of the coalition challenging the use of racial profiling by immigration enforcement. “Somewhere there are founding fathers who are turning over in their graves.”

The chaotic immigration arrests that swept through Los Angeles this summer had all but ceased after the original July 11 order, which bars agents from snatching people off the streets without first establishing reasonable suspicion that they are in the U.S. illegally.

An Aug. 1 ruling in the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals seemed to assure they could not resume again for weeks, if ever.

For the Department of Justice, the 9th Circuit loss was the latest blow in a protracted judicial beatdown, as many of the administration’s most aggressive moves have been held back by federal judges and tied up in appellate courts.

Trump “is losing consistently in the lower courts, almost nine times out of 10,” said Eric J. Segall, a professor at Georgia State University College of Law.

In the last two weeks alone, the 9th Circuit also found Trump’s executive order ending birthright citizenship unconstitutional and signaled it would probably rule in favor of a group of University of California researchers hoping to claw back funding from Trump’s war on diversity, equity and inclusion policies.

Elsewhere in the U.S., the D.C. Circuit Court appeared poised to block Trump’s tariffs, while a federal judge in Miami temporarily stopped construction at the migrant detention center known as Alligator Alcatraz.

California Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta has noted that his Department of Justice had sued the administration nearly 40 times.

But even the breakneck pace of current litigation is glacial compared with the actions of immigration agents and federalized troops.

Federal officials have publicly relished big-footing California Gov. Gavin Newsom and Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass, who have repeatedly warned the city is being used as a “petri dish” for executive force.

On Monday, the White House seemed to vindicate them by sending the National Guard to Washington.

Speaking for more than half an hour, Trump rattled off a list of American cities he characterized as under siege.

Asked whether he would deploy troops to those cities as well, the president said, “We’re just gonna see what happens.”

“We’re going to look at New York. And if we need to, we’re going to do the same thing in Chicago,” he said. “Hopefully, L.A. is watching.”

This image taken from video shows U.S. Border Patrol agents jumping out of a Penske box truck during an immigration raid at a Home Depot in Los Angeles, on Aug. 6, 2025.

(FOX News/Matt Finn via AP)

The U.S. Department of Justice argues that the same power that allows the president to federalize troops and deploy them on American streets also creates a “Constitutional exception” to the Posse Comitatus Act, a 19th century law that bars troops from civilian police action.

California lawyers say no such exception exists.

“I’m looking at this case and trying to figure out, is there any limitation to the use of federal forces?” Judge Breyer said.

Even if they keep taking losses, Trump administration officials “don’t have much to lose” by picking fights, said Ilya Somin, law professor at George Mason University and a constitutional scholar at the Cato Institute.

“The base likes it,” Somin said of the Trump’s most controversial moves. “If they lose, they can consider whether they defy the court.”

Other experts agreed.

“The bigger question is whether the courts can actually do anything to enforce the orders that they’re making,” said David J. Bier, an immigration expert at the Cato Institute. “There’s no indication to me that [Department of Homeland Security agents] are changing their behavior.”

Some scholars speculated the losses in lower courts might actually be a strategic sacrifice in the war to extend presidential power in the Supreme Court.

“It’s not a strategy whose primary ambition is to win,” said professor Mark Graber of the University of Maryland Francis King Carey School of Law. “They are losing cases right and left in the district court, but consistently having district court orders stayed in the Supreme Court.”

Win or lose in the lower courts, the political allure of targeting California is potent, argued Segall, the law professor who studies the Supreme Court.

“There is an emotional hostility to California that people on the West Coast don’t understand,” Segall said. “California … is deemed a separate country almost.”

A favorable ruling in the Supreme Court could pave the way for deployments across the country, he and others warned.

“We don’t want the military on America’s streets, period, full stop,” Segall said. “I don’t think martial law is off the table.”

Pedro Vásquez Perdomo, a day laborer who is one of the plaintiffs in the Southern California case challenging racial profiling by immigration enforcement, has said the case is bigger than him.

He took to the podium outside the American Civil Liberties Union’s downtown offices Aug. 4, his voice trembling as he spoke about the temporary restraining order — upheld days earlier by the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals — that stood between his fellow Angelenos and unchecked federal authority.

“I don’t want silence to be my story,” he said. “I want justice for me and for every other person whose humanity has been denied.”

The Trump administration petitioned the Supreme Court to free up its mass deportation efforts across Southern California Thursday, seeking to lift a ban on “roving patrols” implemented after a lower court found such tactics likely violate the 4th Amendment.

The restrictions, initially handed down in a July 11 order, bar masked and heavily armed agents from snatching people off the streets of Los Angeles and cities in seven other counties without first establishing reasonable suspicion that they are in the U.S. illegally.

Under the 4th Amendment, reasonable suspicion cannot be based solely on race, ethnicity, language, location or employment, either alone or in combination, U.S. District Judge Maame Ewusi-Mensah Frimpong of Los Angeles found in her original decision.

The Trump administration said in its appeal to the high court that Frimpong’s ruling, upheld last week by the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, “threatens to upend immigration officials’ ability to enforce the immigration laws in the Central District of California by hanging the prospect of contempt over every investigative stop.”

Lawyers behind the lawsuits challenging the immigration tactics immediately questioned the Trump administration’s arguments.

“This is unprecedented,” said Mark Rosenbaum of Public Counsel, part of the coalition of civil rights groups and individual attorneys challenging cases of three immigrants and two U.S. citizens swept up in chaotic arrests. “The brief is asking the Supreme Court to bless open season on anybody on Los Angeles who happens to be Latino.”

The move comes barely 24 hours after heavily-armed Border Patrol agents snared workers outside a Westlake Home Depot after popping out of the back of a Penske moving truck — actions some experts said appeared to violate the court’s order.

If the Supreme Court takes up the case, many now think similar aggressive and seemingly indiscriminate enforcement actions could once again become the norm.

“Anything having to do with law enforcement and immigration, the Supreme Court seems to be giving the president free reign,” said Eric J. Segall, a professor at Georgia State University College of Law and a prominent scholar of the country’s highest court. “I think the court is going to side with the Trump administration.”

The Department of Justice has repeatedly argued that the temporary restraining order causes “manifest irreparable harm” to the government. Officials are especially eager to see it overturned because California’s Central District is the single most populous in the country, and home to a plurality of undocumented immigrants.

In its Supreme Court petition, the Justice Department alleged that roughly 10% of the region’s residents are in the U.S. illegally.

“According to estimates from Department of Homeland Security data, nearly 4 million illegal aliens are in California, and nearly 2 million are in the Central District of California. Los Angeles County alone had an estimated 951,000 illegal aliens as of 2019—by far the most of any county in the United States,” the petition said.

President Trump made mass deportations a centerpiece of his 2024 campaign, and has poured billions in federal funding and untold political capital into the arrest, incarceration and removal of migrants. Though DOJ lawyers told the appellate court there was no policy or quota, administration officials and those involved in planing its deportation operations have repeatedly cited 3,000 arrests a day and a million deportations a year as objectives.

District and appellate courts have stalled, blocked, and sometimes reversed many of those efforts in recent weeks, forcing the return of a Maryland father mistakenly deported to Salvadoran prison, compelling the release of student protesters from ICE detention, preserving birthright citizenship for children of immigrant parents and stopping construction of Alligator Alcatraz.

But little of the President’s immigration agenda has so far been tested in the Supreme Court.

If the outcome is unfavorable for Trump, some observers wonder whether he will let the justices limit his agenda.

“Even if they were to lose in the Supreme Court, I have serious doubts they will stop,” Segall said.

Aug. 1 (UPI) — El Salvadoran lawmakers voted to abolish presidential term limits as part of constitutional reforms that could allow the country’s populist president, Nayib Bukele, to remain in power indefinitely.

Under the reformed electoral system, the previous five-year term is increased to six years and a restriction limiting presidents to a single term is removed, allowing El Salvador’s executive to run for office an unlimited number of times.

Members of Bukele’s New Ideas Party in the Legislative Assembly voted through the reform on Thursday, 18 months after Bukele won a second term in a landslide victory, despite a constitutional prohibition on consecutive terms. The Supreme Court, packed with pro-Bukele justices, waived the ban on grounds that it infringed Bukele’s human rights.

Opposition politicians and human rights organizations condemned the move, saying it removed one of the last remaining checks on power and brought the country a step closer to becoming a one-party state.

“Today, democracy has died in El Salvador,” said opposition Republican National Alliance MP Marcela Villatoro.

Human Rights Watch said it was a power grab by Bukele aimed at ushering in a dictatorship.

“He’s very clearly following the path of leaders who use their popularity to concentrate power to undermine the rule of law and eventually to establish a dictatorship,” said HRW Americas deputy director Juan Pappier.

Cristosal, El Salvador’s leading human rights organization, which fled the country for Guatemala two weeks ago citing threats and intimidation against its staff, criticized the lack of process and the way the change was rushed through.

“The day before vacation, without debate, without informing the public, in a single legislative vote, they changed the political system to allow the president to perpetuate himself in power indefinitely and we continue to follow the well-travelled path of autocrats,” said Cristosal executive Noah Bullock.

Bukele’s popularity mainly stems from a crime crackdown, targeting gangs in particular, that has seen El Salvador transformed from one of the most violent nations in the world to one of the safest in the region.

However, he is a divisive figure among Salvadorans.

His policies, including the use of emergency powers to detain as many as 75,000 people without due process, have drawn fire from human rights groups such as Amnesty International, which has said El Salvador was engaged in a “gradual replacement of gang violence with state violence.”

The United States got pulled into questions around El Salvador after Maryland resident Kilmar Abrego Garcia, an undocumented Salvadoran migrant, was detained in one of Bukele’s notorious ‘mega prisons’ after being wrongly deported to El Salvador in violation of a 2019 court order that said he could not be deported there.

He was among a group of 261 inmates imprisoned in one of the huge penal facilities after being deported by the Trump administration, who it said were either members of the Venezuelan Tren de Aragua gang or the Salvadoran-dominated MS-13.

Abrego Garcia, who was accused of being a member of the MS-13, was returned to the United States in June at the request of the Justice Department to face federal migrant smuggling charges in Tennessee.

The Trump administration asked a federal appeals court Monday to allow immigration agents to resume unfettered raids across Southern California, seeking to overturn a federal judge’s order in Los Angeles that barred “roving patrols” in seven counties.

The order “is inflicting irreparable harm by preventing the Executive from ensuring that immigration laws are enforced, severely infringing on the President’s Article II authority,” Department of Justice lawyers wrote in a motion asking for an emergency stay on Monday. “These harms will be compounded the longer that injunction is in place.”

After weeks of aggressive sweeps by masked and heavily armed federal agents, the operations seemingly ceased in Los Angeles, Riverside, San Bernardino, Orange, Ventura, Santa Barbara and San Luis Obispo counties following a temporary restraining order granted Friday night by U.S. District Judge Maame Ewusi-Mensah Frimpong.

A coalition of civil rights groups and private attorneys sued the federal government, challenging the cases of three immigrants and two U.S. citizens swept up in chaotic arrests that have sown terror and sparked widespread protest since June 6.

“It should tell you everything you need to know that the federal government is rushing to appeal an order that instructs them only to follow the Constitution,” said Mohammad Tajsar, an attorney with ACLU of Southern California, who argued the case. “We look forward to defending the temporary restraining order and ensuring that communities across Southern California are safe from the federal government’s violence.”

Despite arguments from the Trump administration that its tactics are valid, Frimpong ruled that using race, ethnicity, language, accent, location or employment as a pretext for immigration enforcement is forbidden by the Fourth Amendment, which protects against unreasonable searches and seizures by the government. The judge found that preventing detainees from meeting with lawyers violates the right to due process guaranteed by the Fifth Amendment.

“What the federal government would have this court believe — in the face of a mountain of evidence presented in this case — is that none of this is actually happening,” she wrote.

Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem incorrectly referred to Frimpong as a man when responding to the order during a news conference Saturday, saying of the judge’s order: “He’s an idiot.”

“We have all the right in the world to go out on the streets and to uphold the law and to do what we’re going to do. So none of our operations are going to change,” Noem said. “We’re going to appeal it and we’re going to win.”

In addition to blocking roving patrols, the judge also ordered the Department of Homeland Security to open part of its detention facility in Downtown Los Angeles to attorneys and legal aid groups.

“While the district court injunction is a significant victory for immigrants, the whiplash of court orders and appeals breeds uncertainty,” said Ming Hsu Chen, a professor at UC Law San Francisco. “That form of real-world insecurity weakens communities and undermines democratic values in places like LA.”

The Trump administration did not immediately contest the 5th Amendment portion of the ruling. Instead, its attacked the 4th Amendment claim, seeking a stay that would immediately restore the status quo for immigration agents across Southern California while the case is heard by judges from the higher court.

“It is untenable for a district judge to single-handedly ‘restructure the operations’ of federal immigration enforcement,” the appeal argued. “This judicial takeover cannot be allowed to stand.”

But some experts say that’s unlikely.

“Their argument [is] the sky’s falling,” said professor Carl Tobias of the University of Richmond. “They make very extreme arguments, and that doesn’t necessarily help their case in the 9th Circuit.”

The appeal escalates an already fierce and sprawling legal battle over Trump’s promised mass deportations and the means used to achieve it.

After the president deployed troops to quell anti-ICE protests in June, California sued and won a temporary restraining order that would have stripped the president of command.

The appellate panel swiftly blocked that decision, before overturning it in mid-June, leaving thousands of soldiers in Trump’s hands.

But the Trump appointee who authored the June 19 ruling, Judge Mark J. Bennett of Honolulu, also bristled at the government’s argument that the president’s actions in the case were “unreviewable.”

“Some of the things they say are unorthodox, arguments we don’t usually hear in court,” Chen said. “Instead of framing this as executive overreach, they’re saying the judiciary’s efforts to put limits on executive power is judicial overreach.”

Last week, another 9th Circuit judge challenged that June decision, petitioning the court to rehear the issue with a larger “en banc” panel — a move that could nudge the case to the Supreme Court.

“Before [courts] became so politicized, many judges would often defer to the 3-judge panels that first heard appeals, because they trusted their colleagues,” Tobias said. “Increasing politicization of most appeals courts and somewhat decreased collegiality complicate efforts to predict how the Ninth’s judges will vote in this case.”

Meanwhile, California is gathering evidence to bolster its claim that Marines and National Guard forces participating in immigration enforcement run afoul of the Posse Comitatus Act, which forbids using soldiers to enforce civilian laws.

Compared to those questions, the legal issues in the L.A. appeal are simple, experts said.

“What makes this case different is how much it’s based on facts,” said Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of the UC Berkeley School of Law. “It’s much harder for an appellate court to overturn a trial court finding of fact then it is with regard to legal conclusions.”

The French Riviera resort of Cannes is the latest destination to crack down on cruise ship traffic.

From the start of 2026, ships accommodating more 1,000 guests will be banned from its harbour.

Additionally, there will be a limit of 6,000 passengers per day.

Larger ships are not totally banned from visiting but will have to tender further out at sea.

This is already the case for some of the largest ships now as the port cannot accommodate the largest vessels.

The Cannes city council voted for new limits following similar restrictions in Nice and Villefranche.

“Cannes has become a major cruise ship destination, with real economic benefits. It’s not about banning cruise ships, but about regulating and setting guidelines for their navigation,” said Mayor David Lisnard.

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WASHINGTON — Citing the explosion of online porn, the Supreme Court ruled Friday that states may enforce age verification laws in hopes of screening out children and young teens.

By a 6-3 vote, the justices rejected a free-speech claim from the adult entertainment industry.

“The power to require age verification is within a State’s authority to prevent children from accessing sexually explicit content,” said Justice Clarence Thomas for the court.

The free-speech advocates who challenged the law said it would infringe the rights of adults because they could be forced to disclose their identity.

But the court disagreed.

The Texas law “advances the State’s important interest in shielding children from sexually explicit content. And, it is appropriately tailored because it permits users to verify their ages through the established methods of providing government-issued identification and sharing transactional data,” Thomas said.

The court’s three liberals dissented.

Under the Texas law, a website must use “reasonable age verification methods” to confirm visitors are at least 18 years old if more than one-third of its content is “sexual material harmful to minors.”
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More than 21 other Republican-led states have adopted similar laws in recent years.

In defense of the Texas law, Atty. Gen. Ken Paxton said that prior to the internet, the court had upheld laws that required bookstores or magazine stands to “check the age of their customers before selling them pornography.”

He argued that moving their business online should not give pornographers a 1st Amendment right “to provide access to nearly inexhaustible amounts of obscenity to any child with a smartphone.”

State officials also said porn online is increasingly violent and degrading.

“The average child is exposed to internet pornography while still in elementary school,” wrote state attorneys for Ohio and Indiana. “Pornography websites receive more traffic in the U.S. than social media platforms Instagram, TikTok, Netflix, and Pinterest combined.”

WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court has limited the power of federal district judges to hand down orders that apply nationwide.

By 6-3 vote, the justices said Friday that judges may not issue orders that apply to people beyond those who sued.

“Federal courts do not exercise general oversight of the Executive Branch,” said Justice Amy Coney Barrett. And while judges can give full relief to plaintiffs, including groups of people, their injunctions should not be “broader than necessary” to shield those people.

The court’s three liberals dissented.

In her dissent, Justice Sonia Sotomayor said the Trump administration is trying to defend a blatantly unconstitutional order repealing birthright citizenship.

“The gamesmanship in this request is apparent and the Government makes no attempt to hide it. Yet, shamefully, this Court plays along,” she said.

The procedural ruling is a victory for President Trump and a setback for advocates who seek to block his executive orders.

It prevents a single district judge in Boston or San Francisco from blocking Trump’s policies from taking effect nationwide.

However, it does not decide on the constitutionality of Trump’s plan to limit birthright citizenship.

Three federal district judges—in Maryland, Massachusetts and Washington—issued nationwide orders declaring Trump’s plan unconstitutional.

The 14th Amendment, adopted in 1868, says “All persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.”

On his first day in office, Trump issued an executive order disagreeing with the traditional understanding and asserting the Constitution does not “extend citizenship universally to everyone born within the United States.”

He said it would be U.S. policy to not recognize citizenship for newborns if the child’s mother or father was “not a United States citizen or lawful permanent resident at the time of said person’s birth.”

But in quick succession, judges declared Trump’s order may not be enforced across the nation. They said his proposed restrictions violated the federal law and Supreme Court precedent as well as the plain words of the 14th Amendment.

Rather than challenge those rulings directly, Trump’s lawyers sent an emergency appeal to the Supreme Court with “a modest request.”

Rather than rule on birthright citizenship, they urged the justices to rein in the practice of district judges handing down nationwide orders.

They have “reached epidemic proportions since the start of the current administration,” they said.

In the international relations structures in Southeast Asia, “strategic trust” acts as a glue between countries that are diverse in terms of institutions, histories, and national interests. Strategic trust can be understood as the extent to which one country believes that another country will not harm its core interests, even in the absence of strong enforcement mechanisms. This is not blind trust but calculated trust, based on consistent behavior, policy transparency, and commitment to complying with common rules of the game. In Southeast Asia, strategic trust is not only the foundation for bilateral cooperation but also a prerequisite for building the ASEAN Political-Security Community (APSC) according to the roadmap by 2025.

The relationship between Thailand and Cambodia is a case in point, reflecting the complex and fragile nature of strategic trust in the region. There have been periods of serious border conflicts, such as the dispute over the Preah Vihear temple area in 2008–2011, and the two countries have repeatedly been embroiled in military tensions. Although bilateral relations have stabilized under Hun Sen and subsequent civilian governments in Bangkok, underlying factors such as anti-Cambodian sentiment in the Thai military and a lack of transparency in the handling of migrant workers and border issues persist. In this context, the ASEAN institution, with its principles of non-interference and consensus, has shown its limits even more clearly. When tensions flare up, ASEAN often lacks effective tools for coordination and mediation, leading to a situation of “every man for himself” and dependence on personal relationships between leaders.

The leak of an audio recording between Thai Prime Minister Paetongtarn Shinawatra and Cambodian Senate President Hun Sen in June 2025 is a typical example of the failure of strategic trust in a loose institutional framework like ASEAN.

What is remarkable about the incident is not only the content of the call but also the nature of the diplomatic form used. The 17-minute exchange was conducted outside official channels and was marked by an excessively intimate tone: Ms. Paetongtarn called Mr. Hun Sen “uncle” and agreed with him to ignore criticism from a Thai military general. This reflects the deeply personal political model in both countries. In Thailand, “Thaksinism” is not just a political phenomenon but also a family-based power structure, where the Shinawatra clan still holds great influence in politics, despite opposition from the military and royalists. In Cambodia, “Hun Senism” is a symbol of decades of personal rule, where Mr. Hun Sen and his family control almost all state power, passing the throne to his son without any real democratic competition.

The leaked audio recordings reveal a number of statements that have crossed the line on the military and security. Notably, the Thai military’s disdain for Ms. Paetongtarn’s response to her claim that the generals were just “showing off” is a provocative and insulting statement to the military, which has staged coups to overthrow governments led by her family. In addition, the fact that the prime minister of one country made such a clear statement in favor of another country’s leader on a potentially disputed border issue has touched the limits of domestic and international strategic trust. Not surprisingly, shortly afterwards, the Bhumjaithai Party—the second largest partner in the ruling coalition—announced its withdrawal from the government, citing the serious damage to the honor of the nation and the military.

Hun Sen’s role in releasing the recording has further complicated the situation. While Cambodia has said that Hun Sen simply wanted to “clarify the truth” after the first nine minutes of the recording were leaked earlier, observers have said that the release of the entire transcript was politically calculated. On the one hand, it helped Hun Sen demonstrate his status as a “great friend” of Thailand while sending a message to the Thai military that they should not underestimate his influence. On the other hand, he also unintentionally—or intentionally—put the Thai Prime Minister in a difficult position when Ms. Paetongtarn was forced to apologize publicly, undermining her reputation and legitimacy at home.

The impact of the leaked audio recording between Thai Prime Minister Paetongtarn Shinawatra and Cambodian Senate President Hun Sen goes beyond the bilateral level, spreading like a domino effect to many levels of national political structures, international relations, and institutional functioning of ASEAN. At each level, this incident highlights the fragility of strategic trust while exposing the gaps in the ability to control and institutionalize individual power in Southeast Asia.

For Thailand, the political consequences are profound and potentially long-lasting. Internally, Paetongtarn’s government—newly formed with the support of the Shinawatra family—is on the brink of collapse after the Bhumjaithai Party, the second-largest partner in the ruling coalition, announced its withdrawal. This move not only created a parliamentary majority crisis but also cost Paetongtarn her already fragile political legitimacy and credibility as the “political heir” to her father, Thaksin Shinawatra. Polls after the event showed that the government’s approval rating plummeted, while support for the military’s role as a guarantor of national stability increased significantly.

The Thai military—which has traditionally been deeply involved in politics—now has a new justification for acting in the name of “protecting national honor and the face of the military.” The coups of 2006 and 2014 were both carried out in the name of maintaining stability and countering the influence of the Shinawatra family. This time, a civilian leader directly insulting the generals and showing subservience to foreign leaders could be interpreted as a threat to national security. In this context, the possibility of the military intervening, directly or indirectly, is a very real risk. This raises questions about the future of Thailand’s young democratic system, which has been repeatedly disrupted by military coups.

For Cambodia, this event can be seen by Hun Sen as a tactical victory in domestic affairs. The release of the entire recording demonstrates his proactive control of information and public opinion and helps him affirm his role as a powerful regional figure, despite having stepped down from the position of prime minister. In the eyes of the Cambodian public, Hun Sen is praised as someone who maintains his influence in foreign affairs and takes the initiative against a larger country like Thailand. However, on the international level, the release of a private recording between two heads of state may raise doubts about Phnom Penh’s diplomatic credibility. The deliberate release of confidential information will make other partners—both within and outside ASEAN—more cautious in all forms of high-level contact with Cambodian leaders. This, in the long term, may cause Cambodia to be partially isolated in strategic diplomatic channels or at least lose its image as a responsible partner in the region.

In terms of bilateral relations, Hun Sen’s release of the full transcript of the call also puts Thailand in a vulnerable position, forcing the Paetongtarn government to publicly apologize. This is an extremely dangerous diplomatic precedent, especially in the context of the two countries still having unresolved historical disputes. Without a clear and in-depth trust-building strategy from both sides, Thai-Cambodian relations risk taking a major step backward. Any efforts to build trust through defense, border security, and labor cooperation channels could be frozen or shifted to a state of precaution.

Regionally, the impact of this event is systemic for ASEAN. First of all, the incident has seriously undermined strategic trust within the bloc. ASEAN countries, which are already very cautious about sharing information and coordinating security, will now be even more cautious in high-level communications if they are concerned that the content may be leaked or exploited for internal political purposes. The fact that a high-level leader was recorded and then released in full without any official response from ASEAN shows the inability of this organization to handle internal crises. ASEAN does not have any mechanism to investigate, intervene, or mediate in bilateral diplomatic crises, especially when they do not take the form of traditional armed conflicts.

In addition, this incident also sets a dangerous precedent for the entire regional diplomatic culture: when personal relationships can be recorded, edited, disseminated, and exploited for political purposes. This breaks the unwritten norms of ASEAN diplomacy, where friendliness and discretion are considered the foundation. If this trend continues, regional leaders will gradually lose trust in each other, and instead there will be a permanent state of hidden tension. More importantly, strategic rivals outside the region, such as China or the United States, can take advantage of these trust gaps to amplify internal ASEAN conflicts. If any member state feels threatened or betrayed, it can turn to external powers as a strategic counterweight, leading to polarization in regional foreign policy and seriously weakening ASEAN’s neutrality in the Asia-Pacific security architecture.

Recent developments are a wake-up call for Southeast Asia on the need to institutionalize and make transparent strategic diplomatic channels. First, countries need to establish clear standards for high-level contacts between leaders—including confidentiality, recording, and public statements. Calls or personal contacts between leaders should be coordinated by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and controlled by an official system to ensure accountability and information security. Second, ASEAN countries need to strengthen the role of professional diplomacy, limiting the use of backroom channels or friendly relationships as tools to resolve crises. In a region where individual leaders can change quickly, betting on personal relationships is a risky strategy.

ASEAN also needs to rethink its operating model. It is necessary to establish an early warning mechanism for intra-bloc diplomatic crises, as well as a code of conduct for senior leaders in bilateral contacts. This is not to control or limit the freedom of leaders but to ensure that individual actions do not undermine the foundation of shared trust. In the long term, a strong ASEAN security community can only be built if member states agree to abandon the mindset of “personal politics” and replace it with institutionalized, accountable, and transparent diplomacy.

“If you’re a parent, Lauren Greenfield’s new doc about teens and social media ‘is a horror movie.’”

That Los Angeles Times headline ran on an August story about Greenfield’s acclaimed five-part docuseries that followed Los Angeles-area high school students during the 2021-22 school year, tracking their cellphone and social media use for a revealing portrait of their online life.

Greenfield remembers the headline.

“I’ve heard that from parents,” Greenfield says. “And I keep hearing it whenever we screen the series.”

Greenfield has taken “Social Studies” to schools around the country since its premiere last summer, airing episodes and answering questions, speaking alongside a rotating group of the show’s subjects. And, yes, the most common takeaway remains: Parents have no idea what’s going on with their teenagers — though “horror” is in the eye of the beholder.

Today, Greenfield and three of the “Social Studies” participants — Cooper Klein, Dominic Brown and Jonathan Gelfond, all now 21 — are in a Venice bungalow, just back from showing the series to some 6,000 teenagers in San Francisco — young people who, by and large, had a much different reaction than their elders to the depictions of online bullying, body-image issues, partying, hooking up and FOMO culture.

These teens were sometimes gasping and talking to the screen, laughing at points, fully immersed, fully relating, even feeling nostalgic for TikTok trends that were popping three years ago.

In one episode, teenager Sydney Shear is having a text exchange with a guy Greenfield describes as “creepy.” We see the message he sends: “Permission to beat.” Right after she tells him no, the group of girls sitting behind Greenfield screamed, “You know he did anyway!”

“It’s really fascinating how differently adults versus adolescents reacted to the show,” says Klein, now a junior at Vanderbilt. “Adults are terrified by it, but young people find it funny. It’s like watching reality TV.”

Lauren Greenfield.

(Matt Seidel / For The Times)

Much has changed for these “Social Studies” subjects since Greenfield stopped filming in 2022. How could it not? The years immediately following high school usually bring about intense growth and change and, hopefully, a little maturity. The world around them is different. Palisades Charter High School, which many of the students in the series attended, was heavily damaged in the January wildfires. (“The show’s like a time capsule,” says Gelfond, a Pali High grad. “Looking back, the series is even more special now.”)

Some things haven’t changed at all, though. Technology remains addictive, they all agree. Even when you are aware that the algorithms exist to snare your time and attention, it can be hard to stop scrolling, the self-soothing leading to numbness and deepening insecurities.

“You can have a greater understanding about the effects, but it still pulls you in,” says Brown, who, like Gelfond and Cooper, has worked at teen mental health hotlines. “It’s hard to stay away from what is essentially our lifelines.”

Which is one reason why they all see the value in the Los Angeles Unified School District’s cellphone ban, which went into effect in February.

“The pull-away from tech only works if it applies to everyone,” Klein says. “When a whole group doesn’t have access, that’s when the magic happens. You’re going to start to connect with the people in front of you because …” She pauses, smiling. “I mean, you want to be engaging with something, right?”

Then you have time to do things like read and solve jigsaw puzzles with friends, two hobbies Klein says she has taken up again recently in a conscious effort to disengage from her phone. Reclaiming your time, she says, can only work if you’ve got a plan.

If the takeaway from the series was that parents couldn’t fully comprehend how technology shapes and defines their teens’ lives (“They’re the guinea pig generation,” Greenfield notes), watching “Social Studies,” either together or alone, has served as a conversation starter.

“I have always had a very open relationship with my parents,” Gelfond says, “but the way this really explains social media has led to eightfold more transparency.”

“It made me more grateful for the way my parents navigated all this,” Klein adds. “I thought they were overstepping boundaries, trying to protect me too much. And I think this show validated that they did a really great job. Because we were the first generation, they were kind of flying blind.”

Gelfond, left, and Klein, right, join one of the group discussions in “Social Studies.”

(Lauren Greenfield / INSTITUTE)

Now Klein wonders what she’d do differently if she ever has kids. She started on Instagram at 12. If she could go back, she’d probably delay that entry, even though Klein says it now seems normal for kids to join the app when they turn 8 or 9.

So what would be the ideal starter age?

“Maybe I’m crazy for saying this, but I think it should be 16,” Brown says. Greenfield nods her head, noting Australia recently banned social media — Snapchat, TikTok, Instagram and X — for children under 16.

“I got on Instagram when I was 10 or 11, and I had no idea of the world that I had just gained access to,” Brown continues. “You should wait until you gain critical thinking skills. Sixteen, 17, 18, maybe.”

“It is the end of childhood,” Greenfield says. “You get that phone and everything that comes with it, and it is the end of innocence.”

In that respect, Greenfield sees “Social Studies” in conversation with “Adolescence,” the Netflix limited series about a 13-year-old boy suspected of killing a girl. The boy had been actively exploring incel culture online.

“What’s scary about ‘Adolescence’ is how did they not know he was involved in something so terrible,” Greenfield says. “But it makes sense. That’s the world we live in now.”

June 7 (UPI) — Arrivals and departures are limited for the rest of the year at Newark Liberty International Airport in New Jersey.

The restrictions took effect on Friday and limit arrivals and departures to 28 per hour on weekends while airport construction occurs from Sept. 1 through Dec. 31, the Federal Aviation Administration announced on Friday.

Arrivals and departures also are limited to no more than 34 per hour during other periods through Oct. 25.

“The confirmed reduced rates will maintain safety while alleviating excessive flight delays at the airport due to staffing and equipment challenges,” the FAA announcement says.

“The early completion of runway construction at the airport that added to the delays will also contribute to a more efficient operation.”

Similar travel restrictions “paid dividends” by enabling “smooth travel into and out of Newark” over the Memorial Day holiday, according to the FAA.

Officials at the federal agency recently met with airline representatives to discuss problems at the Newark airport that triggered long delays and flight cancellations that left many air passengers stranded for hours and sometimes longer.

The discussions led to the current flight restrictions while undertaking several improvements at the airport and regionally.

The FAA is working to improve operations at the Newark airport by adding three new high-bandwidth telecommunications links between New York-based hubs and the Philadelphia-based terminal radar approach control system for regional air traffic control.

Old copper telecommunications connections will be replaced with fiber-optic technology for greater bandwidth and speed, and a temporary backup system to the Philadelphia-based TRACON system will be active while improvements are done.

The FAA also is increasing air traffic controller staffing by adding 22 fully certified controllers and five fully certified supervisors at the Newark airport and others in the area.

“The U.S. Department of Transportation and the FAA will continue working with all stakeholders to ensure that the airport is a safe, efficient and functional gateway for passengers and air crews,” the FAA announcement says.

California and three other states petitioned the U.S. Food and Drug Administration Thursday to ease its new restrictions on the abortion pill mifepristone, citing the drug’s proven safety record and arguing the new limits are unnecessary.

“The medication is a lifeline for millions of women who need access to time-sensitive, critical healthcare — especially low-income women and those who live in rural and underserved areas,” said California Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta, who filed the petition alongside the attorneys general of Massachusetts, New York and New Jersey.

The petition cites Senate testimony by Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. last month, in which Kennedy said he had ordered FDA administrator Martin Makary to conduct a “complete review” of mifepristone and its labeling requirements.

The drug, which can be received by mail, has been on the U.S. market for 25 years and taken safely by millions of Americans, according to experts. It is the most common method of terminating a pregnancy in the U.S., with its use surging after the Supreme Court overturned Roe vs. Wade in 2022.

The Supreme Court upheld access to the drug for early pregnancies under previous FDA regulations last year, but it has remained a target of anti-abortion conservatives. The Trump administration has given Kennedy broad rein to shake up American medicine under his “Make America Healthy Again” banner, and Kennedy has swiftly rankled medical experts by using dubious science — and even fake citations — to question vaccine regimens and research and other longstanding public health measures.

At the Senate hearing, Kennedy cited “new data” from a flawed report pushed by anti-abortion groups — and not published in any peer-reviewed journal — to question the safety of mifepristone, calling the report “alarming.”

“Clearly, it indicates that, at very least, the label should be changed,” Kennedy said.

Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) on Monday posted a letter from Makary to X, in which Makary wrote that he was “committed to conducting a review of mifepristone” alongside “the professional career scientists” at the FDA.

Makary said he could not provide additional information given ongoing litigation around the drug.

The states, in their 54-page petition, wrote that “no new scientific data has emerged since the FDA’s last regulatory actions that would alter the conclusion that mifepristone remains exceptionally safe and effective,” and that studies “that have frequently been cited to undermine mifepristone’s extensive safety record have been widely criticized, retracted, or both.”

Democrats have derided Kennedy’s efforts to reclassify mifepristone as politically motivated and baseless.

“This is yet another attack on women’s reproductive freedom and scientifically-reviewed health care,” Gov. Gavin Newsom said the day after Kennedy’s Senate testimony. “California will continue to protect every person’s right to make their own medical decisions and help ensure that Mifepristone is available to those who need it.”

Bonta said Thursday that mifepristone’s placement under the FDA’s Risk Evaluation and Mitigation Strategy program for drugs with known, serious side effects — or REMS — was “medically unjustified,” unduly burdened patient access and placed “undue strain on the nation’s entire health system.”

He said mifepristone “allows people to get reproductive care as early as possible when it is safest, least expensive, and least invasive,” is “so safe that it presents lower risks of serious complications than taking Tylenol,” and that its long safety record “is backed by science and cannot be erased at the whim of the Trump Administration.”

The FDA has previously said that fewer than 0.5% of women who take the drug experience “serious adverse reactions,” and deaths are exceedingly rare.

The REMS program requires prescribers to add their names to national and local abortion provider lists, which can be a deterrent for doctors given safety threats, and pharmacies to comply with complex tracking, shipping and reporting requirements, which can be a deterrent to carrying the drug, Bonta said.

It also requires patients to sign forms in which they attest to wanting to “end [their] pregnancy,” which Bonta said can be a deterrent for women using the drug after a miscarriage — one of its common uses — or for those in states pursuing criminal penalties for women seeking certain abortion care.

Under federal law, REMS requirements must address a specific risk posed by a drug and cannot be “unduly burdensome” on patients, and the new application to mifepristone “fails to meet that standard,” Bonta said.

The states’ petition is not a lawsuit, but a regulatory request for the FDA to reverse course, the states said.

If the FDA will not do so nationwide, the four petitioning states asked that it “exercise its discretion to not enforce the requirements” in their states, which Bonta’s office said already have “robust state laws that ensure safe prescribing, rigorous informed consent, and professional accountability.”

Chad Rivera gingerly makes his way to the edge of what looks like an emptied out swimming pool, a lime-green skateboard in one hand, a white cane in the other. At 58, he’s legally blind, but he’s been skateboarding since he was 5, so what’s about to happen is part muscle memory, part “trust fall.”

Deathracer Chad Rivera is 58 and blind, but says he’ll never give up skateboarding.

Dozens of other skateboarders — mostly men in their 50s and 60s decked out in skating gear — roll along the periphery, watching on, at Encinitas Skate Park near San Diego. It’s not yet 11 a.m., but punk music blasts from the speakers, punctuated by the rumbling and clanking of skateboard wheels on concrete.

Standing at the deep end, Rivera considers the pool bowl’s nine-foot concrete walls. He sets down his white cane and secures the tail of his board on the pool’s rim with one foot, the rest of the board hanging in the air, like a mini diving board. He then steps onto the front of the board with his other foot and throws his body weight forward, “dropping in.”

He races down and around the sides of the walls before flipping around and landing back up on the pool deck.

It’s a frightening move to watch, but Rivera now beams, triumphant, eyes shining.

“Woo! Feel it and kill it,” says Rivera, a retired grape grower who’s suffered from a rare optic nerve disease since he was 22. “It always feels good, so I keep doing it. I’ll never stop, no matter how old I get.”

Rivera is a member of Deathracer413, a group of older skateboarders who believe that skateboarding is their key to longevity. They grew up amid the ’70s and ’80s skate scene and are as passionate about the sport as when they were teens. Many of them are now retired and the joy they get from skateboarding, the sense of community and the health benefits, such as core strength and balance, keep them young, they say. The inherent danger gives them an adrenaline rush that, they argue, keeps their brains sharp.

“Our slogan is: Keep dropping in or you’ll be dropping out,” says the group’s founder, Doug Marker, a former professional skateboarder and retired construction worker who’s lived in San Diego his entire life. Marker, who also surfs, plays guitar and rides motorcycles, is 63 going on 16, with silver hair and a skate-park suntan. On this Saturday morning, he’s wearing baggy shorts, Vans sneakers and a graphic T-shirt featuring “Death Racer” in heavy metal band-like typography.

“Knowing you can get hurt keeps you ultra-focused,” Marker says. “And trusting that you can do it — believing in yourself — is hugely empowering. I keep dropping in, I keep going. It’s put me into a bubble where I never feel like I’m getting older.”

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Marker founded Deathracer413 in 2011 to draw like-minded people who are “living life to the fullest,” he says. The name Deathracer reminded him of a motorcycle club and 413 are his initials, numerically. It was just a loose social affiliation at first, but in 2020 Marker launched the Deathracer413 Road Show, an invitation to join him in skating a different skate park every Saturday.

Deathracer413 now includes former and current pro skateboarders doing tricks alongside average enthusiasts and late-life skating newbies. There are a handful of women in the group as well as a few children honing their skills with the masters.

Marker estimates there are about 1,300 members of the group internationally, though typically only about 20-30 locals attend on any given Saturday. He welcomes anyone into the club and mails them a “welcome letter” and custom Deathracer413 patch that he designed. Hundreds of recipients remain members from afar, kindred spirits who share a “full throttle” outlook on life and participate via social media. Others have trekked from Australia, Germany, Belgium and the UK to skate with Deathracer413.

“’Cause now everybody’s retired and can travel,” Marker says. “They’re finding destinations to come and skateboard and San Diego’s a top one. So they come.”

‘I’ll stop when my body tells me to stop’

The deathracers catch up with one another, fist bumping and drinking beers, as one of them drops into the pool bowl.

As Deathracer413 celebrates its 200th skating session, the vibe is affectionate and rambunctious, jovial retiree backyard barbecue meets heavily tattooed skater meetup. More than 50 members — many with bushy gray beards, paunchy bellies and caps reading “The Goonies: Never Say Die” or “Independent” — mingle on the pool deck, cracking open beers, fist-bumping one another and catching up on life as the Ramones’ “I Wanna Be Sedated” fades into Bikini Kill’s “Rebel Girl” on the sound system.

The skaters drop into the pool one after another — swirling and swooshing around, “carving” and “grinding,” before popping back up — in such tight succession it feels choreographed. It’s as if we’re inside a pinball machine, with tiny objects orbiting around one another maniacally, wheels spinning, helmets twisting, boards whizzing by or flying into the air before crashing back down. Every so often someone wipes out, sliding across the pool bottom, sparking cheers of encouragement.

“I feel like the older I get the more I worry about getting hurt — because it lasts longer,” admits skateboarding legend Steve Caballero, 60. “If you think about it, it’s kind of a scary sport. You can get really hurt.”

Caballero has been a pro skateboarder since he was 15 and fear doesn’t stop him today — “I’ll stop when my body tells me to stop,” he says. He performs one of his signature moves, sliding along the rim of the pool on the skateboard truck instead of the wheels. No small feat for a body that’s endured more than 45 years of extreme athletics. A documentary about his life, “Steve Caballero: The Legend of the Dragon,” debuts this November.

Legendary skateboarder and deathracer Steve Caballero, 60, has been pro since he was 15.

“It definitely keeps me in shape,” he says. “It keeps me youthful-thinking, staying creative and being challenged. I think when people get older they quit doing these things because they feel like they should. I’m trying to show people, hey, even in your older age you can still have fun and challenge yourself.”

The feeling of freedom, the thrill of sailing through the air, is worth the risk to Barry Blumenthal, 60, a retired stockbroker.

“I’m more worried about crashing my car. I mean, I wear gear in here,” Blumenthal says. “Skating is just extreme fun where you can’t help but grin. It’s kid-like. It’s a fountain of youth experience. You’re chasing stoke.”

Pushing the boundaries of skating

Wiping out is part of the process, the Deathracers say. It’s still “kid-like” fun, “a fountain of youth experience.”

No doubt “dropping in” and “chasing stoke” for eternity would be “rad.” But is there any validity to Deathracer413’s claims that skateboarding promotes health and longevity?

“I’d worry about fractures,” says Dr. Jeremy Swisher, a UCLA sports medicine physician. “As you get older, it takes the body longer to heal. But it comes down to a risk-benefit analysis. The endorphins, the adrenaline — the joy of it — as well as the new challenges that stress the mind in a good way would be very mentally stimulating. You’re forming new neural pathways as you’re trying new moves. It would help keep the brain young and fresh.”

“I race cars for a hobby, and I know what that does for my aging,” adds Dr. Eric Verdin, president and chief executive of the Buck Institute for Research on Aging in Northern California. “Finding a thing that you’re passionate about, having a sense of community, not to mention the balance and motor coordination — skateboarding is extremely physical — all of that is part of healthy aging.”

Deathracer413 also has an important place in the trajectory of skateboarding.

Skateboarding has been around in California since the 1950s — a way to recreate surfing, but on dry land. “Vertical skateboarding,” which the Deathracers partake in, grew out of SoCal kids commandeering emptied backyard swimming pools. It was especially prevalent during the 1976-77 drought, when residents had to drain their pools and kids began performing elaborate airborne tricks. Skate parks emerged and “vert skating,” as it was dubbed, became a phenomenon.

Doug Marker, founder of Deathracer413, shows off the ring and patch he designed, bearing the group’s name.

The first park in California opened in Carlsbad in 1976 and the San Diego area is still considered a central hub for the sport. So today there’s a critical mass of ’70s and ’80s-era skateboarding devotees who still live nearby. That’s why Deathracer413 — the only club of its kind in the area, Marker says — has so many active members.

“There hasn’t ever been 60-year-plus [vert skaters] before,” Marker says. “The sport’s not that old. So that’s kind of our thing — we’re just gonna keep pushing the bar.”

In that sense, Deathracer413 is more than a subcultural vestige — its members present a sports medicine study of sorts, says Michael Burnett, editor in chief of “Thrasher Magazine,” a longtime skateboarding publication.

“A lot of people here are older than me,” says John Preston Brooks, 56.

“There were a few old-guy outliers, but this is the first generation of older skaters,” Burnett says. “We’re now witnessing how long someone can physically skateboard for — this is the test. It’s uncharted territory.”

Still, many of the Deathracers have modifed their skating techniques as they’ve aged. Marker says he now skates within 80-85% of his ability range to be safe. Others admit that the inevitable — death — is on their minds.

“As an older adult, you can get into your head about, oh, how much time do I have left?” says John Preston Brooks, 56. “But a lot of people here are older than me and it just makes me realize I got a lot more time to do the things I love and make the best of life.”

David Skinner, 60, a retired school teacher, says he’s realistic about his physical limits.

“A lot of us have health issues,” he says. “We’re not necessarily trying to cheat death, but we’re definitely trying to stay ahead. We know it’s coming, but we wanna keep dropping in and having fun, and this gives us a venue to do it.

A brotherhood, even if you no longer skate

As the day grinds on, the skate session morphs into an actual barbecue. Marker fires up the grill, tossing on an assortment of meat: burgers, bratwursts, hot dogs. Plumes of aromatic smoke float over the pool bowl, which is still getting some action.

Lance Smith, 74, stands off to the side of the bowl, a Coors Light in one hand, a Nikon camera in the other. With his dark sunglasses, soul patch of facial hair above his chin and trucker hat that reads “Old Bro,” he appears like someone’s cool great-uncle. He can’t skate anymore due to three replacements — two hip, one knee — after years of skateboarding injuries. (“I wouldn’t trade it for anything,” he says.) But Smith, who documented the SoCal skateboarding scene in the ’70s and photo edited the book “Tracker: Forty Years of Skateboard History,” still attends Deathracer413 events nearly every Saturday. He photographs club members in action.

Doug Marker mans the grill as the afternoon skate session morphs into a barbecue.

“It’s the community,” Smith says, stretching out his arm and snapping a passing skater. “I get enjoyment out of shooting pictures and seeing my friends skateboard. And, yeah, drinking a Coors Light.”

Deathracer413 is both a brotherhood and a sisterhood, says Tuli Lam, 31, a physical therapy student and one of the only women skaters in attendance today. “When I’m here, I’m just one of the guys. We’re bonded by skating.”

That camaraderie is evident when the group presents Marker with a gift of thanks.

“OK, gather round! Bring it in!” yells Lansing Pope, 58.

The skaters crowd around, stretching their necks to see what’s in the wrapped box Marker is tearing open.

“It’s a knee brace!” someone yells.

“It’s a crutch!” says another.

“Something for his prostate?” jokes a third.

“Whoa, super dope,” Marker says. (It’s a leather Deathracer413 bedroll for his motorcycle.) “I’m super stoked.”

The skateboarders presented Doug Marker with a gift, a custom Deathracer413 bedroll for his motorcycle.

“Till your wheels fall off!” several guys scream in unison, fists in the air.

Then, as if on cue, the skaters disperse around the pool bowl, streaming in and out of it, the sound of rattling wheels and screeching metal on concrete filling the space.

Tye Donnelly, 54, surveys the scene from a nearby picnic table, an electric guitar on his lap. He noodles on it, playing a mix of Black Sabbath and reggae.

“When I was 18, I never thought I’d be the old age of 20 and still skateboarding,” he says. “At 54, I thought I’d have a hat on, a suit, with a newspaper. But it turns out you can skateboard your whole life. And I’m thankful for this group — because it wasn’t like this back in the day.”

Caballero sums up senior skateboarding best: “This is the new bingo.”