President Donald Trump‘s global “liberation day” tariffs were struck down in the courts, shattering the cornerstone of his trade agenda. Some trade experts say his newest duties — which have already caught their first legal challenge — could meet the same fate.

The Trump administration on Friday imposed broad tariffs on goods from more than 80 countries, alleging they have failed to effectively prohibit the use of forced labor practices.

The latest tariffs — which apply to trade partners covering 99.4% of U.S. trade — were brought under Section 301 of the Trade Act of 1974, which enables the government to impose import levies in response to unfair trade practices. Section 301 has been used many times across presidential administrations to threaten or impose tariffs — including against China during Trump’s first administration.

But Trump is “using the statute in a fundamentally different way,” Peter Harrell, visiting scholar at Georgetown University Law Center’s Institute of International Economic Law, told CNBC.

Section 301 was “never intended for the president to just wholesale rewrite the tariff schedule” and impose “permanent” duties, Harrell said, adding that Trump’s latest use of it could “for sure” be struck down in court.

Trump appears to see Section 301 as a key pathway for more tariffs. On Friday, he declared that the U.S. will “immediately” start a 301 investigation into the EU in retaliation for the hefty fines it has imposed on U.S. tech giants. It was the latest in a flurry of tariff actions Trump has taken in recent days, including slapping 25% duties on Brazilian imports — also via a 301 probe — and vowing 50% tariffs on some goods from Canada.

The legal battle has already begun. Just hours after the new tariffs took effect, two small businesses sued, arguing that the government is using Section 301 as a pretext to re-create the same global tariff regime that the Supreme Court torpedoed five months earlier.

The new lawsuit, filed in the U.S. Court of International Trade, notes that the Section 301 tariffs took effect right as another batch of tariffs expired.

Those lapsed duties, brought under Section 122 of the 1974 law, were announced by Trump mere hours after the Supreme Court struck down his global tariffs on Feb. 20. By using the Section 122 authority, those tariffs had a set end date.

The high court had ruled that the law Trump used to unilaterally slap tariffs on nearly every other country — the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, or IEEPA — did not actually allow him to impose the levies.

Friday’s lawsuit argues that Trump’s new tariffs, while ostensibly aimed at addressing forced labor practices, are “designed to preserve substantially the same broad tariff regime that this Court and the Supreme Court have held Congress did not authorize.”

Section 301 “is not a…

An outbreak of the deadly Ebola virus in central Africa has been exacerbated by cuts to U.S. and Western foreign support, experts say, a year after Washington slashed its international aid operations.

In May, authorities in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Uganda declared outbreaks after lab tests detected the spread of Bundibugyo virus, which causes a type of Ebola disease. Transmitted through contact with infected bodily fluids, wild animals and contaminated objects or meat, Ebola is a rare but serious illness that has a fatality rate of around 50%.

The current outbreak is the 17th that the DRC has suffered. With more than 1,400 cases confirmed to date, it is the third-largest outbreak on record, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Currently, no known cases have been reported in the U.S., but one case has been confirmed in France. The CDC’s latest data shows there have been 440 confirmed deaths from the virus.

Near the beginning of the outbreak, the International Rescue Committee – a global nongovernment organization focused on humanitarian aid, relief, and development – warned that the current outbreak could become the deadliest on record without urgent intervention.

“The warning signs are flashing red,” Bob Kitchen, vice president of emergencies for the IRC, said in a statement, before noting that the DRC is confronting the current outbreak “more fragile and less prepared” than it had been during the 2018-2020 outbreak that killed more than 2,000 people.

“Increased conflict and cuts to global aid funding have dismantled defenses at exactly the wrong moment,” Kitchen said. “The risks are growing and the resources are shrinking; that is the brutal arithmetic facing global aid today.”

The U.S. Agency for International Development officially closed last July, with the majority of its programs abolished and a small remainder absorbed into the U.S. State Department. The move attracted criticism from former presidents Barack Obama and George W Bush, as well as billionaire philanthropist Bill Gates.

USAID’s demise came as part of the cuts enacted by the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), a temporary organization set up by President Donald Trump shortly after his return to the White House. Trillionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk initially oversaw DOGE’s operations, and recently defended decisions on cutting USAID following claims that it had contributed to the deaths of children.

DOGE officially shuttered on July 4, 2026.

Days after Elon Musk’s SpaceX made its debut on the Nasdaq, much ink has been spilt over the company, the valuation, and its place in the burgeoning tech space.

The company’s stratospheric IPO has made founder Elon Musk the world’s first trillionaire, and if the first day’s price action is anything to go by, investors are still very optimistic. SpaceX closed at $161, jumping 19% from its offer price of $135 per share.

Speaking to CNBC’s “Squawk Box Asia,” Steve Westly, founder and managing partner of The Westly Group and a former board member of Musk’s Tesla, noted that the company attracted a lot of retail investors, but added that it have to deliver results, and fast.

“Retail investors bought $100 billion in shares, and you’ve got to ask the question, are some of them going to get panicky if SpaceX misses a few quarters, because this stuff is not easy to do.”

In a now-deleted post on X, Musk said that SpaceX “might be able” to reach approximately $1 trillion in revenue by 2030, and added that he would be “surprised” if revenue is not greater than that figure by 2031.

“Investors at SpaceX, I believe, will get pretty grumpy after three or four quarters if he doesn’t meet some of the growth projections that they made in the S1,” Westly added, referring to the SEC filing used by companies planning on going public.

Some views that the trillion-dollar IPO were overvalued were swirling ahead of SpaceX’s debut.

Matthew Maley, Chief Market Strategist at asset management firm Miller Tabak. said that “we’ll merely say that we agree [the IPO] went very well, but we also think it is much too overvalued.”

While the stock does not have a formal price-to earnings ratio, Musk’s $1.75 trillion valuation currently reflects a P/E ratio of almost 100 times.

In comparison, Nvidia, arguably the world’s most valuable company, trades with a P/E ratio of just over 31 times, while Apple trades at about 35 times.

This overvalued view is also shared by Morningstar equity analyst Nicolas Owens, who said last week that the stock is “significantly overvalued.”

The firm has a fair value estimate for SpaceX of $63 per share, and said on June 11 that the company had only a 7% chance of hitting its “moonshot” scenario of $154 a share.

Nonetheless, the stock could prove to be a good buy if investors are willing to ride it out.

“We do believe that very long-term investors will do fine,” Maley said, with Westly also expressing optimism on the company’s future path.

“No one’s going to hand this to them. He and the team there, I think Gwynne Shotwell is extraordinary, have some tough hills to climb, but if anybody can do it, it may be the combination of Gwynne and Elon,” Westly said, referring to SpaceX’s president and chief…

Global banks, tech giants and governments were sent scrambling last month to contain the risks posed by Mythos, the Anthropic model said to be so powerful that it has found thousands of previously unknown vulnerabilities in the world’s software infrastructure.

There’s just one problem: the capability they’re worried about is already here.

Cybersecurity experts and artificial intelligence researchers told CNBC that the software vulnerabilities revealed by Mythos can be found using existing models, including those from Anthropic and OpenAI.

“What we are seeing across the industry now is that people are able to reproduce the vulnerabilities found with Mythos through clever orchestration of public models to get very, very similar results,” said Ben Harris, CEO of cybersecurity firm watchTowr Labs.

Mythos has jolted executives and policymakers alike over concern that a perilous new era of AI-enabled cybercrime may be near. Anthropic limited its release to a few American companies including Apple, Amazon, JPMorgan Chase and Palo Alto Networks to reduce the risk that bad actors get their hands on it.

Even with that precaution, the release has prompted the Trump administration to consider new government oversight over future models.

It’s the latest in a string of high-profile launches from Anthropic that have intensified its rivalry with OpenAI as the two AI giants approach their highly anticipated IPOs. Weeks after the arrival of Mythos, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman announced GPT-5.5-Cyber, a model specifically tailored for cybersecurity.

OpenAI on Thursday allowed limited access to GPT-5.5-Cyber to vetted cybersecurity teams.

The controlled rollout of Mythos, part of a security measure called Project Glasswing, was to give the corporate world time to gird its cyber defenses against a coming onslaught of attacks from criminal groups and adversarial nations.

“The danger is just some enormous increase in the amount of vulnerabilities, in the amount of breaches, in the financial damage that’s done from ransomware on schools, hospitals, not to mention banks,” Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei said this week at an Anthropic event.

But to those fighting in the trenches of cyber warfare, one of the key capabilities advertised by Anthropic — to find software vulnerabilities at scale — has been around since last year.

“The models that we have right now are powerful enough to detect zero days in a large scale, and this is scary enough,” Klaudia Kloc, CEO of cybersecurity firm Vidoc, told CNBC.

That has been the case for “a couple of months, if not a year,” she said.

The term “zero-day” refers to a previously unknown software flaw that hasn’t been patched, giving attackers a window to exploit it before defenders can respond.

Researchers at Vidoc leaned on a technique called “orchestration”…

Defense and geopolitical experts are skeptical that “Project Freedom,” the Trump administration’s new effort to reopen the Strait of Hormuz to commercial traffic, will succeed.

“In my view, it’s not a solution at all,” Jennifer Kavanagh, senior fellow and director of military analysis at Defense Priorities, a libertarian-leaning foreign policy think tank, said of the operation.

“It doesn’t really address the underlying problem here, which is that the uncertainty about the safety of transit means that ship captains and shipping companies are hesitant to take the risk,” Kavanagh said in a phone interview.

The administration, however, says its day-old effort to defend ships transiting the strait from Iranian attacks is already working.

“We’ve now opened a passage through the Strait of Hormuz to allow for the free flow of commerce to proceed,” U.S. Central Command leader Adm. Brad Cooper said Monday, just hours after Project Freedom commenced.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said Tuesday that two U.S. commercial ships, accompanied by American destroyers, “have already safely transited the strait, showing the lane is clear.”

“We know the Iranians are embarrassed by this fact,” he boasted. “They said they control the strait. They do not.”

The administration hasn’t put a price tag or timeline on the new mission, though Hegseth said it will be “focused in scope and temporary in duration.”

Analysts who spoke with CNBC questioned whether the operation offers either a short-term or long-term solution to the chokepoint in the strait, the top global oil pathway that is at the center of the ongoing conflict with Iran. Pre-war, the narrow waterway saw 20% of the world’s oil transit through it leaving the Persian Gulf.

The defensive operation, they say, doesn’t sufficiently address or inhibit Iran’s ability to threaten vessels attempting to transit the strait, and so the journey remains too risky for most to attempt.

It could also further fray relations with Iran, leading to increased aggression and prolonging any diplomatic agreement, which may be the only way to return commercial traffic in the strait to pre-war levels.

“Project Freedom is unlikely to be a completely decisive solution to Gulf maritime insecurity, but rather a limited, high‑risk deterrence experiment,” Jack Kennedy, head of Middle East and North Africa country risk at S&P Global Market Intelligence, said in an email.

President Donald Trump announced the operation in a Truth Social post Sunday evening, saying the U.S. has assured countries whose vessels are stuck due to the war that it will “guide their Ships safely out of these restricted Waterways.”

CENTCOM said the U.S. military will deploy “guided-missile destroyers, over 100 land and sea-based aircraft, multi-domain unmanned platforms, and 15,000 service members” to support Project Freedom.

The mission is…

Since the U.S. and Israel launched surprise strikes on Iran last weekend, Washington has been keen to stress that the military action will be over in a matter of weeks and won’t turn into a so-called “forever war.”

But experts say the U.S. could easily get bogged down in “Operation Epic Fury” if the Iranian regime proves more resilient than expected, and that could mean the conflict drags on.

“What we’re seeing is going to be more complicated than the White House may have hoped,” Suzanne Maloney, Brookings Institution vice president and director of foreign policy, told CNBC Tuesday.

“Obviously, the start of the conflict appeared to be tremendously successful with the very quick announcement that Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the supreme leader of Iran, had been killed, that was a huge breakthrough in many respects and the U.S. and Israel have been able to do immense damage to Iran’s military capabilities.”

“But the day after is going to be immensely complicated as well, and I am not optimistic that we’re going to see a quick end to this conflict, because the Iranians are escalating across the region and that is their long-standing game plan,” she said.

When airstrikes began to target Iran’s leadership and military sites last Saturday, killing Khamenei in his compound within hours, it quickly became apparent that the attacks would not be a case of “one and done.”

But U.S. President Donald Trump has said in the last week that the military operation in Iran would be over in “four to five weeks” and top officials, from Vice President JD Vance to Defense Secretary Peter Hegseth, have stressed that this will not be a prolonged, low-burn conflict of the type seen in Afghanistan or Iraq.

Such so-called “forever wars” have proved contentious and unpopular with the American public and are particularly frowned upon by Trump’s MAGA fanbase who want the president to prioritize domestic rather than foreign policy. Just one in four Americans supports the attacks on Iran, a Reuters/IPSOS poll found in the last week, and there have been protests in Washington against the strikes.

The U.S. and Israel initially stated their primary aim was to obliterate Iran’s nuclear program once and for all, but those war aims appear to have shifted this week, with the stated objectives ranging from destroying Iran’s ballistic missile program to wanting to protect the American public from an imminent, but…

Oil markets are bracing for a possible supply shock after U.S. strikes on Iran over the weekend reignited fears that flows through the Strait of Hormuz could be disrupted.

While analysts expect an immediate “knee-jerk” reaction to oil prices when trading resumes in New York on Sunday evening, the bigger question is whether tensions could escalate into a sustained interruption of Gulf exports. 

“At this point, it seems we are looking at a full-scale military conflict between the U.S. and Iran, which would be unprecedented and the trajectory impossible to assess,” said Vandana Hari, CEO of energy research firm Vanda Insights.

“If it carries on for days with Iran and its proxies retaliating to the fullest extent, we are looking at the worst-case scenarios for oil, including a major disruption of oil flows through the Middle East,” Hari told CNBC. This is unless the U.S. is able to pre-emptively disarm the Iranian navy and military, as well as ensure tanker traffic through the Strait of Hormuz continues to flow normally.

With tensions escalating, attention has shifted back to the Strait of Hormuz, where any disruption would have immediate and outsized consequences for global oil and LNG flows.

Positioned between Oman and Iran, the strait serves as a critical transit route – and potential chokepoint – for global crude, with about 13 million barrels per day moving through it in 2025, equal to approximately 31% of all seaborne oil flows, Kpler data showed.

It links major Gulf producers including Saudi Arabia, Iran, Iraq and the United Arab Emirates to the Gulf of Oman and the Arabian Sea.

Reuters reported on Saturday that an official with the European Union’s naval mission, Aspides, said commercial vessels had received VHF radio messages from Iran’s Revolutionary Guards warning that “no ship is allowed to pass the Strait of Hormuz.”

The official was quoted as saying that Tehran had not formally confirmed any directive to close the waterway.

Reuters noted that Iran has repeatedly threatened over the years to block the narrow passage in response to attacks against the Islamic Republic.

Iran has in the past repeatedly threatened to block the narrow passage in response to attacks against the Islamic Republic.

Bob McNally, president of Rapidan Energy Group, who had advised clients for weeks that conflict was a 75% probability, called it “a very serious development” for the world’s oil and gas markets given their dependence on Hormuz production and flows.

The larger question is…