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Stock market today: S&P 500, Dow notch fresh records as Wall Street shrugs off Trump’s tariff threat
US stocks on Tuesday shrugged off President-elect Donald Trump’s threat to impose new tariffs on China, Canada, and Mexico, with two major indexes securing fresh records.
The S&P 500 (^GSPC) rose nearly 0.6% to nab a record close, while the tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite (^IXIC) also jumped about 0.6%. The Dow Jones Industrial Average (^DJI) reversed earlier losses to finish the day up around 0.3% as it reclaimed another back-to-back record.
The index had been under pressure for most of the day after drugmaker Amgen (AMGN) tumbled as much as 12% on weight-loss data that failed to impress Wall Street. Shares pared losses by the end of the trading session, closing down around 5%.
Markets were initially caught off guard by Trump’s pledge late Monday to slap big tariffs on the US’s biggest trading partners on his first day in office. His comments fired up trade war fears and dented Wall Street’s hopes that Treasury Secretary nominee Scott Bessent would rein in any extreme moves by the new administration.
Carmaker stocks, both domestic and abroad, fell on the heels of Trump’s “America First” push. Nissan (7201.T) and Honda Motor (HMC), which have auto plants in Mexico, came under pressure, along with Ford (F), General Motors (GM), and Stellantis (STLA).
Outside of possible tariffs, investors also digested the release of the minutes from the Federal Open Market Committee meeting ended Nov. 7, which showed officials prefer a gradual pace of interest rate cuts if the economy remains on solid footing.
“Participants anticipated that if the data came in about as expected, with inflation continuing to move down sustainably to 2% and the economy remaining near maximum employment, it would likely be appropriate to move gradually toward a more neutral stance of policy over time,” the minutes read.
Some officials noted that a resurgence of inflation, which has remained sticky, along with a downturn in the labor market, could force the central bank to pause its easing cycle.
The release sets the stage for the October reading of the Personal Consumption Expenditures (PCE) index, the Fed’s preferred inflation gauge, on Wednesday. LIVE 13 updates
Argentina’s Lionel Messi celebrates the team’s second goal by Lautaro Martínez during their World Cup semifinal against England on Wednesday in Atlanta. Argentina defeated the English 2-1 to advance to Sunday’s final against Spain.
Shaun Botterill/Getty Images
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Shaun Botterill/Getty Images
ATLANTA — Argentina, the death-defying defending World Cup champion, will play for a second consecutive title after scoring two late goals to beat England in the semifinal, 2-1.
For a fourth straight knockout game, Argentina survived a heart-stoppingly close call. First was Cape Verde, the African island nation underdog, who took the champions to extra time. Then was the furious miracle comeback after Egypt took a 2-0 lead. Then, in the quarterfinal, a shorthanded Switzerland squad forced extra time despite a 72nd-minute red card.
This gutsy Argentina squad prevailed in all three games, and Wednesday, they pulled it off yet again. In the 55th minute, England took a 1-0 lead when forward Anthony Gordon tapped in a cross.
But, as the clock ticked up, Argentina turned up the intensity. A relentless onslaught yielded near miss after near miss before finally midfielder Enzo Fernández scored off a rocket from outside the penalty area to equalize the game at 1-1 in the 85th minute.
Then, in stoppage time, forward Lautaro Martínez sent the Argentina crowd into delirium with a header off a cross from 39-year-old superstar Lionel Messi, who assisted on both goals.
“I think that this team plays the best when we are facing a difficult situation, with adversity, ” said Argentina coach Lionel Scaloni afterward. “We had a challenging game, a challenging situation. There was blood in the water, and we went for it.”
In Sunday’s final they will face Spain, which defeated France on Tuesday 2-0 to contend for their second-ever title.
England’s Anthony Gordon celebrates scoring his team’s first goal during the World Cup semifinal against Argentina on Wednesday in Atlanta.
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Wednesday’s game, the sixth meeting between these two teams at the men’s World Cup, was the newest chapter in their storied rivalry. That history includes the infamous “Hand of God” goal scored by Diego Maradona in the 1986 World Cup, four years after a war between the two countries over the Falkland Islands. The British won the war, but the sovereignty of the territory is still under dispute.
(Asked Tuesday about the “Hand of God,” which was the first of two goals scored by Maradona, coach Scaloni slyly deflected. “I think all of the world remembers that game, remembers Diego’s performance, remembers above all the second goal,” he said.)
To hear England’s coach, none of that mattered on Wednesday. “We respect our opponent, but we don’t dip in historic events, and we don’t make it bigger than it is,” Thomas Tuchel told reporters the day before the match.
Yet from the opening kick, both teams eagerly played a physical game: Collisions, jersey tugs, tough tackles, bodies flying to the ground. Referee Ismail Elfath, the first American man to work a World Cup semifinal, awarded a yellow card to each team before halftime.
And after the game, as Argentina’s players celebrated on the field, midfielder Giovani Lo Celso, who did not play in the match, unfurled a white banner bearing the words “Las Malvinas son Argentinas,” or “the Malvinas are Argentine,” a reference to the Argentine name for the Falkland Islands. The banner appeared to have been first held by Argentina fans in the stands.
For England fans, the pain is a familiar one as they watched the team fall short in yet another major tournament knockout game. England lost in the Euros final in both 2024 and 2020, and the last time they reached the World Cup semifinal in 2018, they lost by the same score as Wednesday’s match, 2-1, despite scoring first.
England’s forward Harry Kane (#9) and teammates react after losing their World Cup semifinal match 2-1 against Argentina.
Odd Andersen/AFP via Getty Images
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“It’s a similar story to what’s happened in previous tournaments,” England Captain Harry Kane conceded afterward. “We’d done so well for that 60 minutes. We scored. We deserved to be ahead. And then, for one reason or another, we struggled to keep the ball. We struggled to put pressure on the ball and it just allowed them to create more momentum.”
The atmosphere inside Mercedes-Benz Stadium in Atlanta was raucous and ear-splitting. Argentine fans by the thousands wore the white and sky blue striped jerseys bearing the name of their star Messi. The English celebrated their team wearing all-white or all-red jerseys of their scoring sensations: Kane and Jude Bellingham.
But neither star could save England from another defeat, extending what has already been an agonizing 60-year wait to return to the final.
NPR’s Russell Lewis contributed reporting from Atlanta
News
ICE should do traffic stops despite recent shootings, Trump says, seeming to oppose new suspension
WASHINGTON (AP) — The Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency should continue vehicle stops after recent fatal shootings, President Donald Trump said on Wednesday, seeming to oppose a new suspension of the practice used as part of his immigration crackdown.
ICE is “doing a GREAT job, one that has to be done,” Trump wrote on his social media site.
The Republican president said that to remove criminals he claims were let into the country under the previous Democratic administration “we must be strong, tough, and smart, and we CANNOT give up one of ICE’s most important and effective Crime Fighting tools, THE TRAFFIC STOP!” Trump said, “Once we do, we are playing right into the criminal’s hands.”
Trump administration officials have told Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers to suspend most vehicle stops after two deadly shootings within a week, people familiar with the decision said Tuesday.
The suspension was ordered after an ICE officer shot and killed a Colombian driver Monday in Maine and a week after another officer shot and killed a motorist in Houston, renewing criticism of the agency’s enforcement tactics that were widely condemned last winter after the killings of Alex Pretti and Renee Good in Minnesota.
In Florida on Tuesday, a third man in roughly a week died during an encounter with immigration officers. This time, a 28-year-old man was killed after he was hit by a tractor trailer while running from immigration and other federal officers, authorities said.
It’s a narrative that has been repeated again and again since the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown began, with federal officers confronting drivers and then saying they opened fire when the drivers’ vehicles became a danger. That’s despite decades of warnings from policing experts that shooting into moving cars presents a danger of its own and should almost always be avoided.
There have been at least 10 deaths involving encounters with immigration agents since Trump launched his deportation campaign. At least four of those deaths involved people in vehicles, including the one last week in Houston, a trend so troubling that U.S. Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, said Tuesday that she had urged Department of Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin “to cease all non-urgent vehicle stops.”
John Sandweg, who was acting director at ICE, which is part of DHS, during President Barack Obama’s Democratic administration, estimated recently that there have been roughly 18 traffic stop shootings during the Trump immigration crackdown.
The office of Maine Sen. Angus King, an independent who caucuses with Democrats, was told by DHS that ICE was suspending traffic stops, office spokesperson Matthew Felling said.
ICE, which has been under pressure to beef up arrest and deportation numbers, often says people it’s trying to arrest are increasingly resistant to leaving their homes. ICE officers blame immigration advocates who advise immigrants to stay in their homes unless ICE produces a warrant signed by an independent judge instead of the administrative warrants the agency generally uses that are signed by another ICE officer. So, ICE officers say, they’re forced to find other areas in which to make arrests.
Shooting angers Maine
Hundreds of people in Maine protested Tuesday over the fatal shooting of Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero, a 25-year-old Colombian national. Advocacy groups said Guerrero, who had a wife and a young daughter, was authorized to work in the United States.
DHS said Monday that an officer, “fearing for public safety,” shot and killed Durán Guerrero while officers were watching the home of someone they believed was in the U.S. illegally and facing a final order of removal from the country. It said in a post on X that when ICE tried to stop a car driven by someone who came from the home, the person attempted to flee in the vehicle and the officer fired.
That was a shift from how King earlier described the encounter, when he said Mullin told him the officer opened fire after the man tried to use his vehicle as a weapon. King said Mullin told him the officers were trying to serve an arrest warrant but not for the man who was shot.
In a scathing post on X, outgoing Colombian President Gustavo Petro called the shooting a targeted killing “at the hands of the U.S. government.”
Petro, who has openly quarreled with Trump, urged Trump to provide an explanation and accused ICE officers of treating Durán Guerrero as “an inferior being without rights.”
In Wednesday’s social media post, Trump told ICE to be “judicious, fair and smart, and go back and do your very important job.”
Maine’s congressional delegation on Tuesday demanded a “comprehensive, transparent, and expedited investigation.”
Questions surround the shooting
Photos showed bullet holes in Durán Guerrero’s car windshield, but the officers involved in the shooting didn’t have body cameras, leaving many questions. Among them are how close the officer was to the vehicle when shooting, whether officers told Durán Guerrero to stop and why ICE believes he had put the public in danger.
Border czar Tom Homan told reporters Tuesday that the investigation needs to play out and that officers will be held accountable if they are found to have acted inappropriately or illegally.
Maine’s attorney general’s office, which said it is working with federal agencies to investigate, said initial statements suggest the driver was trying to flee in the direction of the officer, whose name hasn’t been released and who was placed on leave.
Collins said Mullin told her the DHS inspector general is investigating in cooperation with the FBI.
Democrats seeking to unseat Collins in November have sought to connect her with ICE’s methods, which have drawn public scrutiny and derision. Collins later said in a statement that although ICE needs to improve, eliminating the agency would make the nation less safe.
Maine Secretary of State Shenna Bellows, a Democrat who is vying for Collins’ seat, called the ICE officers at the shooting “thugs” during a vigil Tuesday in Lewiston.
___
Whittle contributed from Biddeford, Maine; Brook from New Orleans; and Sisak from New York.
Supreme Court Justices Elena Kagan and Amy Coney Barrett testify before the House Appropriations Committee on Capitol Hill on July 14, 2026 in Washington, D.C.
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The Supreme Court did something Tuesday that it has not done in seven years. It sent two of the justices to Capitol Hill to testify about the court’s budget request for the coming year. The budget has grown dramatically in recent years because of the equally dramatic rise in the number and intensity of threats to the justices’ safety.
Designated as the court’s representatives were Justice Elena Kagan, appointed by President Obama, and Justice Amy Coney Barrett, appointed by President Trump.
As Kagan pointed out in her testimony, it was Republican Darrell Issa and Democrat Elijah Cummings who insisted that the court beef up its security ten years ago after Justice Antonin Scalia died in his sleep on a hunting trip, with no security anywhere nearby to respond quickly.
“They said, kind of like, we think you’re crazy, you know, that that you have less security than director of the Office of Personnel Management does,” she recounted the Congressmen as telling the Court, “and we think that you have to do better.”
Before that, the justices basically had little to no security. They drove their own cars to work; went to the movies and shopped at supermarkets unaccompanied, and did their private travel on their own. And frankly, they liked it that way, because having security is personally invasive.
In recent years, however, the court has undertaken major changes, including continually expanding the court police force to protect the justices and their homes at all times, and funding additional cybersecurity measures.
And yet, as Justice Kagan pointed out, the Court’s $207 million budget request is less than one tenth of one percent of the entire federal budget.
The justices spoke at length Tuesday about how rising threats impacted their lives. Justice Barrett came prepared with two harrowing stories. First was the day she brought home a bullet-proof vest.
“My 12-year-old son was standing in the doorway of my bedroom and he wanted to know what it was,” she testified, “and I didn’t know how to respond. I didn’t expect that performing this service was going to put me in the position of explaining to my children what a bulletproof vest was and why I had to wear one.”
She also described how just six weeks ago, her house was swatted, with local police responding to a fake emergency call. Local police could have stormed her home, but for the fact that her own security detail was there to prevent it.
Indeed, threats have deeply affected judges across America. After U.S. District Court Judge Esther Salas’s 20-year old son was murdered by a gunman seeking to kill her, many federal judges have reported receiving packages bearing the name of her slain son. Those threats, Justice Barrett testified, “are meant to intimidate and they’re meant to harass.”
Sen. Jack Reed (D-R.I.), asked questions about President Trump’s furious response to adverse rulings in the tariff and birthright citizenship cases, and whether Trump’s heaping insults on the court could play a role in jeopardizing the safety of some justices. Kagan had a two-part reply.
“Criticism is fair game. I mean, go for it. You know, life in the big city is that you’re subject to all kinds of criticism. But intimidation is a different thing entirely. And when political figures of any stripe are trying to intimidate judges,” she said, “that’s where we really have crossed the line.”
The hearings were not confined to issues of safety. Congresswoman Rosa De Lauro (D-Conn.) asked about the Supreme Court’s ethics requirements, noting that members of Congress and the executive branch are limited to gifts under $50, while the Supreme Court has no such limit.
She is supporting a bill that would impose upon the Supreme Court the same restrictions on receiving gifts that apply to Congress. And she called for an enforcement mechanism for the ethics rules adopted by the Supreme Court itself.
But Justice Kagan, who said she favors an enforcement mechanism, added that creating such a system is “hard.” After all, as she noted, “you wouldn’t want either the President or Congress” imposing a system on the court because that could well lead to compromising the independence of the judiciary.
One idea that Kagan seemed to like would be to create a panel of distinguished retired judges to enforce the court’s ethics code. But Justice Barrett seemed unpersuaded.
“Who selects the judges? How is the panel composed? There’s just a lot of complexity,” that hasn’t been worked out, she said. The disagreement between the two was, if anything, illustrative of just how hard it was to get the court to finally agree on even the relatively porous ethics code it voluntarily adopted in 2023.
The Justices were also questioned about the court’s emergency docket, dubbed by critics “the shadow docket.” These cases were extremely rare until the Trump administrations.
The critical difference between the emergency docket and the so-called merits docket is that emergency docket appeals often leapfrog over the lower courts, allowing the high court to decide cases without full briefing and argument, and inevitably without much, if any, explanation.
Critics, including Justice Kagan, have often criticized these unsigned and unexplained emergency docket orders for making it difficult for lower courts to know what the law is. Some have in fact accused the court of inviting the Trump administration to treat the docket like a fast-pass to getting policy rubber-stamped.
Questioned by Senator Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.), Kagan observed that part of the reason for the Court’s increasing use of the emergency docket comes from the fact that “we’ve granted a number of these…And when people know that relief is available, there are a lot of smart lawyers out there in the world who are going to say, ‘Why don’t we take our shot at that?’” In other words, the court’s own behavior may have invited the existing problem to metastasize.
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