Category Archives: Trump administration

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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Canada and Mexico can avoid tariffs before Saturday’s deadline, says Trump’s commerce pick

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Howard Lutnick testified at his US Senate confirmation hearing for his nomination to head commerce department

Donald Trump’s nominee to run the commerce department, Howard Lutnick, said on Wednesday that Canada and Mexico can avoid looming US tariffs if they act swiftly to close their borders to fentanyl, while vowing to slow China’s advancement in artificial intelligence.

Lutnick, a billionaire Wall Street CEO, at his US Senate confirmation hearing said he has advised Trump to pursue across-the-board tariffs country by country to restore “reciprocity” to America’s trading relationships and said he would erect stronger curbs on China’s access to US technology, including advanced AI semiconductors.

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Fed holds interest rates steady amid uncertainty over Trump’s impact on economy

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President has made clear he wants rates to fall as benchmark interest rate now sits at a range of 4.25% to 4.5%

Federal Reserve officials decided on Wednesday to hold interest rates steady as uncertainty over Donald Trump’s impact on the US economy looms and inflation remains above the central bank’s target levels.

This is the first time Fed policymakers have met since the president, who has made clear he wants rates to fall, returned to the White House. The benchmark interest rate now sits at a range of 4.25% to 4.5%.

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White House revokes spending freeze in face of legal challenges

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Move come after federal judge blocked freeze that disrupted payments to medical and childcare providers

Donald Trump’s administration pulled back a proposed spending freeze that threatened to disrupt hundreds of billions of dollars in aid to US programs, a White House official said on Wednesday.

The first major domestic policy reversal of the Republican president’s new term came after one federal judge had temporarily blocked the freeze and before another judge was due to hear a separate legal challenge. The proposal had thrown the federal government into chaos and disrupted payments to medical and childcare providers.

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Federal workers decry Trump attempt to force mass resignations as ‘cruel joke’

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Advocates say email sent to 3 million employees offering resignations is dangerous and ‘of questionable legality’

Federal workers and their advocates on Wednesday condemned the Trump administration’s attempt to encourage them to resign en masse, describing an unprecedented email from the government’s human resources department office as a ham-handed attempt to create hostility in their workplaces and offer a false promise of an easy transition out of government service.

On Tuesday, the US office of personnel management (OPM) sent nearly all of its 3 million employees an email offering them deferred resignations and warning that, if they choose to stay, they may be laid off or reassigned.

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Trump offers US federal workers buyouts to resign

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Government employees’ union says offer pressures career workers to quit and will cause chaos in federal programs

The Trump administration has offered federal workers buyouts worth more than seven months’ salary if they would leave their jobs by 6 February as the White House attempts to slash the civil service in an unprecedented overhaul of US government.

The office of personnel management, the government’s human resources agency, sent a memo to the federal workforce on Tuesday evening with four directives that it says Trump is mandating, including a full-time return to the office for most employees. It also said that the federal workforce would be subjected to “enhanced standards of suitability and conduct” and warned that most agencies would be downsized.

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Special counsel prosecutors were fired on instructions of White House

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Press secretary Karoline Leavitt says late-night dismissals came after White House’s personnel office issued memo

The justice department fired more than a dozen federal prosecutors involved in the two criminal prosecutions against Donald Trump after receiving instructions to do so from the White House, indicating the late-night purge was a political directive that deputized the justice department.

The termination of the career prosecutors were ostensibly at the direction of the acting attorney general, James McHenry, according to the notices sent to anyone remaining on the trial team of 18 who had worked for former special counsel Jack Smith.

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Alarm as Trump administration pauses all federal spending on grants and loans

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Memo says social security and Medicare are excluded but congressional Democrats express ‘extreme alarm’

Donald Trump’s second presidential administration has paused all grants and loans disbursed by the federal government, potentially upending programs relied upon by millions of Americans.

In a two-page internal memo, Matthew Vaeth, Trump’s acting head of the office of management and budget (OMB), instructed all federal agencies to “temporarily pause all activities related to obligations or disbursement of all federal financial assistance”.

The Associated Press contributed reporting

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Trump repeats suggestion Palestinians should leave Gaza for Egypt and Jordan

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US president insists leaders of both countries would agree to move that could be ‘temporary or long-term’

Donald Trump has repeated his suggestion that large numbers of Palestinians should leave Gaza for Egypt or Jordan, despite widespread opposition to the proposal from Palestinian leadership, the UN and US allies in the region.

Speaking to reporters onboard Air Force One on Monday night, the US president was asked about his comments over the weekend about “cleaning out” the Gaza Strip either “temporarily or long-term”. Trump reiterated he would “like to get [Palestinians from Gaza] living in an area where they can live without disruption and revolution and violence so much”.

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Woman at heart of birthright citizenship lawsuit reacts to Trump’s order: ‘This is a right’

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A pregnant mother from Venezuela responds to Trump’s executive order that would render her baby stateless

On his first day in office, Donald Trump signed an order ending constitutionally recognized right of birthright citizenship. Thousands of expecting parents across the US suddenly had to consider that their babies would be born into a legal limbo.

Among them is Monica, a woman expecting her first child after escaping political persecution in Venezuela. If Trump’s order stands, Monica’s baby will be born stateless.

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Trump orders review of Fema after saying disaster agency ‘is not good’

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Council including defense and homeland security secretaries will report within 180 days on future of agency

Donald Trump has ordered an investigation into whether there should be a radical shake-up of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema), the US government’s body for responding to natural disasters, after saying he supported its abolition.

In a new executive order, the returning president appointed a review council to examine the workings of the agency, which he accused of political bias and of denying aid to his supporters.

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Trump to sign executive order removing DEI from military, says Hegseth

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Orders will also reinstate troops kicked out for refusing Covid vaccines during pandemic, says defense secretary

Donald Trump will soon sign executive orders removing diversity, equity and inclusion from the military and reinstating thousands of troops who were kicked out for refusing Covid vaccines during the pandemic, the defense secretary Pete Hegseth said on Monday.

Hegseth, a former Fox News personality and decorated veteran, narrowly secured enough votes to become the next defense secretary, a major victory for Trump after fierce opposition from Democrats and even some Republicans to his controversial nominee.

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