Category Archives: Trump administration

Toronto Raptors fans boo US national anthem after Donald Trump tariffs

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  • Canadian NHL fans also booed Star-Spangled Banner
  • Applause breaks out during Canadian national anthem

Fans at a Toronto Raptors game on Sunday continued an emerging trend of booing the American national anthem at sporting events in Canada.

Fans of the NBA’s lone Canadian franchise booed the US anthem before the Raptors’ game against the Los Angeles Clippers at the Scotiabank Arena in downtown Toronto. Similar reactions broke out on Saturday night at NHL games in Ottawa and Calgary, where the Senators and Flames faced the Minnesota Wild and Detroit Red Wings respectively. Those games came hours after Donald Trump made his threat of import tariffs on Canada a reality.

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Trump revokes deportation protections for 300,000 Venezuelans in US – report

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Move comes as one-two punch for group already reeling from last week’s decision to rescind 18-month extension

The Trump administration has stepped up its attack on Venezuelans living in the US under temporary deportation protections, revoking the right to stay of more than 300,000 people.

The move, first reported by the New York Times, comes as a one-two punch for Venezuelans who were already reeling from last week’s decision to rescind an 18-month extension of temporary protected status (TPS) that had been introduced in the final days of the out-going Biden administration. Reversing the extension was a blow that affected more than 600,000 Venezuelans living in the US.

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Netanyahu heads for Trump talks in US amid uncertainty over Gaza truce

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Negotiations on second phase of ceasefire likely to be put back until after two leaders meet on Tuesday

Benjamin Netanyahu has flown to Washington for Donald Trump’s first meeting with a foreign leader since his return to office.

The pair are due to meet on Tuesday, amid widespread uncertainty about the parameters of the encounter.

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Wall Street Journal editorial calls Trump tariffs ‘dumbest trade war in history’

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Some US business leaders reacted neutrally, while JP Morgan CEO says tariff threats can be used effectively

US business leaders are offering a mixed reaction to the steep trade tariffs that Donald Trump’s administration has imposed on Canada, Mexico and China, as the editorial board of the Wall Street Journal called it “the dumbest trade war in history”.

Donald Trump hit Canada and Mexico with a 25% tariff on imports, and China with 10%, on Saturday in a move that launched a new era of trade wars between the US and three of its largest trading partners. The tariffs against Canada tax oil and energy products at 10%.

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Trump warns Americans that tariffs may cause ‘pain’– US politics live

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US president says measures against Mexico, Canada and China will ‘all be worth the price’

After Donald Trump’s return to the White House, Volkswagen, Germany’s largest carmaker, said that tariffs would have a “harmful economic impact” on American consumers, as well as the international automotive industry.

German automakers say the tariffs will cause inflation for consumers.

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Top Democrats warn Trump tariffs will ‘hit Americans in their wallets’

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Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer leads charge against president’s tax plans on neighbors and allies

Top Democrats have slammed Donald Trump’s plans to impose serious tariffs on America’s neighbors and allies, warning that they will hit working families and small businesses hard.

Chuck Schumer, the minority leader in the US senate, led the charge by saying the president’s threatened tariffs would likely “hit Americans in their wallets”. “It would be nice if Donald Trump could start focusing on getting the prices down instead of making them go up.”

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Trump’s order targeting pro-Palestinian protests mirrors rightwing blueprint

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New fact sheet bears similarity to Heritage Foundation’s Project Esther, which aims to quash US support of Palestine

Critics warn that a new executive order from Donald Trump’s administration purporting to “combat antisemitism”, and a corresponding fact sheet suggesting deporting international students who protest Israel, could chill political speech on campuses.

The fact sheet released before Trump signed the order on Wednesday quoted the president as saying: “To all the resident aliens who joined in the pro-jihadist protests, we put you on notice: come 2025, we will find you, and we will deport you. I will also quickly cancel the student visas of all Hamas sympathizers on college campuses, which have been infested with radicalism like never before.”

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‘Very retaliatory’: the federal workers caught up in Trump’s DEI purge

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Employees condemn ‘unprecedented and scary’ effort to push out those who had worked on diversity programs

Jeremy Wood thought he was safe from the shuttering of federal government diversity initiatives that he expected to start as soon as Donald Trump was sworn in.

A Raleigh, North Carolina-based career civil servant in the US agriculture department, Wood had been among those tasked with implementing policies ordered by Joe Biden to curtail discrimination on the basis of race, sexual orientation and gender identity in the federal government.

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Trump aid spending freeze halts leading malaria vaccine programme

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Global collaboration with US researchers likely to be set back by years, including on spread of drug-resistant HIV

A flagship programme to create malaria vaccines has been halted by the Trump administration, in just one example of a rippling disruption to health research around the globe since the new US president took power.

The USAid Malaria Vaccine Development Program (MVDP) – which works to prevent child deaths by creating more effective second-generation vaccines – funds research by teams collaborating across institutes, including the US university Johns Hopkins and the UK’s University of Oxford.

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US gas prices likely to go up with Trump tariffs on Canadian and Mexican oil

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Tariffs on imports mean higher costs for finishing fuels, much of which is likely to be passed on to consumers

US consumers will see higher prices at the gas pump from Donald Trump’s decision on Saturday to apply tariffs on Canadian and Mexican oil, according to analysts and fuel traders.

The likely hike in fuel prices reflects the double-edged nature of Trump’s trade protections, which are designed to bolster domestic business and pressure US neighbors to curb illegal immigration and drug smuggling, but which will also run counter to his promises to tackle inflation.

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USAid website offline as Trump moves to put agency under state department

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Move would threaten life-saving global humanitarian aid programs, from HIV/Aids treatments to clean water access

The website for the US Agency for International Development, or USAid, appeared to be offline on Saturday, as the Trump administration moves to put the free-standing agency, and its current $42.8bn budget for global humanitarian operations, under state department control.

A message stating that the “server IP address could not be found” appeared when attempts were made to access the website on Saturday.

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Ken Martin elected new chair of Democratic National Committee

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Minnesota Democratic–Farmer–Labor chair to lead party still reeling from extensive losses

Ken Martin, chair of the Minnesota Democratic–Farmer–Labor party, won the crowded race to become the next chair of the Democratic National Committee on Saturday.

The move provides Martin with a powerful perch to determine the messaging and trajectory of a party that is still reeling from its extensive losses in the November election and confronting four more years of Donald Trump’s leadership.

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Pentagon swaps desk for New York Times reporters for New York Post

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Other swaps due to new ‘rotation’ include NPR for Breitbart, NBC for One America News and Politico for HuffPost

The Trump administration’s program to shake up media representation at official briefings and press calls in Washington is set to affect the Pentagon, with credentialed media being rotated out of assigned workspaces for media newcomers.

The conservative-leaning One America News Network will replace NBC News, Breitbart will be given space held by National Public Radio, the New York Post has been offered the New York Times’ workspace and HuffPost will replace Politico.

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Trump orders USDA to take down websites referencing climate crisis

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Forest service website among many sites affected as agencies scramble to comply with president’s orders

On Thursday, the Trump administration ordered the US agriculture department to unpublish its websites documenting or referencing the climate crisis.

By Friday, the landing pages on the United States Forest Service website for key resources, research and adaptation tools – including those that provide vital context and vulnerability assessments for wildfires – had gone dark, leaving behind an error message or just a single line: “You are not authorized to access this page.”

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Trump special envoy flies to Venezuela to meet with Nicolás Maduro

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Richard Grenell’s visit prompts fresh speculation of rapprochement between Washington and Caracas

A Donald Trump special envoy has flown to Venezuela to hold talks with its authoritarian leader, Nicolás Maduro, fuelling fresh speculation of a possible deal between the two governments.

Richard Grenell, a prominent Maga cheerleader and diplomat who was the US ambassador to Germany during Trump’s first term, was set to land in Caracas on Friday, according to CNN.

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Pardoned January 6 attacker sentenced to 10 years for fatal drunk-driving crash

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Emily Hernandez, 24, killed Victoria Wilson, 32, and injured her husband in a 2022 Missouri wreck

One of the US Capitol attackers pardoned by Donald Trump at the start of his second presidency has been handed a 10-year prison sentence for killing a woman in a drunk-driving crash, according to authorities.

Emily Hernandez served 30 days in federal prison after she joined the mob of Trump supporters who stormed the US Capitol on 6 January 2021 and was photographed holding the broken nameplate of Nancy Pelosi, the House speaker at the time.

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US court rules banning gun sales to young adults under 21 unconstitutional

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Conservative New Orleans court ruling for people between 18 and 21 comes amid major shifts in firearm legal landscape

A conservative US appeals court on Thursday ruled that a ban on handgun sales to people between the ages of 18 and 21 violates the second amendment.

The ruling, handed down by a panel of three judges on the fifth US circuit court of appeals in New Orleans, comes amid major shifts in the national firearm legal landscape following a landmark US supreme court decision that expanded gun rights in 2022.

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Tulsi Gabbard grilled on Snowden, Assad and Putin in tense Senate hearing

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Skeptical senators ruthlessly questioned Trump’s national intelligence director nominee ahead of confirmation vote

Tulsi Gabbard, Donald Trump’s nominee for national intelligence director, refused to call the whistleblower Edward Snowden a “traitor” but sought to rein in her unorthodox views on foreign dictators and opposition to electronic surveillance during a tense confirmation hearing that could sink her nomination to oversee the country’s sprawling intelligence community.

In a three-hour hearing before the Senate intelligence committee, Gabbard, a former congresswoman and member of the Hawaii army national guard, partially recanted her views that Russia was provoked into invading Ukraine, said she had “no love” for the Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad and denied meeting with Hezbollah representatives during a trip to Lebanon in 2017.

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‘America’s gulag’: Trump’s Guantánamo ploy tars migrants as terrorists

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The president wants to detain thousands of people at a site that is notorious for its secrecy and history of abuse

It has been denounced as “America’s gulag”: a secretive, abuse-ridden Caribbean prison camp for terror suspects that Donald Rumsfeld once said contained “the worst of the worst”.

“All of us have scars in our souls, deformities, from living at Guantánamo,” a former Yemeni inmate recalled of his time at the notorious military detention facility in south-east Cuba.

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Trump’s US aid freeze will drive migration from Latin America, experts warn

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Abrupt decision to pause all foreign aid could exacerbate violence in region already struggling with organized crime

The Trump administration’s abrupt decision to immediately pause all US foreign aid programmes could exacerbate violence in Latin America, driving more migration from a region already struggling with the rise of organised crime, experts have warned.

The world’s largest aid provider by far, the US disbursed $1.5bn (£1.2bn) to South American countries in the 2023 financial year, funding a broad range of projects, including humanitarian, military, environmental and economic aid.

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