Trump complains that 'nobody' gives US credit but US will provide 'more' food aid for starving Gaza
He faced repeated questions about the ominous situation there while meeting with EU Commission President Ursuala von der Leyen at his Turnberry golf course in Scotland.
Trump complained about 'one-sided' trade and view-obstructing wind turbines – but also said the U.S. might do more amid reports of starvation in suffering in the war-ravaged territory amid Israel 's bombardment.
'People don't know this – and we didn't certainly get any acknowledgement or thank you, but we contributed $60 million to food and supplies and everything else,' said Trump.
'We hope the money gets there, because you know, that money gets taken. The food gets taken. We're going to do more, but we gave a lot of money.'
'Nobody acknowledged it. Nobody talks about it,' Trump complained.
'And it makes you feel a little bad when you do that. And you know, you have other countries not giving anything.'
'The US is going to do more aid for Gaza but we'd like to have other countries participate,' Trump said.
'It would be nice to have at least a thank you' – Trump said, raising a demand for appreciation that also featured in Trump's blowup with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in the Oval Office.
Trump spoke after Israel announced it would provide 10-hour 'tactical' pauses to allow food aid deliveries amid the humanitarian crisis and the breakdown in talks for a ceasefire that would free remaining hostages that Hamas took after the October 7 attack on Israel.
It has made other allowances for aid since beginning its attacks following the Oct. 7, 2023 Hamas attack inside Isreal. But the blockade and difficulty for people to move and access food and medecine has led to reports of widespread hunger.
'If we weren't there, I think people would have starved, frankly – they would have starved. And it's not like they're eating well, but a lot of that food is getting stolen by stolen by Hamas. You know, they're stealing the food. They're stealing a lot of things. You ship it in, and they steal it, then they sell it,' Trump said.
He held out the prospect of more U.S. releif.
In his push to have others join, Trump said, 'We're going to mention that to the European Union today. Yeah, that's an international problem. It's not a US problem. It's an international problem.'
The EU announced an aid package worth €120 million for Gaza in January. British PM Keir Starmer, who meets Trump Monday, said he is working on air drops for Gaza. He is also expected to press Trump to renew ceasefire talks.
Tho two sat down in a ballroom at Turnberry after the president played a round of golf with his son, Eric.
It was his second day of golfing, on a trip where he is set to attend the opening of a new golf course in Aberdeenshire.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
.jpeg%3Ftrim%3D0%2C5%2C0%2C5%26width%3D1200%26height%3D800%26crop%3D1200%3A800&w=3840&q=100)
The Independent
2 minutes ago
- The Independent
White House reportedly told Pete Hegseth's team to stop doing polygraph tests after complaint
The White House has put a stop to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth 's alleged use of polygraph tests in an attempt to root out leakers to the press, according to a new report. As Hegseth became embroiled in the Signalgate scandal, his team began administering polygraph tests in April to those in his inner circle, U.S. officials, and others with knowledge of the matter, according to The Washington Post. The White House's intervention came after Hegseth's senior advisor, Patrick Weaver, raised concerns to officials that he could be the next target of the defense secretary 's polygraph campaign, the sources said. Weaver, who held posts in the Department of Homeland Security and the National Security Council in Donald Trump 's first administration, allegedly grew irate after learning he might be ordered to take a polygraph test. Weaver remains an adviser to Hegseth, according to The Post. The alleged spate of polygraphs came during a tumultuous period where Hegseth fired three senior Pentagon appointees – Dan Caldwell, Colin Carroll and Darin Selnick – who he accused of leaking classified and sensitive information to the media. The men deny any accusations of wrongdoing, and Hegseth's team has presented no evidence to back its claims. Just days later, the defense secretary was engulfed in Signalgate after top officials mistakenly included The Atlantic editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg in a Signal group chat, giving him a front-row seat to discussions about impending U.S. strikes on Houthi militants in Yemen back in March. Multiple tests were carried out over several weeks, with approval from Hegseth and his private attorney, Tim Parlatore, the sources said. However, a Trump administration official intervened with a phone call, instructing the Defense Department to halt the campaign. Members of the Joint Service Interagency Advisory Group, a specialized Pentagon team assembled to address national security issues like drug cartels, had already been administered tests prior to Weaver's complaint, the sources added. Senior Hegseth advisor Colonel Ricky Buria took a polygraph test and received inconclusive results, the sources said, which officials first told the Guardian in May. Navy Admiral Christopher Grady, the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Army Lieutenant General Douglas Sims, the director of the Joint Staff, have also faced the threat of polygraph tests, those with knowledge of the matter said. The Pentagon declined to provide a comment to the newspaper on reports of polygraph testing, citing an 'ongoing investigation.' 'The Fake News Media's obsession with months-old workplace gossip is a reflection of the sad and pathetic state of 'journalism' in Washington,' spokesperson Sean Parnell said. Despite facing multiple scandals, Trump continues to publicly support Hegseth. 'A lot of people swirl shit to try to take him down, honestly — but talk of drama with him is overblown,' a senior White House official told Politico on Monday. 'What I know is that everyone who matters has his back completely, currently.' However, some Trump allies and MAGA supporters have expressed concerns that the defense secretary's controversies could damage the administration's credibility. One source close to Hegseth said he is being urged to make peace with the employees he has ousted. 'If there's any chance at Pete resetting and ensuring that whatever time he has left in this position is well served, he's got to do it — otherwise Pete is just doubling down on the lie,' they told Politico.
The Independent
2 minutes ago
- The Independent
Creating realistic deepfakes is getting easier than ever. Fighting back may take even more AI
The phone rings. It's the secretary of state calling. Or is it? For Washington insiders, seeing and hearing is no longer believing, thanks to a spate of recent incidents involving deepfakes impersonating top officials in President Donald Trump 's administration. Digital fakes are coming for corporate America, too, as criminal gangs and hackers associated with adversaries including North Korea use synthetic video and audio to impersonate CEOs and low-level job candidates to gain access to critical systems or business secrets. Thanks to advances in artificial intelligence, creating realistic deepfakes is easier than ever, causing security problems for governments, businesses and private individuals and making trust the most valuable currency of the digital age. Responding to the challenge will require laws, better digital literacy and technical solutions that fight AI with more AI. 'As humans, we are remarkably susceptible to deception,' said Vijay Balasubramaniyan, CEO and founder of the tech firm Pindrop Security. But he believes solutions to the challenge of deepfakes may be within reach: 'We are going to fight back.' AI deepfakes become a national security threat This summer, someone used AI to create a deepfake of Secretary of State Marco Rubio in an attempt to reach out to foreign ministers, a U.S. senator and a governor over text, voice mail and the Signal messaging app. In May someone impersonated Trump's chief of staff, Susie Wiles. Another phony Rubio had popped up in a deepfake earlier this year, saying he wanted to cut off Ukraine's access to Elon Musk's Starlink internet service. Ukraine's government later rebutted the false claim. The national security implications are huge: People who think they're chatting with Rubio or Wiles, for instance, might discuss sensitive information about diplomatic negotiations or military strategy. 'You're either trying to extract sensitive secrets or competitive information or you're going after access, to an email server or other sensitive network," Kinny Chan, CEO of the cybersecurity firm QiD, said of the possible motivations. Synthetic media can also aim to alter behavior. Last year, Democratic voters in New Hampshire received a robocall urging them not to vote in the state's upcoming primary. The voice on the call sounded suspiciously like then-President Joe Biden but was actually created using AI. Their ability to deceive makes AI deepfakes a potent weapon for foreign actors. Both Russia and China have used disinformation and propaganda directed at Americans as a way of undermining trust in democratic alliances and institutions. Steven Kramer, the political consultant who admitted sending the fake Biden robocalls, said he wanted to send a message of the dangers deepfakes pose to the American political system. Kramer was acquitted last month of charges of voter suppression and impersonating a candidate. 'I did what I did for $500,' Kramer said. 'Can you imagine what would happen if the Chinese government decided to do this?' Scammers target the financial industry with deepfakes The greater availability and sophistication of the programs mean deepfakes are increasingly used for corporate espionage and garden variety fraud. 'The financial industry is right in the crosshairs," said Jennifer Ewbank, a former deputy director of the CIA who worked on cybersecurity and digital threats. 'Even individuals who know each other have been convinced to transfer vast sums of money.' In the context of corporate espionage, they can be used to impersonate CEOs asking employees to hand over passwords or routing numbers. Deepfakes can also allow scammers to apply for jobs — and even do them — under an assumed or fake identity. For some this is a way to access sensitive networks, to steal secrets or to install ransomware. Others just want the work and may be working a few similar jobs at different companies at the same time. Authorities in the U.S. have said that thousands of North Koreans with information technology skills have been dispatched to live abroad, using stolen identities to obtain jobs at tech firms in the U.S. and elsewhere. The workers get access to company networks as well as a paycheck. In some cases, the workers install ransomware that can be later used to extort even more money. The schemes have generated billions of dollars for the North Korean government. Within three years, as many as 1 in 4 job applications is expected to be fake, according to research from Adaptive Security, a cybersecurity company. 'We've entered an era where anyone with a laptop and access to an open-source model can convincingly impersonate a real person,' said Brian Long, Adaptive's CEO. 'It's no longer about hacking systems — it's about hacking trust.' Experts deploy AI to fight back against AI Researchers, public policy experts and technology companies are now investigating the best ways of addressing the economic, political and social challenges posed by deepfakes. New regulations could require tech companies to do more to identify, label and potentially remove deepfakes on their platforms. Lawmakers could also impose greater penalties on those who use digital technology to deceive others — if they can be caught. Greater investments in digital literacy could also boost people's immunity to online deception by teaching them ways to spot fake media and avoid falling prey to scammers. The best tool for catching AI may be another AI program, one trained to sniff out the tiny flaws in deepfakes that would go unnoticed by a person. Systems like Pindrop's analyze millions of datapoints in any person's speech to quickly identify irregularities. The system can be used during job interviews or other video conferences to detect if the person is using voice cloning software, for instance. Similar programs may one day be commonplace, running in the background as people chat with colleagues and loved ones online. Someday, deepfakes may go the way of email spam, a technological challenge that once threatened to upend the usefulness of email, said Balasubramaniyan, Pindrop's CEO. 'You can take the defeatist view and say we're going to be subservient to disinformation," he said. 'But that's not going to happen.'
Telegraph
3 minutes ago
- Telegraph
Recognising Palestine will not solve Labour's electoral woes
In Scottish Labour ranks there used to be a saying: you can't out-nat the Nats. This was usually in response to armchair strategists who expressed the view that if only Labour in Scotland would embrace a more robust form of devolution – the 'full fiscal autonomy' model, or devo max, as it was called – then those who yearned for independence would consider supporting us. Naturally, such self-delusion was almost childishly easy to dismiss: why would nationalists vote for a unionist party that denied them the very thing they wanted? Why settle for 90 per cent of your ambition when an alternative party (the SNP) were promising to deliver 100 per cent? Labour's current troubles over whether to recognise Palestine formally as a nation reeks of the same cynicism and strategic folly. There are other hurdles to navigate before we even get to Labour's (relatively unimportant) internal squabbles: how do you recognise a country that doesn't exist? What is the point of recognising even a hypothetical country when no one can agree what its borders should be, where its capital is and who represents its leader or its government? More importantly, how would recognition by the UK aid the peace process? It is far more likely to do the opposite, since Hamas would (correctly) see it as a reward for the grotesque act of barbarism they inflicted on Israeli civilians on October 7, 2023, which led directly to the calamity now befalling their own people. Labour MPs, already nervous about their chances of re-election in a few years' time, believe that their chances of survival depend upon the recovery of their party's support among Britain's Muslim voters and recognition of Palestine, even though it can have no practical beneficial impact except in terms of propaganda. They are understandably concerned, not only about the imminent emergence of Jeremy Corbyn's latest political party – one that will specifically target voters disillusioned by Labour's current approach to Israel and Palestine and whose formation has been largely motivated by that conflict – but by others on the Left seeking to exploit the current conflict for their own electoral ends, like the Greens. So put yourself in the shoes of a British Muslim voter, one who has traditionally backed Labour, mainly because of its relaxed approach to mass immigration, not least from your ancestral home country. Two things have happened: first, the Conservatives have proved that Labour does not have a monopoly on support for mass immigration without the consent of the indigenous population. In fact, while in office they established that they were more enthusiastic about an open-door immigration policy than even Labour. And second, the conflict in Gaza exposed Labour as fair-weather friends to both Israel and Palestine. If, as Nye Bevan once said, those who cannot ride two horses at the same time shouldn't be in the circus, then the current administration might have to retire from the ring. The government started out supporting Israel in the face of the Islamist threat. Then, once in office, after it recognised the threat to its electoral strongholds from independent pro-Gaza candidates, it pivoted and jumped on the International Criminal Court bandwagon by allowing arrest warrants to be issued for Israel's prime minister for alleged 'war crimes'. Yet still ministers resist calls from shouty middle-class people in our city centres every weekend to boycott, disinvest and sanction Israel. Still they defend Israel's 'right to exist' – a point of principle that few pro-Palestinian protesters would concede. And now numerous Labour MPs actually seem to believe that recognising Palestine will bring all those disillusioned Muslim and far-Left voters home to Labour. But why would they come back? Why return to a party that, however much it has served their purposes in past decades, is now prevaricating over the one conflict in the region they have chosen to feel strongly about? Just as Scottish Labour could only hope to attract the support of nationalists by fully signing up to the fight for independence, so Labour cannot hope to thwart the appeal of Corbyn's new party on this issue – unless it follows Palestinian recognition, from the river to the sea, with a refusal to recognise Israel's right to exist or defend itself. It would also have to ban all Israeli imports and ban British companies from exporting to that country. Even then, would those lost voters return to Labour in big enough numbers? Why support a 'Johnny-come-lately' to the Palestinian cause when Jeremy has a proud record of describing Hezbollah and Hamas terrorists as his 'friends'? Beat that, Keir Starmer! The Prime Minister mustn't even try. You can't beat the far Left at their own game, at least not while hoping to retain the much more centrist and sensible voters who put you in office. The various weirdos, extremists and weekend paper-sellers that will form the activist base of Corbyn's new party have a lifetime's experience in opposing the only liberal democracy in the Middle East and yearn to see it replaced by the kind of Islamist dictatorship that has brought so much misery to ordinary Palestinians. Far better for Starmer to take the side of Israel as our long-term ally in western democracy's fight against worldwide Islamism.
