US updates: Federal appeals court reinstates Trump tariffs

And with those words from US President Donald Trump, we're closing down these live updates that saw one court overturn the US leader's sweeping tariffs, and, about 24 hours later, another court reinstate them. 

Thanks for reading. 

US President Donald Trump criticized the trade court decision that said he had overstepped his authority by setting global tariffs.

"The ruling by the U.S. Court of International Trade is so wrong, and so political! Hopefully, the Supreme Court will reverse this horrible, Country threatening decision, QUICKLY and DECISIVELY," he wrote on Truth Social, going on to question if the legal decision came out of "purely a hatred of 'TRUMP.'"

The over 500-word post also claimed that tariffs had brought "many Trillions of dollars" into the US economy. No current economic analysis supports this claim.

The White House downplayed questions about its report on children's health, but edited the document Thursday after authors listed in the paper confirmed it cited studies that do not exist.

Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. released the "Make America Healthy Again" (MAHA) report on May 22, but authors and publishers of at least four studies listed in the original document told the AFP news agency they or their organizations were credited with papers they did not write — or that never existed.

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt described the mishaps as "formatting issues" during a press briefing Thursday.

The errors were first reported on Thursday by NOTUS, a US digital news website affiliated with the nonprofit Allbritton Journalism Institute.

Columbia University, the peer-reviewed journal JAMA Pediatrics, a professor Baylor College of Medicine, and the Virginia Commonwealth University said their work was incorrectly cited in the MAHA report or that the work cited did not exist.

Kennedy has promised to bring "radical transparency" and "gold-standard" science to the public health agencies.

The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) declined to comment, referring questions from AFP to the White House. The White House declined to address whether artificial intelligence was used to draft the report, directing questions back to HHS.

US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said Elon Musk did "very important work" in the Trump administration, adding that the so-called Department of Government Efficiency's (DOGE) work would continue following the billionaire's departure.

"DOGE is not going to end with Elon," Bessent told the Fox News Channel. "It is a way of thinking about cutting costs, and it's also a way of thinking about making the government more productive and more efficient. So I would expect that these would be the initial savings, and they will continue from here."

Musk announced on Tuesday that his time as a government employee had come to an end (see earlier entry).

Kenneth Genalo, the head of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement's (ICE) removal division, and Robert Hammer, who runs ICE's investigative arm, will be replaced, according to sources familiar with the matter.

Genalo will retire. Hammer will be reassigned, according to the department.

It has been rumored that the two were pushed out of their posts for failing to meet demands from the Trump administration that ICE triple the number of daily arrests it makes from 1,000 to 3,000.

The current number of deportations remains lower than those posted by Trump's predecessor, Joe Biden.

A spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security denied the men had been pushed out by the White House but gave no further information.

Trump's deputy chief of staff, Stephen Miller, a hardline anti-immigrant figure within the US administration, reportedly railed at ICE officials last week, shouting at them over weak arrest numbers, according to White House sources.

ICE on Thursday said former Dallas field office director Marcos Charles would take over enforcement and removal operations, while Washington-based official Derek Gordon will be put in charge of investigations.

A global stock rally that kicked off earlier on Thursday when a federal judge blocked US President Donald Trump's global tariff scheme stalled when the administration won a temporary lifting of the injunction at an appeals court.

The S&P 500 gave up more than half of its early gains at the end of trading Thursday, rising 0.4%. The Dow Jones index was up 0.3% and the NASDAQ composite was up 0.4%. That came after global stocks leapt nearly 2% in both Tokyo and Seoul. 

Uncertainty has plagued markets since Trump's return to office, a phenomenon reflected in the latest US economic and employment data released by the Commerce and Labor Departments.

The Commerce Department projected that Q1 corporate profits in the US were down $118.1 billion (€103.8 billion), and that the economy shrank by 0.2% overall compared to Q1 2024 — the largest contraction in four years.

Those drops have led to higher US unemployment numbers, with analysts predicting more layoffs may be on the way due to the uncertainty sparked by Trump's erratic economic and trade policies.

A federal appeals court reinstated the Trump administration's sweeping tariffs on Thursday afternoon, a day after a trade court had blocked them and ruled that the president had overstepped his authority.

The United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit did not provide an opinion or reasoning as part of its ruling, which suspends the block on the "Liberation Day" tariffs imposed by the Court of International Trade in New York a day earlier.

The appeals court directed the plaintiffs to respond by June 5, and the Trump administration to respond by June 9.

The White House reacted strongly rebuked a federal court's decision to block many of President Donald Trump's sweeping tariffs, which has been seen as a setback to his trade strategy.

The White House called this ruling "blatantly wrong" on social media, expressing confidence that the decision would be overturned on appeal.

Trump's trade adviser Peter Navarro also told Bloomberg Television: "Nothing's really changed. If anybody thinks this caught the administration by surprise, think again."

Attorneys for the Trump administration have filed an appeal against the ruling, which gave the White House 10 days to complete the process of halting affected tariffs. 

White House spokesman Kush Desai earlier said: "It is not for unelected judges to decide how to properly address a national emergency."

An initial rally in various stock markets on Thursday eased off as uncertainty continued following a court ruling related to the global tariffs imposed by US President Donald Trump.

The ruling saw the stock markets in Tokyo and Seoul, which had the first chance to react, leap by almost 2%, after raising hopes in financial markets that a hamstrung Trump would not see the economy move into a recession with his desired tariffs.

Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney welcomed the decision, saying it was "consistent with Canada's longstanding position" that Trump's tariffs were unlawful.

However, other US trading partners offered careful responses. The British government said the ruling was a domestic matter for the US administration and noted it was "only the first stage of legal proceedings." 

Trump "is still able to impose significant and wide-ranging tariffs over the longer-term through other means," according to Ulrike Hoffmann-Burchardi, chief investment officer of global equities at UBS Global Wealth Management.

China urged the United States on Thursday to completely drop all the tariffs that it has imposed since President Donald Trump took office in January after a US federal court blocked most of them from going into effect.

"China urges the United States to heed the rational voices from the international community and domestic stakeholders and fully cancel the wrongful unilateral tariff measures," Commerce Ministry spokeswoman He Yongqian told a news conference. 

China has been a major target of US tariffs, with Trump recently raising them to 145% before pulling them back to 30% for 90 days of negotiation.

Most economists have said the sweeping levies ordered by Trump would be unlikely to produce the positive effects for the US economy that he has promised.

Beijing has condemned the US decision, announced on Wednesday, to revoke the visas of Chinese students.

"The US has unreasonably canceled Chinese students' visas under the pretext of ideology and national rights," Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Mao Ning said. "China firmly opposes this and has lodged representations with the US."

Mao went on to say that the decision had "seriously damaged the legitimate rights and interests of Chinese students and disrupted the normal cultural exchanges between the two countries."

"This political and discriminatory practice of the US has exposed the lies of the so-called freedom and openness that the US has always advertised, and further damaged the US's own international image, national image and national credibility," she said.

US Secretary of State Marco Rubio said Wednesday evening that visas for Chinese students would be "aggressively" revoked and future visa applications from China and Hong Kong subjected to enhanced scrutiny.

Chinese students are one of the largest sources of revenue for US universities, and make up roughly a quarter of all foreign students in the United States. Only India has a larger student contingent in the US.

The visa move seems in line with the Trump administration's seemingly hostile attitude to US institutes of higher learning, which  it apparently sees as bastions of a liberal ideology that is at odds with its own agenda. 

The court ruling has invalidated with immediate effect all of the orders on tariffs given by Trump since January that took the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) as a justification.

Among other things, it applies to the sweeping import duties on most trading partners that Trump announced on April 2, which included tariffs at a baseline of 10% in addition to higher levies on dozens of economies, including China and the European Union.

Separate duties imposed by Trump on Canada, Mexico and China under the IEEPA have also been ruled invalid.

But US tariffs imposed on automobiles, steel and aluminum remain unaffected, as they were issued under a different statute.

There's still uncertainty about what will happen next as the Trump adminstration, while already engaging in trade talks over the planned tariffs, lodges an appeal. 

"TACO trade" — with the acronym standing for "Trump Always Chickens Out" — is the term coined by Robert Armstrong from The Financial Times to denote US President Donald Trump's tactic of setting high tariff rates, then pulling back.

The term has reportedly spread on Wall Street, as investors and traders learned not to react quickly to his decisions, but rather wait and see if he walks back on them.

As could be expected, Trump himself is not pleased by the term, calling a reporter's question as to whether he was indeed chickening out "nasty."

"It's called negotiation; you set a number," Trump said.

Among other things, the president defended raising tariffs on Chinese goods to 145% before reducing them to 30% for 90 days to allow negotiations.

Trump claimed that his strategy has led to $14 billion (€12.4 billion) in new investment in the US, a figure that no economic data has so far fully substantiated.

"Don't ever say what you said!" Trump told the reporter who asked him on Wednesday if TACO was a good description of his trade policy.

US President Donald Trump's administration has canceled $766 million (€681 million) awarded to drugmaker Moderna Inc to develop an mRNA vaccine against potential pandemic influenza viruses, including the avian flu strain H5N1, the company said.

The cancelation is the latest anti-vaccine move by Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has long promoted misinformation about immunization and particulary mRNA vaccines, which were key to the fight against COVID-19.

The development by Moderna of a vaccine against H5N1 comes as experts warn that the strain, which has been circulating among birds and cattle, could jump to humans and trigger another pandemic.

As Moderna announced the cancelation of the federal funding, it also announced positive results from an early-stage clinical trial of the vaccine.

"While the termination of funding from HHS [Health and Human Services Department] adds uncertainty, we are pleased by the robust immune response and safety profile observed in this interim analysis of the Phase 1/2 study of our H5 avian flu vaccine, and we will explore alternative paths forward for the program," said CEO Stephane Bancel in a statement. 

"These clinical data in pandemic influenza underscore the critical role mRNA technology has played as a countermeasure to emerging health threats," he said.

During his first term in office, Trump backed the so-called Operation Warp Speed, a private-public partnership that aimed to facilitate the fast development of COVID-19 vaccines, among them the mRNA vaccines that Kennedy regards with suspicion.

Harvard University is due to hold its annual graduation ceremony Thursday as the storied Ivy League institute continues to contend with the punitive measures taken against itby President Donald Trump.

Dr. Abraham Verghese, a bestselling author and Stanford expert on infectious diseases, will be the principal speaker at what will be the university's 374th commencement.

On Wednesday,  basketball star and human rights campaigner Kareem Abdul-Jabbar addressed the class of 2025 for Class Day, praising the university's president, Alan Garber, for taking a stand against Trump.

"When a tyrannical administration tried to bully and threaten Harvard to give up their academic freedom and destroy free speech, Dr. Alan Garber rejected the illegal and immoral pressures the way Rosa Parks declined," he said to applause.

Rosa Parks was a Black activist whose refusal to give up her seat on a bus in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1955 triggered a boycott that ultimately led to the desegregation of the city's public transit services, which is seen as a watershed moment in the US civil rights movement.

Since taking office, Trump has sought to ban the university from having foreign students, canceled its contracts with the federal government and slashed grants worth millions of dollars, while accusing it of antisemitism and liberal bias.

All the measures are being challenged in court.

Harvard was founded in 1636, making it a century and a half older than the US itself.

Former German Chancellor Angela Merkel held the commencement speech at Harvard in 2019.