In the News

Federal student loan borrowers are temporarily unable to apply to income-driven repayment plans, a decades-old safety net that ties their monthly loan payment size to household income levels, as the U.S. Education Department reviews a recent federal court ruling.

Rep. Deborah Ross (D-N.C.) and Rep. Lloyd Doggett (D-Texas), a top Democrat on the House Ways and Means Committee, led a letter to IRS Acting Commissioner Melanie Krause Wednesday blasting the firings of the new hires and the lack of transparency on where the cuts are happening. These Democrats also asked for clarity on how the IRS plans to mitigate the fallout and what the impact of firings are on compliance and the collection of revenue.

President Donald Trump’s new tariff hikes on Canada and Mexico will affect many states and congressional districts he won in the November election — starting with Texas. The Lone Star State, which Trump captured with 56 percent of the vote in 2024, is especially vulnerable to tariffs on Mexican goods. Its two-way trade with Mexico was $272 billion in 2023, or about one-third of total U.S.-Mexican trade that year.

Now 91, Doniecka still remem­bers the Ger­man phrase “schneller, schneller, pol­nis­che Sch­weine”, or “faster, faster, Pol­ish pigs”, she said dur­ing an inter­view in her Warsaw flat. Today she will be among some 50 sur­viv­ors who will return to Aus­chwitz for the 80th anniversary of its lib­er­a­tion by Soviet troops at a spe­cial cere­mony with heads of state, includ­ing Bri­tain’s King Charles III. They will pay homage to the estim­ated 1.1mn vic­tims who died at the camp, the epi­centre of the Holo­caust built by the Nazis near the town of Oświęcim in occu­pied Poland. Most vic­tims were Jew­ish, but many Pol­ish, Roma and Rus­sian pris­on­ers of war also died there.

Donald Trump insisted he was serious in his determination to take over Greenland in a fiery telephone call with Denmark’s prime minister, according to senior European officials. The US president spoke to Mette Frederiksen, the Danish premier, for 45 minutes last week. The White House has not commented on the call but Frederiksen said she had emphasised that the vast Arctic island — an autonomous part of the kingdom of Denmark — was not for sale, while noting America’s “big interest” in it.

President Trump on Tuesday granted a pardon to Ross Ulbricht, the creator of the Silk Road drug marketplace and a cult hero in the cryptocurrency and libertarian worlds.

Oilfield services company SLB is facing growing pressure from US lawmakers to pull out of Russia following the imposition of sweeping new sanctions against the nation’s energy sector by the Biden administration. Two US congressmen told the Financial Times the company, better known as Schlumberger, should get out of Russia or risk breaching US sanctions. Lloyd Doggett and Jake Auchincloss issued the warning following an order published by the Biden administration on Friday, prohibiting the provision of US petroleum services to persons located in Russia from February 27.