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Bullied and buffeted by Donald Trump’s tariffs for the past year, America’s longstanding allies are desperately seeking ways to shield themselves from the president’s impulsive wrath.

U.S. trade partners are cutting deals among themselves —- sometimes discarding old differences to do so — in a push to diversify their economies away from a newly protectionist United States. Central banks and global investors are dumping dollars and buying gold. Together, their actions could diminish U.S. influence and mean higher interest rates and prices for Americans already angry about the high cost of living.

Last summer and fall, Trump used the threat of punishing taxes on imports to strong-arm the European Union, Japan, South Korea and other trading partners into accepting lopsided trade deals and promising to make massive investments in the United States.

But a deal with Trump, they’ve discovered, is no deal at all.

The developer of the popular open source text editor Notepad++ has confirmed that hackers hijacked the software to deliver malicious updates to users over the course of several months in 2025.

In a blog post published Monday, Notepad++ developer Don Ho said that the cyberattack was likely carried out by hackers associated with the Chinese government between June and December 2025, citing multiple analyses by security experts who examined the malware payloads and attack patterns. Ho said this “would explain the highly selective targeting” seen during the campaign.

French prosecutors searched the offices of Elon Musk’s social media platform X on Tuesday as part of a preliminary investigation into a range of alleged offences, including spreading child sexual abuse images and deepfakes.

The investigation was opened in January last year by the prosecutors’ cybercrime unit, the Paris prosecutors’ office said in a statement. It is looking into alleged “complicity” in possession and spreading of pornographic images of minors, sexually explicit deepfakes, denial of crimes against humanity and manipulation of an automated data processing system as part of an organized group, among other charges.

In addition, prosecutors filed a request for “voluntary interviews” of Elon Musk and Linda Yaccarino, CEO of X from 2023 to 2025, scheduled for April 20. Employees of the platform X have also been summoned that same week in April to be heard as witnesses, the statement said.

The deaths of Renee Macklin Good and Alex Pretti have shaken up the conversation about how states should respond to immigration crackdowns across the country.

Some Democratic leaders have vowed to hold federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers accountable — even charging them with crimes.

However, after Trump took office last year, many red states jumped to support the president's mass deportation efforts.

In Tennessee, the state provides grants to law enforcement agencies that work with ICE. Since that was passed last year, the number of sheriff's offices and police departments that have signed a formal agreement with ICE has skyrocketed.

Now, Republican lawmakers in the state are considering making that voluntary program involuntary as part of a bigger immigration package. Kentucky lawmakers are moving in the same direction.

When Donald Trump looks like he’s gearing up to meddle in an election, still-raw history suggests he should be believed.

He showed yet again Monday he’s obsessing about the midterm elections — two days after a Democratic upset in a reliably Republican state Senate district in Texas offered another ominous sign for the GOP in November.

“The Republicans should say, ‘We want to take over, we should take over the voting, the voting in at least many, 15 places.’ The Republicans ought to nationalize the voting,” Trump said. “We have states that are so crooked, and they’re counting votes. We have states that I won, that show I didn’t win.”

Trump’s warning was one of his most overt efforts yet to create a narrative of suspicion around November’s elections in case the Republican Party does poorly because of his tanking poll numbers. This is a familiar tactic. Trump laid groundwork for his false claims the election was stolen in 2020 months before the first votes were cast in his defeat to Joe Biden.

The White House says the president is ‘not involved’ in running his businesses. Ethics experts remain concerned

Donald Trump has been accused of “corruption, plain and simple” after it was revealed that a member of the Emirati royal family was behind a $500m investment into the Trump family’s cryptocurrency company.

Ethics experts say the deal – struck just days before the US president’s inauguration last January – amounts to a deep conflict of interest for the White House, amid calls for a congressional investigation into the transaction.

Months after the deal, the Trump administration announced that the United Arab Emirates would be allowed to import 500,000 of Nvidia’s powerful AI chips – overriding concerns that the deal could eventually allow China access to the technology.

China is banning hidden door handles on all cars sold in the country, becoming the first country in the world to target the feature – which was popularized by Tesla but has for years drawn concern over safety risks.

The feature has previously come under heavy scrutiny, both in China and elsewhere.

Last September, Tesla said it was looking into redesigning the way to open its car doors in an emergency, after several accidents where passengers were reportedly killed or severely injured in burning vehicles because rescuers could not open them.

Other Tesla owners have reported having to break their own car windows after buckling their children in and then being unable to get in the car again, according to an investigation by the US National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.

An investigation by Bloomberg found 140 incidents of people being trapped in their Teslas due to problems with the door handles, including several that resulted in horrific injuries.

Advocates call for further disclosures after Trump’s justice department released more than 3m files last week

The release of about 3m Jeffrey Epstein investigative files has failed to quell outrage over justice department officials’ handling of these disclosures, with advocates claiming potentially millions of documents are still being withheld.

Donald Trump’s Department of Justice was required to disclose all investigative files by 19 December under The Epstein Files Transparency Act (EFTA). While the justice department did release some documents on that date, last week’s disclosure came nearly six weeks after this deadline.

The missed deadline and up to 3m files that remain unreleased have prompted criticism and calls for further disclosure to answer how Epstein sexually abused girls with impunity for decades and landed a sweetheart plea deal about 20 years ago that allowed him to avoid federal prosecution.

Offices belonging to Elon Musk's social media platform, X, in France are being raided by the Paris prosecutor.

Its cyber-crime unit is conducting the searches, it said in a statement on X. Europol is assisting.

It added it was related to an investigation opened in January 2025 following complaints about X's algorithm and the content it recommended.

In its statement, the prosecutor's office said the operation formed part of efforts to ensure X complied with French laws. It said the probe, led by French cyber-crime police, was expanded in July 2025 after reports of sexually explicit deepfakes and holocaust denial content circulating on the platform.

Trump supporter Júnior Pena falsely claimed migrants being rounded up, including Brazilians, were ‘all crooks’

A rightwing Brazilian influencer who claimed Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown targeted only “crooks” has been arrested by ICE agents in New Jersey.

Júnior Pena, whose full name is Eustáquio da Silva Pena Júnior, declared his support for the US president in a recent video message to his hundreds of thousands of social media followers.

“I [support] Donald Trump – I like the guy,” announced the South American TikToker and Instagrammer whose account purports to show “the reality of the United States” from a migrant’s perspective.

On Saturday, Pena was himself reportedly detained and sent to the Delaney Hall detention facility in Newark, New Jersey. One friend told the local newspaper the Brazilian Times that Pena had been taken into custody after missing a court hearing. The detainee’s lawyer, Andrew Lattarulo, was reportedly trying to resolve the situation and prevent him being transferred to another state.

Commissioner to file motion requesting return of property unlawfully taken during raid related to 2020 election

Fulton county leaders said they would fire back in court on Monday, intent on limiting the scope of a federal warrant that led the FBI to seize 2020 elections documents last week.

County attorneys intend to file a motion in federal court asking for an order mandating the return of property that was unlawfully seized or retained, said the Fulton county commissioner Marvin Arrington Jr.

The FBI needs to explain why they took original documents including ballots, instead of the copies that a previous ruling in a related civil case had entitled them to, Arrington said.

“The judge in that case told them that they could not get the records, and so instead of them complying with that order, they did an end run and circumvented the judge’s order,” Arrington said. “I can’t imagine that Judge [Thomas W] Thrash will be happy about the fact that they did this after he said no.”

The Hennepin County Attorney’s Office said it has sent what are known as Touhy letters to gain crime scene evidence from the shooting death of Renee Good by ICE agent Jonathan Ross.

State prosecutors have formally demanded that the Trump administration turn over any evidence gathered by federal authorities after the shooting death of Renee Good by ICE agent Jonathan Ross.

Hennepin County Attorney Mary Moriarty announced Monday that her office had served what are known as Touhy letters on the Department of Justice and the Department of Homeland Security. The legal filing seeks a wide range of potential evidence from Good’s killing on Jan. 7 in south Minneapolis and gives a Feb. 17 deadline to respond.

The demand letters come as the county attorney — alongside the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension and the Minnesota Attorney General’s Office — continues to pursue an independent state investigation into Ross’ deadly use of force.