PBS sues Trump administration over defunding

In the claim, PBS relies on similar arguments, saying Mr Trump was overstepping his authority and engaging in 'viewpoint discrimination' because of his claim that PBS' news coverage is biased against conservatives.
'PBS disputes those charged assertions in the strongest possible terms,' lawyer Z W Julius Chen wrote in the case, filed in a US court in Washington.
'But regardless of any policy disagreements over the role of public television, our constitution and laws forbid the president from serving as the arbiter of the content of PBS's programming, including by attempting to defund PBS.'
It was the latest of many legal actions taken against the administration for its moves, including several by media organisations impacted by Mr Trump's orders.
A PBS spokesman said that 'after careful deliberation, PBS reached the conclusion that it was necessary to take legal action to safeguard public television's editorial independence, and to protect the autonomy of PBS member stations'.
Mr Trump's order 'would have profound impacts on the ability of PBS and PBS member stations to provide a rich tapestry of programming to all Americans,' Mr Chen wrote.
PBS said the US Department of Education has cancelled a 78 million dollar grant to the system for educational programming, used to make children's shows like Sesame Street, Clifford the Big Red Dog and Reading Rainbow.
Besides Mr Trump, the claim names other administration officials as defendants, including US education secretary Linda McMahon, treasury secretary Scott Bessent and homeland security secretary Kristi Noem.
PBS says its technology is used as a backup for the nationwide wireless emergency alert system.
The administration has fought with several media organisations. Government-run news services like Voice of America and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty are also struggling, The Associated Press has battled with the White House over press access and the Federal Communications Commission is investigating television news divisions.

Try Our AI Features

Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:

Learn with AIFact CheckingText to SpeechAI Summary

Related Articles

Daily Mail​

27 minutes ago

• Daily Mail​

BREAKING NEWS Shelter in place ordered for Americans in Qatar amid growing fears of Iran retaliation

The US Embassy in Qatar has ordered Americans in the nation to 'shelter in place' as fears grow of an Iranian retaliation to the US strikes on Saturday night. The Embassy warned Americans to seek shelter 'out of an abundance of caution.' It did not say how long the shelter in place order is expected to last. There are up to 15,000 American residents in Qatar, and the United States also has 19 military facilities in the Middle East nation. Qatar has served as an intermediary between the United States and Iran in the past and was coordinating negotiations over Iran's nuclear resources earlier this month before Israel ended the talks by attacking Iran on June 13. This is a developing story, check back for updates.

Daily Mirror

27 minutes ago

• Daily Mirror

'Trump let Iran make nukes he's mad about - he's at war for a Nobel Peace Prize'

If there is one disease which lies behind the constant spasms of horror with which our days our currently blighted, it is the human race's inability to remember what happened five minutes ago. Once upon a time, journalists would go to the pub, and then bed. Sometimes they'd go to bed with each other, because they'd been to the pub. But they'd wake up in the morning and go "blimey, an earthquake in Japan. I had better find a good story of my own about this". And they would have to go deeper into a story and its origins. Today they don't drink, barely know their colleagues, and wake up to emails from a 24-rolling news ecosystem that demands constant feeding. Journalists think "blimey, everyone else is ahead of me" and scramble to catch up. No-one has time to think, which is why no-one has told you that Donald Trump just bombed Iran for making nuclear weapons that Donald Trump let them make. I wish I was making this stuff up, but no-one's got time for that. It's imperative people start remembering how we got to the cliff edge, because we did it by skipping about blindfold and if we don't stop soon we're going to go right over. America gave Iran nuclear technology in 1957. The aim was 'atoms for peace', to create wealth, and allies in the Middle East. After years of the world's greatest democracy propping up a cruel monarchy, the shah fell, the mullahs arose, and Iran was in less-friendly hands. The 1980s was taken up with a war against Iraq, but in the 1990s two Gulf Wars and continued US tinkering led the mullahs to the not-entirely-mad opinion that a nuclear weapon was the best way of keeping the Great Satan at bay. Israel, quite reasonably, was less than chuffed. And as technology sped up it became imperative to find ways of stopping Iran getting a weapon that apocalyptic fundamentalists would see very little reason not to detonate, slap-bang in the middle of a resource-rich, conflict-heavy trade route. And so in 2015, six countries signed a deal with Iran. In return for checks that it wasn't building The Bomb, everyone was open for business. And for three years the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action worked. Germany, China, Russia, France, the UK, China and the US lifted economic sanctions, and every 90 days would ratify everything was non-nuclear and tickety-boo. But such a vague agreement could not withstand the arrival of Donald Trump, whose tiny hands happily dismantled everything that made Barack Obama look good. In 2018 when Benjamin Netanyahu - yes it really is all the same people - gave a speech claiming his spy agency Mossad had stolen 100,000 documents showing Iran had lied and was enriching uranium, Trump saw a 30-second clip and decided it must be true. It might have been. The other nations in the deal didn't think so. But rather than renegotiate, send in inspectors, react as any sane human might, Trump just went "nah", and pulled out of the deal. The other countries tried to keep it going. The International Atomic Energy Authority said there was no enrichment. But the US whacked the regime with sanctions, and Iran said it too would pull out unless they were lifted. They were not. In 2020 the IAEA said Iran had tripled its uranium stockpile, a year later it blocked access to inspectors, and by 2023 it had weapons-grade material. Over the same period, Iran's population suffered. A third were ground into poverty. The economic woes weakened the regime just enough to make it lash out. Iran was behind terror attacks worldwide, former Republican Guards were linked to planned assassinations of ex-Trump officials, and it faced internal protests too. Then Iran funded the October 7 massacre by Hamas. Cue Netanyahu, who was leading a rickety coalition and facing jail the moment it fell, cue the war in Gaza, cue pro-Palestine protests, and cue a lot of blaming Iran. This isn't hard to figure out or remember. It's just that the constant churn of new things to hold our attention never scrolls back to the start of the liveblog, or delves into the third page of search results. Iran is definitely run by a bunch of rotten eggs who could well have been pulling the radioactive wool over the world's eyes in return for a financial boost to stabilise their rule. But the best way of fixing that wasn't walking away from the only half-arsed deal anyone had. It was making a better deal, and if Trump had actually written his own biography rather than paying someone else to make him look good, he might have known how to do it. Trump's withdrawal was supported by Israel and Saudi Arabia, with 63% of US voters, most of the planet and his own advisers screaming at him not to. It was "a horrible one-sided deal that should have never, ever been made", he insisted. "It didn't bring peace and it never will." And so he destabilised and raised the oil price with sanctions, screwed regional trade which meant the price of wheat rose and people starved across several countries, and gave fresh targets to jihadis. Back in office for a second time, Trump wants a legacy and more than anything he wants the Nobel Peace Prize that Obama got, largely for diplomatic efforts with the Muslim world. Trump pledged to end the war in Ukraine "on day one" and it only got worse; he suggested building a golden beachside golf club in Gaza, and got laughed at. So his eye turned to Ayatollah Khameini, and the country which the US has done so much to make worse, for so long. Anyone with an ounce of realism in their body might wonder at the convenience with which the B-2 bombers and their bunker-busting payload were able to fly in unmolested, after the Israelis had suddenly switched attention from Gaza to take out the Iranian air defences a week earlier. It does seem odd that the imminent threat Netanyahu had predicted in 2018 bloomed 7 years later, 6 months after Trump returned to office and only after his other draft entries for the peace prize had evaporated. We might also ponder why the US president with the worst personal polls in history at this point in his leadership might be in want of some surgical strikes to appease his Muslim-hating base, and whether it would do him any harm if there were a couple of small terror attacks on US bases that would give an excuse to bomb the mullahs to the table. And having thought this far, we could ask ourselves how close to the edge of nuclear catastrophe Trump will allow the world to careen before he picks up the phone to "make a deal" which will be the bigliest, most beautiful peace deal of all time. And whether it will be worse than the one we used to have, before he ripped it to shreds out of petulance and exploited the disastrous consequences for the sake of vanity. With Iran alone, Trump has cost the world trillions. Now he is about to march an entire planet to the gates of hell, just so he can look good for marching everyone back again. And this plan works if he is a diplomatic genius able to unpick decades of crapola, and capable of remembering why and how it happened in the first place. But when all he watches is 24-hour rolling news, with constant updates about new stuff that isn't new at all, the best we can hope for is that the Nobel Committee gives him the prize now, just to make him stop.

NBC News

an hour ago

• NBC News

ICE detains Marine Corps veteran's wife who was still breastfeeding their 3-month-old

BATON ROUGE, La. — Marine Corps veteran Adrian Clouatre doesn't know how to tell his children where their mother went after U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers detained her last month. When his nearly 2-year-old son Noah asks for his mother before bed, Clouatre just tells him, "Mama will be back soon." When his 3-month-old, breastfeeding daughter Lyn is hungry, he gives her a bottle of baby formula instead. He's worried how his newborn will bond with her mother absent skin-to-skin contact. His wife, Paola, is one of tens of thousands of people in custody and facing deportation as the Trump administration pushes for immigration officers to arrest 3,000 people a day. Even as Marine Corps recruiters promote enlistment as protection for families lacking legal status, directives for strict immigrant enforcement have cast away practices of deference previously afforded to military families, immigration law experts say. The federal agency tasked with helping military family members gain legal status now refers them for deportation, government memos show. To visit his wife, Adrian Clouatre has to make an eight-hour round trip from their home in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, to a rural ICE detention center in Monroe. Clouatre, who qualifies as a service-disabled veteran, goes every chance he can get. Paola Clouatre, a 25-year-old Mexican national whose mother brought her into the country seeking asylum more than a decade ago, met Adrian Clouatre, 26, at a southern California nightclub during the final months of his five years of military service in 2022. Within a year, they had tattooed each other's names on their arms. After they married in 2024, Paola Clouatre sought a green card to legally live and work in the U.S. Adrian Clouatre said he is "not a very political person" but believes his wife deserved to live legally in the U.S. "I'm all for 'get the criminals out of the country,' right?" he said. "But the people that are here working hard, especially the ones married to Americans — I mean, that's always been a way to secure a green card." Detained at a green card meeting The process to apply for Paola Clouatre's green card went smoothly at first, but eventually she learned ICE had issued an order for her deportation in 2018 after her mother failed to appear at an immigration hearing. Clouatre and her mother had been estranged for years — Clouatre cycled out of homeless shelters as a teenager — and up until a couple of months ago, Clouatre had "no idea" about her mother's missed hearing or the deportation order, her husband said. Adrian Clouatre recalled that a U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services staffer asked about the deportation order during a May 27 appointment as part of her green card application. After Paola Clouatre explained that she was trying to reopen her case, the staffer asked her and her husband to wait in the lobby for paperwork regarding a follow-up appointment, which her husband said he believed was a "ploy." Soon, officers arrived and handcuffed Paola Clouatre, who handed her wedding ring to her husband for safekeeping. Adrian Clouatre, eyes welling with tears, said he and his wife had tried to "do the right thing" and that he felt ICE officers should have more discretion over arrests, though he understood they were trying to do their jobs. "It's just a hell of a way to treat a veteran," said Carey Holliday, a former immigration judge who is now representing the couple. "You take their wives and send them back to Mexico?" The Clouatres filed a motion for a California-based immigration judge to reopen the case on Paola's deportation order and are waiting to hear back, Holliday said. Less discretion for military families Department of Homeland Security spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin said in an emailed statement that Paola Clouatre "is in the country illegally" and that the administration is "not going to ignore the rule of law." "Ignoring an Immigration Judge's order to leave the U.S. is a bad idea," U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services said in a June 9 post on X which appeared to refer to Clouatre's case. The agency added that the government "has a long memory and no tolerance for defiance when it comes to making America safe again." Adrian Clouatre said the agency's X post does not accurately reflect his wife's situation because she entered the country as a minor with her mother, seeking asylum. "She was not aware of the removal order, so she was not knowingly defying it," he said. "If she had been arrested, she would have been deported long ago, and we would never have met." Prior to the Trump administration's push to drive up deportations, USCIS provided much more discretion for veterans seeking legal status for a family member, said Holliday and Margaret Stock, a military immigration law expert. In a Feb. 28 memo, the agency said it "will no longer exempt" from deportation people in groups that had received more grace in the past. This includes the families of military personnel or veterans, Stock said. As of June 12, the agency said it has referred upward of 26,000 cases to ICE for deportation. USCIS still offers a program allowing family members of military personnel who illegally entered the U.S. to remain in the country as they apply for a green card. But there no longer appears to be room for leeway, such as giving a veteran's spouse like Paola Clouatre the opportunity to halt her active deportation order without facing arrest, Stock said. But numerous Marine Corps recruiters have continued to post ads on social media, geared toward Latinos, promoting enlistment as a way to gain "protection from deportation" for family members. "I think it's bad for them to be advertising that people are going to get immigration benefits when it appears that the administration is no longer offering these immigration benefits," Stock said. "It sends the wrong message to the recruits." Marine Corps spokesperson Master Sgt. Tyler Hlavac told The Associated Press that recruiters have now been informed they are "not the proper authority" to "imply that the Marine Corps can secure immigration relief for applicants or their families."