Posts on Friday, July 24, 2026

On an island in the Bering Sea 1,200 miles from Anchorage sits an abandoned house on an abandoned Navy base. There is no furniture, and the wind blows through broken windows. The last people to live here moved away long ago. Yet a bright orange pipe with a black fiber-optic cable inside runs down into the surrounding soil. The cable was installed to connect the home to the internet after the base closed. It costs more than $340,000 per year to provide this building and hundreds of others with internet access no one says they use. The multibillion-dollar Universal Service Fund pays for customers who no longer use it.

The Trump administration has imposed new tariffs of at least 10% on imports from 60 countries over claims they failed to prevent forced labour. The duties, ranging from 10% to 12.5%, target trading partners that make up the majority of US imports - including the UK, Canada, China, Mexico and the EU - and will come into effect as the current levies are set to expire. The Office of the USTR, acting under the president's direction, said the new measures had been introduced after an investigation found the impacted economies to have failed to "impose and effectively enforce a prohibition on the importation of goods produced with forced labour".