freeze

Commercial flights between the countries to restart as diplomatic thaw eases tensions over border clashes.

State-backed China Eastern Airlines will resume Shanghai-Delhi flights from November 9, the airline’s website shows, as China and India resume direct air links amid a diplomatic thaw, largely triggered by aggressive United States trade policies, after a five-year freeze.

The flights will operate three times a week on Wednesdays, Saturdays and Sundays, the airline’s online ticket sales platform showed on Saturday.

China Eastern Airlines did not immediately respond to the Reuters news agency’s emailed request for comment.

India’s foreign ministry said earlier this month that commercial flights between the two neighbouring countries would restart after a five-year freeze.

The announcement followed Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s first visit to China in more than seven years, for a summit meeting of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation regional security bloc. The two sides discussed ways to improve trade ties, while Modi raised concerns about India’s burgeoning bilateral trade deficit.

India and China’s foreign ministries did not immediately respond to requests for comment on the Shanghai-Delhi flights.

India’s largest carrier, IndiGo, previously announced it would start daily nonstop flights between Kolkata and Guangzhou.

State-backed Guangzhou Baiyun International Airport said at the time of the IndiGo announcement that it would encourage airlines to open more direct routes, such as between Guangzhou and Delhi.

Direct flights between the two countries were suspended during the COVID pandemic in 2020 and did not resume after deadly clashes along their Himalayan border led to a prolonged military stand-off later that year.

Four Chinese soldiers and 20 Indian soldiers were killed in the worst violence between the neighbours in decades.

India and China’s diplomatic thaw comes amid US President Donald Trump’s increasingly belligerent trade polices.

The US president raised the tariff rate on Indian imports to a stiff 50 percent in September, citing the nation’s continuing purchases of Russian oil.

He also urged the European Union to impose 100 percent tariffs on China and India, ostensibly as part of his efforts to pressure Moscow to end its war in Ukraine.

WASHINGTON — Chief Justice John Roberts on Tuesday temporarily kept in place the Trump administration’s decision to freeze nearly $5 billion in foreign aid.

Roberts acted on the administration’s emergency appeal to the Supreme Court in a case involving billions of dollars in congressionally approved aid. President Trump said last month that he would not spend the money, invoking disputed authority that was last used by a president roughly 50 years ago.

The high court order is temporary, though it suggests the justices will reverse a lower court ruling that withholding the funding was probably illegal. U.S. District Judge Amir Ali ruled last week that Congress would have to approve the decision to withhold the funding.

Trump told House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) in a letter Aug. 28 that he would not spend $4.9 billion in congressionally approved foreign aid, effectively cutting the budget without going through the legislative branch.

He used what’s known as a pocket rescission. That’s when a president submits a request to Congress toward the end of a current budget year to not spend the approved money. The late notice means Congress cannot act on the request in the required 45-day window and the money goes unspent.

The Trump administration has made deep reductions to foreign aid one of its hallmark policies, despite the relatively meager savings relative to the deficit and the possible damage to America’s reputation abroad as foreign populations lose access to food supplies and development programs. The administration turned to the high court after a panel of federal appellate judges declined to block Ali’s ruling.

Justice Department lawyers told a federal judge last month that an additional $6.5 billion in aid that had been subject to the freeze would be spent before the end of the fiscal year Sept. 30.

The case has been winding its way through the courts for months, and Ali said he understood that his ruling would not be the last word on the matter.

“This case raises questions of immense legal and practical importance, including whether there is any avenue to test the executive branch’s decision not to spend congressionally appropriated funds,” he wrote.

In August, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit threw out an earlier injunction Ali had issued to require that the money be spent. But the three-judge panel did not shut down the lawsuit.

After Trump issued his rescission notice, the plaintiffs returned to Ali’s court and the judge issued the order that’s now being challenged.

Sherman writes for the Associated Press.

Sept. 3 (UPI) — A federal judge cited First Amendment rights Wednesday in an order blocking the Trump administration’s attempt to withhold more than $2 billion in government funding from Harvard University.

U.S. Judge Allison Burroughs of the District of Massachusetts restored the funding — in the form of grants and contracts — in response to a lawsuit brought by the university and employee groups. The lawsuit accused the President Donald Trump of leveraging the funding “to gain control of academic decision-making at Harvard.”

Among the programs affected by the block in funding were research in science and medicine, including on radiation exposure, ALS diagnostics and tuberculosis treatment.

Trump attempted to withhold funding and block Harvard from admitting international students after taking issue with students’ anti-Israel protests over the war in Gaza. The administration accused Harvard of failing to crack down on anti-Semitism.

Burroughs said that while Harvard was wrong to not attempt to curtail “hateful behavior for as long as it did,” she doubts the administration’s stated aims.

“The record here, however, does not reflect that fighting anti-semitism was Defendants’ true aim in acting against Harvard and, even if it were, combatting anti-Semitism cannot be accomplished on the back of the First Amendment,” she wrote.

In June, Burroughs granted a preliminary injunction blocking Trump’s efforts to bar international students from enrolling at Harvard.

Their medical research focuses on potentially lifesaving breakthroughs in cancer treatment, and developing tools to more easily diagnose debilitating diseases. Their studies in mathematics could make online systems more robust and secure.

But as the academic year opens, the work of UCLA’s professors in these and many other fields has been imperiled by the Trump administration’s suspension of $584 million in grant funding, which University of California President James B. Milliken called a “death knell” to its transformative research.

The freeze came after a July 29 U.S. Department of Justice finding that the university had violated the civil rights of Jewish and Israeli students by providing an inadequate response to alleged antisemitism they faced after the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack.

The fight over the funding stoppage intensified Friday after the Trump administration demanded that UCLA pay a $1-billion fine, among other concessions, to resolve the accusations — and California Gov. Gavin Newsom said the state will sue, calling the proposal “extortion.”

Amid heightened tensions in Westwood, thousands of university academics are in limbo. In total, at least 800 grants, mostly from the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health, have been frozen.

UCLA scholars described days of confusion as they struggle to understand how the loss of grants would affect their work and scramble to uncover new funding sources — or roles that would ensure their continued pay, or that of their colleagues. While professors still have jobs and paychecks to draw on, many others, including graduate students, rely on grant funding for their salaries, tuition and healthcare.

At least for the moment, though, several academics told The Times that their work had not yet be interrupted. So far, no layoffs have been announced.

Sydney Campbell, a UCLA cancer researcher whose grant funding has been cut, stands inside the Biomedical Sciences Research building at UCLA.

(Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)

Sydney Campbell, a pancreatic cancer researcher and postdoctoral scholar at UCLA’s David Geffen School of Medicine, said her work — which aims to understand how diet affects the disease — is continuing for now. She has an independent fellowship that “hopefully will protect the majority of my salary.” But others, she said, don’t have that luxury.

“It is absolutely going to affect people’s livelihoods. I already know of people … with families who are having to take pay cuts almost immediately,” said Campbell, who works for a lab that has lost two National Institutes of Health grants, including one that funds her research.

Pancreatic cancer is among the most deadly of cancers, but Campbell’s work could lead to a better understanding of it, paving the way for more robust prophylactic programs — and treatment plans — that may ultimately help tame the scourge.

“Understanding how diet can impact cancer development could lead to preventive strategies that we can recommend to patients in the future,” she said. “Right now we can’t effectively do that because we don’t have the information about the underlying biology. Our studies will help us actually be able to make recommendations based on science.”

Campbell’s work — and that of many others at UCLA — is potentially groundbreaking. But it could soon be put on hold.

“We have people who don’t know if they’re going to be able to purchase experimental materials for the rest of the month,” she said.

Fears of existential crisis

For some, the cuts have triggered something close to an existential crisis.

After professor Dino Di Carlo, chair of the UCLA Samueli Bioengineering Department, learned about 20 grants were suspended there — including four in his lab worth about $1 million — he felt a profound sadness. He said he doesn’t know why his grants were frozen, and there may not be money to pay his six researchers.

So Di Carlo, who is researching diagnostics for Lyme and other tick-borne diseases, took to LinkedIn, where he penned a post invoking the Franz Kafka novel “The Trial.” The unsettling tale is about a man named Josef K. who wakes up and finds himself under arrest and then on trial — with no understanding of the situation.

“Like Josef K., the people actually affected — the public, young scientists, patients waiting for better treatments and diagnostic tools — are left asking: What crime did we commit?” wrote Di Carlo. “They are being judged by a system that no longer explains itself.”

The LinkedIn post quickly attracted dozens of comments and more than 1,000 other responses. Di Carlo, who has been working to find jobs for researchers who depend on paychecks that come from now-suspended grants, said he appreciated the support.

But, goodwill has its limits. “It doesn’t pay the rent for a student this month,” he said.

Di Carlo’s research is partly focused on developing an at-home test that would detect Lyme and other tick-borne diseases, which are on the rise. Because no such product is currently approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, he said, people who’ve experienced a tick bite have to wait for lab results to confirm their infection.

“This delay in diagnosis prevents timely treatment, allowing the disease to progress and potentially lead to long-term health issues,” he said. “A rapid, point-of-care test would allow individuals to receive immediate results, enabling early treatment with antibiotics when the disease is most easily addressed, significantly reducing the risk of chronic symptoms and improving health outcomes.”

Di Carlo lamented what he called “a continual assault on the scientific community” by the Trump administration, which has canceled billions of dollars in National Institutes of Health funding for universities across the country.

It “just … hasn’t let up,” Di Carlo said.

Scrambling for funds

Some professors who’ve lost grants have spent long hours scrambling to secure new sources of funding.

Di Carlo said he was in meetings all week to identity which researchers are affected by the cuts, and to try to figure out, “Can we support those students?” He has also sought to determine whether some could be moved to other projects that still have funding, or be given teaching assistant positions, among other options.

He’s not alone in those efforts. Mathematics professor Terence Tao also has lost a grant worth about $750,000. But Tao said that he was more distressed by the freezing of a $25-million grant for UCLA’s Institute for Pure and Applied Mathematics. The funding loss for the institute, where Tao is director of special projects, is “actually quite existential,” he said, because the grant is “needed to fund operations” there.

Tao, who is the James and Carol Collins chair in the College of Letters and Sciences, said the pain goes beyond the loss of funds. “The abruptness — and basically the lack of due process in general — just compounds the damage,” said Tao. “We got no notice.”

A luminary in his field, Tao conducts research that examines, in part, whether a group of numbers are random or structured. His work could lead to advances in cryptography that may eventually make online systems — such as those used for financial transactions — more secure.

“It is important to do this kind of research — if we don’t, it’s possible that an adversary, for example, could actually discover these weaknesses that we are not looking for at all,” Tao said. “So you do need this extra theoretical confirmation that things that you think are working actually do work as intended, [and you need to] also explore the negative space of what doesn’t work.”

Tao said he’s been heartened by donations that the mathematics institute has received from private donors in recent days — about $100,000 so far.

“We are scrambling for short-term funding because we need to just keep the lights on for the next few months,” said Tao.

Rafael Jaime, president of United Auto Workers Local 4811, which represents 48,000 academic workers within the University of California — including about 8,000 at UCLA — said he was not aware of any workers who haven’t been paid so far, but that the issue could come to a head at the end of August.

He said that the UC system “should do everything that it can to ensure that workers aren’t left without pay.”

What comes next?

A major stressor for academics: the uncertainty.

Some researchers whose grants were suspended said they have not received much guidance from UCLA on a path forward. Some of that anxiety was vented on Zoom calls last week, including a UCLA-wide call attended by about 3,000 faculty members.

UCLA administrators said they are exploring stopgap options, including potential emergency “bridge” funding to grantees to pay researchers or keep up labs such as those that use rodents as subjects.

Some UCLA academics worried about a brain drain. Di Carlo said that undergraduate students he advises have begun asking for his advice on relocating to universities abroad for graduate school.

“This has been the first time that I’ve seen undergraduate students that have asked about foreign universities for their graduate studies,” he said. “I hear, ‘What about Switzerland? … What about University of Tokyo?’ This assault on science is making the students think that this is not the place for them.”

But arguably researchers’ most pressing concern is continuing their work.

Campbell explained that she has personally been affected by pancreatic cancer — she lost someone close to her to it. She and her peers do the research “for the families” who’ve also been touched by the disease.

“That the work that’s already in progress has the chance of being stopped in some way is really disappointing,” she said. “Not just for me, but for all those patients I could potentially help.”

Eduardo Bolsonaro, son of Brazil’s former president, Jair Bolsonaro, accuses Supreme Court justice of behaving ‘like every dictator’, after assets and accounts frozen.

Brazilian Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes has ordered the freezing of the accounts and assets of former President Jair Bolsonaro’s third son, Eduardo Bolsonaro, while the former president may now face arrest over his activities on social media.

Eduardo, a Brazilian congressman who has been active in Washington, DC, drumming up support for his father’s court battle, called the decision “another arbitrary and criminal decision” by Moraes.

“Moraes relies on illegal decisions to protect himself from the consequences of his crimes. Like every dictator,” Eduardo Bolsonaro said in a post on X on Tuesday.

“If he thinks this will make me stop, I make it clear: I will not be intimidated, and I will not be silenced. I prepared myself for this moment,” he said.

“This is just another demonstration of abuse of power and confirms everything I have been denouncing in Washington and to authorities worldwide,” he added.

CNN Brasil first reported that the confidential court decision was issued on Saturday as part of a probe into Eduardo Bolsonaro’s conduct in the United States.

In a separate court order issued on Monday, Justice Moraes, who oversees the criminal case in which the former president is accused of plotting a coup to overturn the result of the 2022 election, said any attempt to circumvent a court ruling in which he ordered Bolsonaro to wear an ankle bracelet and banned him from using social media could result in arrest.

Brazilian news outlet G1 reported that Moraes summoned Bolsonaro’s lawyers to clarify their client’s alleged non-compliance with his court order restricting his use of social media. According to G1, Moraes gave the lawyers 24 hours to present an explanation, adding that if the defence does not adequately justify Bolsonaro’s online behaviour, he may order the immediate arrest of the former president.

On Friday, Bolsonaro described the decision by Moraes to prohibit his social media use as “cowardice”, and said he intended to continue engaging with the media to ensure his voice was heard.

Vera Chemim, a Sao Paulo-based constitutional lawyer, told the Reuters news agency that she believed the country’s former leader is now on shaky ground, noting that media interviews, while not explicitly mentioned in the court order, could still be used to justify Bolsonaro’s arrest.

“Bolsonaro is now completely silenced,” she said. “Any misstep could lead to a preventive arrest.”

The tightening restrictions on Bolsonaro come after US Secretary of State Marco Rubio said that Brazilian court officials, and specifically Justice Moraes, were conducting a “political witch-hunt” against the former president. As a result, the US was revoking travel visas for “Moraes and his allies on the court, as well as their immediate family members”, Rubio said.

Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula swiftly labelled Washington’s decision to impose visa bans on court officials “arbitrary” and “baseless”, saying that foreign interference in his country’s judiciary was “unacceptable”.

Earlier this month, US President Donald Trump threatened to impose a 50 percent tariff on Brazilian goods starting on August 1, as he called on Lula to drop the charges against Bolsonaro.

Bolsonaro, whose right-wing policies while in power earned him the nickname “Trump of the Tropics “, has denied that he led an attempt to overthrow the government but acknowledged taking part in meetings aimed at reversing the 2022 election outcome.

California officials on Monday announced that the state is suing the Trump administration for holding back an estimated $939 million in education funds from the state — and about $6.8 billion nationwide — that school districts had expected to begin receiving on July 1, calling the action “unconstitutional, unlawful and arbitrary.”

The funding, already appropriated by Congress, supports programs to help students who are learning English and also those from migrant families. The money also boosts teacher training, after-school programs and classroom technology. The impact on Los Angeles Unified — the nation’s second-largest school system — was estimated by Supt. Alberto Carvalho to be at least $110.2 million.

California and three other Democratic-led states are taking the lead on the lawsuit on behalf of 23 states with Democratic attorneys general and the Democratic governors of Kentucky and Pennsylvania, which have Republican attorneys general. The suit was to be filed Monday in federal court in Rhode Island.

On Monday morning, Trump administration officials had not yet had an opportunity to review the lawsuit, but they have said no final decision has been made on the release of the withheld funds. The administration has cited alleged instances in which some of this money has been used in ways contrary to its policies. One example is the “separate and segregated academic instruction to new English learners,” according to a Trump administration official speaking not for attribution.

The Trump administration has tried to shut down — and often penalize — efforts to promote racial diversity, which it views as a form of discrimination and also has focused on controversies over LGBTQ+ issues. It also opposes what it views as advocacy and support for immigrants who lack legal status to live in the United States.

Although the held-back funds make up less than 1% of California’s education budget, they have an outsize cumulative effect. And they involve dollars that already have been accounted for in terms of staff hired and programs planned.

“With no rhyme or reason, the Trump Administration abruptly froze billions of dollars in education funding just weeks before the start of the school year,” California Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta said in a statement. “In doing so, it has threatened the existence of programs that provide critical after school and summer learning opportunities, that teach English to students, and that provide educational technology to our classrooms.”

The complaint argues that the Constitution does not give the executive branch power “to unilaterally refuse to spend appropriations that were passed by both houses of Congress and were signed into law.”

The lawsuit is being led by the attorneys general of Massachusetts, Colorado and Rhode Island. Colorado Gov. Jared Polis spoke of the issue at a webinar last week featuring activists and public officials.

“With many teachers not knowing whether to report to duty — that are funded by these streams — this is a very last minute, opaque decision to withhold billions of dollars from our schools,” said Polis, whose state was expecting to receive an estimated $80 million on July 1. “Every single school district in the country is impacted to some degree by this freeze, risking services like counseling, supporting students, teacher training — all investments that help students succeed.”

“These are funds that schools have already budgeted for — because the funding was already committed — and schools now have to make impossible decisions here just in the 11th hour, days or weeks before people were scheduled to report to work.”

Funding freeze blamed for ‘chaos’

The held-back funds are tied to programs that, in some cases, have received these dollars for decades. Each year the U.S. Department of Education makes around 25% of the funds available to states on or about July 1. This permits school districts to begin or continue their efforts in these areas.

“The plaintiff states have complied with the funding conditions set forth under the law and have state plans that the Department of Education has already approved,” according to a statement from Bonta’s office.

This year, instead of distributing the funding, the U.S. Department of Education notified school districts and state education offices, on June 30, that it would not be “obligating funds” for the affected programs.

In its 84-word communication to states, the administration listed the programs by their federal designation, including Title III-A, which supports students who are learning English. Also listed was Title I-C, which aims to help the children of migrant workers overcome learning challenges. Both programs had all their funds withheld.

Other similarly curtailed programs provide training for teachers and administrators; enhance the use of technology for academic achievement and digital literacy, and fund before- and after-school and summer programs.

“This funding freeze has immediately thrown into chaos plans for the upcoming academic year,” according to Bonta’s office. “Local education agencies have approved budgets, developed staffing plans and signed contracts to provide vital educational services under these grants.”

Los Angeles Unified plans to carry affected programs using district reserves, but this money was already designated for other uses over the long term. Ultimately, hundreds of positions are funded by the estimated $110.2 million at stake.

The greatest impact would be seen once schools begin to open across the nation in August, but there have been immediate effects.

The Thomasville Community Resource Center in Georgia ended its summer program three weeks early, affecting more than 300 children in two counties. In Missouri, the Laclede Literacy Council laid off 16 of 17 staff members after adult education funds were held back.

Texas is estimated to be short approximately $660 million in expected education funding, according to the Texas Standard news site. The freeze particularly affects students learning English, nearly one in four Texas students. During the 2024-25 school year, Texas received more than $132 million from the federal government to support these students.

A rising mountain of litigation

The Trump administration action — and the litigation that has followed — represent the latest of many conflicts over funding and policy with California.

Last week, it was the Trump administration that initiated litigation, suing California for allowing transgender athletes to compete on school sports teams that match their gender identity. The administration alleges that state officials are violating federal civil rights law by discriminating against women, a legal action that threatens billions of dollars in federal education funds.

In line with California law, state education policy specifically allows athletic participation based on a student’s gender identity.

In that litigation, the amount of funding that the Trump administration asserts to be at stake is staggering, with federal officials citing a figure of $44.3 billion in funding that California was allotted for the current year, including $3.8 billion not yet sent out — money that is immediately endangered.

“Potentially, all federal dollars to California public entities are at risk,” said a senior official with the U.S. Department of Education, who spoke on a not-for-attribution basis.

Separately, the department has canceled or modified more than $1 billion in contracts and grants “based on the inclusion of illegal DEI or being out of alignment with Administration priorities,” said spokesperson Madi Biedermann, alluding to programs categorized as including “diversity, equity and inclusion” components.

Altogether, California is involved in more than two dozens lawsuits opposing Trump administration actions.

“Taken together with his other attacks on education, President Trump seems comfortable risking the academic success of a generation to further his own misguided political agenda,” Bonta said. “But as with so many of his other actions, this funding freeze is blatantly illegal, and we’re confident the court will agree.”

The lawsuits against the Trump administration have resulted in a multitude of restraining orders, but have not halted all major Trump actions related to education and other areas.

Trump has insisted that he wants to return education to the states and cut wasteful and ineffective spending. He also has tried to exert greater federal control in education over so-called culture-war issues.