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Donald Trump wins the presidential election 2024 to become the 47th President of the US, marking his second term in office [Post Updated #199]

Who will win the 2024 US Presidential Election?

  • Donald Trump (Republican Party)

    Votes: 13 100.0%

  • Kamala Harris (Democratic Party)

    Votes: 0 0.0%

  • Cornel West (Independent)

    Votes: 0 0.0%

  • Chase Oliver (Libertarian Party)

    Votes: 0 0.0%

  • Jill Stein (Green Party)

    Votes: 0 0.0%
  • Total voters
    13
  • Poll closed .
Aang_The_last_airbender said:
Its IK that had been crying foreign intervention when his govt. fell. That was the greatest crime against Pakistan by the "remote controlled establishment" and now IK doing the very act he called treason.

Basically, no ethics, no patriotism, "Power ke liye kuch bhi karega" . and for IK followers, it is clearly visible IK >>>>> Pakistan.
Click to expand...

Nice Spin but highlighting Human Rights abuses and a Foreign power taking rightful stock of the human rights abuses is very different vs the foreign power bribing internal stakeholders in the target country to over throw a democratically elected govt.
 
Savak said:
Nice Spin but highlighting Human Rights abuses and a Foreign power taking rightful stock of the human rights abuses is very different vs the foreign power bribing internal stakeholders in the target country to over throw a democratically elected govt.
Click to expand...
Never knew following chronology is called "A SPIN" :ROFLMAO:
IK and PTI have openly courted foreign politicians and power players to interfere in Pakistan's internal politics. I don't think links have to be shared on those facts.
"Aapke foreign friends shubhchintak, dusron ke foreign friends dushman" :nonstop: Whaata spin sirjee!! :snack: \

Anyway, I think we are derailing the topic a bit. We can switch to other threads.
 
Three women shot in Miami after election dispute

Three women were shot in Miami yesterday morning during an apparent argument about the US election.

A witness to the incident told CBS News that she heard gunfire at 12.25am local time near the apartment complex where she lived.

Mike Vega, a spokesperson for Miami Police, said the women were part of a large group "drinking and having a good time".

"They started talking about the elections, and one of the individuals went to a vehicle, grabbed a gun, and started shooting," he said.

"It seems that alcohol, along with the election discussion, led this person to go to the vehicle, grab a gun, and start shooting," he added.

"But this is not acceptable. We have to handle our differences and respect each other's beliefs. We need to either reach an agreement or simply avoid such topics."

Vega said it was not yet confirmed whether the shooter was male or female, and police have not released a description of the suspect.

He added that one of the victims is in a critical condition at Jackson Memorial Hospital, while two others, one of whom was shot "several times", are in a stable condition.

Sky News
 

The view from countries where Trump's win really matters​

News of Donald Trump's return to power in the White House has made global headlines.

His so-called America First foreign policy could see a withdrawal of US involvement in areas of conflict around the world.

Five BBC correspondents assess the effect it could have where they are.

Trump seen as respite on Ukraine frontlines

"Do not try to predict Trump's actions. No one knows how he is going to act."

The words of one Ukrainian MP reflect the political challenge facing Kyiv. A Trump victory was widely feared here, over what it could mean for future US support.

The Republican once vowed to end the war in a single day, and has repeatedly criticised US military aid for Ukraine. Now, it's anyone's guess what he could do.

"He could ask Putin to freeze this war, and he says 'OK'," says a front-line soldier. "It's the worst scenario because in a couple of years the Russians will advance again and might destroy us."

"The second scenario is if Putin refuses," he says. "There is a chance Trump will react radically. That is a more promising scenario."

Ukraine hopes that means the US further upping its military support in the face of a likely Ukrainian defeat.

For those close to the front lines who have had enough of Russian aggression, Trump is seen as a route to respite.

Analysis - Why Kamala Harris lost: A flawed candidate or doomed campaign?

Volodymyr Zelensky, Ukraine's president once labelled by Trump as "the greatest salesman in history" sent an early message of congratulations.

He talked up the political and economic opportunities a partnership could provide, and wants to be able to keep fighting in return.

There's also another ingredient.

Trump won't just have to consider further military support for Ukraine, but also how or whether to respond to North Korea's growing involvement in Russia's invasion.

No plans for Putin congratulations

You might expect the Kremlin to be cock-a-hoop at Trump winning back the White House.

After all, out on the campaign trail, he had avoided criticising Vladimir Putin. Kamala Harris meanwhile called the Russian president "a murderous dictator".

Trump had also questioned the scale of US military assistance to Kyiv.

Publicly, though, the Kremlin is going out of its way to give the impression that it's not excited by a Trump victory.

"I'm not aware of any plans [for President Putin] to congratulate Trump," said Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov. "Don't forget that [America] is an 'unfriendly country' which is directly and indirectly involved in a war against our state."

The dampening down of expectations are the result of how Trump's first term turned out: the Kremlin had high hopes that a Trump presidency would transform US-Russian relations. It didn't.

Nevertheless, at the political discussion club I'm attending in the mountains above Sochi, leading Russian political scientists seem to be looking forward to Trump the sequel.

One pundit told me he thinks that under Trump the US will "retreat" from its global super power status.

Another suggested the US election fitted the Kremlin's "overall vision of the world", in which "liberal globalism has depleted its efficiency".

Europe's leaders see security trouble ahead

When dozens of European leaders from the EU and beyond gather in Budapest on Thursday, those on the right will be celebrating Donald Trump's election victory, but the rest will be asking themselves what happens next.

Hungarian host and Trump ally Viktor Orban was first on to Facebook with his delighted message: "It's in the bag!"

But for many other EU leaders Trump 2.0 could signal trouble ahead on security, trade and climate change.

Within minutes of congratulating the Republican candidate, France's Emmanuel Macron said he had agreed with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz to work towards a "more united, stronger, more sovereign Europe in this new context".

German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock gave an idea of that context. Just back from Ukraine, she said Europeans now had to "think big and make investments in our European security big", with the US as a partner.

Her Polish and Nato counterpart Radoslaw Sikorski said he had been in touch with Trump's top team and agreed "Europe must urgently take greater responsibility for its security".

The prospect of steep US tariffs on EU imports weigh heavily too. EU Commission chief Ursula von der Leyen congratulated Trump but gave a timely reminder that "millions of jobs and billions in trade" relied on their transatlantic relationship.

Israel 'clear-sighted' about who Trump is

Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel's prime minister, was one of the first to congratulate Trump and has previously called him Israel's best ever friend in the White House.

Trump previously won favour here by scrapping a US nuclear deal with Iran that Israel opposed. He also upended decades of US policy by recognising Jerusalem as Israel's capital.

Trump's first term in office was "exemplary" as far as Israel is concerned, says Michael Oren, a former Israeli ambassador to the US. But he adds: "We have to be very clear-sighted about who Donald Trump is and what he stands for."

The former president sees wars as expensive, Mr Oren notes, and Trump has urged Israel to finish the war in Gaza quickly.

"If Donald Trump comes into office in January and says, 'okay, you have a week to finish this war', Netanyahu is going to have to respect that."

In Gaza, where the Israeli military has been battling Palestinian group Hamas, desperation has narrowed the focus of some residents.

Trump "has some strong promises", says Ahmed, whose wife and son were both killed when their house was destroyed. "We hope he can help, and bring peace."

Another displaced resident, Mamdouh, said he didn’t care who won the US election - he just wanted someone to help.

""
Xi might see opportunity on world stage

China is bracing itself for the return of Donald Trump where there are fears that his presidency will trigger a new trade war.

As president, Trump imposed tariffs on over $300 billion of Chinese imports. This time around he has said the tariffs could be in excess of 60%.

Beijing will not stand by - it will retaliate. But China's economy is already ailing and it will be in no mood for a second protracted trade war.

Trump's unpredictable policies and fiery rhetoric are also a headache for Chinese leaders who prefer stability.

But in the battle for power and influence, some analysts see an opportunity for Beijing.

Why many Chinese people wanted Trump win

The Biden administration has spent the last four years building friendships across Asia with the likes of South Korea, Japan, the Philippines and Vietnam - all in an effort to contain China.

Trump's "America first" doctrine has, in the past, isolated and weakened these US alliances. He prefers trying to make deals over delicate diplomacy and often puts a price tag on America’s friendships.

In 2018, he demanded more money from South Korea to continue to host US troops in the country

Make no mistake, China wants to challenge the US-led world order. Beijing has already built alliances with emerging economies across the so-called Global South.

If Washington's influence does wane in Asia and around the world, it could be a win for President Xi.

Source: BBC
 
Biden calls electoral system 'fair and transparent' and urges respect for election workers

In his first public remarks since the election, Biden also emphasized the integrity of the electoral system and urged respect for election workers, which Trump and his supporters have repeatedly assailed as "rigged" and corrupted.

"I also hope we can lay to rest the question about the integrity of the American electoral system," he said. "It is honest, it is fair and it is transparent. And it can be trusted, win or lose."

"I also hope we can restore the respect for all our election workers who busted their necks, took risks to the outset," Biden said. "We should thank them, thank them for staffing voting sites, counting the votes, protecting the very integrity of the election. Many of them are volunteers who do it simply out of love for their country."

Source: NBC News
 
Trump picks Susie Wiles as his White House chief of staff

President-elect Donald Trump on Thursday announced that Susie Wiles, one of his two campaign managers, will be his White House chief of staff, entrusting a top position to a political operative who helped him win election.

The appointment was the first of what is expected to be a flurry of staffing announcements as Trump girds for a return to the White House on Jan. 20.

Wiles will be the first woman to serve as White House chief of staff.

“Susie Wiles just helped me achieve one of the greatest political victories in American history, and was an integral part of both my 2016 and 2020 successful campaigns,” Trump said in a statement.

“Susie is tough, smart, innovative, and is universally admired and respected," Trump said. "I have no doubt that she will make our country proud.”

The Republican Trump has been secluded at his Mar-a-Lago club in Palm Beach, Florida, since defeating Democrat Kamala Harris in Tuesday's election.


 
Media personality Megyn Kelly says podcasts played a major role in Trump's election

Speaking to our colleagues at Radio 4's Today programme, the host of The Megyn Kelly Show podcast says the format "saved America" and was instrumental to the campaign.

Podcasts "reported on Trump honestly in a way that counterbalanced the misinformation that was being put out about him at every turn by the mainstream so-called media”, she says.

When asked about the legacy of mainstream media, Kelly says Trump has "revived" them, but said they are dying. "Let me put it to you this way: CNN on election night, I think had 4 million viewers. You know who else had 4m viewers on election night? I did," she says.

CNN declined a request for comment from the Today programme. CNN had 4.7 million viewers on election night. and Kelly's special has had 4.1 million views on YouTube.

BBC
 
Trump says 'no choice' besides deportation plan

Trump says his administration would have "no choice" but to carry out the mass deportation of people who do not have legal permission to be in the United States.

In an interview with NBC News yesterday, the president-elect said:

"It’s not a question of a price tag. It’s not - really, we have no choice. When people have killed and murdered, when drug lords have destroyed countries, and now they’re going to go back to those countries because they’re not staying here."

If a US administration was able to legally move ahead with plans for mass deportations, authorities would still have to contend with enormous and expensive logistical challenges. Experts estimate it would cost billions of dollars to deport one million people.

Controversial raids on worksites that were carried out during the Trump administration were suspended in 2021.

Annual deportations of people arrested in the US interior have hovered at below 100,000 for a decade, after peaking at over 230,000 per year during the early years of the Obama administration.

BBC
 
Trump put Elon Musk on phone with Ukraine’s Zelenskyy during congratulatory call, official says

President-elect Donald Trump put billionaire Elon Musk on the line with President Volodymyr Zelenskyy when the Ukrainian leader called to congratulate the incoming U.S. president, according to a Ukrainian official with direct knowledge of the phone call.

The person, who was not authorized to comment on the matter publicly, confirmed that Zelenskyy and Musk spoke during the call with Trump, but that Musk did not appear to be on the line for the entire conversation on Wednesday. Trump seemingly handed his phone over to Musk, the person said, and the Ukrainian president thanked the SpaceX owner for assisting his country with access to the Starlink satellite internet platform.

The presence of Musk on the call highlights his influence in the president-elect’s circle. Trump has mused that Musk could have a formal role in his administration that focuses on government efficiency, raising questions about potential conflicts of interest given SpaceX’s lucrative government contracts.

Trump’s interactions with Zelenskyy are being closely watched as he prepares to take over the presidency on Jan. 20 and has signaled a shift in Washington’s steadfast support for Ukraine against Russia’s nearly three-year-old invasion.

Trump has promised to swiftly end the war and suggested that Kyiv should agree to cede some territory to Moscow in return for peace, a condition Zelenskyy has rejected.

It was under Trump that the United States first sent weapons to Ukraine in its fight against Russia, in 2017. Those Javelin anti-tank missiles were crucial to Ukraine’s initial ability to fend off the full-scale invasion in 2022.

President Joe Biden’s administration has sent tens of billions of dollars in military and economic assistance to Ukraine, drawing criticism from Trump and Vice President-elect JD Vance, who are wary of U.S. involvement in foreign conflicts and suggested the money could better be spent domestically.

Trump has promoted his good relationship with President Vladimir Putin and called the Russian leader “pretty smart” for invading Ukraine. He characterized Zelenskyy as “the greatest salesman on earth” for winning U.S. aid.

Zelenskyy is one of dozens of world leaders, business executives and political leaders to speak with Trump, who has been at his private club and residence in Florida, in the days since he won the White House.

The Trump transition said it would not comment on private meetings.

Axios was first to report on Musk’s presence on the Trump-Zelenskyy call.

apnews.com

Trump put Elon Musk on phone with Ukraine's Zelenskyy during congratulatory call, official says

President-elect Donald Trump put billionaire Elon Musk on the line with President Volodymyr Zelenskyy when the Ukrainian leader called to congratulate the incoming U.S. president.
apnews.com apnews.com
 
Democrats dreamt of an unbeatable coalition. Trump turned it to dust

Donald Trump swept to victory on Tuesday by chipping away at groups of voters which Democrats once believed would help them win the White House for a generation.

After Barack Obama’s victory in 2008, many triumphantly claimed that the liberal voting coalition which had elected the first black president was growing more powerful, as the makeup of America changed.

Older, white conservatives were dying off, and non-white Americans were projected to be in the majority by 2044. College-educated professionals, younger people, blacks, Latinos and other ethnic minorities, and blue-collar workers were part of a “coalition of the ascendant”.

These voters were left-leaning on cultural issues and supportive of an active federal government and a strong social safety net. And they constituted a majority in enough states to ensure a Democratic lock on the Electoral College – and the presidency.

“Demography,” these left-wing optimists liked to say, “is destiny.” Sixteen years later, however, that destiny appears to have turned to dust.

Cracks began forming when non-college educated voters slipped away from the Democrats in midterm elections in 2010 and 2014. They then broke en masse to Trump in 2016. While Joe Biden, with his working-class-friendly reputation built over half a century, won enough back to take the White House in 2020, his success proved to be only a temporary reprieve.

This year, Trump supplemented his gains with the blue-collar workers by also cutting into the Democratic margins among young, Latino and black voters. He has carved up the coalition of the ascendant.

According to exit polls, Trump won:

- 13% of the black vote in 2024 compared to Republican John McCain’s 4% against Obama

- 46% of the Latino vote this time, while McCain got 31% in 2008

- 43% of voters under 30 against the 32% for McCain

- 56% of those without a college degree - back in 2008, it was Obama who won a majority

Speaking on Thursday after his comeback victory, Trump celebrated his own diverse coalition of voters.

“I started to see realignment could happen because the Democrats are not in line with the thinking of the country," the president-elect told NBC News.

Immigration and identity politics

Trump did it with a hard-line message on immigration that included border enforcement and mass deportations – policies that Biden and the Democrats recoiled from when they took power back from Trump in 2021, lest they anger immigrant rights activists in their liberal base.

Illegal border crossings reached record levels under the Biden administration, with more than eight million encounters with migrants at the border with Mexico.

“If you watch a video from Hillary Clinton back in 2008 in the primaries, she talks about making sure there's wall-building, making sure that that immigrants who violate the law get deported, making sure everybody learns English,” said Kevin Marino Cabrera, a Republican commissioner in Miami-Dade County. “It's funny how far to the left [the Democrats] have gone.”

This week, Trump became the first Republican since 1988 to win that heavily Latino county in Florida. He also won Starr County in south Texas, with its 97% Latino population, with 57% of the vote. In 2008, only 15% of the county voted for McCain, the Republican.

Mike Madrid, an anti-Trump Republican strategist who specialises in Latino voting trends, told the BBC that the problem with “demography is destiny” was that it risked treating all non-white Americans as an “aggrieved racial minority”. “But that is not and nor has it ever been the way Latinos have viewed themselves,” he added.

“I hate that if you’re black, you've got to be a Democrat or you hate black people and you hate your community,” Kenard Holmes, a 20-year-old student in South Carolina, told the BBC during the presidential primaries earlier this year. He said he agreed with Republicans on some things and felt Democratic politicians took black voters for granted.

With some states still tabulating their results, Trump currently has improved on his electoral margins in at least 2,367 US counties, while slipping in just 240.

It wasn’t just the number of counties that Trump won that made a difference, either. Kamala Harris needed to post significant margins in the cities to offset Republican strength in rural areas. She consistently fell short.

In Detroit’s Wayne County, for example, which the latest US Census reports is 38% black, Harris won 63% of the vote – significantly lower than Joe Biden’s 68% in 2020 and Obama’s 74% in 2008.

Polls consistently suggested that the economy, along with immigration, were the two issues of highest importance to voters - and where polls indicated Trump had an advantage over Harris.

His economic message cut across racial divides.

“We're just sick of hearing about identity politics," said Nicole Williams, a white bartender with a black husband and biracial children in Las Vegas, Nevada – one of the key battleground states that Trump flipped this year.

“We're just American, and we just want what's best for Americans," she said.

The Democratic blame game begins

Democrats are already engaged in considerable soul-searching, as they come to grips with an election defeat that has delivered the White House, the Senate and, perhaps, the House of Representatives to Republican control.

Various elements within the party are offering their own, often conflicting, advice on the best path from the wilderness back to power.

Left-wing Senator Bernie Sanders, who twice ran for the Democratic presidential nomination, also criticised identity politics and accused the party of abandoning working-class voters.

Some centrist Democrats, meanwhile, have argued that the struggle to connect with voters goes beyond the economy and immigration. They point to how the Trump campaign was also able to use a cultural message as a wedge to fracture the Democratic coalition.

Among the positions that Republicans targeted in this year’s election were calls to shift funding away from law enforcement, decriminalise undocumented border-crossings and minor crimes like shoplifting, and provide greater protections for transgender Americans.

Many arose after the murder of George Floyd in 2020 and the resulting rise of the Black Lives Matter movement, as well as other efforts to advance social justice and acknowledge darker parts of American history.

Within a few years, however, some of those positions proved a liability for Democrats when trying to win over persuadable voters and keep their coalition from fraying. Harris, for example, backed away from some positions she’d taken when she first ran for president in 2019.

In the last month of the presidential campaign, the Trump team made the vice-president’s past support for taxpayer-funded gender transition surgeries for federal prisoners and detained immigrants a central focus.

One advert ended with the line: “Kamala is for they/them. President Trump is for you.”

The Trump campaign spent more than $21m on transgender issue ads in the first half of October – about a third of their entire advertising expenditures and nearly double what they spent on spots on immigration and inflation, according to data compiled by AdImpact.

It’s the kind of investment a campaign makes if it has hard data showing an advert is moving public opinion.

After Trump’s convincing win, Congressman Seth Moulton, a moderate from Massachusetts, said his party needed to rethink its approach on cultural issues.

“Democrats spend way too much time trying not to offend anyone rather than being brutally honest about the challenges many Americans face,” Moulton told the New York Times. “I have two little girls, I don’t want them getting run over on a playing field by a male or formerly male athlete, but as a Democrat I’m supposed to be afraid to say that.”

Progressive Democrats, meanwhile, reject that characterisation, and argue that standing up for the rights of minorities has always been a core value of the party. Congressman John Moran wrote on X in response: "You should find another job if you want to use an election loss as an opportunity to pick on our most vulnerable.”

Mike Madrid, the political strategist, has a brutal assessment of where the Democratic coalition is today.

“The Democratic Party was predicated on what really is an unholy alliance between working-class people of colour and wealthier white progressives driven and animated by cultural issues,” Madrid said. “The only glue holding that coalition together was anti-Republicanism.”

Once that glue came unstuck, he said, the party was ripe for defeat.

Future elections are sure to be held in a friendlier political environment for Democrats. And Trump, who has shown a unique ability to attract new and low-propensity voters to the polls, has run his last campaign.

But 2024’s results will provide plenty of fuel for Democratic angst in the days to come.

The Harris campaign itself believes she lost to Trump because she was facing a restive public angry over the economic and social turbulence in the aftermath of the Covid pandemic.

“You stared down unprecedented headwinds and obstacles that were largely out of our control,” campaign chair Jen O’Malley Dillon wrote in a letter to her staff. “The whole country moved to the right, but compared to the rest of the country, the battleground states saw the least amount of movement in his direction. It was closest in the places we competed.”

Moses Santana, a Puerto Rican living in Philadelphia, is from a demographic which seemed reliably Democratic a decade or so ago. But when he spoke to the BBC this week, he was not so convinced the Democrats had delivered when in power - or that their message today connected with Americans like him.

“You know, Joe Biden promised a lot of progressive things, like he was going to cancel student debt, he was going to help people get their citizenship,” he said. “And none of that happened. Donald Trump is bringing [people] something new.”

BBC
 

Damn DT spits facts during his last term... Now NATO will be worried.

I wonder what's in for store democrat protected stooges like the Chappi and Dhal aka

Gurpatwant Singh Pannun...​

 
Romali_rotti said:

Damn DT spits facts during his last term... Now NATO will be worried.

I wonder what's in for store democrat protected stooges like the Chappi and Dhal aka

Gurpatwant Singh Pannun...​

Click to expand...

For the record, nothing happened to Pannun during Trump's first presidency.

Also, don't think NATO is in threat due to Trump. They have checks and balances. It is not a dictatorship.
 
sweep_shot said:
For the record, nothing happened to Pannun during Trump's first presidency.

Also, don't think NATO is in threat due to Trump. They have checks and balances. It is not a dictatorship.
Click to expand...
That was Trumps beginning. He is now pissed because all the harm the democrats did to him. Let's see how his second term will turn out...
 
Romali_rotti said:

Damn DT spits facts during his last term... Now NATO will be worried.

I wonder what's in for store democrat protected stooges like the Chappi and Dhal aka

Gurpatwant Singh Pannun...​

Click to expand...

Germany was an amazing country until they allowed these clowns to stop their energy supply from Russia , blowing up nord stream pipeline etc. Germany doesn’t need any protection from USA , Russia & Germany both spent together to build nord stream . Americans ran from Afghanistan & in a world of missiles & nukes , the days of worrying about Americans is long gone .

Russia is part of Europe. European leaders need to wake up & realise this .
 
KingKhanWC said:
Germany was an amazing country until they allowed these clowns to stop their energy supply from Russia , blowing up nord stream pipeline etc. Germany doesn’t need any protection from USA , Russia & Germany both spent together to build nord stream . Americans ran from Afghanistan & in a world of missiles & nukes , the days of worrying about Americans is long gone .

Russia is part of Europe. European leaders need to wake up & realise this .
Click to expand...
I think DT might broker a peace in the Ukraine Russia conflict..
 

Donald Trump committed to NATO and is right to push Europe to increase funding, UK defence secretary John Healey says​


The defence secretary has insisted Donald Trump is committed to NATO and is right to push other European nations to put more funding into the security alliance.

John Healey dismissed suggestions the US president-elect will pull out of NATO, the military alliance consisting of 30 European countries and the US and Canada, after previous reports Mr Trump has discussed doing so.

Mr Healey told Sky News: "I don't expect the US to turn away from NATO.

"They recognise the importance of the alliance, they recognise the importance of avoiding further conflict in Europe.

"But, I do say, and I've argued for some time, that the European nations in NATO need to do more of the heavy lifting."

He added that Mr Trump "rightly pushed European nations to do more to fund NATO better".

The defence secretary said the US commitment to NATO remained through the previous Trump administration and he has no reason to think that support will discontinue during his second term.

Mr Trump has repeatedly criticised NATO and complained about the US contributing too much of its budget to the alliance while accusing European countries of spending too little on defence.

During the election campaign, he said the US would only help defend NATO members from a future attack by Russia if they met their spending obligations.

Members pledged to spend at least 2% of GDP on defence by 2024, with 23 of the 32 countries expected to do so by the end of the year.

Poland, which shares a border with Russia, is the biggest spender at 4.1% of GDP, Estonia is second with 3.4% and the US is third with 3.4%.

The UK comes ninth on the list, reaching 2.3% of GDP under the previous Conservative government.

Mr Healey said his government has committed to spending 2.5% of GDP on defence but did not give a timeline for that goal to be reached.

He said Labour was starting to make good on their promise by increasing defence spending by £3 billion next year.

"That's a sign of a government that recognises the first duty of any government is to defend the country and keep our citizens safe," he added.

Mr Trump spoke to Russian President Vladimir Putin after the American's win, and told him not to escalate the war in Ukraine, according to The Washington Post and Reuters.

Several sources familiar with the call told them the president-elect reminded Mr Putin of the US's sizeable military presence in Europe and discussed the goal of peace on the continent.

news.sky.com

Donald Trump committed to NATO and is right to push Europe to increase funding, UK defence secretary John Healey says

Concerns about the new US president's commitment to NATO have been raised after he has repeatedly complained about the alliance and said European states contribute too little.
news.sky.com news.sky.com
 
Kremlin has denied media reports that US President-elect Donald Trump held a call with Vladimir Putin, in which he is said to have warned the Russian president against escalating the war in Ukraine

The call, which was first reported by the Washington Post on Sunday, is said to have happened on Thursday.

Trump is also reported to have mentioned America's extensive military presence in Europe to Putin.

A Kremlin spokesperson said the reports were "pure fiction", while Trump's team told the BBC that it would not comment on the president-elect's "private calls".

Trump's communications director Steven Cheung told the BBC: "We do not comment on private calls between President Trump and other world leaders."

But he said leaders had begun the process of contacting the president-elect.

Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov denied a conversation had taken place.

"This is completely untrue, it is pure fiction. That is, this is simply false information. There was no conversation," Peskov said.

Trump has promised to end the nearly three-year long war in Ukraine, but has yet to outline how he intends to do so.

A former adviser to the Trump campaign, Bryan Lanza, on Saturday told the BBC the incoming administration would focus on achieving peace in Ukraine rather than enabling the country to gain back occupied territory.

A spokesperson for Trump distanced the incoming president from the remarks, saying Mr Lanza "does not speak for him".

Zelensky has previously warned against conceding land to Russia and has said that without US aid, Ukraine would lose the war.

While Peskov on Sunday spoke to Russian state media of "positive" signals from the incoming US administration, others say they trust the future president will not abandon Ukraine.

They include John Healey, the British defence secretary, who said he expected the US "to remain alongside allies like the UK, standing with Ukraine for as long as it takes to prevail over Putin's invasion".

On Sunday, during a visit to Ukraine, EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell warned that any end to the war needed to be sustainable.

"This is a warning for the ones who say, this war has to end, so let's finish it as soon as possible no matter how. How matters," he said.

In Washington, US National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan said outgoing president Joe Biden would make the case to Trump that walking away from Ukraine would mean greater instability in Europe.

On Monday, Germany's Foreign Minister, Annalena Baerbock, warned that Putin could take advantage of the US post-election transition period to press Moscow's advantage in Ukraine.

Urging Berlin and fellow European Union member states to increase aid to Kyiv, she said: "We don't have time to wait until spring. Now is the transition phase that Putin has been waiting for and aiming for."

Last week, Russia and Ukraine launched their largest drone attacks since the start of the war.

Source: BBC
 
Trump names Elon Musk to role for creating greater government efficiency

U.S. President-elect Donald Trump on Tuesday named Elon Musk to a role aimed at creating a more efficient government, handing even more influence to the world's richest man who donated millions of dollars to helping Trump get elected.

Musk and former Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy will co-lead a newly created Department of Government Efficiency, an entity Trump indicated will operate outside the confines of government.

Trump said in a statement that Musk and Ramaswamy "will pave the way for my Administration to dismantle Government Bureaucracy, slash excess regulations, cut wasteful expenditures, and restructure Federal Agencies."

Trump said the new department will realize long-held Republican dreams and "provide advice and guidance from outside of government," signaling the Musk and Ramaswamy roles would be informal, without requiring Senate approval and allowing Musk to remain the head of electric car company Tesla (TSLA.O), opens new tab, social media platform X and rocket company SpaceX.

The new department would work with the White House and Office of Management & Budget to "drive large scale structural reform, and create an entrepreneurial approach" to government never seen before, Trump said.

The work would conclude by July 4, 2026 - the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence.

Musk, ranked by Forbes as the richest person in the world, already stood to benefit from Trump's victory, with the billionaire entrepreneur expected to wield extraordinary influence to help his companies and secure favorable government treatment.

With many links to Washington, opens new tab, Musk gave millions of dollars to support Trump's presidential campaign and made public appearances with him. Trump had said he would offer Musk a role in his administration promoting government efficiency.

Adding a government portfolio to Musk's plate could benefit the market value of his companies and favored businesses such as artificial intelligence and cryptocurrency.

"It's clear that Musk will have a massive role in the Trump White House with his increasing reach clearly across many federal agencies," equities analyst Daniel Ives of Wedbush Securities said in a research note.

"We believe the major benefits for Musk and Tesla far outweigh any negatives as this continues to be a 'poker move for the ages' by Musk betting on Trump," Ives said.

Trump likened the efficiency effort to the Manhattan Project, the U.S. undertaking to build the atomic bomb that helped end World War Two, while Musk promised transparency.

"All actions of the Department of Government Efficiency will be posted online for maximum transparency," Musk said on X, inviting the public to provide tips.

"We will also have a leaderboard for most insanely dumb spending of your tax dollars. This will be both extremely tragic and extremely entertaining," Musk said.

Musk said at a Trump rally at Madison Square Garden in October that the federal budget could be reduced by "at least" $2 trillion. Discretionary spending, including defense spending, is estimated to total $1.9 trillion out of $6.75 trillion in total federal outlays for fiscal 2024, according to the Congressional Budget Office.

"Your money is being wasted and the Department of Government Efficiency is going to fix that. We're going to get the government off you back and out of your pocketbook," Musk said at the rally.

The acronym of the new department - DOGE - also references the name of the cryptocurrency dogecoin that Musk promotes.

In August Musk and Tesla won the dismissal of a federal lawsuit accusing them of defrauding investors by hyping dogecoin and conducting insider trading, causing billions of dollars of losses.

Ramaswamy is the founder of a pharmaceutical company who ran for the Republican presidential nomination against Trump and then threw his support behind the former president after dropping out.

Ramaswamy said the appointment means he is withdrawing from consideration for the pending U.S. Senate appointment in Ohio, where Governor Mike DeWine will appoint a replacement for JD Vance, who will become Trump's vice president when they are inaugurated on Jan. 20.

REUTERS
 
Trump names Fox News host Pete Hegseth as defence secretary pick

US President-elect Donald Trump has named Pete Hegseth, a Fox News host, author and military veteran, as his pick for defence secretary.

Hegseth, 44, who served in Afghanistan and Iraq, will be responsible for the world's most powerful military in his first political role.

Announcing his choice on Tuesday, Trump described him as "tough, smart and a true believer in America First".

The news came on the same day Trump announced another political newcomer, billionaire Elon Musk, would take a government cost-cutting role.

Trump's administration is taking shape after his win in last week's presidential election. Hegseth was one of a flurry of security appointments that also included Trump's pick of John Ratcliffe to head the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).

If confirmed for his role by the US Senate, Hegseth will arrive at the Pentagon with decisions to make on issues such as military assistance for Israel during its campaign in Gaza, and on support for Ukraine in the face of Russia's invasion.

Trump wants the US to disentangle itself from foreign conflicts generally. During the election campaign, he criticised the Biden administration's expenditure to support Kyiv.

Also on Tuesday, Trump confirmed that he wanted South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem to play a significant role as homeland security secretary. Another military veteran, Michael Waltz, was chosen by Trump as national security adviser - meaning he will advise the president on foreign threats.

Senator Marco Rubio - who shares Waltz's hawkish views on China - is expected to be Trump's future secretary of state, sources have told the BBC's US partner, CBS News. But the pick is not yet confirmed.

Republicans have won back control of the Senate, the upper chamber of Congress, and are inching towards a majority in the House, the lower chamber, as vote-counting continues.

Some of the government appointments - including Hegseth's - require a vote of approval by senators, although Trump, also a Republican, has demanded that the next leader of the US Senate let him bypass this process. He can give out other jobs directly.

Senate Republicans are due to vote on a new leader on Wednesday - the day that Trump is also expected to visit the outgoing president, Joe Biden, at the White House as part of the traditional transfer of power.

Who is Pete Hegseth?

Born in Minneapolis, Minnesota, Ivy League graduate Hegseth has in recent years worked as a conservative commentator. He has hosted programmes on Fox News, using his platform to draw attention to military and veterans' issues.

He is reported by US media to have successfully lobbied Trump during his first presidency to pardon servicemen accused of war crimes.

In his statement announcing Hegseth as his pick for defence secretary on Tuesday, Trump highlighted the former soldier's education at Princeton and Harvard universities, and his military experience in Afghanistan and Iraq.

"With Pete at the helm, America’s enemies are on notice - our military will be great again, and America will never back down," Trump wrote in a post.

The president-elect also drew attention to Hegseth's work as a published author. He said the book The War on Warrior "reveals the leftwing betrayal of our warriors, and how we must return our military to meritocracy, lethality, accountability, and excellence".

BBC
 

Jack Smith plans to step down before Trump takes office​


Jack Smith, the special counsel who led two federal criminal cases against Donald Trump, is expected to leave the Justice Department before the president-elect takes office, CBS News, the BBC's US media partner, reports.

The timing would allow Mr Smith to leave his post without being fired by Trump or his eventual attorney general, CBS says, citing two people familiar with his plans.

If his exit goes to plan, Mr Smith would leave without either of his criminal prosecutions of Trump – over the alleged improper hoarding of classified documents and an alleged attempt to interfere in the 2020 election outcome – seeing trial.

His team is reportedly winding down its work, as Trump’s election renders the cases all but finished.

A Trump-appointed Florida judge dismissed Trump’s classified documents case in July, though the decision remains on appeal.

The election interference case is currently ongoing. But Justice Department procedure bars criminal proceedings against sitting presidents while they are in office.

Traditionally, special counsels issue a final report when their investigations conclude that detail the steps their investigation took and their conclusions about whether to bring charges.

It is not yet clear whether Mr Smith will submit such a report to US Attorney General Merrick Garland and if it would see the light of day before Trump takes office.

The Justice Department did not immediately respond to the BBC's request for comment.

Though they do not directly result in legal action, special counsel reports can have significant impact in the public sphere if they are released.

Over the summer, for example, special counsel Robert Hur released a report on Joe Biden’s retention of classified documents; the prosecutor’s decision not to charge Biden was overshadowed by damaging revelations about Biden’s age and mental acuity.

Mr Smith has already aired much of his evidence in Trump’s election interference case through court filings.

Trump had pleaded not guilty in both cases and sought to cast the prosecutions as politically motivated.

Trump successfully argued to the US Supreme Court that presidents enjoy immunity from criminal prosecution for certain “official acts” undertaken while in office. The victory forced Mr Smith to re-calibrate his indictment – but also allowed him to file a tranche of supporting evidence for his case.

US District Judge Tanya Chutkan has granted Mr Smith a 2 December deadline to decide how to proceed.

Mr Smith’s departure would mark Trump’s legal triumphs over the US criminal justice system.

The president-elect was indicted in four different criminal cases in 2023, only one of which went to trial in New York.

That case, involving a fraudulent attempt to cover up hush money payments to an adult film star, resulted in a conviction on 34 felony counts.

But Trump’s election has thrown even that verdict into question, as his lawyers seek to overturn the conviction on the grounds that it violates presidential immunity, and would interfere with his White House duties.

www.bbc.com

Jack Smith plans to leave Justice Department before Trump takes office

The special counsel has led two federal criminal cases against Donald Trump.
www.bbc.com www.bbc.com
 
Technics 1210 said:
Let the liberal meltdown begin!

Kamala Harris had to lose, she was pushing the rainbow agenda, and anyone pushing the rainbow agenda must surely be the fuel of hellfire.
Click to expand...

Agree. But remember ond thing. Donald Trump will come in with the blessing of Aipac, and will give the zionest extremists the full green light to totally massacre the remaining Palestinians
 
Lol entire media is having a metldown with bis nominees :yk3 insane level stuff by the nut job.
 
FearlessRoar said:

Jack Smith plans to step down before Trump takes office​


Jack Smith, the special counsel who led two federal criminal cases against Donald Trump, is expected to leave the Justice Department before the president-elect takes office, CBS News, the BBC's US media partner, reports.

The timing would allow Mr Smith to leave his post without being fired by Trump or his eventual attorney general, CBS says, citing two people familiar with his plans.

If his exit goes to plan, Mr Smith would leave without either of his criminal prosecutions of Trump – over the alleged improper hoarding of classified documents and an alleged attempt to interfere in the 2020 election outcome – seeing trial.

His team is reportedly winding down its work, as Trump’s election renders the cases all but finished.

A Trump-appointed Florida judge dismissed Trump’s classified documents case in July, though the decision remains on appeal.

The election interference case is currently ongoing. But Justice Department procedure bars criminal proceedings against sitting presidents while they are in office.

Traditionally, special counsels issue a final report when their investigations conclude that detail the steps their investigation took and their conclusions about whether to bring charges.

It is not yet clear whether Mr Smith will submit such a report to US Attorney General Merrick Garland and if it would see the light of day before Trump takes office.

The Justice Department did not immediately respond to the BBC's request for comment.

Though they do not directly result in legal action, special counsel reports can have significant impact in the public sphere if they are released.

Over the summer, for example, special counsel Robert Hur released a report on Joe Biden’s retention of classified documents; the prosecutor’s decision not to charge Biden was overshadowed by damaging revelations about Biden’s age and mental acuity.

Mr Smith has already aired much of his evidence in Trump’s election interference case through court filings.

Trump had pleaded not guilty in both cases and sought to cast the prosecutions as politically motivated.

Trump successfully argued to the US Supreme Court that presidents enjoy immunity from criminal prosecution for certain “official acts” undertaken while in office. The victory forced Mr Smith to re-calibrate his indictment – but also allowed him to file a tranche of supporting evidence for his case.

US District Judge Tanya Chutkan has granted Mr Smith a 2 December deadline to decide how to proceed.

Mr Smith’s departure would mark Trump’s legal triumphs over the US criminal justice system.

The president-elect was indicted in four different criminal cases in 2023, only one of which went to trial in New York.

That case, involving a fraudulent attempt to cover up hush money payments to an adult film star, resulted in a conviction on 34 felony counts.

But Trump’s election has thrown even that verdict into question, as his lawyers seek to overturn the conviction on the grounds that it violates presidential immunity, and would interfere with his White House duties.

www.bbc.com

Jack Smith plans to leave Justice Department before Trump takes office

The special counsel has led two federal criminal cases against Donald Trump.
www.bbc.com www.bbc.com
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If failure had a face
 
Lol another one for Liberal meltdown- Tulsi Gabbard.

He has literally chosen to enrage all Liberals with his picks :viru

Going to be weird 4 years, wonder if he will get impeached before that.
 
Appointing Elon Musk to a department of government efficiency is wild. America was already capitalism on steroids. Now it’s going to be a dystopian Silicon Valley fever dream, where efficiency isn’t about cutting waste but slashing people, programs, and protections in the name of profit margins. Musk's chainsaw approach to bureaucracy might shred public trust faster than dogecoin memes hit Twitter timelines.
 
JaDed said:
Lol another one for Liberal meltdown- Tulsi Gabbard.

He has literally chosen to enrage all Liberals with his picks :viru

Going to be weird 4 years, wonder if he will get impeached before that.
Click to expand...
It's like he's gone and chosen the specific picks to cause outrage whether they're relevant or not.

Matt Gaetz for Attorney General. The guy's been investigated for sex with underage girl. Now he'll be heading the agency investigating him
Tulsi Gabbard for Intelligence head. She's never been on the intelligence and seems to actually have contempt for the function
Pete Hegseth for Defense. Fox News warmonger host. While still just a media guy, he got Trump to issue pardons to several US soldiers who ruthlessly murdered people in Iraq and Afghanistan. Just sadistic murderers
RFK Jr. for Health. An unscientific quack who might actually set public health back

Right now it feels more like a carnival ride than an administration but I'm sure it'll eventually settle down and there'll be some adults in the room.
 
Red-Indian said:
It's like he's gone and chosen the specific picks to cause outrage whether they're relevant or not.

Matt Gaetz for Attorney General. The guy's been investigated for sex with underage girl. Now he'll be heading the agency investigating him
Tulsi Gabbard for Intelligence head. She's never been on the intelligence and seems to actually have contempt for the function
Pete Hegseth for Defense. Fox News warmonger host. While still just a media guy, he got Trump to issue pardons to several US soldiers who ruthlessly murdered people in Iraq and Afghanistan. Just sadistic murderers
RFK Jr. for Health. An unscientific quack who might actually set public health back

Right now it feels more like a carnival ride than an administration but I'm sure it'll eventually settle down and there'll be some adults in the room.
Click to expand...
Tulsi is a Hawai National Guard surely has more credentials than others, Hilary did a witch hunt against her, so it definitely was good to see her come in, she has been anti-troop deployment for Business propaganda, the Armed forces actually back her more than other cAndidates to protect them from continuously being involved in wars.

Unfortunately I agree on others , they look stupid, but having said that Lina Khan was a very similar pick by Biden she ran FTC to the ground bringing about the highest attrition rate in the agency with most losses for her directionless crusade.

Democratic picks esp by Biden were along similar footing if not stupider in most situations , just that NY times etc weren’t running pieces 24 7 against them.
 
RedwoodOriginal said:
Appointing Elon Musk to a department of government efficiency is wild. America was already capitalism on steroids. Now it’s going to be a dystopian Silicon Valley fever dream, where efficiency isn’t about cutting waste but slashing people, programs, and protections in the name of profit margins. Musk's chainsaw approach to bureaucracy might shred public trust faster than dogecoin memes hit Twitter timelines.
Click to expand...
Pure Capitalism is absolute worth it, Crony capitalism or socialism for Business masked as capitalism by conservatives is definitely an issue.

Only Libertarians can balance the capitalism and this is the only system that actually has worked.
 
JaDed said:
Tulsi is a Hawai National Guard surely has more credentials than others, Hilary did a witch hunt against her, so it definitely was good to see her come in, she has been anti-troop deployment for Business propaganda, the Armed forces actually back her more than other cAndidates to protect them from continuously being involved in wars.

Unfortunately I agree on others , they look stupid, but having said that Lina Khan was a very similar pick by Biden she ran FTC to the ground bringing about the highest attrition rate in the agency with most losses for her directionless crusade.

Democratic picks esp by Biden were along similar footing if not stupider in most situations , just that NY times etc weren’t running pieces 24 7 against them.
Click to expand...
I think the difference is that Biden was a lifetime politician not some leftist fanatic.

While he made the odd wild appointment like Lina Khan, in general the appointments were typical faceless boring bureaucrats like Yellen or Blinken. Trump did the same the first time around - guys like ex-Army generals for NSA, Secretary of Defense, Tillerson for Sec State...reasonably non-partisan appointments. This time, he's gone wholesale on the loonies.
 
Red-Indian said:
I think the difference is that Biden was a lifetime politician not some leftist fanatic.

While he made the odd wild appointment like Lina Khan, in general the appointments were typical faceless boring bureaucrats like Yellen or Blinken. Trump did the same the first time around - guys like ex-Army generals for NSA, Secretary of Defense, Tillerson for Sec State...reasonably non-partisan appointments. This time, he's gone wholesale on the loonies.
Click to expand...
Fair Point, but i think they will be replaced with time due to performance.

Some of them he has put in positions are pretty much from his first term, and in terms of credentials all of them have same educational credentials as Biden’s appointees.

But have to agree Biden was not a left fanatic and have to say overall Biden would most probably end up being better than Trump, only if he was more sane.
 
Trump names fracking executive Chris Wright energy secretary

Donald Trump has named oil and gas industry executive Chris Wright as his pick to lead the US Energy Department.

He is expected to fulfil the president-elect’s promise to increase fossil fuel production - an aim summed by the campaign slogan “drill, baby, drill”.

Wright is the founder and CEO of Liberty Energy, which serves companies extracting oil and gas from shale fields in a process known as “fracking”.

Trump wrote in a statement: “Chris was one of the pioneers who helped launch the American Shale Revolution that fuelled American Energy Independence, and transformed the Global Energy Markets and Geopolitics.

“As Secretary of Energy, Chris will be a key leader, driving innovation, cutting red tape, and ushering in a new Golden Age of American Prosperity and Global Peace.”

Wright is a climate change sceptic who previously said he does not care where energy comes from, “as long as it is secure, reliable, affordable and betters human lives”.

In a video posted to his LinkedIn profile last year, he said: “There is no climate crisis, and we're not in the midst of an energy transition either.”

Wright will also be appointed to a new Council of National Energy, the Trump campaign said.

The council will oversee “the path to US energy dominance by cutting red tape, enhancing private sector investments across all sectors of the Economy,” Trump said.

The Trump campaign cited Wright’s work with Pinnacle Technologies, a company he founded before Liberty Energy, as being critical to the US’s fracking boom, which has made the country the largest oil producer in the world.

Wright’s appointment is a win for the fossil fuel industry, which expects a boom under the next administration. Trump has pledged to increase production of US fossil fuels rather than investing in renewable energy sources such as wind power - a goal Wright will be instrumental in driving.

The president-elect has pledged to open areas such as the Arctic wilderness to oil drilling, which he argues would lower energy costs.

During his first presidency, Trump rolled back hundreds of environmental protections and made America the first nation to withdraw from the Paris climate agreement.

BBC
 

Trump attends UFC event with top cabinet picks​


Donald Trump celebrated his election victory at the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) in New York alongside Elon Musk and some of his cabinet picks.

Trump entered the arena to loud music and cheers from the UFC 309 crowd at Madison Square Garden. He hugged the US podcaster Joe Rogan and spent most of the night sitting between UFC president Dana White and Tesla CEO Musk.

Two of Trump's key cabinet picks, Robert F Kennedy Jr and Tulsi Gabbard, plus Vivek Ramaswamy, who will lead Trump's cost-cutting Department of Government Efficiency with Musk, were also in attendance.

www.bbc.com

Trump attends UFC event with top cabinet picks

Donald Trump attends Ultimate Fighting Championship event with top cabinet picks.
www.bbc.com www.bbc.com
 

Xi says he will work with Trump in last meeting with Biden​


Chinese leader Xi Jinping has pledged to work with incoming President Donald Trump in his final meeting with current US leader Joe Biden.

But president Xi also took the opportunity to state China’s objectives in what appears to be a message to Donald Trump and the next administration in Washington.

In a robust readout of the meeting released afterwards, Beijing said President Xi had underscored that "a new Cold War should not be fought and cannot be won. Containing China is unwise, unacceptable and bound to fail".

Xi also said a stable relationship between China and the United States was "critical to both parties and the world".

The two met on Saturday on the sidelines of the annual Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (Apec) summit in Peru where they acknowledged "ups and downs" in relations over Biden's four years in office.

Speaking at Saturday's meeting, which was held at President Xi's hotel in Lima, the leader said that if the US and China "treat each other as opponents or enemies, engage in vicious competition and mutual harm, China-US relations will suffer setbacks or even regressions".

He added that Beijing's goal of a stable relationship with Washington would remain unchanged and that he would work with the new US administration "to maintain communication, expand cooperation and manage differences."

Biden, meanwhile, said strategic competition between the two global powers should not escalate into war.

"Our two countries cannot let any of this competition veer into conflict. That is our responsibility and over the last four years I think we've proven it's possible to have this relationship," he said.

Both leaders highlighted progress in lowering tensions on issues such as trade and Taiwan.

Analysts say US-China relations could become more volatile when Trump returns to office in two months, driven by factors including a promise to raise tariffs on Chinese imports.

The president-elect has pledged 60% tariffs on all imports from China. He has also appointed prominent China hawks to top foreign and defence positions.

During his first term, Trump labelled Beijing a “strategic competitor”. Relations worsened when he labelled Covid a “Chinese virus” during the pandemic.

Biden's time in office did see flare-ups in relations with China, including a spy balloon saga and displays of Chinese military firepower around Taiwan triggered by the visit of a senior US official.

China says its claim to the self-ruling island is a red line.

However, the Biden administration aimed to "responsibly manage" rivalry with Beijing after Trump's first term.

Beijing is likely to be most concerned about the president-elect's unpredictability, analysts say.

"The Chinese are ready to negotiate and deal, and probably hope for early engagement with the Trump team to discuss potential transactions," said Bonnie Glaser, managing director of the German Marshall Fund's Indo-Pacific Program.

"At the same time, however, they are ready to retaliate if Trump insists on imposing higher tariffs on China."

She added that China may also be "likely worried that they lack reliable back channels to influence Trump's policy".

Biden on Saturday acknowledged there had always been disagreements with Xi but added that discussions between him and the Chinese leader had been "frank" and "candid".

The pair held three face-to-face meetings during Biden's time in the White House, including a key summit last year in San Francisco where both sides came to agreements on combatting narcotics and climate change.

But Biden's White House also continued Trump-era tariffs. His government imposed duties in May targeting China's electric cars, solar panels and steels.

He also strengthened defence alliances across Asia and the Pacific to counter China's increasing assertiveness in the region. The outgoing president has also said the US would defend Taiwan if it were invaded by China.

www.bbc.com

China's Xi Jinping says he is ready to work with Trump in last meeting with Joe Biden

The incoming Trump administration loomed over Chinese President Jinping Xi's final meeting with outgoing US president Joe Biden.
www.bbc.com www.bbc.com
 
Trump vows to use US military for mass deportations

President-elect Donald Trump has confirmed on his social media network that he plans to use the US military to carry out a mass deportation of undocumented migrants.

On Monday, he posted "TRUE!!!" in response to a conservative commentator who wrote that Trump would declare a national emergency and use military assets to lead “a mass deportation program”.

At campaign events, Trump repeatedly pledged to mobilise the National Guard to assist Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), the federal agency tasked with carrying out deportations.

Trump's latest comment comes as questions grow about how he would fulfil his pledge to execute the largest mass deportation in US history.

He has repeatedly said he would begin deportations on his first day in office, which will be 20 January 2025.

But even if a US administration was able to legally move ahead with these plans, authorities would still have to contend with enormous logistical challenges.

For example, experts are doubtful that ICE's 20,000 agents and support personnel would be enough to find and track down millions of undocumented migrants.

There would also be a major financial cost, but Trump recently told NBC News that this would not deter his administration's efforts.

Trump's post was made on his Truth Social network early on Monday as he continues to announce his nominations for key posts in his administration.

Trump has already chosen several loyal allies for top roles overseeing immigration and deportation policy, including Kristi Noem who has been nominated to lead the Department of Homeland Security, and former ICE chief Tom Homan who Trump has named his "border tsar".

Trump's team have so far released few details about how the plan will be executed.

He has previously said that he plans to declare a national emergency, which would authorise him to deploy troops on US soil.

Homan told Fox News on Monday that he will visit Trump's Florida home this week "to put the final touches on the plan", including deciding what role the US Department of Defense (DOD) will have.

"Can DOD assist? Because DOD can take a lot off our plate," he said, saying that the pace of deportations will depend on the resources agencies are given.

On Monday, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) sued ICE for more details on how the deportation plan will work. The group plans to continue to file legal challenges in an effort to block the mass deportation.

Under the four years of the previous Trump administration, around 1.5 million people were deported, both from the border and the US interior.

The Biden administration - which had deported about 1.1 million people up to February 2024 - is on track to match that, statistics show.

BBC
 
Trump picks WWE co-founder Linda McMahon for education secretary

Donald Trump has picked World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE) co-founder and his transition co-chair, Linda McMahon, as his nominee for education secretary.

A long-time Trump ally, McMahon led the Small Business Administration during Trump's first presidency and donated millions of dollars to his presidential campaign.

Announcing his pick on Truth Social, Trump said McMahon would "use her decades of leadership experience, and deep understanding of both Education and Business, to empower the next Generation of American Students and Workers".

Trump has criticised the Department of Education, and has promised to close it down - a job McMahon could be tasked with.

Her nomination came shortly after Trump chose Mehmet Oz, a celebrity doctor and former television host, to lead the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.

The two selections on Tuesday, along with Trump's choice of Howard Lutnick for commerce secretary, follows a pattern of the president-elect nominating loyal supporters to top roles in his cabinet.

McMahon has a long history with the WWE and Trump, who used to make occasional appearances at wrestling matches. She co-founded the wrestling league with her husband in 1980, resigning as CEO in 2009 in order to undertake a failed bid to run for the Senate.

She has little background in education, but did serve on Connecticut state's board of education from 2009 until 2010.

She is the board chair of the pro-Trump think tank the America First Policy Institute, meaning her confirmation in the Republican-majority Senate is likely.

“For the past four years, as the Chair of the Board at the America First Policy Institute, Linda has been a fierce advocate for Parents’ Rights,” Trump said in his statement.

He said McMahon would "spearhead" the effort to "send Education BACK TO THE STATES", in reference to his pledge to close the department.

McMahon was named in a lawsuit filed last month involving the WWE.

It alleges that she, her husband and other company leaders knowingly allowed young boys to be abused by a ringside announcer who died in 2012.

The McMahons deny wrongdoing. A lawyer representing the pair told USA Today Sports that the allegations are "false claims" that stem from "absurd, defamatory and utterly meritless" media reports.

Celebrity TV doctor picked to run Medicaid

Trump earlier picked Mehmet Oz to run the powerful agency that oversees the healthcare of millions of Americans.

Oz, who was selected to lead the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Service, trained as a surgeon before finding fame on The Oprah Winfrey Show in the early 2000s, later hosting his own TV programme.

Oz has been criticised by experts for promoting what they called bad health advice about weight loss drugs and "miracle" cures, and suggesting malaria drugs as a cure for Covid-19 in the early days of the pandemic.

“There may be no Physician more qualified and capable than Dr. Oz to Make America Healthy Again," Trump said in a statement

The Trump transition team said in a statement that Oz "will work closely with [Health Secretary nominee] Robert F Kennedy Jr to take on the illness industrial complex, and all the horrible chronic diseases left in its wake".

Oz will need to be confirmed by the Senate next year before he officially takes charge of the agency.

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services oversee the country’s largest healthcare programs, providing coverage to more than 150 million Americans. The agency regulates health insurance and sets policy that guides the prices that doctors, hospitals and drug companies are paid for medical services.

In 2023, the US government spent more than $1.4 trillion on Medicaid and Medicare combined, according to the Congressional Budget Office.

Trump said in a statement that Oz would “cut waste and fraud within our Country's most expensive Government Agency”, and the Republican Party platform pledged to increase transparency, choice and competition and expand access to healthcare and prescription drugs.

Oz, 64, trained as a cardiothoracic surgeon – specialising in operations on the heart and lungs – and worked at New York City’s Presbyterian Hospital and Columbia University.

After he appeared in dozens of Oprah segments, he started The Dr Oz Show, where he doled out health advice to viewers.

But the line between promotion and science on the show was not always clear, and Oz has recommended homeopathy, alternative medicine and other treatments that critics have called “pseudoscience”.

He was criticised during Senate hearings in 2014 for endorsing unproven pills that he said would “literally flush fat from your system” and “push fat from your belly”.

During those hearings Oz said he never sold any specific dietary supplements on his show. But he has publicly endorsed products off air and his financial ties to health care companies were revealed in fillings made during his 2022 run for the US Senate in Pennsylvania.

During the Covid-19 pandemic, Oz promoted the anti-malaria drugs hydroxychloroquine and chloroquine, which experts say are ineffective against the virus.

BBC
 
Texas offers Trump land for migrant 'deportation facilities'

Texas authorities say they are prepared to offer President-elect Donald Trump 1,400-acres (567 hectares) of land along the US-Mexico border to build detention facilities for undocumented migrants.

In a letter, the Texas General Land Office said the plot could be used to build facilities for "processing, detention, and co-ordination of the largest deportation of violent criminals in the nation's history".

Trump has repeatedly pledged to deport millions of undocumented migrants and mobilise the National Guard to help carry this out.

His plan, however, is likely to face enormous financial and logistics hurdles, as well as immediate legal challenges from rights groups.

The letter, published online and sent to Trump at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida, notes that the owner of the recently purchased land had refused to allow a border wall to be built there and "actively blocked law enforcement" from accessing it.

"Now it's essentially farmland, so it's flat, it's easy to build on. We can very easily put a detention centre on there," Texas Land Commissioner Dawn Buckingham said in an interview with Fox News, which first reported the offer.

The state government in Texas, which launched its own unilateral border security operation after Trump left office, has been broadly supportive of Trump's promises to strengthen the US-Mexico border.

Buckingham said she was "100% on board with the Trump administration's pledge to get these criminals out of our country".

But the Democratic governors of three other southern border states - California, Arizona, and New Mexico - have said they will not aid mass deportations.

“Local and state officials on the frontlines of the Harris-Biden border invasion have been suffering for four years and are eager for President Trump to return to the Oval Office," Trump transition spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt said in a statement.

"President Trump will marshal every lever of power to secure the border, protect their communities, and launch the largest mass deportation operation of illegal immigrant criminals in history.”

What any new detention facilities would look like is unclear, although the incoming "border czar" Tom Homan has suggested they could be "soft-sided".

Facilities currently in use range from soft-sided, camp-like facilities used by Customs and Border Patrol to house undocumented migrants for short periods of time, as well as brick-and-mortar buildings used by Immigrations and Customs Enforcement, or ICE.

County and state jails are also used, for which local jurisdictions receive compensation from immigration authorities.

Stephen Miller, the top Trump adviser on immigration who has been picked as deputy chief of staff for policy, has previously said the Trump administration would build vast holding facilities to serve as staging centres for mass deportations.

In a late 2023 interview with the New York Times, Miller said that the facilities would likely be built on open land near Texas' border with Mexico.

A 2024 spending bill signed by President Joe Biden allocated $3.4m (£2.69m) for ICE to house as many as 41,500 on any given day.

"If Trump conducts mass deportations, ICE would blow past that number very quickly," Adam Isacson, a migration and border expert from the Washington Office on Latin America told the BBC.

ICE data compiled by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University found that there were 38,863 immigrant detainees being held as of 2 November.

The largest number - just over 12,000 - are held at facilities located in Texas.

News of Texas' offer to the president-elect comes as Democratic-run cities and states have vowed to not co-operate with Trump's promises of mass deportations.

On Tuesday, for example, Los Angeles' city council passed a "sanctuary city" ordinance to bar using local resources to help federal immigration authorities.

Kathleen Bush-Joseph, a policy analyst at the Washington-based Migration Policy Institute, said that the fact that Republican-led states are more likely to co-operate with the Trump administration's immigration goals could create a "patchwork of protections" that differ widely across the country.

"We might see the divide between red and blue states widen," she said.

Ms Bush-Joseph added that additional facilities in Texas could also mean that undocumented migrants detained in the US interior could ultimately be moved and processed there.

"If you're picking up people in blue states, and they don't have detention facilities available, then do you try to move them to red states?" she asked. "That's the question.""

BBC
 
Matt Gaetz withdraws as Trump's nominee for attorney general

Former Florida Congressman Matt Gaetz has withdrawn his name from consideration to become attorney general after days of debate over whether to release a report on sexual misconduct allegations against him.

On X, formerly Twitter, the 42-year-old said that the controversy over his potential nomination "was unfairly becoming a distraction" to the work of the incoming Trump administration.

The report included the findings of a probe sparked by allegations of sexual misconduct and illicit drug use.

Gaetz has denied the claims but said that he hoped to avoid a "needlessly protracted Washington scuffle."



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Matt Gaetz withdraws as Trump's nominee for attorney general

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Trump picks Pam Bondi for US Attorney General after Gaetz withdraws

U.S. President-elect Donald Trump on Thursday nominated former Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi to be Attorney General of the United States, moving swiftly to replace former nominee Matt Gaetz after the embattled former congressman withdrew from consideration.

Gaetz, who faced opposition from Senate Republicans, was the subject of a House Ethics Committee probe into allegations of having sex with an underage 17-year-old girl. He has denied wrongdoing.

Bondi served as the top law enforcement officer of the country's third most populous state from 2011 to 2019. She served on Trump's Opioid and Drug Abuse Commission during his first administration.

Her resume contrasts with that of Gaetz, who has little of the traditional experience expected of an attorney general. Bondi would likely face less opposition from senators involved in the confirmation process.



 

Blue state to shutter over a dozen migrant shelters as Trump’s set to implement deportation agenda​

Deep blue New York will shutter 12 migrant shelters before the end of the year, just weeks before President-elect Donald Trump takes office.

Two hotels-turned-migrant shelters in the city have already closed – the Hotel Merit in Manhattan and the Quality Inn JFK in Queens – while 10 other shelter facilities across the state are earmarked for closure by Dec. 31, New York City Mayor Eric Adams’ office told Fox News Digital.

The 10 shelters are located in Albany, Dutchess, Erie, Orange and Westchester counties and had been put into operation by the city when it ran out of space, such was the sheer scale of the crisis.

Additionally, New York City's sprawling migrant shelter on Randall's Island, which was designed to house up to 3,000 people, is slated to shut down by February, a couple of weeks after Trump's inauguration to a second term on Jan. 20, 2025.

The closures come as Adams revealed Monday that the city has catered to more than 223,000 migrants and asylum seekers who have arrived in New York City since the spring of 2022, which he said equated to about half the population of the state capital of Albany.

City taxpayers were footing a $352 nightly bill per migrant with just $130 of that going to the hotels for housing. The rest went to costs like social services, food and cleaning, according to the New York Post.

There are currently 58,000 migrants still staying in taxpayer-funded shelters, the mayor’s office told Fox News Digital. There are around 210 city-run shelter sites scattered across the five boroughs, according to the Post. The city's website states that the crisis could cost taxpayers around $12 billion over the next three fiscal years without policy changes.

The city said the declining numbers of migrants arriving in New York is the reason for the closures and thanked the federal government and executive orders issued by the Biden-Harris administration for the reduction.

In September, there were 101,790 encounters at the border, the lowest number since February 2021, and there have been no major signs of a significant increase in numbers since then. The Post reported that in the week ending Nov. 10, more than 600 new asylum seekers arrived in Gotham.

www.foxnews.com

Blue state to shutter over a dozen migrant shelters as Trump’s set to implement deportation agenda

New York will close 12 migrant shelters before the end of the year and weeks before President-elect Donald Trump takes office. The crisis is set to cost New York City around $12 billion.
www.foxnews.com www.foxnews.com
 

Trump picks billionaire investor Scott Bessent as Treasury secretary​

US President-elect Donald Trump has picked hedge fund manager Scott Bessent to serve as Treasury secretary in a blitz of announcements after his choice for attorney general said he was withdrawing.

The 62-year-old Bessent, founder of the investment firm Key Square Capital Management, was tapped to execute an economic agenda expected to be built around cutting taxes and imposing tariffs.

“Scott is widely respected as one of the world’s foremost international investors and geopolitical and economic strategists,” Trump said in a statement late on Friday.

“He will help me usher in a new Golden Age for the United States, as we fortify our position as the world’s leading economy,” he said, adding that Bessent would also help “reinvigorate the private sector, and help curb the unsustainable path of federal debt”.

The choice for Treasury secretary, a protracted process, was the most anticipated by the US business and finance community, given Trump’s plans to remake global trade through tariffs and extend and potentially expand the raft of tax cuts enacted during his first term.

The head of the Treasury Department will have broad oversight of tax policy, public debt, international finance and sanctions.


Bessent, a Wall Street financier who once worked for George Soros, was an early backer of Trump’s 2024 bid, donating at least $3m to the campaign, according to records from the election commission.

He has called for rolling back government subsidies, deregulating the economy, raising domestic energy production, and has also defended the use of tariffs.

The market’s surge after Trump’s election victory signalled investor expectations of “higher growth, lower volatility and inflation, and a revitalized economy for all Americans”, he wrote in an opinion piece published in The Wall Street Journal.

Trump’s announcement capped a flurry of appointments to fill his cabinet after Matt Gaetz announced that he was withdrawing from consideration for attorney general following renewed focus on sexual misconduct allegations against him.

www.aljazeera.com

Trump picks billionaire investor Scott Bessent as Treasury secretary

Hedge fund manager will be responsible for implementing president-elect’s pledges to cut taxes and raise tariffs.
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Nominee for agriculture secretary completes Trump cabinet

Having grown up on a farm, Rollins was involved early with Future Farmers of America in addition to 4H, a nationwide agricultural club.

She graduated from the Texas A&M University with a Bachelor of Science degree in agriculture development and later worked as a lawyer.

If confirmed by the Senate, she would oversee farm subsidies, federal nutrition programmes, meat inspections and other facets of the country's farm, food and forestry industries.

She would also play a key role in renegotiating the trade agreement between the US, Canada and Mexico, which could involve imposing Trump's promised tariffs.

Rollins' nomination marks the end of Trump's picks for his cabinet - a group of 15 advisers who each helm a bureaucratic department within the American government.

Each nominee will have to be confirmed by the Senate.

Trump has chosen an eclectic array of cabinet picks, from Maga loyalists to former political rivals.

Some of his nominations - such as Robert Kennedy Jr for the Department of Health and Human Services and Matt Gaetz for attorney general - have raised eyebrows.

Kennedy, a former environmental lawyer and vaccine sceptic who ran against Trump as an independent before dropping out and endorsing him, would be in charge of the Food and Drug Administration.

Gaetz, a bombastic former Florida congressman who spearheaded the ouster of former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, withdrew his nomination and resigned over allegations of sexual misconduct with a minor, soliciting for sex and illicit drug use.

Media reported that senators made it clear it would be difficult to confirm Gaetz for the job. Gaetz has denied wrongdoing, but said he withdrew from consideration because he was becoming a "distraction".

Trump did not waste time, quickly nominating Pam Bondi, a former Florida attorney general, to the post instead.

Another pick, Pete Hegseth, has also been embroiled in scandal, after a police report revealed new details about an alleged sexual assault encounter the former Fox-news host had with a woman in 2017.

Hegseth has denied any wrongdoing and claims the encounter was consensual. He was never arrested or charged.

Education secretary nominee Linda McMahon - the former CEO of World Wrestling Entertainment - has also been criticised for her lack of experience in education.

BBC
 
Prosecutor drops federal criminal cases against Trump

The special prosecutor who brought two key criminal cases against Donald Trump has asked judges to drop both of them after his victory in the 2024 presidential election.

Special counsel Jack Smith was overseeing cases accusing Trump of trying to overturn the 2020 election results and improperly storing classified documents after he left office.

Trump had pleaded not guilty in both cases.

In new documents filed on Monday, Mr Smith said the cases should be closed because of a Justice Department policy that bans the prosecution of a sitting president.

“It has long been the position of the Department of Justice that the United States Constitution forbids the federal indictment and subsequent criminal prosecution of a sitting President,” Smith wrote in a filing in the election case.

“This outcome is not based on the merits or strength of the case against the defendant,” Smith added in the six-page filing.

A judge must sign off on both decisions for them to be officially dismissed. Smith requested both cases be dismissed "without prejudice", meaning the charges could be refiled after Trump finishes his second term.

In a statement, Trump’s team said the move to end the cases was “a major victory for the rule of law”.

“The American People re-elected President Trump with an overwhelming mandate to Make America Great Again,” said Trump spokesperson Steven Cheung. “The American People and President Trump want an immediate end to the political weaponization of our justice system and we look forward to uniting our country.”

Trump had pledged to get rid of Smith as soon as he took office. Attorney General Merrick Garland appointed Smith in 2022 to take over the two federal investigations into Trump’s conduct. Smith has reportedly said he plans to step down next year.

The request to dismiss Trump’s election subversion case marks an end to a lengthy legal saga. Smith had to refile charges against the president based on a July Supreme Court ruling that Trump was immune from prosecution over "official acts" that took place while he was in the White House.

Smith had argued in a revised indictment that Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election results were related to his campaign and therefore not official acts.

The Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit was also weighing an appeal from Smith to carry on with the classified documents case, in which Trump was accused of storing dozens of sensitive files in his Florida Mar-a-Lago resort and obstructing government efforts to retrieve them. Trump-appointee Judge Aileen Cannon initially dismissed it because she ruled Smith was improperly appointed to lead the case.

When Trump won the 2024 election this month, Smith began to take steps to wind down both cases, though Smith said in the Monday filing that the documents appeal would continue for two other defendants in the case, Trump employees Walt Nauta and Carlos De Oliveira.

Trump’s return to the White House left several state-level criminal cases against him in limbo, too.

His sentencing for his criminal conviction in the state of New York has been indefinitely delayed.

Trump also faces state charges in Georgia for his attempts to overturn election results there, but that case faces delays as well. An appeals court is considering whether to overturn a previous ruling allowing Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis to stay on the case despite a relationship she had with a prosecutor she hired.

Since Trump won the 2024 presidency, “his criminal problems go away”, said former federal prosecutor Neama Rahmani.

“It’s well established that a sitting president can’t be prosecuted,” he said.


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Jack Smith drops federal criminal cases against Trump

Jack Smith asked a judge to dismiss a federal election interference case and a classified documents case.
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Trump vows day-one tariffs on Mexico, Canada and China

Donald Trump says he will hit China, Mexico and Canada with new tariffs on day one of his presidency, in an effort to force them to crack down on illegal immigration and drug smuggling into the US.

The president-elect said that immediately after his inauguration on 20 January he will sign an executive order imposing a 25% tariff on all goods coming from Mexico and Canada.

He also said an additional 10% tariff will be levied on China until the government there blocks smuggling of the synthetic opioid fentanyl from the country.

If Trump follows through with the threats it will mark a major escalation in tensions with America's three biggest trading partners.

The tariffs on Mexico and Canada will remain in place until the two countries clamp down on drugs, particularly fentanyl, and migrants illegally crossing the border, Trump said in a post on his Truth Social platform.

"Both Mexico and Canada have the absolute right and power to easily solve this long simmering problem," he said.

"It is time for them to pay a very big price!"

In a separate post, Trump attacked Beijing for failing to follow through on promises he said Chinese officials made to carry out the death penalty for people caught dealing fentanyl.

A spokesperson for the Chinese embassy in Washington told the BBC "the idea of China knowingly allowing fentanyl precursors to flow into the United States runs completely counter to facts and reality".

"China believes that China-US economic and trade cooperation is mutually beneficial in nature. No one will win a trade war or a tariff war," he added.

The Biden administration has been calling on Beijing to do more to stop the production of ingredients used in fentanyl, which Washington estimates killed almost 75,000 Americans last year.

During his election campaign, Trump threatened Mexico and China with tariffs of up to 100%, if he deemed them necessary, much higher than those he put in place during his first term in office.

Trump has also said he will end China's most-favoured-nation trading status with the US - the most advantageous terms Washington offers on tariffs and other restrictions.

Tariffs are a central part of Trump's economic vision - he sees them as a way of growing the US economy, protecting jobs and raising tax revenue.

He has previously claimed that these taxes are "not going to be a cost to you, it’s a cost to another country".

This is almost universally regarded by economists as misleading.

"It's clearly consistent with his promise that he made during the campaign to utilise tariffs as a weapon to accomplish many of his policy initiatives," Stephen Roach, Senior Fellow at the Paul Tsai China Center of Yale Law School told the BBC's Business Today programme.

Trump's pick for Treasury Secretary, Scott Bessent, has previously suggested that the president-elect's threats to impose major tariff hikes were part of his negotiating strategy.

“My general view is that at the end of the day, he's a free trader," Bessent said of Trump in an interview with the Financial Times before he was nominated for the role.

“It’s escalate to de-escalate.”

It comes as the Chinese economy is in a significantly more vulnerable position than it was during the previous Trump presidency.

The country has been struggling with a number of serious issues, including an ongoing property market crisis, weak domestic demand and growing local government debt.

The new tariffs appear to break the terms of the US-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA) on trade.

The deal, which Trump signed into law, took effect in 2020. It continued a largely duty-free trading relationship between the three neighbouring countries.

After Trump made his tariff threat, he discussed trade and border security with Canada's Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, according to the Reuters news agency.

Mexico's finance ministry said: "Mexico is the United States' top trade partner, and the USMCA provides a framework of certainty for national and international investors."

BBC
 
'No-one will win' - Canada, Mexico and China respond to Trump tariff threats

Officials from Canada, Mexico and China have warned US President-elect Donald Trump's pledge to impose sweeping tariffs on America's three largest trading partners could upend the economies of all four countries.

"To one tariff will follow another in response and so on, until we put our common businesses at risk," Mexico's President Claudia Sheinbaum said.

Trump vowed on Monday night to introduce 25% tariffs on goods coming from Mexico and Canada and an additional 10% on goods coming from China. He said the duties were a bid to clamp down on drugs and illegal immigration.

Canada's Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said he spoke to Trump in the hours after the announcement and planned to hold a meeting with Canada's provincial leaders on Wednesday to discuss a response.

A spokesman for China's embassy in Washington DC told the BBC: "No-one will win a trade war or a tariff war.”

The international pushback came a day after Trump announced his plans for his first day in office, on 20 January, in a post on his social media website, Truth Social.

Trudeau said his country was prepared to work with the US in "constructive ways".

"This is a relationship that we know takes a certain amount of working on, and that's what we'll do," Trudeau told reporters.

In a phone call with Trump, Trudeau said the pair discussed trade and border security, with the prime minister pointing out that the number of migrants crossing the Canadian border was much smaller compared with the US-Mexico border.

Trump's team declined to confirm the phone call.

But Trump spokesman Steven Cheung added that world leaders had sought to "develop stronger relationships" with Trump "because he represents global peace and stability".

Mexico's President Sheinbaum told reporters on Tuesday that neither threats nor tariffs would solve the "migration phenomenon" or drug consumption in the US.

Reading from a letter that she said she would send to Trump, Sheinbaum also warned that Mexico would retaliate by imposing its own taxes on US imports, which would "put common enterprises at risk".

She said Mexico had taken steps to tackle illegal migration into the US and that “caravans of migrants no longer reach the border”.

The issue of drugs, she added, “is a problem of public health and consumption in your country’s society”.

Sheinbaum, who took office last month, noted that US car manufacturers produce some of their parts in Mexico and Canada.

"If tariffs go up, who will it hurt? General Motors,” she said.

Meanwhile, a spokesman for China's embassy in Washington, Liu Pengyu, told the BBC that "China-US economic and trade co-operation is mutually beneficial in nature".

He denied that China allows chemicals used in the manufacture of illegal drugs - including fentanyl - to be smuggled to the US.

"China has responded to US request for verifying clues on certain cases and taken action," Liu said.

"All these prove that the idea of China knowingly allowing fentanyl precursors to flow into the United States runs completely counter to facts and reality."

President Joe Biden has left in place the tariffs on China that Trump introduced in his first term, and added a few more of his own.

Currently, a majority of what the two countries sell to each other is subject to tariffs - 66.4% of US imports from China and 58.3% of Chinese imports from the US.

Speaking in the House of Commons in Ottawa, Trudeau told lawmakers that "the idea of going to war with the United States isn’t what anyone wants".

He called on them to not "panic", and to work together.

"That is the work we will do seriously, methodically. But without freaking out,” he said.

The leaders of Canadian provinces suggested that they would impose their own tariffs on the US.

"The things we sell to the United States are the things they really need," Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland said on Tuesday. "We sell them oil, we sell them electricity, we sell them critical minerals and metals."

America's northern neighbour accounted for some $437bn (£347bn) of US imports in 2022, and was the largest market for US exports in the same year, according to US data.

Canada sends about 75% of its total exports to the US.

Doug Ford, the premier of Ontario, Canada's most populous province, said on Monday the proposed tariff would be "devastating to workers and jobs in both Canada and the US".

“To compare us to Mexico is the most insulting thing I’ve ever heard,” said Ford.

Ford was echoed by the premiers of Quebec, Saskatchewan and British Columbia, while a post on the X account of Alberta Premier Danielle Smith acknowledged that Trump had "valid concerns related to illegal activities at our shared border".

The Canadian dollar, the Loonie, has plunged in value since Trump vowed to impose tariffs on Canadian imports come January.

The Canadian dollar dipped below 71 US cents, the lowest level the Loonie has fallen to since May 2020, when Trump threatened to impose tariffs on Canadian goods during his first stint as US president. The Mexican peso fell to its lowest value this year, around 4.8 cents.

BBC
 
Trump picks Covid lockdown critic to lead top health agency

US President-elect Donald Trump has picked a leading Covid lockdown sceptic Jay Bhattacharya to be the next director of a key US public health agency.

Trump said he had selected the Stanford University-trained physician and economist to lead the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the world’s biggest government-funded biomedical research entity.

Bhattacharya became the face during the pandemic of a fiercely disputed open letter - known as the Great Barrington Declaration - that opposed widespread lockdowns.

Tuesday's nomination rounds out Trump’s top public health team. He has already unveiled all 15 posts for his cabinet as he prepares to take office on 20 January.

Earlier this month Trump announced he wanted former rival Robert Kennedy Jr to run the US health department. Kennedy’s vaccine scepticism has alarmed the medical community, though his calls for stricter regulation of food ingredients have won praise.

In a statement Trump said Bhattacharya would work with Kennedy to "restore the NIH to a Gold Standard of Medical Research as they examine the underlying causes of, and solutions to, America’s biggest Health challenges, including our Crisis of Chronic Illness and Disease".

Bhattacharya posted on X, formerly Twitter, that he was "humbled" to be picked.

"We will reform American scientific institutions so that they are worthy of trust again and will deploy the fruits of excellent science to make America healthy again!" he wrote.

On Tuesday the president-elect also nominated Jim O’Neill - a former federal health official and close ally of conservative donor Peter Thiel - as deputy secretary of the health department.

But it is Bhattacharya who's more widely known after he challenged the public health establishment's response to the Covid outbreak four years ago.

In October 2020, Bhattacharya co-authored an open letter known as the Great Barrington Declaration, calling for an alternative to lockdowns, recommending that the focus should instead be on protecting vulnerable groups such as elderly people.

He remains a vocal critic of how Anthony Fauci - a former director of the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, a division of NIH - handled the pandemic.

Then-NIH director Francis Collins said at the time the Great Barrington Declaration, which came before Covid vaccines were available, was dangerous, dismissing the authors as “fringe experts”.

Bhattacharya is not the only Trump nominee to have criticised the response of US public health agencies to the pandemic.

Trump has also picked Marty Makary, a Johns Hopkins surgeon who opposed the Covid-19 vaccine mandate, to run the Food and Drug Administration (FDA).

Dave Weldon, a physician and former Republican congressman who has also cast doubt on vaccine safety, was picked to run the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

Kennedy and O'Neill’s department of health would oversee the agencies run by Makary, Weldon and Bhattacharya, but all five need to be confirmed by the Senate.

Last week Trump also nominated TV personality Dr Mehmet Oz to be the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services administrator.

While Trump’s picks for US public health agencies have broadly been welcomed by his allies, not all of them have won a positive reception from conservatives.

He has also nominated Dr Janette Nesheiwat, a Fox News medical contributor, to become the next surgeon general.

But her previous comments opposing abortion restrictions and in support of masking schoolchildren during the pandemic have riled some Trump supporters.

BBC
 

China warns Donald Trump over tariffs threat​


China has warned Donald Trump a new trade war "will leave no party unscathed" as the incoming US president's new tariff threats provoke an angry reaction.

The response by the world's second-largest economy to Mr Trump's promise of additional 10% tariffs on all goods from China into the US, came via state media.

"There are no winners in tariff wars. If the US continues to politicise economic and trade issues by weaponising tariffs, it will leave no party unscathed," the China Daily said in an editorial.

Mr Trump announced late on Monday that he would also target neighbours Mexico and Canada.

He pledged 25% tariffs on goods coming from both nations due to excessive migration.

Mexico and China, however, are also in his sights for another reason.

Mr Trump has said both are responsible for "attacking" the US with fentanyl - a drug widely blamed for the opioid crisis in the country that has seen more than 100,000 people die from overdoses alone in recent years.

China, his camp has argued, is the dominant source of chemical precursors used by Mexican cartels to produce the deadly drug.

The China Daily editorial continued: "The excuse the president-elect has given to justify his threat of additional tariffs on imports from China is farfetched.

"The world sees clearly that the root cause of the fentanyl crisis in the US lies with the US itself."

Mr Trump wants both Mexico and China to clamp down on the drugs.

Mexico has long been in his sights over migration, with the volume of illegal border crossings prompting a crackdown during his first term in office.

That did, however, fall short of his 2016 threat of a "big, beautiful" border wall though the existing barrier was extended and bolstered in places.

This is a big deal for both Canada and Mexico especially.

More than 83% of exports from Mexico went to the US in 2023 and 75% of Canadian exports go to the country.

Mexico has pledged to react to any US tariffs by responding in kind.

Canada's government has spoken of working together but provincial leaders have voiced anger and shock.

Ontario's premier, Doug Ford, expected retaliation against its closest trading partner.

He said of Mr Trump's threat: "I found his comments unfair. I found them insulting. It's like a family member stabbing you right in the heart."

If tariffs were to be implemented, as Mr Trump has threatened, the aim would be to hurt exports in each of the countries' targeted in a bid to shrink the US trade deficit.

The country imports far more than it sends abroad.

However, by raising the cost of imported goods, Mr Trump would risk raising US inflation; the pace of price increases in his own domestic economy as the cost is passed on down supply chains to consumers.

Analysis by Goldman Sachs estimated they would raise consumer prices inflation by 1%, if carried through.

They would also hurt profit margins for US companies, while raising the threat of retaliatory tariffs by other countries, the US bank projected.

The prospect of a trade war has not spooked financial markets, with European and Asian equities seeing only limited losses while the broad S&P 500 on Wall Street is at record levels.

However, the spectre of a wider Trump-led crackdown on imports has been felt elsewhere, with shares of carmakers coming under pressure on Tuesday.

AJ Bell head of financial analysis, Danni Hewson, wrote: "Proving his love of tariffs wasn't just a campaign stunt, Trump has pledged he will immediately target Mexico, Canada and China before the last bit of confetti has fallen on his inauguration."

"For European car makers already struggling to make the shift to EVs profitable, it will have sounded an alarm and shares in Stellantis and Volkswagen both took a hit as did US automakers which import a large number of vehicles from both Canada and Mexico."

news.sky.com

China warns Donald Trump over tariffs threat

There's a widespread belief that the president-elect's warnings of new import duties when he takes power again are a shot across the bows but there has been an angry reaction in the nations he is targeting.
news.sky.com news.sky.com
 

Drone company's stock soars after appointing Donald Trump Jr. to advisory board​


Shares in a little-known drone company soared Wednesday morning after announcing that Donald Trump Jr. had joined its advisory board.

Unusual Machines, an Orlando, Florida-based firm born just two years ago as it acquired a drone manufacturer and a separate drone retailing firm, announced the appointment in an early-morning press release.

“Don Jr. joining our board of advisors provides us unique expertise we need as we bring drone component manufacturing back to America,” Allan Evans, Unusual Machines' CEO, said in the release. “He brings a wealth of experience and I look forward to his advice and role within the Company as we continue to build our business.”

“The need for drones is obvious. It is also obvious that we must stop buying Chinese drones and Chinese drone parts,” Trump Jr. said in the statement. “I love what Unusual Machines is doing to bring drone manufacturing jobs back to the USA and am excited to take on a bigger role in the movement.”

After publishing the release, Unusual Machines' stock nearly doubled to more than $10 on heavy trading volume.

In a separate securities filing Wednesday, Trump Jr. is listed as at one point having been Unusual Machines’ second-largest shareholder.

The stock surge demonstrates the extent to which an association with the Trump name can once again transform an entity's fortunes — for better or worse.

During Donald Trump's first term as president, his social media posts mentioning a company or one of its executives could cause shares to slide or jump, creating material risks — or gains —for investors.

Ironically, Unusual Machines notes in the securities filing its heavy reliance on Chinese imports, which Trump now says would face punitive tariffs once he takes office.

www.nbcnews.com

Drone company's stock soars after appointing Donald Trump Jr. to advisory board

Orlando-based Unusual Machines shares nearly doubled, demonstrating the potency of leveraging the president's family as the second Trump administration approaches.
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Numerous bomb threats made against Trump cabinet nominees

Several of Donald Trump’s cabinet nominees and picks for his White House team have been targeted by bomb threats.

The FBI said it was aware of "numerous bomb threats" as well as "swatting incidents", in which hoax calls are made to attract a police response to the target's home.

Threats were made against Trump's choices to lead the departments of Housing, Agriculture and Labor, as well as his pick for US ambassador to the United Nations.

Police are investigating the incidents, which happened on Tuesday night and Wednesday morning.



www.bbc.com

Numerous bomb threats made against Trump cabinet nominees

Police are investigating a wave of incidents which happened on Tuesday night and Wednesday morning.
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Bomb threats made against Trump cabinet nominees

Several of Donald Trump’s cabinet nominees and picks for his White House team have been targeted by bomb threats.

The FBI said it was aware of "numerous bomb threats" as well as "swatting incidents", in which hoax calls are made to attract a police response to the target's home.

Threats were made against at least nine people chosen by Trump to lead the Departments of Defence, Housing, Agriculture and Labor, as well as his pick for US ambassador to the United Nations, among others.

Police are investigating the incidents, which happened on Tuesday night and Wednesday.

Karoline Leavitt, a spokeswoman for Trump's transition team, said the Trump appointees “were targeted in violent, unAmerican threats to their lives and those who live with them”.

She said "law enforcement acted quickly to ensure" the nominees' safety.

"With President Trump as our example, dangerous acts of intimidation and violence will not deter us,” she said.

Neither Leavitt nor the FBI identified any of the targets by name.

New York Republican Elise Stefanik, who Trump has named to be the US ambassador to the United Nations, was the first to say her family home had been targeted by a bomb threat.

Her office said the congresswoman was informed of the threat while she was driving with her husband and three-year-old son from Washington DC to New York for Thanksgiving.

Defence secretary nominee Pete Hegseth later confirmed that he was also targeted.

On X, he said that a police officer had shown up at his home on Wednesday morning, as his seven children were sleeping inside to notify him they had received "a credible pipe bomb threat".

"I will not be bullied or intimidated. Never," he wrote. "President Trump has called on me to serve - and that is what I intend to do.”

Trump, who survived two assassination attempts during his campaign, was not among those who received the hoax calls, law enforcement sources told US media.

He has received genuine threats recently, according to officials in Arizona who arrested a man earlier this week for posting videos on a "near-daily basis" in which he threatened to kill Trump and his family.

None of those targeted this week were protected by the US Secret Service, according to media reports.

Lee Zeldin, who Trump has nominated to become administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, also confirmed he was targeted, saying a "pipe bomb threat" was sent to his home with a “pro-Palestinian themed message”.

"My family and I were not home at the time and are safe," he said. "We are thankful for the swift actions taken by local officers."

Brooke Rollins, Trump's pick to lead the Department of Agriculture, posted on X to thank police in Fort Worth, Texas, for their "swift efforts" to investigate a threat to her family on Wednesday morning.

"We were unharmed and quickly returned home," she wrote.

Scott Turner, Trump’s pick for Department of Housing, and Lori Chavez-Deremer, his pick for Labour Secretary, also posted on social media that they had been targeted. They each vowed that they would not be deterred by the threats.

President Joe Biden has been briefed on the incidents, the White House said in a statement.

"The White House is in touch with federal law enforcement and the President-elect’s team, and continues to monitor the situation closely."

US Capitol Police, which protects Congress, said in the statement that it was working with federal law enforcement agencies on any "swatting", but declined to provide further details "to minimise the risk of copy-cats".

Florida Republican Matt Gaetz, who recently dropped out of the running to become US attorney general, was also targeted.

The sheriff's office in Florida's Okaloosa County confirmed that a bomb threat targeted an address in the town of Niceville.

The home's mailbox was cleared and no devices were located, police said, and a search of the area did not uncover anything.

New York police told the BBC's US partner CBS News that the New York home of Trump's nominee for commerce secretary, Howard Lutnick, was also threatened.

Pam Bondi, who was selected to replace Gaetz as Trump's nominee, was also targeted along with incoming White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles, according to CBS.

Fox News reports that John Ratcliffe, Trump's nominee to be director of the CIA, also received threats.

Similar hoax tactics have been recently used against other high-profile political figures, including against the judges and prosecutors who oversaw the criminal cases against Trump.

Last year, US politicians around the country were swatted over Christmas. Most were Republican, but some Democrats were targeted as well.

BBC
 

Trump's pick for health secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr once called US vaccine rollout agency a 'fascist' enterprise​


Donald Trump's pick for health secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr once labelled the agency responsible for vaccine rollouts in the US a "fascist" enterprise and accused it of knowingly hurting children.

Mr Kennedy, a vaccine sceptic, also compared what he saw as a widespread conspiracy to hide harms from the US' child vaccination programme to the cover-up of child sexual abuse in the Catholic Church.

The comments were made from 2013 onwards to private audiences of AutismOne, a conference for parents of autistic children. Recordings of the remarks have recently been shared with NBC News, the US sister network of Sky News.

In other comments, he also claimed that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) was a "cesspool of corruption", filled with profiteers, and was harming children in a way he likened to "Nazi death camps".

Mr Kennedy, the son of the late Robert Kennedy and nephew of the late former president John F Kennedy, is poised to run the US Health Department when president-elect Mr Trump enters the White House in January.

In previously unreported comments from 2019, Mr Kennedy compared the CDC and its vaccine programme to "fascism".

"The word 'fascism' in Italian means a bundle of sticks, and what it means is the bundle is more important than the sticks," he said.

"The institution, CDC and the vaccine programme is more important than the children that it's supposed to protect.

"It's the same reason we had a paedophile scandal in the Catholic Church," he added.

"Because people were able to convince themselves that the institution, the church, was more important than these little boys and girls who were being raped. And everybody kept their mouth shut.

"The press, the prosecutors, the priests, the bishops, the Vatican, and even the parents of the kids who just didn't want to believe it was happening, or believed so much in the church they were unwilling to criticise it.

"And you know, that is the perfect metaphor for what's happening to us."

In comments made in 2013 at AutismOne, he criticised a group of experts, including vaccine scientists, involved in what he falsely claimed was a conspiracy to hide vaccines as the cause of autism.

Links between autism and vaccines, which originate from a discredited and fraudulent research paper, have long been debunked and been described as "perhaps, the most damaging medical hoax of the last 100 years".

Mr Kennedy also said vaccine scientists "should be in jail and the key should be thrown away".

At the 2013 AutismOne conference question-and-answer session, when asked about the CDC's motives for failing to acknowledge autism as an epidemic, Mr Kennedy made a comparison to the Holocaust.

"To me, this is like Nazi death camps, what happened to these kids," he said.

Mr Kennedy said of the rising number of children diagnosed with autism and what he described as a link to vaccines: "I can't tell you why somebody would do something like that. I can't tell you why ordinary Germans participated in the Holocaust."

Over the weekend, Mr Trump picked former congressman Dr Dave Weldon to lead the CDC.

Dr Weldon has also spoken at AutismOne conferences and in remarks made in 2004 suggested vaccines caused neurological problems and said parents of autistic children were "the 900-pound gorilla that has not had its voice heard adequately on Capitol Hill".

Mr Kennedy and the Trump transition team did not respond to requests for comment when asked by NBC. The CDC also declined to comment.

news.sky.com

Trump's pick for health secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr once called US vaccine rollout agency a 'fascist' enterprise

Robert F Kennedy Jr made a series of comments attacking vaccine rollouts and scientists from 2013 onwards to private audiences of AutismOne, a conference for parents of autistic children.
news.sky.com news.sky.com
 
Trudeau at Mar-a-Lago to meet Trump after tariff threat

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is in Florida to meet Donald Trump as Canada seeks to head off the president-elect's threat to impose a 25% tariff on Canadian goods, a source has confirmed to the BBC.

Canadian media reported that Trudeau landed in Palm Beach International Airport on Friday evening to visit Trump at his Mar-a-Lago estate.

The two spoke by phone earlier in the week after Trump announced that, upon taking office in January, he would slap an across-the-board tariff on all products entering the US from Mexico and Canada.

Neither the prime minister's office nor Trump's team have responded to a request for comment on the visit.

The trip was not included on Trudeau's public itinerary for Friday. The two men will have dinner, the source said.

Trump has been at his Mar-a-Lago estate meeting with his transition team. Trudeau is reported to be the first G7 leader to visit the president-elect since the election.

Trudeau has often underscored that the two countries were able to successfully renegotiate a major trade pact during Trump's first term, though the relationship between the two leaders has occasionally been rocky.

On Friday, speaking at an event in Prince Edward Island, Trudeau said the two countries "rolled up our sleeves and were able to create jobs on both sides of the border".

He said looked forward to having many "great" conversations with Trump.

The Florida visit is the latest move by Canada as it seeks to avoid the hefty tariffs, which could have wide-reaching economic impacts.

It remains unclear whether the incoming Trump administration will actually move ahead with the threatened tariffs, as analysts note that the president-elect has been known to use such threats in the past as a negotiating tactic to achieve his goals.

Trump - who has also threatened the same levy against Mexico - has signalled that they would remain in place until both countries work to secure their shared borders with the US.

Trudeau said on Friday that "when Trump makes statements like that, he plans on carrying them out".

He said his goal was to point out the tariff would not just harm Canadians but also raise prices for Americans and hurt that country's economy.

Trudeau was accompanied on the trip by Dominic LeBlanc, the minister in charge of border security.

US media reported that Trudeau and Trump were joined at dinner by Howard Lutnick, Trump's nominee for commerce secretary; Doug Burgum, tapped to lead the Department of the Interior; and Mike Waltz, who has been selected as the next national security adviser.

Canada is one of America's largest trading partners and it sends about 75% of its total exports to the US. The two countries also share deeply integrated supply chains.

After the phone call with Trump, Trudeau held an emergency meeting on Wednesday with the leaders of Canada's provinces and territories over how to manage the US-Canada relationship.

Trudeau is promising to present a united "Team Canada" approach to working with the US to make the case against the levy.

Several leaders of Canadian provinces have criticised Trump's plan, saying it would be devastating to the country's economy, including the oil and gas and automotive industries.

Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum also had a phone call with Trump this week.

The number of crossings at the US-Canada border is significantly lower than that at the southern border, according to US Border Patrol data on migrant encounters.

During the 2024 fiscal year, there were around 23,700 apprehensions at the northern land border, while the southern border saw more than 1.53 million apprehensions.

But Canadian officials have said in recent days there is still joint work to be done to improve border security.

BBC
 

Trudeau travelled to Mar-a-Lago to meet Trump after tariff threat​


Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said he had an "excellent conversation" with US President-elect Donald Trump, after the two leaders met at Trump's Florida estate Mar-a-Lago.

Trudeau travelled to West Palm Beach as Canada seeks to head off the president-elect's threat to impose a 25% tariff on Canadian goods, a source has confirmed to the BBC.

Canadian media reported that Trudeau landed in Palm Beach International Airport on Friday evening to visit Trump at his Mar-a-Lago estate.

The two spoke by phone earlier in the week after Trump announced that, upon taking office in January, he would slap an across-the-board tariff on all products entering the US from Mexico and Canada.

Neither the prime minister's office nor Trump's team have responded to the BBC's request for comment on the visit.

Leaving his hotel in Palm Beach on Saturday morning, Trudeau ignored questions from reporters about whether he and Trump had discussed potential tariffs.

The trip was not included on Trudeau's public itinerary for Friday.

Trump has been at his Mar-a-Lago estate meeting with his transition team. Trudeau is reported to be the first G7 leader to visit the president-elect since the election.

The two men reportedly had dinner, alongside Trump's pick for commerce secretary Howard Lutnick and Canada's public safety minister Dominic LeBlanc.

Trudeau has often underscored that the two countries were able to successfully renegotiate a major trade pact during Trump's first term, though the relationship between the two leaders has occasionally been rocky.

On Friday, speaking at an event in Prince Edward Island, Trudeau said the two countries "rolled up our sleeves and were able to create jobs on both sides of the border".

He said looked forward to having many "great" conversations with Trump.

The Florida visit is the latest move by Canada as it seeks to avoid the hefty tariffs, which could have wide-reaching economic impacts.

It remains unclear whether the incoming Trump administration will actually move ahead with the threatened tariffs, as analysts note that the president-elect has been known to use such threats in the past as a negotiating tactic to achieve his goals.

Trump - who has also threatened the same levy against Mexico - has signalled that they would remain in place until both countries work to secure their shared borders with the US.

Trudeau said on Friday that "when Trump makes statements like that, he plans on carrying them out".

He said his goal was to point out the tariff would not just harm Canadians but also raise prices for Americans and hurt that country's economy.

Trudeau was accompanied on the trip by Dominic LeBlanc, the minister in charge of border security.

US media reported that Trudeau and Trump were joined at dinner by Howard Lutnick, Trump's nominee for commerce secretary; Doug Burgum, tapped to lead the Department of the Interior; and Mike Waltz, who has been selected as the next national security adviser.

Canada is one of America's largest trading partners and it sends about 75% of its total exports to the US. The two countries also share deeply integrated supply chains.

After the phone call with Trump, Trudeau held an emergency meeting on Wednesday with the leaders of Canada's provinces and territories over how to manage the US-Canada relationship.

Trudeau is promising to present a united "Team Canada" approach to working with the US to make the case against the levy.

Several leaders of Canadian provinces have criticised Trump's plan, saying it would be devastating to the country's economy, including the oil and gas and automotive industries.

Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum also had a phone call with Trump this week.

The number of crossings at the US-Canada border is significantly lower than that at the southern border, according to US Border Patrol data on migrant encounters.

During the 2024 fiscal year, there were around 23,700 apprehensions at the northern land border, while the southern border saw more than 1.53 million apprehensions.

But Canadian officials have said in recent days there is still joint work to be done to improve border security.

www.bbc.com

Justin Trudeau in Florida to meet Donald Trump

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau made a surprise visit to Florida as Canada seeks to the avoid blanket tariffs threatened by the president-elect.
www.bbc.com www.bbc.com
 
Trump announces he intends to replace current FBI director with loyalist Kash Patel

President-elect Donald Trump said Saturday that he intends to nominate Kash Patel to serve as FBI director, in an extraordinary announcement that once in office Trump would move to replace the current director, Christopher Wray, before his term expires.

“I am proud to announce that Kashyap ‘Kash’ Patel will serve as the next Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Kash is a brilliant lawyer, investigator, and ‘America First’ fighter who has spent his career exposing corruption, defending Justice, and protecting the American People,” Trump posted on Truth Social on Saturday evening.

Wray has three years remaining in his 10-year term and would have to resign or be fired to create a vacancy. Trump nominated Wray in 2017 after firing James Comey, but he began to sour on Wray before he left office in 2021. Trump’s view of the FBI only worsened after his Mar-a-Lago resort was searched in August 2022, and Trump was later indicted for allegedly retaining classified documents.

“Every day, the men and women of the FBI continue to work to protect Americans from a growing array of threats,” the agency said in a statement to CNN. “Director Wray’s focus remains on the men and women of the FBI, the people we do the work with, and the people we do the work for.”

Trump’s interest Patel speaks to his urge to fill top law enforcement and intelligence positions with supporters who may be open to carrying out his demands for specific investigations as well as inoculating the president against possible future probes.

It also sets up another potentially explosive confirmation battle in the Senate, where members are already bracing for how they’ll navigate a slew of unorthodox Trump picks. One of those picks, fellow Trump loyalist and Justice Department critic Matt Gaetz, dropped out of the fight to become attorney general as it became clear the former Florida congressman would not have the GOP support necessary for confirmation.

It’s unclear whether Patel, a firebrand, could face a similar uphill battle through the confirmation process.

Patel has heavily criticized the FBI and, in a podcast interview in September, called for the agency’s headquarters in Washington, DC, to be dismantled and turned into a “museum of the deep state.”

“The FBI’s footprint has gotten so freakin’ big,” Patel said on the “Shawn Ryan Show,” criticizing the agency’s intelligence-gathering operation.

During the interview, Patel also ridiculed the FBI for its 2022 search warrant of Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence in Florida, which led to charges being brought against the former president for retaining classified documents. The judge overseeing that case eventually dismissed the charges against Trump.

In a 2023 interview with Steve Bannon, a former Trump adviser, Patel said the Justice Department under Trump would “come after” members of the media.

“We’ve got to put in all-American patriots top to bottom,” Patel said of the DOJ, adding that the department under Trump “will go out and find the conspirators, not just in government but in the media.”

“Yes, we’re going to come after the people in the media who lied about American citizens, who helped Joe Biden rig presidential elections – we’re going to come after you,” he said.

Earlier this month, one of the president-elect’s top advisers, Elon Musk, appeared to weigh in on Patel’s candidacy for the FBI job via X, the social media platform he owns. He responded with a “100” emoji to a top Trump ally’s tweet endorsing Patel for the job.

Even among Trump loyalists, Patel is widely viewed as a controversial figure and relentless self-promoter whose value to the president-elect largely derives from a shared disdain for the so-called deep state.

Patel rose to prominence within Trump’s orbit in 2018, when he served as an aide to Rep. Devin Nunes, the top Republican on the House Intelligence Committee at the time. Patel played a key role in Nunes’ efforts to discredit the FBI’s Russia investigation into the Trump campaign, including a controversial classified memo that alleged FBI abuses of Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act warrants on Trump advisers.

In his 2023 book, “Government Gangsters: The Deep State, the Truth, and the Battle for Our Democracy,” Patel lambasted “crazed partisans” for hijacking “the law enforcement apparatus” against Trump.

Patel’s book heavily criticizes what he refers to as “the deep state” – an amorphous term he says includes elected leaders, journalists, Big Tech tycoons and “members of the unelected bureaucracy” – calling it “the most dangerous threat to our democracy.”

Patel in his book also calls for “a comprehensive housecleaning” of the Justice Department, arguing it has protected high-ranking members of the Democratic Party, failed to prosecute individuals who leaked information during the first Trump administration, and unjustly targeted Republicans and their allies.

Trump has praised the book as a “blueprint to take back the White House and remove these Gangsters from all of Government,” according to promotional endorsements of the book.

In 2019, Patel went to work for Trump on the National Security Council before becoming chief of staff to the acting defense secretary at the end of Trump’s first term.

When Trump considered firing then-CIA Director Gina Haspel after the 2020 election – as he pushed to release more information about the Russia investigation – Patel was floated as a potential replacement.

While that never came to pass, Patel has remained a fixture in Trump’s orbit, though his proximity to the president-elect has ebbed and flowed.

The mixed views of Patel among those close to Trump has been on display during the transition process as he was passed over for the job of CIA director – a role sources say he had actively lobbied for.

Multiple sources familiar with the Trump transition process previously expressed deep concerns about the possibility of Patel being named FBI director – a role where he would have vast authority to investigate the president’s political enemies, help declassify sensitive information and carry out a purge of career civil servants.

“Kash is frightening at the bureau,” a source familiar with internal deliberations about the role of FBI director previously told CNN.

FBI directors serve 10-year terms in part to shield the bureau’s leader from political pressure. FBI directors serve decadelong terms as the result of a post-Watergate law passed in response to J. Edgar Hoover’s controversial 48-year leadership of the agency.

The breaking of this norm is not new for Trump, who fired Comey shortly after taking office in 2017. Comey, who helmed the FBI during the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election as well as the Hillary Clinton email controversy, was fired by Trump in May 2017 after serving in the position for over three years.

Trump on Saturday evening also announced that he has picked Chad Chronister, sheriff of Hillsborough County, Florida, to lead the Drug Enforcement Administration in his incoming administration.

SOURCE: https://edition.cnn.com/2024/11/30/politics/kash-patel-fbi-director-trump/index.html
 
Concerns raised over Trump's FBI nominee's agenda and qualifications

Some also raised fears that Kash Patel, a marginal figure in Trump's first administration known for his loyalty, aims to dismantle an apolitical federal security service and refashion it into a means of partisan retribution.

"Look, 99.9% of the bureau is made up of hard working agents who adhere to the principles of fidelity, bravery and integrity," Jeff Lanza, a former FBI agent, said. "But he's said that he's coming in to just decimate the agency. How is that going to go well and how will that play into the morale of the agents who have to work under him?"

The FBI director leads 37,000 employees across 55 US field offices. They also oversee 350 satellite offices and more than 60 other foreign locations expected to cover almost 200 countries.

Former FBI and Department of Justice officials who spoke to BBC said the job is difficult, and it would be nearly impossible for someone like Patel, who has limited management experience, to operate effectively.

Gregory Brower, a former FBI assistant director and deputy general counsel who worked closely with the past two directors, called the job "nonstop".

"It's relentless. It's high stakes. It requires expert judgment, stamina, experience, and a strong ethical and moral compass," he told the BBC.

When he announced his pick for FBI director, Trump called Patel "a brilliant lawyer, investigator, and 'America First' fighter who has spent his career exposing corruption, defending Justice, and protecting the American People".

Patel began his career as a federal public defender in Miami before working as a terrorism prosecutor at the Department of Justice between 2014 and 2017. He then spent two years as senior aide to Republicans who led the House Intelligence Committee, reportedly fighting the investigation of Trump and Russian collusion in the 2016 election.

When Democrats took control of the House in 2019, he was hired as a staffer on Trump’s National Security Council. In February 2020, he became principal deputy in the Office of Director of National Intelligence - then led by acting director Richard Grenell.

By November of that year, he had moved to the Pentagon to serve as chief ofstaff to Acting Secretary of Defense Christopher Miller - a position he held until Trump left office two months later.

“Kash Patel has served in key national security positions throughout the government. He is beyond qualified to lead the FBI and will make a fantastic Director," Alex Pfeiffer, a Trump transition spokesman, told the BBC.

Those critical of Patel cite past FBI directors, many of whom worked their way up through the justice department or FBI for decades, as a better measure of the qualifications needed to lead the agency.

"It's certainly not like the backgrounds that we've seen other directors of the FBI and those who have overseen other similarly sized and important federal agencies bring to their jobs," Brower said of Patel's experience.

Some pointed to former US Attorney General Bill Barr’s recollection in his 2022 memoir of Trump's attempt to place Patel in a senior FBI position in his first term to stress the point further.

“I categorically opposed making Patel deputy FBI director. I told Mark Meadows it would happen ‘over my dead body,'” he wrote. “Someone with no background as an agent would never be able to command the respect necessary to run the day-to-day operations of the bureau.”

Since leaving office, Patel has promised in interviews that, if Trump returns to office, he and others will use the government to go after political opponents - including politicians and members of the media who he alleges without evidence helped overturn the 2020 US presidential election results.

"We're going to come after the people in the media who lied about American citizens, who helped Joe Biden rig presidential elections," Patel told Steve Bannon, a White House chief strategist in Trump's first term, on the War Room podcast.

"We're going to come after you, whether it's criminally or civilly. We'll figure that out. But yeah, we're putting you all on notice… We're actually going to use the Constitution to prosecute them for crimes they said we have always been guilty of but never have."

Trump said during his reelection campaign that he considers Patel’s book - titled Government Gangsters - to be a “blueprint” for his next administration.

In the memoir, which criticises the so-called deep state, Patel calls for "comprehensive housecleaning" of the FBI by firing “the top ranks”.

On a recent podcast, he said the incoming Trump administration intends to retain about 50 members of the FBI’s Washington staff, and the remaining workforce would be put into the field. They would, in essence, "close that building down", he said, referring to FBI headquarters.

“Open it up the next day as the museum to the deep state,” he added.

The FBI did not respond to a request for comment.

Mr Grenell and other former Trump administration officials who worked with Patel have praised his nomination and characterised him as a hardworking public servant.

“I have no doubt that Kash Patel will inspire our line FBI agents who want to fight crime, destroy the cartels, capture spies, and jail mobsters, thugs, fraudsters and traffickers,” Robert O’Brien, Trump’s last national security adviser, said on X.

Few, however, mentioned current FBI Director Christopher Wray, who was appointed by Trump after the then-president fired the agency’s last leader - James Comey - or that he still has three years remaining on his term.

Ultimately, it remains up to the Senate who will vote on whether Patel's nomination will be confirmed.

While most senators have remained relatively quiet about Patel and a few Republicans have praised the pick, there is some apparent scepticism.

Senator Mike Rounds, a Republican from South Dakota, seemed to raise some doubt that he would receive the necessary votes.

“I think the president picked a very good man to be the director of the FBI when he did that in his first term,” Rounds told ABC’s “This Week” on Sunday.

“We’ll see what his (Trump’s) process is, and whether he actually makes that nomination,” Rounds commented about Patel. “We still go through a process, and that process includes advice and consent, which, for the Senate, means advice or consent sometimes.”

Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Dick Durbin, a Democrat who will soon hand his gavel to Republicans, stressed that Trump knows Wray’s term has not yet expired and called for his colleagues to block Patel's confirmation.

“Now, the President-elect wants to replace his own appointee with an unqualified loyalist,” Durbin said in a statement. “The Senate should reject this unprecedented effort to weaponize the FBI for the campaign of retribution that Donald Trump has promised.”

BBC
 
Trump's defence nominee hits out after reports he could be dropped

Donald Trump's embattled nominee for defence secretary says he still has the president-elect's backing after reports suggested his nomination may be in jeopardy over allegations of misconduct.

Trump is considering replacing Pete Hegseth with Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, the BBC's partner CBS News reported, after Hegseth's nomination came under intense scrutiny.

Since Trump nominated the former Fox News host, questions about Hegseth's qualifications have been raised - and a historical sexual assault allegation has surfaced.

Hegseth has denied any wrongdoing, and was never arrested or charged.

Hegseth did not address the DeSantis reports directly and told reporters on Wednesday he had earlier spoken with Trump.

"He said 'keep going, keep fighting. I'm behind you all the way," he said.

“I spoke to the president this morning. (Trump) supports me fully. We’re not going anywhere,” he later told the BBC.

In a post on X on Wednesday morning, Hegseth accused "the Left" of trying to smear him with "fake" stories.

His nomination is the subject of growing scrutiny by members of his own party - including US senators who have the power to confirm or deny his appointment when are asked to vote on it.

"I think some of these articles are very disturbing," Senator Lindsey Graham told CBS on Tuesday. "He obviously has a chance to defend himself here, but some of this stuff is going to be difficult."

DeSantis, who was elected Florida governor in 2018, did not reply to a request for comment. A spokesperson for Trump declined to say whether DeSantis was under consideration for the post.

DeSantis ran against Trump in the Republican primary, and before dropping out, he was considered by some to be "Trump 2.0" - a Republican who could deliver Trump's populist agenda without baggage.

The latest speculation - first reported by the Wall Street Journal - comes as Hegseth meets members of Congress this week to discuss the job and drum up support.

A graduate of Princeton and Harvard universities, Hegseth was an infantry platoon leader in Guantanamo Bay and Iraq, and was awarded the Bronze Star Medal.

In nominating Hegseth, who is also a former Fox News TV host, Trump highlighted the former soldier's education, and his military experience in Afghanistan and Iraq.


www.bbc.com

Pete Hegseth: Trump's defence pick hits out after reports he could be dropped

US media suggest the president-elect could replace Pete Hegseth, whose selection is under intense scrutiny.
www.bbc.com www.bbc.com
 
Trump picks former Senator David Perdue as ambassador to China

U.S. President-elect Donald Trump said on Thursday he has chosen former Senator David Perdue to be ambassador to China, tapping a former politician with business experience to help steer relations riven by deep mistrust and trade tensions.

"He will be instrumental in implementing my strategy to maintain Peace in the region, and a productive working relationship with China's leaders," Trump said in a post on his social media platform Truth Social.

Trump, who takes office on Jan. 20, 2025, has said he will impose an additional 10% tariff on Chinese goods unless Beijing does more to stop the trafficking of the highly addictive narcotic fentanyl.

He also threatened tariffs in excess of 60% on Chinese goods while on the campaign trail.

Perdue, a Republican from Georgia who served in the Senate from 2015-2021, previously lived in Hong Kong during a 40-year career as a business executive.

Perdue's nomination marks a return to the frequent practice over recent decades of sending former politicians to the U.S. embassy in Beijing, after President Joe Biden tapped veteran career diplomat Nicholas Burns in 2021.

Trump has nominated China hardliners for other senior roles in his administration, including Senator Marco Rubio for secretary of state, in a signal his policy toward the United States' main strategic rival could go beyond trade measures.

In his first term as president, Trump named former Iowa Governor Terry Branstad as his ambassador to China. Branstad sought to leverage his ties with Chinese officials, including with Xi Jinping before he became China's top leader, to help navigate trade tensions. But the two sides still plunged headlong into an unprecedented trade war.

The ambassador's role in fraught bilateral relations remains to be seen. Some analysts say Beijing is likely to seek direct presidential or high-level engagement with Trump and his closest advisers, in order to navigate the almost-certain return of trade tensions.

REUTERS
 
FBI Director Chris Wray to resign following Trump nomination of Patel

FBI Director Chris Wray will step down from his post early next year, the bureau said on Wednesday, after Republican President-elect Donald Trump signaled his intent to fire the veteran official and replace him with firebrand Kash Patel.

Trump himself had appointed Wray, a fellow Republican, to his 10-year term in 2017, after firing his predecessor James Comey, who the then-president soured on over the FBI's investigations into alleged contacts between his 2016 campaign and Russia.

"After weeks of careful thought, I’ve decided the right thing for the Bureau is for me to serve until the end of the current Administration in January and then step down," Wray told FBI employees today, the agency said in a statement.

In a statement to Reuters, Patel said he looks forward to a "smooth transition."
"I will be ready to serve the American people on day one," he said.
Trump and his hardline allies turned on Wray, and the FBI more generally, after agents conducted a court-approved search of Trump's Florida resort in 2022 to recover classified documents that he had retained after leaving office.


 
Trump says Ric Grenell will be 'high up' in administration after report says ex-intel chief will be Iran envoy

President-elect Donald Trump described Richard "Ric" Grenell, his former acting director of National Intelligence, as a "fabulous person" and "A STAR" in response to a news report about him potentially serving as a special envoy for Iran.

Reuters reported that Trump is considering appointing Grenell to the position, citing "two people familiar with the transition plans."

"He's definitely in the running," a person familiar with deliberations told the outlet under conditions of anonymity. Grenell, however, said the report is "made up."

Trump shared the Reuters report on Truth Social Wednesday night. While he did not confirm or deny the information in the article, he wrote, "Richard Grenell is a fabulous person, A STAR. He will be someplace, high up!"

Grenell shared a link to the Reuters article on his X account on Wednesday evening and denied the information presented.

"Wrong. Again," he wrote. "I hope there’s an actual editor somewhere at @Reuters who is doing journalism. This is made up."

Grenell was previously rumored to be a candidate for various spots in Trump's second term, including Secretary of State before Sen. Marco Rubio was appointed and special envoy for the Russia-Ukraine conflict before retired Lt. Gen. Keith Kellogg was selected.

Whoever is chosen for the Iran position would be responsible for "developing, coordinating, and implementing the State Department's Iran policy," per the job description.

The person would report directly to Rubio – assuming the Senate approves his nomination.

Grenell has been a loyal ally to Trump since his first presidential term and often appeared on the 2024 campaign trail to show his support for the now president-elect.

SOURCE:https://www.foxnews.com/politics/tr...n-after-report-says-ex-intel-chief-iran-envoy
 

Time magazine names Donald Trump ‘Person of the Year’ for second time​


Donald Trump has once again become Time magazine’s coveted “Person of the Year”, securing the annual recognition for a second time in less than a decade.

The president-elect, who previously won the title in 2016, beat out a shortlist of Vice-President Kamala Harris; Catherine, Princess of Wales; the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu; the Mexican president, Claudia Sheinbaum; the billionaire Elon Musk and the podcast sensation Joe Rogan.

The title – historically bestowed on figures who have dramatically shaped global events, from world leaders to cultural revolutionaries – serves as a barometric reading of contemporary significance. Every US president since Franklin D Roosevelt – save for Gerald Ford – has worn the crown at least once, making Time’s annual selection a sort of presidential rite of passage.

Now a two-time winner, the title also underscores Trump’s persistent gravitational pull on the global narrative, despite – or perhaps because of – his tumultuous political trajectory, which culminated in a decisive presidential election win in November.

Trump told Time in an interview alongside his appointment that one of his first official acts as president would be to pardon most of the rioters accused or convicted of storming the Capitol to block the certification of Biden’s victory.

“It’s going to start in the first hour,” he says. “Maybe the first nine minutes.”

The president-elect also told the magazine about his thoughts on ending the war in Ukraine.

“The Middle East is an easier problem to handle than what’s happening with Russia and Ukraine. The numbers of dead young soldiers lying on fields all over the place are staggering. It’s crazy what’s taking place,” he said, before taking aim at Kyiv for launching US-made missiles into Russian territory last month: “I disagree very vehemently with sending missiles hundreds of miles into Russia. Why are we doing that? We’re just escalating this war and making it worse.”

Trump went on to say that he would use US support for Ukraine as leverage against Russia in an effort to end the war.

“I want to reach an agreement,” he said, “and the only way you’re going to reach an agreement is not to abandon.”

On inflation, Trump told Time he would going to work on specifically lowering the price of groceries.

“It’s hard to bring things down once they’re up,” he said. “You know, it’s very hard.”

Beyond the latest accolade, Trump has been on Time’s cover three times this year.

While he first appeared on the cover in 1989, Trump’s relationship with the magazine has long been fickle. Once dismissing the 100 most influential persons list as a “joke and stunt”, he has simultaneously craved its validation.

In 2015, when the then German chancellor Angela Merkel got the nod, Trump posted on Twitter: “I told you @TIME Magazine would never pick me as person of the year despite being the big favorite [sic] They picked [sic] person who is ruining Germany.”

When he was revealed as the cover winner the following year, Trump told NBC News “to be on the cover of Time as Person of the Year is a tremendous honor”.

His 2024 recognition arrives amid a similar political moment. Trump joins a list of 14 US presidents honored by the magazine.

www.theguardian.com

Time magazine names Donald Trump ‘Person of the Year’ for second time

Every president since Franklin D Roosevelt – but Gerald Ford – has won title at least once, making it a rite of passage
www.theguardian.com www.theguardian.com
 

Canada Threatens to Cut Power to U.S. Over Trump Tariffs​


www.yahoo.com

Canada Threatens to Cut Power to U.S. Over Trump Tariffs

Canada’s most populous province has no plans to go gentle into that good night if Donald Trump follows through on his threat to impose massive tariffs on Canadian goods. Ontario Premier Doug Ford said his province was putting together a list of retaliatory measures and would go so far as to cut...
www.yahoo.com www.yahoo.com


Trudeau acting tough after Trump's comments last week by calling Juntinder as Governor and Canada as 51st state. Lets see how long his tough act lasts. ;)
 

US to pressure UK to import high-quality American meat in Trump trade deal​


The United States is expected to push Britain to allow tariff-free access to high-quality American meat as part of any trade deal signed under the incoming Trump administration, amid interest from the president-elect’s trade chief.

Previous attempts to forge an agreement with the US have failed. Demands to allow the import of chlorinated chicken and hormone-fed beef – produced in the US but illegal in the UK – have proved too unpalatable for British ministers.

However, leading trade and industry figures in the US now say that stumbling block could be removed by only allowing meat produced to existing UK standards to enter the country without tariffs. They say the market for such meat has flourished in the US since the issue of a post-Brexit trade deal was first raised.

British ministers have only ruled out any future deal that would undermine British food standards. Michael Froman, the US trade representative under Barack Obama from 2013 to 2017, said the incoming administration was likely to concentrate on China and tariffs. However, in terms of a UK deal, he said “much has changed since the old days of battles over chlorinated chicken and hormone-fed beef”.

“The US now has sizeable markets for hormone and chemical-free poultry and beef, and it is at least possible there could be a compromise on certain longstanding issues,” he said. “If the UK is serious about negotiating an FTA with the US, though, it should make sure it has the political support to make hard decisions on market access, rules and standards.”

Any move to widen free access to US meat risks provoking British farmers, who already face stiff competition and many of whom have been angered by the government’s inheritance tax increases on agricultural land. Farmers already complain about the trade deals signed under Boris Johnson that allowed for greater beef and lamb imports from Australia and New Zealand.

But US producers remain keen on the idea of a deal for certain products. “US agriculture has been adamant that we need more proactive initiatives on trade and certainly the UK is one of the big economies, big markets, big consumer bases out there where we have extremely limited access,” said Erin Borror, a vice-president of the US Meat Export Federation. “From our perspective, it’s really just entirely upside potential. Our producers, our exporters are all about supplying what the consumer and the customer wants. Just let the market work.”

The incoming US trade representative, Jamieson Greer, name-checked the UK as a possible partner for a future free trade deal last year. “I recommend that the United States seek market access in non-Chinese markets in incremental, sectoral and bilateral agreements with other countries,” he said. “Focusing on trading partners such as the United Kingdom, Kenya, the Philippines and India would be a good start.”

Rachel Reeves, the chancellor, has signalled that she will seek to maintain as much free trade as possible with the US after the arrival of Trump. She is also under pressure to deliver promised economic growth. British farmers have already attempted to warn the government. Tom Bradshaw, the president of the National Farmers’ Union, told the Observer that he was “closely monitoring the political changes in the US”.

“Restarting trade talks simply to avoid president-elect Trump’s potential tariffs does not strike me as the right foundation for a balanced trade agreement,” he said. “If negotiations do proceed, it is vital that any agreement upholds the high standards we set in the UK, ensuring that products which would be illegal to produce here do not gain access to our market.”

Jonathan Reynolds, the trade secretary, said recently that past talks over the likes of chlorinated chicken had been difficult because of “the very different regulatory regimes for agriculture and food that exist in the UK and the EU in relation to the US”.

“But are there things we can be talking about? Whether you characterise that as an FTA or simply a negotiation between two allies and friends, there are definitely things we could work together on and I would welcome that conversation.”

www.theguardian.com

US to pressure UK to import high-quality American meat in Trump trade deal

US industry ready to drop demand to export chlorinated chicken and hormone-fed beef in move set to anger British farmers
www.theguardian.com www.theguardian.com
 
Trump-backed bill to keep US government running fails to pass

The US House of Representatives has voted against a Donald Trump-backed funding measure, bringing a government shutdown this weekend a step closer.

A revised spending plan failed to reach the two-thirds majority needed in the lower chamber of Congress, with 38 Republicans voting against the bill on Thursday night, defying the president-elect.

Trump had thwarted a previous cross-party funding deal that the Republican House leadership had struck with Democrats, after heavy criticism of the measure by tech billionaire Elon Musk.

After the bill failed by 174 votes to 235, Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson said he would come up with another solution before government funding lapses at midnight on Friday.

The Trump-approved replacement bill would have tied government funding to a two-year suspension of the federal debt limit, which determines how much the government can borrow to pay its bills.

Republican rebels objected because they oppose increases in government spending, while Democrats voted against it because they said the extra borrowing would be used to give tax cuts to the wealthy.

Here are five things to know about the possible government shutdown:

1. How we got here

The now-looming government shutdown can be traced back to September, when another budget deadline loomed.

Johnson failed to pass a six-month funding extension. Mostly Democrats voted against the extension, which included a measure (the SAVE Act) to require proof of citizenship for voting.

Instead, Congress came to a bipartisan deal for a bare-bones bill that would keep the government funded through 20 December.

Johnson pledged to his Republican conference then that come December, when the funding was set to expire, they would not have to vote on an everything-but-the-kitchen-sink spending bill ahead of the holiday recess.

But when congressional leaders released the text of the latest spending bill on Tuesday, three days before lawmakers were set to break for the holidays, it totalled 1,547 pages.

The bill would have extended government funding until March 14 - nearly three months after Trump is set to return to the White House.

It included more than $110bn (£88bn) in emergency disaster relief and $30bn in aid to farmers; the first pay raise for lawmakers since 2009; federal funds to rebuild a bridge that collapsed in Baltimore; healthcare reforms; and, provisions aimed at preventing hotels and live event venues from deceptive advertising.

Some Republicans criticised Johnson for abandoning a more basic spending bill, specifically condemning left-leaning provisions that were negotiated to win support from Democrats.

Johnson defended the deal, putting the blame on "acts of God" for needing some of the added provisions, like disaster aid and assistance for farmers.

2. Trump, Musk tank bipartisan plan

Still, opposition for Johnson's spending deal grew on Wednesday.

Musk, who Trump has tasked with identifying spending cuts by co-leading the Department of Government Efficiency ( which is not an official government department), lobbied heavily against the existing deal with dozens of posts on X.

He called it "criminal" and often referenced false statements about the bill in his posts.

Musk wrote on X that any lawmaker "who votes for this outrageous spending bill deserves to be voted out in 2 years".

After Musk drummed up opposition for the spending bill, Trump and JD Vance, the incoming vice-president, dealt the final blow to Johnson's deal that evening.

They said in a joint statement they wanted streamlined legislation without the Democratic-backed provisions that Johnson had included.

They also called for Congress to raise or eliminate the debt ceiling, which determines how much the government can borrow to pay its bills, and limit the funding legislation to temporary spending and disaster relief.

They called anything else "a betrayal of our country".

3. What happens next

Johnson and House Republicans introduced the streamlined legislation on Thursday, which then failed in a vote that evening. It's not clear what they will do next.

Lawmakers are not expected to vote again on Thursday, meaning they'll return on Friday morning with less than 24 hours on the clock until a potential shutdown.

But it's clear the partisan blame game is in full swing. After the Thursday bill was shot down, Johnson told reporters it was "very disappointing" that almost every House Democrat had voted against it.

"It is, I think, really irresponsible for us to risk a shutdown over these issues on things that they have already agreed upon," he said.

Johnson will likely need Democratic support, especially as divisions inside his own party over the bill became clear this week.

But Democrats are unlikely to help Johnson with support for a revamped funding bill, blaming him for breaking their bipartisan agreement.

"You break the bipartisan agreement, you own the consequences that follow," Democratic House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries posted on X, which is owned by Musk.

And others seemed to taunt Republicans for seeming to take their direction from the unelected Mr Musk.

On the House floor on Thursday, Connecticut Representative Rosa DeLauro - the top Democratic appropriator in the House - called the billionaire "President Musk", to laughter from fellow Democrats.

"President Musk said 'don't do it, shut the government down,'" she said.

Still, Johnson needs to find a way to win over Democrats in order to pass a spending bill, especially when pent-up anger within his own caucus is set to boil over.

Time is also of the essence. These negotiations usually take weeks.

4. The effects of a government shutdown

Federal agencies rely on annual funding to function. When Congress fails to pass the 12 spending bills that make up the spending budget, these agencies must discontinue non-essential functions.

Essential services - like border protection, in-hospital medical care, law enforcement and air-traffic control - continue to operate.

But many federal employees may go without pay.

While Social Security and Medicare checks are sent out, benefit verification and card issuance stops. The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program's funding is mandatory, but food stamp benefits may be impacted by a shutdown. This could lead to delays for similar assistance programs.

Other agencies stop operations entirely.

The Food and Drug Administration halts food safety inspections, the Environmental Protection Agency stops inspections and National Parks close to visitors.

5. The repercussions for Republicans

This was the first big test of Trump's influence over current congressional Republicans, and in the vote on Thursday, a number of them balked.

It also poses a challenge for Speaker Johnson, as the House is set to vote in just 15 days on who will serve as the House Speaker for the next Congress.

What previously looked like a secured position for Johnson is now seeming less of a sure thing.

Facing backlash from Trump and Mr Musk, the Louisiana Republican is now under scrutiny from those in his own party over his handling of government funding.

Several Republicans have indicated they will not vote for Johnson to lead the chamber. He cannot afford to lose the support of many Republicans, given that the party holds a slim majority of only five seats in the next Congress.

The threat to Johnson is serious, given Republicans' recent history.

In January 2023, California Republican Kevin McCarthy went through 15 rounds of ballots before winning the speakership.

Just 10 months later, he was ousted by Republicans, who faulted him for failing to cut spending and for working with Democrats to avert a government shutdown.

BBC
 

Warning signs for Trump as Republican rebels defiant​


The government shutdown showdown of December 2024 is becoming the first big test of president-elect Donald Trump's influence over Republicans in Congress.

At least so far, he is struggling, with the chaos of the last 24 hours showing some of the limits of his power and control of his party as he prepares to re-enter the White House.

One day after Trump derailed a bipartisan government funding bill - with a big assist from tech multibillionaire Elon Musk - he issued a new demand, for a stripped-down government funding bill that would also raise the limit on how much new debt the federal government can issue to fund its spending.

It was a big ask for many congressional conservatives who have long demanded that any debt increase at least be accompanied by cuts to what they view as out-of-control government spending.

Trump's demand was also a tacit admission that his legislative agenda, heavy on tax cuts and new military spending, was unlikely to deliver the kind of reduction to America's enormous federal deficit that many on the right have been hoping for.

On Thursday night, this slimmed-down bill, along with a two-year suspension of the debt limit, came up for a vote in the House. Thirty-eight Republicans joined nearly every Democrat in rejecting it. This amounted to a stunning rebuke of the president-elect, who had enthusiastically endorsed the legislation and threatened to unseat any Republicans who opposed it.

Since that defeat, Republican leaders have been huddling behind closed doors in an effort to come up with a new plan.

They could remove the debt-limit increase– winning over some recalcitrant Republicans but angering Trump. They could renegotiate with Democrats, who may be wary of striking any new deal after Trump torpedoed the first one. They could try bringing each component of the legislative package – government funding, disaster relief, health-care fixes and a debt-limit increase – to separate votes.

Or they could throw up their hands and let the government shut down less than a week before Christmas. That would mean federal workers, including members of the US military, would could miss paycheques just as holiday bills come due – a politically fraught option.

Even the best-case scenario for Republicans at this point only pushes the next shutdown fight a few months down the road, when the party will have to juggle funding the federal government while also trying to enact Trump's legislative agenda on immigration, taxes and trade, all with an even narrower House majority.

A worst-case scenario has all this, coming after an extended government shutdown, followed by a debt-limit battle in the summer, when deficit-minded conservatives may be even less willing to fall in line behind the president.

However this ends, this latest drama underscores just how tenuous the Republican majority in the House is – and the limits to Donald Trump's power.

Republicans abhor compromise with the Democrats, but they will be hard-pressed to muster a majority without them.

Trump and Elon Musk can kill legislation, but they can't necessarily rally the support to get their proposals over the finish line.

www.bbc.com

Warning signs for Trump as Republican rebels defiant

Trump has shown he can kill legislation, but can he rally the support to get his proposals over the finish line?
www.bbc.com www.bbc.com
 
US House votes to avert government shutdown

The Republican-controlled House of Representatives has voted to pass a budget deal to avert what would be the first US federal government shut down since 2019.

The deal, which passed by a vote of 366 -34 only six hours before a midnight deadline, must still be approved by the Democratic-controlled Senate before it can be signed into law by President Joe Biden.

Lawmakers earlier this week had successfully negotiated a deal to fund government agencies - but it fell apart after President-elect Donald Trump and tech billionaire Elon Musk called on Republicans to reject it.

This vote was the third attempt this week to get a deal through the House after a second funding measure - that one backed by Trump - failed on Thursday.

The 118-page "American Relief Act, 2025" that passed in the House on Friday strips out a debt-limit provision that Trump had demanded, which was a sticking point for Democrats and some Republican budget hawks in an earlier draft bill.

The deal also removes measures sought by Democrats in the first version of the bill, including the first pay raise for lawmakers since 2009, federal funds to rebuild a bridge that collapsed in Baltimore, healthcare reforms, and provisions aimed at preventing hotels and live event venues from deceptive advertising.

A total of 34 Republicans voted against the short-term funding bill while all Democrats in attendance were in favour.

Trump has not yet commented on the vote. A statement put out by the White House on behalf of Biden praises the deal.

Ahead of the vote, Democrats slammed the involvement of Mr Musk in the process, who they pointed out is an unelected billionaire.

Mr Musk, who Trump has tasked with cutting government spending in his future administration, had lobbied heavily against an earlier bill.

During floor debate, Republicans said they look forward to a "new era" when Trump takes office and Republicans take control of both chambers of Congress next month.

The wrangling over budget left Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson bruised amid criticism from members of his own party over his handling of the process.

"We are grateful that everyone stood together to do the right thing and having gotten this done now as the last order of business for the year, we are set up for a big and important new start in January," Johnson told reporters after Friday's vote.

He also said that he had spoken frequently to both Trump and Mr Musk during the negotiations.

Johnsons remarks came shortly after Mr Musk praised the Louisiana congressman's work on the budget in a post on X, the social media platform he owns.

"The Speaker did a good job here, given the circumstances," he posted. "It went from a bill that weighed pounds to a bill that weighed ounces."

The dramatic budget fight served as a preview of the tense legislative fights that could be in store next year, once Trump is in the White House.

Officials have warned that if there is no funding deal going into the holiday season, millions of federal employees would go without paycheques if the government shuts down.

There will be countless other ways a shut down would affect Americans - including by limiting assistance to aid-reliant farmers and people recovering from natural disasters.

The last government shutdown was during Trump's first term in 2019 after the Republican-controlled House of Representatives failed to come to an agreement on a new spending bill.

That shutdown lasted 35 days, and was the longest in US history.

BBC
 
Trump picks Apprentice producer Mark Burnett as UK envoy

US President-elect Donald Trump has appointed British TV executive Mark Burnett, who produced him on The Apprentice, as his special envoy to the UK.

Trump said it was his "great honour" to pick his former colleague for the role, which is separate to the position of US ambassador to the UK.

"Mark will work to enhance diplomatic relations, focusing on areas of mutual interest, including trade, investment opportunities, and cultural exchanges," he added.

Burnett said in a statement: "I am truly honoured to serve The United States of America and President Trump as his Special Envoy to the United Kingdom."

He created The Apprentice and produced it along with a range of other reality TV programmes, winning 13 Emmy Awards.

"With a distinguished career in television production and business, Mark brings a unique blend of diplomatic acumen and international recognition to this important role," Trump wrote on his social media platform Truth Social on Saturday.

The president-elect, who takes office next month, has already picked billionaire donor Warren Stephens as his ambassador to the UK. While Stephens's nomination requires confirmation by the US Senate, Burnett's role needs no such approval.

Burnett, 64, was raised in Essex and served as a paratrooper in the Army before emigrating to the US in 1982, when he was 22.

He went on to work for MGM and became known as a significant figure in reality television.

In addition to creating and producing The Apprentice, Burnett created formats such as Survivor and Shark Tank - the US version of Dragon's Den.

He helped propel Trump, a real estate developer, to new heights of fame as he starred in The Apprentice from 2008-15.

Burnett became president of MGM Television in December 2015, but stood aside in 2022 when Amazon acquired the studio.

He had a role in planning Trump's first inauguration in 2017.

Burnett told the BBC in 2010 that Trump was "fearless" and "a big, strong tough guy".

"He is a very, very down-to-earth normal guy and he's a really, really loyal friend and, as I've seen him with many other people, not the kind of enemy you would want," said Burnett.

Trump's first run for the presidency as Republican nominee in 2016 was plunged into crisis as tapes emerged of him telling Access Hollywood presenter Billy Bush that "you can do anything" to women "when you're a star".

Burnett released a statement at the time denying he was a supporter of Trump.

"Further, my wife and I reject the hatred, division and misogyny that has been a very unfortunate part of his campaign," he said. Burnett is married to Londonderry-born actress Roma Downey.

Another former producer of The Apprentice subsequently claimed that Trump had been heard making "far worse" remarks in recordings from the show.

But Burnett rejected calls to release all outtakes of Trump, saying he was unable to do so and citing "various contractual and legal requirements".

BBC
 
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