US President Donald Trump takes an unexpected walk on the White House roof to survey new projects
Then it took an unexpected and unusual turn when he appeared on the roof of the White House's West Wing.
Late Tuesday morning, Trump emerged from a door connected to the State Dining Room and stepped onto the roof above the press briefing room and west colonnade that walls the Rose Garden.
He spent nearly 20 minutes surveying the rooftop and the grounds below, including a newly paved makeover of the Rose Garden.
Reporters, tipped off by the out-of-the-ordinary positioning of snipers above the Oval Office, shouted questions from below.
One called out: 'Sir, why are you on the roof?'
'Taking a little walk,' Trump shouted back.
'It's good for your health.'
Trump walked with a small group that included James McCrery, architect of the newly announced $US200 million ($A308 million) ballroom project.
They moved slowly, with Trump frequently gesturing and pointing at the roof and grounds. Several times, he wandered toward the corner nearest the press corps, waving and cupping his hands to shout responses to shouted questions.
At one point, he said he was looking at 'another way to spend my money for this country'.
Later, near the end of his appearance on the roof, Trump was asked what he was going to build. He quipped, 'Nuclear missiles'.
The unexpected walk on the rooftop comes as Trump looks to leave a lasting footprint on what's often referred to as 'The People's House'.
He has substantially redecorated the Oval Office through the addition of golden flourishes and cherubs, presidential portraits and other items, and installed massive flagpoles on the north and south lawns to fly the American flag.
Last week, his administration announced that construction on a massive ballroom will begin in September and be ready before Trump's term ends in early 2029.
While Trump appeared on the West Wing, the White House has said the ballroom will be where the 'small, heavily changed, and reconstructed East Wing currently sits'.
While rare, there have been times through the years when presidents ventured out onto — and even slept on — the White House roof.
To promote renewable energy, Former President Jimmy Carter installed 32 solar panels on the West Wing roof in the 1970s. The panels were then removed during the Reagan administration.
In 1910, President William Howard Taft had a sleeping porch built on the roof to escape Washington's hot summer nights.
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The contentious plans include doubling the tax on the proportion of fund balances over $3 million from 15 per cent to 30pc. The two most divisive aspects of the plans, as they stand, are that the changes would apply to unrealised capital gains and, to a lesser degree, that they will not be indexed. However, while Dr Chalmers still must reintroduce the legislation, the process technically started on July 1 with Labor planning to make the bill retrospective. Addressing the contentious Division 296 legislation during his opening address at the SMSF Association's 2025 technical summit, Mr Burgess said that while the government would argue that the measure was announced two years ago, "it is completely unreasonable to expect individuals to respond to legislation before it becomes law". "The Government has previously acknowledged the need for a long lead time to allow impacted members to consider the impact and make the necessary changes to their superannuation arrangements," he said. Mr Burgess is also preparing proposed amendments to put in front of the Coalition, which remains totally against the measures. "Those amendments would seek to take unrealised capital gains off the table, which would be great for farmers and small business owners," he told ACM. "The Coalition can dig in their heels and say they don't agree with any amendments, or try and do the right thing by their heartland." Questions around consumer law are being pondered after on-road testing has revealed that some of Australia's best-selling electric vehicles failed to meet their advertised range on a single charge and consumed significantly more power than manufacturers had promised. The Australian Automobile Association released the results on Thursday after road-testing five EVs under its federally funded, $14 million Real-World Testing Program. The Chinese-manufactured BYD Atto 3 SUV performed the worst in running out of juice a stunning 111km short of its spruiked range, as well as using 21pc more power than advertised, prompting industry stakeholders to call the result "not good enough". The energy consumption tests were performed on a 93km circuit around Geelong in Victoria in damp and dry conditions. In other results, Elon Musk's Tesla's entry-level electric car, the Model 3, fell 14pc below the advertised range, or 72km, and used 6pc more power than lab testing. Next were the Tesla Model Y and Kia EV6 SUVs with both falling 8pc short of promised ranges, or just over 40km, while the Smart EV 3 was 5pc below the advertised distance. The results should be a concern for a Labor government and regional Australians looking down the road at an EV-dominated future. 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The Australian government was cock-a-hope last week after the US president left the nation sitting on his minimum whack in a 10 per cent global benchmark, saying it franked its low-key negotiating tactics that were condemned by the Coalition. However, as is often the case, President Trump's silk glove announcement contained a sledgehammer after he revealed this week that a 250pc levy could be slapped on Australian pharmaceutical exports, leaving Labor leaders with a fight to talk the nation out of the heavy impost. Prime Minister Anthony Albanese will have a few hours above the Tasman to mull the human hurricane that is Donald J. Trump on his way to the Australia-New Zealand leaders' meeting being held in the Shaky Isles this weekend. Meanwhile, a few hours the White House announced that federal law enforcement officers representing the FBI, DEA, ATF, ICE and the Park Police would be sent to patrol the streets of the nation's capital for the next week in reaction to an assault on a Department of Government Efficiency worker. "Washington DC is an amazing city, but it has been plagued by violent crime for far too long. President Trump has directed an increased presence of federal law enforcement to protect innocent citizens. Starting tonight, there will be no safe harbour for violent criminals in DC," White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said. Speaking of President Trump, if you had a 2025 bingo card that predicted he would somehow disrupt global weather forecasts, you're likely holding a winner. In continuing on his mission of upending Biden-era emissions reduction policies and global climate targets, the president has revealed in a fresh budget request that he wants to savagely cut funding to US science and climate agencies, including NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Both play a key role in formulating domestic weather forecasting data that is then fed into the work of agencies around the globe, including Australia's Bureau of Meteorology, to formulate both short and long-term modelling relied on by a range of economic sectors, including agriculture. It follows the cutting of more than 1000 NOAA jobs as part of Elon Musk's DOGE mass federal layoffs and President Trump's slashing of a significant slab of science-related research and development grants. The incoming director-general of the European Centre for Medium Range Weather Forecasting, one of the world's leading forecasting services, Florian Pappenberger, admitted that the combination of those moves would have global ramifications and "without a doubt" lead to a diminished reliability in forecasts for agencies around the world. "The forecast will not be as good," he said. "There's no question about that. We will lose forecast skill." The president said he wants the NASA funding to be diverted into programs to beat China back to the moon and put the first human on Mars. While far from waving the white flag in its long fight to have the idea scrapped entirely, Self Managed Super Fund Association chief executive Peter Burgess said this week that the lobby group was also urging Treasurer Jim Chalmers to defer implementing his super tax changes should the measures pass through the Senate and into law. The contentious plans include doubling the tax on the proportion of fund balances over $3 million from 15 per cent to 30pc. The two most divisive aspects of the plans, as they stand, are that the changes would apply to unrealised capital gains and, to a lesser degree, that they will not be indexed. However, while Dr Chalmers still must reintroduce the legislation, the process technically started on July 1 with Labor planning to make the bill retrospective. Addressing the contentious Division 296 legislation during his opening address at the SMSF Association's 2025 technical summit, Mr Burgess said that while the government would argue that the measure was announced two years ago, "it is completely unreasonable to expect individuals to respond to legislation before it becomes law". "The Government has previously acknowledged the need for a long lead time to allow impacted members to consider the impact and make the necessary changes to their superannuation arrangements," he said. 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ISC policy director Carol Booth said the measure should be the "proactive, collaborative and science-led" blueprint for future wildlife preparedness exercises. "It's exactly the kind of forward-looking action Australia needs to prepare for wildlife emergencies before they hit,' Dr Booth said. In a major win for the nation's biosecurity efforts, it was announced last month that Australia has been officially declared free from high-pathogenicity avian influenza in poultry. The government has also confirmed that Australia remains free of the H5N1 strain, a subtype of avian influenza that remains on its doorstep and has created havoc across entire continents. The highly contagious strain has infected more than 500 wild bird species and 90 mammalian species overseas and, while these were mainly marine mammals and bird-eating scavengers, "spillover" cases have been detected in dairy cattle, cats, goats, alpacas, and pigs. A sheep was also infected after being exposed to a highly contaminated environment in the UK. Asia has been significantly impacted by the H5N1 strain with cases being reported in several countries, including multiple human fatalities linked to the virus in Cambodia notwithstanding that human infections are rare. Dr Booth added that while the funding announced by Environment Minister Murray Watt and Agriculture Minister Julie Collins on Friday would safeguard animals in captivity, "we now need the same level of urgency and coordination for protecting wildlife in the wild", including in high-risk areas like wetlands, seabird colonies and coastal haul-out sites for seals. In an opinion article published by ACM this week, Australia's Energy Infrastructure Commissioner Tony Mahar said that the clean energy transition was a big, complex, fast-moving train that has well and truly departed the station. He warned that if regional communities continue to be left on the platform as the train disappears down the track, they would also be standing in the rubble of a "disastrous trail of lost trust, unfairness, and missed economic opportunity". "Too many rural and regional communities feel like this transition is being done to them, not with them," he said. "Projects are being announced, good people are being approached by charlatans and salespeople looking for a quick sale and signature under a veil of non-disclosure secrecy. "Timelines are being set and decisions made, while locals are left feeling like bystanders in their own backyards. That's not just unfair, it's unsustainable." The day has arrived for the Trump administration to blow the whistle on a new tariff regime that will do no less than upend and reshape the current global economic order. The Australian government was cock-a-hope last week after the US president left the nation sitting on his minimum whack in a 10 per cent global benchmark, saying it franked its low-key negotiating tactics that were condemned by the Coalition. However, as is often the case, President Trump's silk glove announcement contained a sledgehammer after he revealed this week that a 250pc levy could be slapped on Australian pharmaceutical exports, leaving Labor leaders with a fight to talk the nation out of the heavy impost. Prime Minister Anthony Albanese will have a few hours above the Tasman to mull the human hurricane that is Donald J. Trump on his way to the Australia-New Zealand leaders' meeting being held in the Shaky Isles this weekend. Meanwhile, a few hours the White House announced that federal law enforcement officers representing the FBI, DEA, ATF, ICE and the Park Police would be sent to patrol the streets of the nation's capital for the next week in reaction to an assault on a Department of Government Efficiency worker. "Washington DC is an amazing city, but it has been plagued by violent crime for far too long. President Trump has directed an increased presence of federal law enforcement to protect innocent citizens. Starting tonight, there will be no safe harbour for violent criminals in DC," White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said. Speaking of President Trump, if you had a 2025 bingo card that predicted he would somehow disrupt global weather forecasts, you're likely holding a winner. In continuing on his mission of upending Biden-era emissions reduction policies and global climate targets, the president has revealed in a fresh budget request that he wants to savagely cut funding to US science and climate agencies, including NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Both play a key role in formulating domestic weather forecasting data that is then fed into the work of agencies around the globe, including Australia's Bureau of Meteorology, to formulate both short and long-term modelling relied on by a range of economic sectors, including agriculture. It follows the cutting of more than 1000 NOAA jobs as part of Elon Musk's DOGE mass federal layoffs and President Trump's slashing of a significant slab of science-related research and development grants. The incoming director-general of the European Centre for Medium Range Weather Forecasting, one of the world's leading forecasting services, Florian Pappenberger, admitted that the combination of those moves would have global ramifications and "without a doubt" lead to a diminished reliability in forecasts for agencies around the world. "The forecast will not be as good," he said. "There's no question about that. We will lose forecast skill." The president said he wants the NASA funding to be diverted into programs to beat China back to the moon and put the first human on Mars. While far from waving the white flag in its long fight to have the idea scrapped entirely, Self Managed Super Fund Association chief executive Peter Burgess said this week that the lobby group was also urging Treasurer Jim Chalmers to defer implementing his super tax changes should the measures pass through the Senate and into law. The contentious plans include doubling the tax on the proportion of fund balances over $3 million from 15 per cent to 30pc. The two most divisive aspects of the plans, as they stand, are that the changes would apply to unrealised capital gains and, to a lesser degree, that they will not be indexed. However, while Dr Chalmers still must reintroduce the legislation, the process technically started on July 1 with Labor planning to make the bill retrospective. Addressing the contentious Division 296 legislation during his opening address at the SMSF Association's 2025 technical summit, Mr Burgess said that while the government would argue that the measure was announced two years ago, "it is completely unreasonable to expect individuals to respond to legislation before it becomes law". "The Government has previously acknowledged the need for a long lead time to allow impacted members to consider the impact and make the necessary changes to their superannuation arrangements," he said. Mr Burgess is also preparing proposed amendments to put in front of the Coalition, which remains totally against the measures. "Those amendments would seek to take unrealised capital gains off the table, which would be great for farmers and small business owners," he told ACM. "The Coalition can dig in their heels and say they don't agree with any amendments, or try and do the right thing by their heartland." Questions around consumer law are being pondered after on-road testing has revealed that some of Australia's best-selling electric vehicles failed to meet their advertised range on a single charge and consumed significantly more power than manufacturers had promised. The Australian Automobile Association released the results on Thursday after road-testing five EVs under its federally funded, $14 million Real-World Testing Program. The Chinese-manufactured BYD Atto 3 SUV performed the worst in running out of juice a stunning 111km short of its spruiked range, as well as using 21pc more power than advertised, prompting industry stakeholders to call the result "not good enough". The energy consumption tests were performed on a 93km circuit around Geelong in Victoria in damp and dry conditions. In other results, Elon Musk's Tesla's entry-level electric car, the Model 3, fell 14pc below the advertised range, or 72km, and used 6pc more power than lab testing. Next were the Tesla Model Y and Kia EV6 SUVs with both falling 8pc short of promised ranges, or just over 40km, while the Smart EV 3 was 5pc below the advertised distance. The results should be a concern for a Labor government and regional Australians looking down the road at an EV-dominated future. Charging stations have been as rare as hen's teeth outside the peri-urban fringes for years and, while installations are increasing and more are being placed along major highways, their placement has been predicated on those manufacturer lab tests. It appears yet another regional and remote connectivity "blackspot" needs to be addressed. The Invasive Species Council has welcomed a $2.8 million federal funding announcement to strengthen bird flu biosecurity across captive-breeding threatened species programs - calling it a vital step in national preparedness for H5 avian influenza. The funding - delivered through the Zoo and Aquarium Association - is part of Labor's broader $100m investment to prepare and protect the nation against H5. It will be sprinkled around 23 facilities, from the Currumbin Wildlife Park on the Gold Coast to Adelaide Zoo, in a bid to protect over 20 threatened species from the virus. ISC policy director Carol Booth said the measure should be the "proactive, collaborative and science-led" blueprint for future wildlife preparedness exercises. "It's exactly the kind of forward-looking action Australia needs to prepare for wildlife emergencies before they hit,' Dr Booth said. In a major win for the nation's biosecurity efforts, it was announced last month that Australia has been officially declared free from high-pathogenicity avian influenza in poultry. The government has also confirmed that Australia remains free of the H5N1 strain, a subtype of avian influenza that remains on its doorstep and has created havoc across entire continents. The highly contagious strain has infected more than 500 wild bird species and 90 mammalian species overseas and, while these were mainly marine mammals and bird-eating scavengers, "spillover" cases have been detected in dairy cattle, cats, goats, alpacas, and pigs. A sheep was also infected after being exposed to a highly contaminated environment in the UK. Asia has been significantly impacted by the H5N1 strain with cases being reported in several countries, including multiple human fatalities linked to the virus in Cambodia notwithstanding that human infections are rare. Dr Booth added that while the funding announced by Environment Minister Murray Watt and Agriculture Minister Julie Collins on Friday would safeguard animals in captivity, "we now need the same level of urgency and coordination for protecting wildlife in the wild", including in high-risk areas like wetlands, seabird colonies and coastal haul-out sites for seals. In an opinion article published by ACM this week, Australia's Energy Infrastructure Commissioner Tony Mahar said that the clean energy transition was a big, complex, fast-moving train that has well and truly departed the station. He warned that if regional communities continue to be left on the platform as the train disappears down the track, they would also be standing in the rubble of a "disastrous trail of lost trust, unfairness, and missed economic opportunity". "Too many rural and regional communities feel like this transition is being done to them, not with them," he said. "Projects are being announced, good people are being approached by charlatans and salespeople looking for a quick sale and signature under a veil of non-disclosure secrecy. "Timelines are being set and decisions made, while locals are left feeling like bystanders in their own backyards. That's not just unfair, it's unsustainable."
West Australian
5 hours ago
- West Australian
JD Vance to kick off UK visit with tensions high
US Vice President JD Vance kicks off a trip in the United Kingdom with a meeting with British Foreign Secretary David Lammy on Friday that will bring renewed scrutiny of Vance's sharp criticism of Britain and its governing Labour Party. Vance, his wife, Usha, and their three young children are expected to land in London at the start of a trip that includes staying with Lammy at Chevening, the country residence used by the foreign minister. They will later stay in the Cotswolds, a picturesque area of English countryside and a popular retreat for wealthy and influential figures, from footballers and film stars to media and political figures. The visit to the United Kingdom comes amid heightened transatlantic tensions, domestic political shifts in both countries and increased attention on Vance's foreign policy views as he emerges as a key figure in President Donald Trump's administration. A source familiar with the planning described the trip as a working visit that will include several official engagements, meetings and visits to cultural sites. Vance is also expected to meet with US troops. Vance has championed an America First foreign policy and once said last year's election victory for the centre-left Labour Party meant Britain was "maybe" the first "truly Islamist" country with a nuclear weapon. He also attacked the United Kingdom for undermining freedom of speech and placing the "basic liberties of religious Britons in the crosshairs." Lammy once called Trump a "far right extremist" and a "neo-Nazi" but since coming to power has brushed off his remarks as "old news." Despite their differences, the pair has developed a warm friendship, bonding over their difficult childhoods and shared Christian faith, according to two officials familiar with the relationship. Lammy attended mass at the vice president's Washington residence during a visit in March, and the two leaders met again in Rome in May for Pope Leo XIV's inaugural Mass, the officials said. The bilateral meeting on Friday lacks a formal agenda, officials said, but is likely to touch on the Ukraine and Gaza crises, along with trade issues. The United Kingdom has been pushing Trump to support Ukraine in its war with Russia and to accelerate efforts to bring a humanitarian crisis in Gaza to an end. But Lammy is unlikely to press aggressively, said Bronwen Maddox, a director at the think tank Chatham House. "It's a chance to get UK perspective in there, but they're not looking for conflict," Maddox said, adding that British officials are content with the trade deal they struck with Trump. Vance's visit comes shortly after Trump travelled to Scotland for a private visit that included meetings with British Prime Minister Keir Starmer and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, who struck a framework trade agreement with the US imposing a 15 per cent import tariff on most European Union goods. Trump is also scheduled for a full state visit to the United Kingdom in September, making him the first elected political leader in modern times to be hosted for two state visits by a British monarch.
