Author: Fatimah Idera

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security said Harvard University will lose its ability to enrol foreign students if it does not meet demands from the Trump administration to share information on some visa holders, marking the government’s latest escalation against the educational institution. Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem also announced on Wednesday the termination of two DHS grants totalling more than $2.7 million to Harvard. Noem said she wrote a letter to Harvard demanding records on what she called the “illegal and violent activities” of Harvard’s foreign student visa holders by April 30. “And if Harvard cannot verify…

The United States of America President Donald Trump has threatened to strip Harvard of its tax-exempt status on Tuesday. He said the university should apologize, a day after it rejected what it called unlawful demands to overhaul academic programs or lose federal grants. Beginning with Columbia University, the Trump administration has rebuked universities across the country over their handling of the pro-Palestinian student protest movement that roiled campuses last year following the 2023 Hamas-led attack inside Israel and the subsequent Israeli attacks on Gaza. Trump has called the protests anti-American and anti-Semitic, accused universities of peddling Marxism and radical left…

Australian politicians received about a$245,000 ($147,000) in match tickets from major sporting leagues over two years by the country’s most popular sporting leagues as part of a lobbying campaign against a proposed ban on advertising of online gambling, according to Reuters calculations based on government documents. Lobbying by the gambling industry against the ban has been reported previously in the media but the calculation of the total value of tickets declared by politicians in the parliamentary gift register shows the role played by sporting bodies and provides a dollar amount for the first time. Labour Prime Minister Anthony Albanese had…

Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s bid to transform India into a global factory floor has produced billions of dollars of low-cost iPhones and pharmaceuticals. Now he hopes to add missiles, helicopters and battleships to the shopping carts of foreign governments. The world’s largest importer of weapons after Ukraine is expanding the ability of the state-owned Export-Import Bank (EXIM) to offer long-term, low-cost loans to clients, including those whose political or credit risk profiles may limit their access to conventional financing, according to two Indian officials and three industry sources. New Delhi will also sharply increase the number of defence attachés in…

Britain’s Financial Reporting Council has opened an investigation into EY over its audit of Post Office Limited, it said on Wednesday, amid the lingering fallout from one of the country’s worst miscarriages of justice. The FRC said in a statement it will focus on the audit firm’s role in approving the Post Office’s financial statements from 2015 to 2018, particularly the Horizon IT system which was at the heart of the scandal. “We have been notified of the FRC’s intention to open an investigation into the EY audits of Post Office Limited for the financial years ending March 2015 –…

Despite Western intelligence agencies’ fears about the authoritarian regime amassing health data, researchers from China are to be allowed access to half a million United Kingdom General Practitioners (GP) records. Preparations are under way to transfer the records to UK Biobank, a research hub that holds detailed medical information donated by 500,000 volunteers. One of the world’s largest troves of health data, the facility makes its information available to universities, scientific institutes, and private companies. A Guardian analysis shows one in five successful applications for access come from China. For the past year, health officials had been assessing whether extra…

A federal judge has ordered Bank of America to pay $540.3 million in a long-running Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation lawsuit accusing the second-largest U.S. bank of underpaying what it owed for deposit insurance. In a decision made public on Monday, U.S. District Judge Loren AliKhan in Washington, D.C., said the payment covers assessments from the second quarter of 2013 through the end of 2014, plus interest. Recall that the FDIC sued Charlotte, North Carolina-based Bank of America for $1.12 billion in 2017, accusing it of reducing its deposit insurance contributions by failing to honor a 2011 rule that changed how…

Harvard had rejected numerous demands from the Trump administration that it said would cede control of the school to a conservative government that portrays universities as dangerously leftist. Within hours of Harvard taking its stand, the administration of President Donald Trump announced it was freezing $2.3 billion in federal funding to the school. The funding freeze comes after the Trump administration said last month it was reviewing $9 billion in federal contracts and grants to Harvard as part of a crackdown on what it says is antisemitism that erupted on college campuses during pro-Palestinian protests in the past 18 months.…

Britain said on Tuesday it could keep the country’s last steel blast furnaces burning for at least the next few weeks after securing a delivery of fuel – the latest step in a last-gasp government scramble to save domestic virgin steel production. The government had been racing to secure enough coking coal and iron ore to keep the loss-making furnaces running after passing emergency laws on Saturday to take operational control of the site in northeastern England from Chinese owners Jingye Group. The furnaces need to be constantly fuelled, can not easily be restarted if closed down, and are losing…

The United States has deported another 10 people that it alleges are gang members to El Salvador, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said on Sunday, a day before that country’s president is due to visit the White House. Salvadoran police officers escort an alleged gang member who was deported by the U.S. along with others the U.S. alleges are members of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua and the MS-13 gang to be imprisoned in the Terrorism Confinement Center (CECOT) prison. Lawyers and relatives of the migrants held in El Salvador say they are not gang members and had no…