WASHINGTON U.S. producer prices barely rose in June and the annual increase in producer inflation was the smallest

The US Supreme Court has struck down President Joe Biden’s plan to cancel student loan debts for millions of Americans, reversing his campaign-trail promise as borrowers prepare to resume payments this summer. Chief Justice John Roberts delivered the 6-3 decision from the court’s conservative majority on 30 June. The ruling, which stems from a pair of cases challenging the Biden administration and the US Department of Education, argues that the president does not have the authority to implement sweeping relief, and that Congress never authorised the administration to do so. Within 30 minutes on the last day of its term, the court upended protections for LGBT+ people and blocked the president from a long-held promise to cancel student loan balances amid a ballooning debt crisis impacting millions of Americans. Under the plan unveiled last year, millions of people who took out federally backed student loans would be eligible for up to $20,000 in relief. Borrowers earning up to $125,000, or $250,000 for married couples, would be eligible for up to $10,000 of their federal student loans to be wiped out. Those borrowers would be eligible to receive up to $20,000 in relief if they received Pell grants. Roughly 43 million federal student loan borrowers would be eligible for that relief, including 20 million people who stand to have their debts canceled completely, according to the White House. Roughly 16 million already submitted their applications and received approval for debt cancellation last year, according to the Biden administration. The long-anticipated plan for debt cancellation was met almost immediately with litigation threats from conservative legal groups and Republican officials, arguing that the executive branch does not have authority to broadly cancel such debt. Six GOP-led states sued the Biden administration to stop the plan altogether, and a federal appeals court temporarily blocked any such relief as the legal challenges played out. Lawyers for the Biden administration contended that he has the authority to broadly cancel student loan debt under the Higher Education Relief Opportunities for Students Act of 2003, which allows the secretary of education to waive or modify loan provisions following a national emergency – in this case, Covid-19. Justice Roberts wrote that the law allows the secretary to “waive or modify” existing provisions for financial assistance, “not to rewrite that statute from the ground up.” The Supreme Court’s final decision of its 2022-2023 term also comes one day after another major education ruling, as the same conservative majority upended decades of precedent intended to promote racially diverse college campuses, what civil rights groups and the court’s liberal justices have derided as the court’s perversion of the 14th Amendment and the foundational concept of equal protection. Moments before its decision in the student debt plan, the Supreme Court decided a case involving a website designer who refused to cater to same-sex couples, but the case did not involve any such couple. Likewise, the case at the centre of the court’s decision on student loans involved an independent loan servicer in Missouri that did not want to be associated with the lawsuit. The six GOP-led states that led the challenge – Arkansas, Iowa, Kansas, Missouri, Nebraska, and South Carolina – opposed the Biden administration’s plan for a range of reasons that amount to “just general grievances; they do not show the particularized injury needed to bring suit,” Justice Elena Kagan wrote in her dissent. “And the States have no straightforward way of making that showing – of explaining how they are harmed by a plan that reduces individual borrowers’ federal student-loan debt,” she added. “So the States have thrown no fewer than four different theories of injury against the wall, hoping that a court anxious to get to the merits will say that one of them sticks.” She admonished a decision in which “the result here is that the Court substitutes itself for Congress and the Executive Branch in making national policy about student-loan forgiveness.” “The Court acts as though it is an arbiter of political and policy disputes, rather than of cases and controversies,” and by deciding the case, the court exceeds “the permissible boundaries of the judicial role,” Justice Kagan wrote. Since March 2020, with congressional passage of the Cares Act, monthly payments on student loan debt have been frozen with interest rates set at zero per cent. That Covid-19-pandemic era moratorium, first enacted under Donald Trump and extended several times, was paused a final time late last year – until the Education Department is allowed to cancel debts under the Biden plan, or until the litigation is resolved, but no later than 30 June. Payments would then resume 60 days later. The amount of debt taken out to support student loans for higher education costs has surged within the last decade, alongside growing tuition costs, increased private university enrollment, stagnant wages and GOP-led governments stripping investments in higher education and aid, putting the burden of college costs largely on students and their families. The crisis has exploded to a total balance of nearly $2 trillion, mostly wrapped up in federal loans. Millions of Americans also continue to tackle accrued interest without being able to chip away at their principal balances, even years after graduating, or have been forced to leave their colleges or universities without obtaining a degree at all while still facing loan repayments. Borrowers also have been trapped by predatory lending schemes with for-profit institutions and sky-high interest rates that have made it impossible for many borrowers to make any progress toward paying off their debt, with interest adding to balances that exceed the original loan. One analysis from the Education Department found that nearly 90 per cent of student loan relief would support people earning less than $75,000 per year. The median income of households with student loan balances is $76,400, while 7 per cent of borrowers are below the poverty line. That debt burden also falls disproportionately on Black borrowers and women. Black college graduates have an average of $52,000 in student loan debt and owe an average of $25,000 more than white graduates, according to the Education Data Initiative. Four years after graduating, Black student loan borrowers owe an average of 188 per cent more than white graduates. Women borrowers hold roughly two-thirds of all student loan debt, according to the American Association of University Women. Mr Biden’s announcement fulfilled a campaign-trail pledge to wipe out $10,000 in student loan debt per borrower if elected, though debt relief advocates and progressive lawmakers have urged him to cancel all debts and reject means-testing barriers in broad relief measures. In November 2020, the president called on Congress to “immediately” provide some relief for millions of borrowers saddled by growing debt. “[Student debt is] holding people up,” he said at the time. “They’re in real trouble. They’re having to make choices between paying their student loan and paying the rent.” ReNika Moore, director of the Racial Justice Program with the ACLU, among civil rights groups that filed briefs with the Supreme Court to defend the loan cancellation plan, said the “one-two punch” to end affirmative action and block debt relief will lock Americans out of economic oppurtunity and worsen wealth equality. “We urge the Biden administration and the Department of Education to move quickly to explore other pathways to ease the debt load on student loan borrowers once payments resume after a pandemic-related pause, including new executive action under the Higher Education Act, a law that allows for student loan relief for certain groups,” she added. 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Several current and former elected officials – including Georgia’s two former Republican senators – are on a list of prominent Donald Trump allies who narrowly avoided criminal charges in the state’s sweeping racketeering case against him. The unsealed report from a special purpose grand jury tasked with investigating Trumpworld attempts to overturn the state’s 2020 election results revealed a much wider picture of the subsequent criminal case against the former president and his 18 co-defendants. That report – the product of an eight-month investigation separate from an Atlanta grand jury’s indictment – revealed that grand jurors recommend criminal charges against 39 people for nearly 160 counts of violations against more than a dozen state laws. The list includes Georgia’s two former Republican US senators David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler, but neither of them were charged by Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis in a sweeping racketeering indictment. How did Mr Perdue and Ms Loeffler – who were sitting members of Congress during the time of the alleged crimes – end up in the crosshairs of the sprawling investigation? Mr Perdue was first elected to office in 2014 and lost his bid for re-election in a closely watched runoff against Democratic candidate Jon Ossoff in the smoldering aftermath of the 2020 election. Ms Loeffler – who was appointed to the seat in 2019 following the retirement of her predecessor – lost a runoff election to Democratic candidate Raphael Warnock. Following Mr Trump’s election loss, all eyes were on Georgia for two races that would determine the balance of party power in Congress – high-stakes elections in which the GOP campaigns were intertwined with Mr Trump’s spurious attempts to claim victory in a state he decisively lost. On the campaign trail leading up to the runoff election day on 5 January, 2021, both candidates promoted their Trump links, refused to acknowledge Joe Biden’s victory, and called for the resignation of Georgia’s Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, who was baselessly accused of election “failures” following Mr Trump’s loss in the state. One week after the 2020 election, Governor Brian Kemp issued a joint statement with Lt Governor Geoff Duncan and the state’s House Speaker David Ralston – all Republicans – declaring that any effort to reverse the results through the legislature would lead to “endless litigation.” At a fundraiser on 3 December 2020, Mr Perdue urged the governor to summon lawmakers back to the state Capitol for a special session to overturn Mr Trump’s loss. Two days later, then-President Trump called on Mr Kemp to order a special legislative session among state lawmakers to invalidate the election’s outcome. Mr Kemp refused. At a Georgia rally for the senate candidates that night, Mr Trump baselessly alleged the outcome was manipulated and stolen from him. The governor said that Mr Trump asked him to order an audit of signatures on mail-in ballot envelopes; audits and full hand recounts of the state’s election results repeatedly confirmed Mr Biden’s victory, which also was affirmed and defended by the state’s Republican election officials. “Your people are refusing to do what you ask,” Mr Trump said on Twitter at the time, addressing Mr Kemp. “What are they hiding? At least immediately ask for a Special Session of the Legislature. That you can easily, and immediately, do.” Mr Perdue allegedly spoke daily with Mr Trump before the special election, listening to him unload his gripes, frustrations and bogus allegations surrounding Georgia’s election results and Mr Raffensperger’s refusals to engage Mr Trump. On 2 January, 2021, Mr Trump spoke with Mr Raffensperger on an hour-long conference call in which then-President Trump urged Georgia’s top elections official to “find” enough votes to overturn his loss. That call is central to the indictment facing Mr Trump and his co-defendants in Georgia, as well as a separate indictment from the US Department of Justice surrounding the former president’s attempts to subvert the election’s outcome. Mr Perdue’s term in Congress ended the next day, leaving his seat vacant three days before Congress convened to certify the presidential election results. “Senator Perdue still owes my wife an apology for all the death threats she got after he asked for my resignation,” Mr Raffensperger told Fox News at the time. “I have not heard one peep from that man since. If he wants to call me, face-to-face, man-to-man, I’ll talk to him, off the record, but he hasn’t done that.” Ms Loeffler initially supported efforts among GOP lawmakers to reject the election’s outcome during the joint session of Congress on 6 January, 2021, but she reversed her decision after a mob of then-President Trump’s supporters broke into the US Capitol and stormed the halls in an effort to stop the certification of Mr Biden’s victory. The special grand jury report indicates that then-Senator Perdue was involved with the “persistent, repeated communications directed to multiple Georgia officials and employees” between November 2020 and January 2021. Sixteen jurors voted to indict him on a charge of filing false documents, with one juror voting against and one abstaining. The special grand jury also implicated Mr Perdue and Ms Loeffler under Georgia’s Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act and the national scheme to overturn 2020 election results, “focused on efforts in Georgia, Arizona, Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania” and Washington DC, according to the report. Seventeen jurors voted to support a RICO indictment against Mr Perdue, with four jurors voting against charges. In the case of Ms Loeffler, 14 jurors supported the charge, while six voted against and one abstained. A footnote in the report notes that one of the dissenting jurors voting against recommending indictments against the senators on the RICO charge “believes that their statements following the November 2020 election, while pandering to their political base, do not give rise to their being guilty of a criminal conspiracy.” In a statement following the release of the special grand jury report, Ms Loeffler said she was “giving voice to millions of Americans who felt disenfranchised in 2020” and that she would not be “intimidated by a two-tiered system of justice that seeks to systematically destroy conservatives across this country.” In 2022, Mr Perdue was enlisted and endorsed by Mr Trump to run for governor of the state against incumbent Mr Kemp. Mr Perdue lost that race as well. 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TORONTO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Jun 22, 2023--

Eight people including seven members of one family were killed in Cairo on Monday when a residential building in Egypt's capital collapsed, the public...