Trump says Putin will respond to Ukrainian drone attack ‘very strongly' after phone call
US President Donald Trump said Russian President Vladimir Putin told him "very strongly" in a phone call on Wednesday that he will respond to Ukraine's weekend drone attack on Russian airfields.
The US president said in a social media post that "it was a good conversation, but not a conversation that will lead to immediate peace."
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The Journal
23 minutes ago
- The Journal
US judge blocks Trump's latest ban on foreign students at Harvard
A US JUDGE has put a temporary stay on Donald Trump's latest effort to stop foreign students from enrolling at Harvard, as the US president's battle with one of the world's most prestigious universities intensified. A proclamation issued by the White House late Wednesday sought to bar most new international students at Harvard from entering the country, and said existing foreign enrollees risked having their visas terminated. 'Harvard's conduct has rendered it an unsuitable destination for foreign students and researchers,' the order said. Harvard quickly amended an existing complaint filed in federal court, saying: 'This is not the Administration's first attempt to sever Harvard from its international students.' '(It) is part of a concerted and escalating campaign of retaliation by the government in clear retribution for Harvard's exercising its First Amendment rights to reject the government's demands to control Harvard's governance, curriculum, and the 'ideology' of its faculty and students.' Advertisement US District Judge Allison Burroughs ruled the government cannot enforce Trump's proclamation. Harvard had showed, she said, that without a temporary restraining order, it risked sustaining 'immediate and irreparable injury before there is an opportunity to hear from all parties.' The same judge had already blocked Trump's earlier effort to bar international students from enrolling at the storied university. 'Government vendetta' The government already cut around $3.2 billion (€2.7 billion) of federal grants and contracts benefiting Harvard and pledged to exclude the Cambridge, Massachusetts, institution from any future federal funding. Harvard has been at the forefront of Trump's campaign against top universities after it defied his calls to submit to oversight of its curriculum, staffing, student recruitment and 'viewpoint diversity.' Trump has also singled out international students at Harvard, who accounted for 27% of total enrollment in the 2024-2025 academic year and are a major source of income. In its filing, Harvard acknowledged that Trump had the authority to bar an entire class of aliens if it was deemed to be in the public interest, but stressed that was not the case in this action. Related Reads Harvard University sues Trump administration to stop federal funding freeze Trump threatens to strip Harvard's tax-exempt status after freezing university's funding Harvard University hit with $2.2 billion funding freeze after rejecting Trump's demands 'The President's actions thus are not undertaken to protect the 'interests of the United States' but instead to pursue a government vendetta against Harvard,' it said. Since returning to office Trump has targeted elite US universities which he and his allies accuse of being hotbeds of anti-Semitism, liberal bias and 'woke' ideology. Trump's education secretary also threatened to strip Columbia University of its accreditation. The Republican has targeted the New York Ivy League institution for allegedly ignoring harassment of Jewish students, throwing all of its federal funding into doubt. Unlike Harvard, several top institutions – including Columbia – have already bowed to far-reaching demands from the Trump administration. © AFP 2025
Irish Times
30 minutes ago
- Irish Times
Tesla suffers suffers biggest one-day drop in market value after Trump-Musk spat
Tesla 's market value suffered its biggest one-day drop on record on Thursday as an escalating feud between Donald Trump and Elon Musk triggered a sharp sell-off in the carmaker's shares. The electric vehicle group's shares closed down more than 14 per cent, erasing $153 billion (€134 billion) from its market capitalisation, after the US president signalled he could terminate US government contracts with Mr Musk's companies. 'The easiest way to save money in our Budget, Billions and Billions of Dollars, is to terminate Elon's Governmental Subsidies and Contracts,' Mr Trump wrote on his platform Truth Social. Thursday's drop left Tesla's share price down 25 per cent since the start of the year. READ MORE The spat between two of the world's most powerful men included repeated barbs from Mr Musk on his platform X and Mr Trump's comment that the billionaire, who has been a close ally since the election, was 'wearing thin'. The Tesla sell-off reverberated through US stock markets, with the S&P 500 and the tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite ending the session down 0.5 per cent and 0.8 per cent respectively. Both indices began to decline at around midday, when Mr Trump and Mr Musk began exchanging insults. The pair's 'petulant drama shook up the stock market', said Mike Zigmont, co-head of trading and research at Visdom Investment Group. 'The bond market didn't care, nor should it.' Tesla investors have had a rollercoaster few months. The stock rallied hard in the final quarter of last year after Mr Trump won his second term as president, but fell between mid-December and early March amid a broader market sell-off fuelled by Mr Trump's trade wars. Shares in rivals to Mr Musk's space exploration group SpaceX and its satellite broadband network subsidiary Starlink rose on Thursday as Tesla fell. AST SpaceMobile gained 7.5 per cent while communications group EchoStar jumped 17.4 per cent. The breakdown of Mr Musk's relationship with Mr Trump comes as his public interventions in European politics, including support for far right parties, have contributed to falling car sales across Europe. In March, JPMorgan strategists wrote in a note to clients that they 'struggle[d] to think of anything analogous in the history of the automotive industry, in which a brand has lost so much value so quickly'. The cuts Mr Musk made to federal government spending as head of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency also sparked a backlash. The Tesla boss stepped back from his government role at the end of May, having blamed 'blowback' against his businesses. Some investors said the market should have anticipated Mr Musk's feud with Mr Trump, despite their earlier bonhomie. Renowned short seller Jim Chanos said on X that it was the 'Most. Predictable. Break-up. Ever.' – Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2025
Irish Times
an hour ago
- Irish Times
‘Wearing thin': Trump-Musk bromance descends into a jaw-dropping feud that is funny, dismal and nauseating
Things unravel fast. The arrangement was for chancellor Merz and the German party to spend the night across from the White House in Blair House after their Thursday visit to the Oval Office. The football enthusiasts in the visiting contingent may have intended unwinding with the highlights of the fabulous France-Spain game. But like everyone else in Washington, DC, the German visitors undoubtedly spent their late afternoon and Thursday evening glued to their screens as the once-heated connection between president Donald Trump and Elon Musk degenerated into a jaw-dropping social media feud that is funny and nauseating and dismal all at once. By nightfall, the richest man in the world had made the unsubstantiated claim, on the social media platform he owns, that president Trump is 'in the Epstein files'. He had reposted decades-old footage of Trump in the company of the late and now-reviled Epstein, whose FBI files remain a source of fascination to a strand of the Maga support base. READ MORE Musk's barrage of posts criticising the Trump budget Bill began during chancellor Merz's sit-down in the Oval Office and continued over the course of a day when his personal wealth fell by an estimated $34 billion, even as shares in Tesla slumped. Once freed from his diplomatic duties, during which Trump admired Mr Merz's facility with German and looked less than thrilled to receive a framed birth certificate of Freidrich Trump, the German grandfather of whom he never speaks, the president was free to attack Musk on his own social media account. Piqued, he noted that the 'easiest way' to save money in the budget is to 'terminate Elon's governmental subsidies and contracts'. He also went public with an observation that had become clear over the past six weeks as Musk's prominence within the administration steadily faded. 'Elon was 'wearing thin'. I took away his EV mandate that forced everyone to buy electric cars that nobody else wanted (that he knew for months I was going to do) and he just went CRAZY!' As ever, the drama once again sent the 47th presidency rocketing into the realm of not just a rolling television soap opera, but the darkest parody of the landmark American political dramas. With president Trump, the old line of history repeating itself doesn't fully apply: the tragedy and farce seem to occur simultaneously. Over the course of their Oval Office press spray, chancellor Merz, restrained and impressive, made several serious and sombre points about the Ukraine and Russia war but it was unclear if Trump permitted the clarity and gravity to penetrate. For much of the time, the German visitor sat silent while Trump riffed on his relationship with Musk, which was, on live television, experiencing the same return-to-Earth's-orbit fate as one of the billionaire's SpaceX rockets. By teatime, Steve Bannon, a long-time vitriolic critic of Musk, had called for his deportation. Meanwhile, the Republican lawmakers on Capitol Hill tasked with meeting Trump's expectation that the budget Bill pass the Senate vote and be on his desk for his preferred deadline of July 4th, Independence Day, took stock of the spectacular feud. 'I have a rule. I never get between a dog and a fire hydrant,' the Louisiana senator John Kennedy told a reporter. Kennedy is one of several senators who want to see the Bill amended before it goes to a vote. The Republicans can afford just three defections if it is to get through the Senate. It is already clear that two senators, Kentucky's Rand Paul and Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, represent a hard No to the Bill. 'The math doesn't add up,' Paul posted earlier this week. 'I'm not supporting a Bill that increases debt by $5 trillion.' Kentucky congressman Thomas Massie sounded gleeful when he was asked who he would choose in the playground fight between Trump and Musk. 'I choose math. The math always wins over the words. I trust the math over the guy who lands the rocket backwards, over the politician's maths. I think the patient is on life support and if the Senate thinks they are going to rehabilitate it and rewrite it, I think they are endangering this patient. Because people over here are looking for more reasons to be against it.' Now, with Trump's estranged 'genius' and the world's richest man seeking to sabotage the Bill with venom, it looks more fragile than ever. Even during the height of their public union, when they engaged in a public mutual seduction, with Trump attracted to Musk's limitless wealth and Musk dazzled by Trump's mass public appeal and the peerless power that comes with the presidency, it was clear to everyone that it would be short lived. But as recently as February, Musk was moved to post: 'I love Donald Trump as much as a straight man can love another man.' Perhaps he is just a rank sentimentalist at heart. But this week Musk discovered the limitations and the cold commercialism of the presidential love reciprocated. On Monday, even as reports of his rampant narcotics use circulated, Musk suffered the indignity of a going-away present of an outsized golden key which, Trump clarified, he gives to 'very special people'. It created the impression that there is a thousand identical keys crammed into a cupboard near the Oval Office. The billionaire was sporting a black eye, which he claimed he acquired while horsing around with his young son. Musk said he invited young X to 'punch me in the face' and the youngster – perhaps aware of his deteriorating future fortune – didn't hesitate in socking one to the old man. For the past four days, Musk found himself gone from the White House, his magic lanyard and access returned with nothing but a ceremonial key which opens no doors. And for all of the callous indifference to the vulnerable and impoverished Musk displayed as he set about implementing the federal cuts in his role as head of the Department of Government Efficiency, he may have believed that at some level Trump valued his work. The Bill proposal represents not just an additional burden to America's national debt; it is a personal snub to the man-hours Musk has put in since January. For a man with boundless intellectual vanity, to be made to feel a fool represents the worst insult. And there was a cold truth, too, to Trump's rationale as to why Musk has suddenly gone rogue on him. 'I think he misses the place. He's not the first. People leave my administration and then at some point they miss it so badly. Some of them embrace it and some of them actually become hostile.' The feud does not bode well for the administration. For the Democrats came the welcome novelty of watching the other crowd infighting. But the bitter and reckless war of words will ask deeper questions of the many Republicans who championed Musk during the days when he was the president's favourite courtier. And the critical decision over the big, beautiful Bill still looms. 'When 15 million people lose their health care and plunge into personal crisis,' Connecticut Democrat senator Chris Murphy wrote on Thursday evening, 'none of them are going to give a shit about a made-for-clicks twitter fight between two billionaires arguing about who gets the bigger share of the corruption spoils.' In happier days, Trump made a shrewd observation about Musk. 'He's a true patriot,' he praised. 'And I don't even know if he is a Republican.' He may be about to find out.
