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Mexico on Tuesday began moving troops to its northern border as part of a 10,000-member deployment that President Claudia Sheinbaum promised US counterpart Donald Trump in exchange for a delay of his tariffs.”The deployment has already started,” Sheinbaum told reporters a day after announcing a last-minute deal with Trump to tighten measures against illegal migration and cross-border smuggling of the drug fentanyl.Several hundred members of the National Guard were seen boarding a military airplane in the southeastern city of Merida, heading for the Mexican-US border.Troops were seen arriving in Tijuana, just south of California, and Ciudad Juarez, bordering Texas.”There will be patrols along the entire US-Mexico border,” said Jose Luis Santos, National Guard coordinator in Ciudad Juarez.”Patrols will be conducted on foot and by vehicle, as well as patrols on various roads leading to the border,” he told reporters.Mexico also repeatedly pledged to Trump’s predecessor Joe Biden that it would tackle illegal flows of drugs and migrants, and border states already have a heavy security presence including thousands of troops.Trump on Saturday announced sweeping measures against the United States’ three biggest trading partners: Canada, China and Mexico.Its immediate neighbors were to face a tariff of 25 percent, the president announced, and China an additional 10 percent on top of existing duties.Canada and Mexico announced plans for reciprocal levies before both countries’ presidents managed to strike a deal with Trump Monday that saw him delay the tariffs by a month.Markets had slumped Monday after the weekend threats sparked fears of a global trade war.Sheinbaum said troops had been taken from parts of the country that “do not have as much of a security problem.”Several hundred thousand people have been killed since Mexico deployed the army to combat trafficking in 2006, according to official figures.The US border deployment “does not leave the rest of the country without security,” the president insisted.

Salvage crews have recovered the bodies of all 67 people killed when a passenger plane and a US Army helicopter collided near Washington and plunged into the Potomac River, officials said Tuesday.All but one of the bodies have been identified, said a statement from a variety of government agencies involved in the recovery effort after the deadliest US air crash in 20 years.The statement called the completion of the search for remains a “significant step” toward bringing closure to the families of the people who died in the accident last week.”Our hearts are with the victims’ families as they navigate this tragic loss,” the statement said. “We extend our deepest condolences and remain committed to supporting them through this difficult time.”Crews continue working to recover the wreckage of the passenger plane — a Bombardier CRJ-700 operated by American Eagle airlines — from the frigid waters of the Potomac.So far crews have retrieved pieces including the right wing, a center section of the fuselage, part of the left wing, the tail cone and rudder, the National Transportation Safety Board said.Work to recover the chopper will begin when the plane work is done, the city agencies said.Sixty passengers on the plane and four crew members were killed in Wednesday’s accident along with three soldiers aboard the US Army Black Hawk helicopter.There were no survivors.The plane was on a flight from Wichita, Kansas, to Ronald Reagan National Airport in Washington when the collision occurred.President Donald Trump was quick to blame diversity hiring policies for the accident although no evidence has emerged that they were responsible.Trump also said the helicopter, which was on a routine training mission, appeared to be flying too high.According to US media reports, the control tower at the busy airport may have been understaffed at the time of the accident.The National Transportation Safety Board is expected to compile a preliminary report within 30 days, although a full investigation could take a year.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu met Donald Trump at the White House Tuesday for crucial talks on the truce with Hamas, as the US president suggested permanently resettling Palestinians from war-battered Gaza.”It would be my hope that we could do something really nice, really good, where they wouldn’t want to return,” Trump said as he met Netanyahu in the Oval Office. “Why would they want to return? The place has been hell.”Trump earlier said Palestinians would “love” his plan to move them out of Gaza and into other Middle Eastern countries including Egypt and Jordan.Trump has claimed credit for securing the Israel-Hamas truce after more than 15 months of fighting and bombing, and he was likely to urge Netanyahu to move to the next phase of the ceasefire deal, aimed at a more lasting peace.Netanyahu said “we’re going to try” when asked by AFP how optimistic he was about moving on to phase two.”That’s one of the things we’re going to talk about. When Israel and the United States work together, and President Trump and I work together, the chances go up a lot,” Netanyahu said.The pair were later due to hold a joint press conference.Egypt and Jordan have flatly rejected Trump’s suggestion of moving Palestinians from Gaza. Gazans have also denounced Trump’s idea. “Trump thinks Gaza is a pile of garbage — absolutely not,” said 34-year-old Hatem Azzam, a resident of the southern city of Rafah.- ‘Beautiful piece of land’ -But in a break with previous US policy. Trump doubled down on his suggestion that Palestinians should get a “fresh, beautiful piece of land” in Egypt, Jordan, or other countries.”I think they’d love to leave Gaza if they had an option,” Trump said in the Oval Office ahead of his meeting with Netanyahu.Israel said hours ahead of the White House talks it was sending a team to mediator Qatar to discuss the second phase of the agreement.Palestinian group Hamas said Tuesday negotiations for the second phase had begun, with spokesman Abdel Latif al-Qanou saying the focus was on “shelter, relief and reconstruction”.Under the first six-week phase of the ceasefire, Palestinian militants and Israel have begun exchanging hostages held in Gaza for prisoners in Israeli custody.The war began when Hamas attacked Israel on October 7, 2023, taking into Gaza 251 hostages, 76 of whom are still held in the Palestinian territory including 34 the Israeli military says are dead.Families of the Israeli hostages have been urging all sides to ensure the agreement is maintained so their loved ones can be freed.- ‘Maximum pressure’ -Trump said he would be pushing efforts towards a normalization deal between Israel and Saudi Arabia which froze with the Gaza war.But they will also be discussing Iran, which backs Hamas and Lebanon’s Hezbollah movement.Ahead of the meeting Trump signed an order reinstating what he called the “maximum pressure” policy against Iran over allegations that the country is trying to develop nuclear weapons.Since the Gaza ceasefire took effect on January 19, Israel has launched a deadly operation against militants in the occupied West Bank’s north.UN aid agency UNRWA — which is now banned in Israel — warned that the heavily impacted refugee camp of Jenin was “going into a catastrophic direction”.On Tuesday, the Israeli army said a gunman killed two soldiers before being shot dead in an attack south of Jenin.Under the truce’s first phase, 18 hostages have been freed so far in exchange for some 600 mostly Palestinian prisoners from Israeli jails.The truce has also led to a surge of food, fuel, medical and other aid into Gaza, and allowed people displaced by the war to return to the north of the Palestinian territory.Hamas’s October 7 attack resulted in the deaths of 1,210 people on Israeli side, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally based on official Israeli figures.Israel’s retaliatory response has killed at least 47,518 people in Gaza, the majority civilians, according to the Hamas-run territory’s health ministry. The UN considers these figures as reliable.burs-dk/st

A meteorologist who caved to political pressure during Donald Trump’s first administration to mislead the public about a hurricane forecast was nominated by the president Tuesday to once more lead the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).Neil Jacobs, who previously helmed the renowned science agency from 2018 to 2021, was officially censured for his role in the infamous “Sharpiegate” scandal — one of the more bizarre episodes of Trump’s first term.Despite this, he has now been tapped to return to NOAA, which right-wing ideologues accuse of fueling the “climate change alarm industry.”The controversy erupted in September 2019 when Trump, relying on outdated information, wrongly claimed that Hurricane Dorian was set to strike Alabama. The National Weather Service’s local office in Birmingham swiftly corrected him to prevent unnecessary panic. But Trump refused to back down, lashing out with angry tweets and even displaying a doctored forecast map — apparently amended with one of the black Sharpie pens he favors using — to bolster his false claim.NOAA later issued an unsigned statement backing Trump’s erroneous assertion, sparking widespread backlash from meteorologists. Subsequent official investigations castigated Jacobs and another official for their roles in the drama.A report from the National Academy of Public Administration stated that NOAA’s defense of Trump’s claim “was not based on science but appears to be largely driven by external influences.” It also warned that such actions corrode public trust in scientific institutions.Jacobs’s new nomination has already drawn sharp criticism.”If the data used to help protect people and the economy becomes less reliable, the result will be very real harm to everyone, especially those on the frontlines of the climate crisis,” said Rachel Cleetus of the Union of Concerned Scientists.She added that if Jacobs is confirmed, he must “commit to upholding NOAA’s scientific integrity policy and standing up to any attempt to dismantle NOAA or commercialize its forecasting work, which proponents of Project 2025 have called for.”Developed by the Heritage Foundation, Project 2025 calls for breaking up NOAA, which it says is one of the “main drivers of the climate change alarm industry.”It also seeks to fully privatize the functions of the National Weather Service so that forecasts are only provided by companies like AccuWeather.Although Trump distanced himself from the plan during his 2024 campaign, it appears to be gathering momentum now that he is back in office.

President Donald Trump on Tuesday backed an offer by El Salvador to take in prisoners — including US citizens — despite clear legal problems with such an outsourcing under American law.”If we had the legal right to do it, I would do it in a heartbeat,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office.”It’s no different than our prison system, except it would be a lot less expensive, and it would be a great deterrent,” Trump said.El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele, who has carried out a sweeping crackdown on crime, offered the use of a maximum-security prison, Latin America’s largest, when he met Secretary of State Marco Rubio on Monday.Rubio said Tuesday that the Trump administration would review the proposal but acknowledged legal issues.”We’ll have to study it on our end. There are obviously legalities involved,” Rubio told reporters a day afterward in Costa Rica, where he headed after El Salvador.”We have a constitution, we have all sorts of things, but it’s a very generous offer,” Rubio said.The US Constitution forbids “cruel and unusual punishment” and promises due process.There is little precedent in modern times for a democratic country to send its own citizens to foreign prisons.Rubio again welcomed the offer by Bukele, saying, “No one’s ever made an offer like that.”- ‘They could keep them’ -Bukele said that El Salvador wanted to give the United States a chance to “outsource part of its prison system.”He said he would negotiate payment, which would decrease costs for the United States but help fund El Salvador’s own mass incarceration.Trump said that shipping criminals to El Salvador would be “a very small fee compared to what we pay to private prisons.””Frankly, they could keep them, because these people are never going to be any good,” Trump said.It would be a sharp break with historical practice for the United States not to take back its own citizens.The United States under successive administrations has pushed European allies to take back their citizens who fought for the Islamic State extremist group, in hopes of ending long-term imprisonment in Syria.Trump has sought to end the principle that everyone born in the United States is a citizen, which is enshrined in the Constitution. Most European nations have more leeway in revoking citizenship.Bukele has carried a sweeping crackdown on crime that includes rounding up people without warrants.He last year opened the “Terrorism Confinement Center,” or CECOT, where he has now offered to jail Americans.Designed to house 40,000 inmates, the vast prison lies behind huge concrete walls on the edge of a jungle, with inmates allowed out of their cells only for 30 minutes a day of exercise and for virtual court appointments.Bukele has faced criticism from human rights groups but enjoys sky-high approval ratings from a public grateful for the sharp reduction of crime in what was once one of the world’s most violent countries.Bukele, who has courted American conservatives, has offered to jail not just Americans but nationals from third countries, along with Salvadorans.Trump quickly after taking office stripped roughly 600,000 Venezuelans in the United States of protection from deportation.Trump’s predecessor Joe Biden had refused to deport them due to the security and economic crises in Venezuela, led by leftist Nicolas Maduro.Some 232,000 Salvadorans enjoy similar protections in the United States which Trump has not touched.The Trump administration has also begun to fly detained migrants to the US military base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.burs-sct/

As Elon Musk and his aides take control of the US Treasury’s payments system, the drastic job cuts and other shake-ups he instituted on buying Twitter may offer a preview of what government workers can expect.Musk, the world’s richest person, is leading President Donald Trump’s federal cost-cutting efforts under the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).The Treasury’s closely guarded payments system handles the money flow of the US government, including $6 trillion annually for Social Security, Medicare, federal salaries, and other critical payments.Ryan Mac, co-author of the recently released book “Character Limit: How Elon Musk Destroyed Twitter,” told AFP what the tycoon’s involvement could mean for massive federal agencies.Q: What did Musk make of Twitter?A: “Elon Musk saw Twitter as a bloated company that was being mismanaged. He fashioned himself as a great cost cutter.”He has done this for years at Tesla and SpaceX. That is the same principle he applied after buying Twitter.”Now, we are seeing the impacts of that. More than 80 percent of the company has departed, been laid off or fired.”Costs have been severely reduced, in turn that’s also reduced revenue – that side of the business has been hammered. He’s taking those same tactics to the US government.”- Is Musk stripping funds? “In the same way that Musk has zeroed out budgets at Twitter, he is doing the same with whatever federal agency he is taking an interest in.”They take a contract or expenditure down to zero, then the employee overseeing it has to argue why it’s necessary.”They reassemble the budget based on that and, hopefully, have been able to find some efficiencies or things that could have been cut.”That is something we saw at Twitter that’s now being deployed in the federal government.”We’re seeing the same names of characters, people like Steve Davis who is Elon’s right-hand man that came in to Twitter to slash costs. He’s now part of the DOGE effort with the federal government.”Will engineers rule?”We’ll start to see a heavy reliance on engineers. Elon is driven by this idea that engineers should be the decision makers; everyone else should either help them build or get out of their way.”That’s why you’re starting to see these young engineers coming to these agencies overseeing stuff.”I also expect to see burnout and people that initially sign on to work with him at DOGE start to fall out along the way. That’s a natural attrition you get with working with someone as intense as him. People no longer see eye-to-eye or get tired of the pace and leave or get fired.”Is Musk’s rule illegal?”Elon’s view on laws are they are something that can be challenged. He has this way of thinking called ‘going to first principles.’ If you tell him he can’t do something, he will ask why.”I think you are starting to see a little shift in his strategy. The ‘Fork in the Road’ email is similar to an email he sent out at Twitter after his takeover. At Twitter Elon asked workers who wanted to stay for hard core devotion to their jobs.”With the federal government, you have to opt in to resign. He has learned from his past mistake.”Did cuts break Twitter?”There were some outages, and the crash on X when Ron DeSantis announced his run for president was quite embarrassing.”X has remained online for the most part, and Elon sees that as a big win. We can talk about the cratering of revenue at X, but the site has been online, and he’ll take that as a victory.”But, the federal government is not something you can just slash willy nilly and put things back in place if it doesn’t work. People will get hurt along the way. What happens when you slash Social Security or Medicare too far? Whatever federal payment gets cut off, reassembling that is not as simple as turning on a server again or rehiring the person you just fired. “He has not built up these federal bureaucracies. Now he’s coming in and trying to fly the airplane and change the engine in mid-flight.”

US President Donald Trump on Tuesday signed an executive order withdrawing Washington from a number of United Nations bodies, including its Human Rights Council (UNHRC), and setting up a broader review of US funding for the multilateral organization.The executive order said it withdrew Washington from UNHRC and the main UN relief agency for Palestinians (UNRWA), and would review involvement in the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). The moves were made in protest against what White House staff secretary Will Scharf described as “anti-American bias” at the UN agencies.The 47 members of the UN Human Rights Council are elected by the General Assembly to three-year terms, with the United States ending its latest term on December 31. It currently has observer status at the body.Tuesday’s order would appear to end all US participation in the council’s activities, which include reviews of countries’ human rights records and specific allegations of rights abuses. “More generally, the executive order calls for review of American involvement and funding in the UN in light of the wild disparities and levels of funding among different countries,” said Scharf.Trump highlighted the “tremendous potential” of the UN but said it is “not being well run.””It should be funded by everybody, but we’re disproportionate, as we always seem to be,” he said.Trump has long railed against Washington’s levels of funding of multilateral bodies, calling for other countries to increase their contributions, notably at military alliance NATO.UNRWA is the chief aid agency for Palestinians, with many of the 1.9 million people displaced by the war in Gaza dependent on its deliveries for survival.Under Trump, Washington has backed a move by Israel to ban the agency, after the US ally accused UNRWA of spreading hate material.US funding of UNRWA was halted in January 2024 by the administration of then-president Joe Biden after Israel accused 12 of its employees of involvement in Hamas’s October 7, 2023, attack.A series of probes found some “neutrality related issues” at UNRWA, but found no evidence for Israel’s chief allegations, and most other donors that had similarly suspended funding resumed their financial support. Earlier in his latest term, Trump also withdrew from the Paris climate accord and began withdrawing from the World Health Organization, of which it is the largest donor.Each of the withdrawals has been a repeat of the Republican billionaire’s first term in office, which ended in 2021.

US Secretary of State Marco Rubio on Tuesday lashed out at authoritarian left-wing regimes in Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela, accusing them of being “enemies of humanity” and of causing a regional migration crisis.Rubio is on the third leg of a visit to Latin America, his first foreign tour as the top US diplomat, which has focused largely on stemming migration to the United States.”Those three regimes that exist in Nicaragua, Venezuela and Cuba are enemies of humanity and they have created a migration crisis. If it were not for these three regimes there would not be a migration crisis in the (Western) hemisphere,” Rubio told reporters in Costa Rica.”They have created it because they are countries whose systems do not work,” Rubio, the son of Cuban migrants, said in Spanish.He took particular aim at Nicaragua, where parliament last approved a constitutional amendment giving President Daniel Ortega, a one-time guerrilla, and his wife Rosario Murillo control of all state powers.”In the case of Nicaragua, it’s turned into a family dynasty with a co-presidency where they’ve basically tried to eliminate the Catholic Church and the religious community, and anyone who tries to take power from that regime is punished,” Rubio said.”We’ve seen thousands and thousands of Nicaraguans who are fleeing that system for the same reason people are leaving Cuba or Venezuela,” he added.Cuban President Miguel Diaz-Canel was among the first regional leaders to react.Writing on X, he said Rubio’s remarks were proof of the “shamelessness” of US politicians and blamed his country’s outflow of migrants on the more-than-six-decade US trade embargo on the communist island.”It is proven that the migration exodus in Cuba is proportional to the tightening of the blockade, which deprives our people of essential goods,” Diaz-Canel wrote.”Humanity is endangered by your neofascism,” he added.Rubio left Costa Rica for Guatemala on Tuesday, after earlier visits to Panama and El Salvador.In a stunning move, El Salvador’s iron-fisted leader Nayib Bukele offered to jail US citizen convicts in a mega-prison for gang members opened two years ago on the edge of a jungle.Rubio thanked him profusely for the offer and said that Bukele was also willing to accept deported gang members from other Latin America countries, including Venezuela.

US President Donald Trump on Tuesday said Palestinians would “love” to leave their embattled homeland in Gaza and live elsewhere if given an option.They would “love to leave Gaza,” he told reporters as he signed a raft of initiatives at the White House. “I would think that they would be thrilled.””I don’t know how they could want to stay. It’s a demolition site,” he said, more than 15 months after US ally Israel launched a punishing invasion of the territory in retaliation for attacks launched by Palestinian militant group Hamas. Trump spoke as he was due to meet with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to discuss the truce with Hamas. He is likely to urge his ally to stick to the deal, parts of which have yet to be finalized. Trump has previously touted a plan to “clean out” Gaza, calling for Palestinians to move to Egypt or Jordan.Both countries have flatly rejected this, and on Tuesday their leaders stressed “the need to commit to the united Arab position” that would help achieve peace, according to the Egyptian presidency.”Well they may have said that, but a lot of people have said things to me,” Trump told the journalists at the White House Tuesday. Gazans have also denounced Trump’s idea, with residents in the southern city of Rafah telling AFP “we will not leave.”But Trump appeared undettered. “If we could find the right piece of land, or numerous pieces of land, and build them some really nice places, there’s plenty of money in the area for sure, I think that would be a lot better than going back to Gaza, which has had just decades and decades of death,” he said. When a reporter pressed him on where such places might be, he suggested they could be in Jordan, Egypt or “other places. You could have more than two.””You’d have people living in a place that could be very beautiful, and safe and nice. Gaza’s been a disaster for decades.”When another journalist asked if the United States would pay for such a move, he said that there were “plenty of people that would in the area, they have a lot of money,” and citing Saudi Arabia as one example. “They have no alternative right now,” he added, when an AFP journalist asked if such a move would amount to forcibly displacing Palestinians. “They’re there because they have no alternative. What do they have? It is a big pile of rubble right now…. I would think that they would be thrilled to do it.””I think they’d love to leave Gaza,” he said. “What is Gaza?”He said he did “not necessarily” support Israelis moving into the area instead.”I just support cleaning it up and doing something with it. But it’s failed for many decades. And somebody will be sitting here in ten years or 20 years from now and they’ll be going through the same stuff.” 

US President Donald Trump’s embattled health secretary pick, vaccine conspiracy theorist Robert F. Kennedy Jr, squeaked through a crucial vote in his confirmation bid on Tuesday as senators advanced his nomination to the floor. With Republicans having a one-seat advantage on the Senate Finance Committee, Kennedy’s future hinged on Bill Cassidy, a physician who has clashed with the former Democrat over unfounded claims linking vaccines to autism.But Cassidy backed Kennedy after the 71-year-old environmental lawyer — and nephew of former president John F. Kennedy — was given a vote of confidence from Trump, who urged support for the man whom just nine months ago he was calling “one of the most Liberal Lunatics ever to run for office.””20 years ago, Autism in children was 1 in 10,000. NOW IT’S 1 in 34. WOW! Something’s really wrong. We need BOBBY!!!” Trump posted on his Truth Social platform ahead of the vote. Cassidy is a rare occasional rebel in the Republican ranks but faces reelection next year in Louisiana and risked picking up a challenger from the Republican Party’s Trumpist far right if he upset the president.Kennedy’s nomination has faced myriad concerns from both parties, with Republicans particularly eying his past support for abortion, his record suing big business as an environmental lawyer and his 2023 run for president as a Democrat.Beyond vaccines, Democrats point mainly to sexual misconduct allegations, Kennedy’s suggestion that Covid-19 was designed to spare Jews, his linking of school shootings to antidepressants and his alleged mistreatment of animal corpses.The New York Post, a reliably Trump-supporting newspaper, wrote a scathing editorial arguing that there was “too much wackiness” in Kennedy’s background to trust him with America’s health.- Iron grip -And Elizabeth Warren, the vice chair of the Senate Democrats, called Kennedy an “anti-science conspiracy peddler who is willing to gamble with American lives,” urging senators to reject the nomination.The Senate can confirm nominees without a committee’s endorsement, but Republican Majority Leader John Thune had cast doubt on how likely this was.That raised the stakes for Tulsi Gabbard — another conspiracy theorist with a long record of publicly opposing US national security policy, including siding with its adversaries — who scraped through her own key vote.Like Kennedy, 43-year-old Gabbard was running the gauntlet of a party-line vote and just a single Republican no would have sunk her chances of endorsement by the Senate Intelligence Committee.  But Susan Collins, Todd Young and Jerry Moran — considered the swing votes — all lined up behind the Hawaiian US Army Reserve officer, clearing her path to the Senate floor by nine votes to eight.Collins said the one-time lawmaker — like Kennedy, a former Democrat who once ran for president — had addressed her concerns over her past support for pardoning NSA leaker Edward Snowden.Success for Kennedy and Gabbard, two of the least experienced nominees in modern history, would be another powerful demonstration of Trump’s iron grip on his party, days after controversial Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s confirmation.The Senate confirmed former congressman Doug Collins — no relation of the senator — as secretary of Veterans Affairs on Tuesday, a day after approving fracking executive Chris Wright to lead the Energy Department.Pam Bondi is expected to be confirmed as attorney general in the early hours of Wednesday, replacing fellow Floridian Trump loyalist Matt Gaetz, who was the president’s first choice.Gaetz, who withdrew amid allegations of drug abuse and sex with an underage girl that he denies, is looking set to be the only Trump nominee whose Cabinet ambitions will have been derailed in Congress.