REFILE: Trump praises Saudi's bin Salman, hails ties at Riyadh meeting
(THIS STORY HAS BEEN REFILED TO CORRECT THE AMOUNT IN TRUMP'S SOUNDBITE FROM $600 MILLION TO $600 BILLION) Donald Trump praised Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman on Tuesday (May 13) and hailed their "tremendous relationship" during a bilateral meeting in Riyadh, as the U.S. president begins his first official overseas visit since taking office for a second time.
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NBC News
37 minutes ago
- NBC News
China hits back at Trump, saying U.S. actions 'severely undermine' trade truce
HONG KONG — China on Monday accused the United States of breaching the 90-day trade truce agreed by the world's two largest economies, after President Donald Trump said it was Beijing that had 'totally violated' the agreement. Last month, the U.S. and China announced a 90-day pause on most of their tit-for-tat tariffs, which had reached higher than 100%. Trump initially hailed the truce as a 'total reset' but said Friday in a post on his Truth Social platform that China had 'TOTALLY VIOLATED' the deal. The Chinese Ministry of Commerce struck back at Trump's remarks Monday, saying that while China had implemented and actively upheld the deal, the U.S. had introduced a series of 'discriminatory and restrictive measures against China' that 'severely undermine' the agreement. The ministry said those measures included AI chip export controls, a reported pause on the sale of chip design software to China, and the announcement of U.S. plans to revoke the visas of Chinese students. 'Instead of reflecting on its own actions, it has falsely accused China of violating the consensus, which is a serious distortion of the facts,' the ministry said in a statement. 'China firmly rejects these groundless accusations.' The ministry urged the U.S. to 'immediately correct its erroneous practices' and vowed to take 'strong and resolute' measures if Washington 'insists on acting unilaterally and continues to harm China's interests,' without providing details. U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said Sunday that China was 'holding back' exports of rare earths that it had agreed to release as part of the truce. 'That is not what a reliable partner does,' he said on the CBS news program 'Face the Nation.' Rare earth minerals are a crucial component of products that cut across the U.S. economy, including the tech sector, the energy industry and automobile manufacturing. China supplies 60% of the world's rare earth elements and is responsible for the refining of 90% of them, according to the International Energy Agency. Bessent, who said last week that U.S.-China trade talks were 'a bit stalled,' said he was 'confident' that rare earths exports and other details could be 'ironed out' in a call between Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping. 'Maybe it's a glitch in the Chinese system, maybe it's intentional. We'll see after the president speaks with the party chairman,' Bessent said, referring to Xi. Kevin Hassett, director of the National Economic Council, also suggested Sunday that the two leaders could speak as early as this week. 'President Trump, we expect, is going to have a wonderful conversation about the trade negotiations this week with President Xi,' he said on the ABC news program 'This Week.' Hassett said he was unsure whether a specific date for that conversation had been set. The last publicly known conversation between the U.S. and Chinese presidents was on Jan. 17, days before Trump's inauguration.
The Herald Scotland
41 minutes ago
- The Herald Scotland
Trump attacks conservative judges, Federalist Society. Why?
"I was new to Washington, and it was suggested that I use The Federalist Society as a recommending source on Judges," Trump said on Truth Social. "I am so disappointed in The Federalist Society because of the bad advice they gave me on numerous Judicial Nominations." With that, Trump shifted from being a Republican president with a strong legacy of appointing conservative judges to a Republican president with a growing legacy of attacking conservative judges. That's a bad sign for any of his upcoming judicial nominations. Trump turns on conservative legal movement he helped build Trump and former Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Kentucky, helped deliver Republicans a 6-3 majority on the Supreme Court. A significant part of that effort was The Federalist Society, a conservative legal organization that advocates for an interpretation of the Constitution that adheres to its original meaning. During his first term, Trump's judicial picks were tightly curated by adviser Leonard Leo, then the executive vice president of The Federalist Society. Most notably, all three of Trump's Supreme Court picks - Justices Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett - all had ties to the organization. Opinion: Vance is doing his best to help Trump tear down the Supreme Court These three justices had a hand in overturning Roe v. Wade, striking down unconstitutional firearm restrictions, striking down racist affirmative action practices, curbing the power of administrative state bureaucrats and blocking much of the illegal Biden agenda. Even beyond the Supreme Court, Trump nominated 226 federal judges during his first term, many of those nominations guided by Federalist Society advisers. When did Trump start to turn on conservative judges? While the beginning of this spiral happened when the Supreme Court refused to entertain his 2020 stolen election claims, things have accelerated in his second term. Now, originalist judges have halted Trump's unconstitutional trade policy and have ruled against parts of Trump's mass deportation attempts. Even so, Trump until now was reluctant to outright condemn The Federalist Society. After all, one of the high points of his conservative agenda was his redecorating of the American courts with top-tier judges. The track record of Federalist Society judges is nothing short of a resounding victory for conservatives and the single best accomplishment of Trump's first term in office. Opinion: Elon Musk is frustrated with Republicans wasting DOGE's effort to cut. So am I. None of that matters now. Trump despises those judges because their loyalty is to the Constitution, not to him. He cannot fathom the discipline or honor required to be committed to preserving America's founding documents, rather than his own self-interest. The partnership between the conservative legal movement and Trump was always a temporary one, and Republicans in Congress had to have known that. While Republicans used Trump to reach their goals within the conservative legal movement, they made the mistake of allowing him to undermine the very accomplishments they made in his first term. Trump's future judicial nominations have judges worried Data from Notre Dame Law professor Derek Muller shows that federal judges are retiring at a record-slow pace at the beginning of Trump's second term. Just 11 vacancies have opened up since January, likely because judges are thinking twice about retiring in the face of who may replace them. Trump's first slate of judicial nominees is taking longer than it did in his first term, with confirmation hearings to take place on June 4, according to Axios. There are also fewer vacancies compared with Trump's first term, when he was handed more than 100 on Day 1 as a result of a stubborn Republican Senate majority in President Barack Obama's second term. Opinion alerts: Get columns from your favorite columnists + expert analysis on top issues, delivered straight to your device through the USA TODAY app. Don't have the app? Download it for free from your app store. Trump appears to be prioritizing his supporters in his early slate of judicial picks. Acting Deputy Attorney General Emil Bove, who has previously represented Trump personally, has been nominated to the 3rd U.S. Circuit Courtof Appeals and sparked some concern even among conservatives. Trump's early judicial picks will determine how comfortable more aging federal judges are with retiring under his second administration. Those committed to the Constitution are understandably worried about who may replace them, and his recent rhetoric does not help me feel better. As Trump's brand of the Republican Party drifts from most of the conservative values it once claimed to support, so too does his support for conservative legal philosophy. Now, anything that stands in the way of Trump is bad, even if it is conservative in ideology. Dace Potas is an opinion columnist for USA TODAY and a graduate of DePaul University with a degree in political science.
The Herald Scotland
41 minutes ago
- The Herald Scotland
Volunteers search the desert for migrant remains
Once a month, retiree Abbey Carpenter leads volunteers through a field of dunes near the border, searching for the remains of migrants. She has located 27 sites in southern New Mexico in under two years, artefacts of a wave of migration that has ebbed to a trickle. But the bones - femur, rib, jaw - take her breath away each time. In them, Carpenter, who taught English as a Second Language, sees the journeys made by her former students - migrants who live and work in the United States and learned English in her classroom. Men in construction. Women in service industries. When she first joined the desert searches, she said, "I just felt like I was walking in their footprints. I could see them: their backpacks, their shoes, their clothes." President Donald Trump's border crackdown has helped push illegal crossings to record lows over the past four months. With triple-digit summer temperatures looming here, there are growing hopes that the decline in migration could bring relief from the horrific death toll of the past two years in Border Patrol's El Paso Sector. Last year, border agents found the bodies of 176 migrants in the 264-mile sector stretching from West Texas across New Mexico. They discovered 149 remains the year before. The toll represented a shocking increase from the 20 deaths recorded in 2019. The sector has become a focal point. That's in part because of the rise in deaths and in part because local Border Patrol leaders shared the sector statistics during two deadly years, when the Biden administration failed to provide broader numbers - despite a congressional mandate. U.S. Customs and Border Protection didn't respond to a USA TODAY request for the missing data for fiscal years 2023 and 2024. Along the length of the U.S.-Mexico border, migrant deaths climbed five years running through fiscal 2022, the last period for which data is publicly available. Deaths rose to 895 from 281 over that time, according to CBP. The numbers include human remains found by Border Patrol and other federal, state, local and tribal agencies. The climbing death toll prompted CBP to create the "Missing Migrant Program" in 2017, under the first Trump administration. The goal was "to help rescue migrants in distress and reduce migrant deaths along the Southwest border," according to an Government Accountability Office report. The program also helped facilitate the identification and return of migrant remains to their families. Under the new Trump administration, the effort has been renamed the "Missing Alien Program." The vast majority of migrant remains in El Paso Sector have been found in a single county, New Mexico's Dona Ana, in an area painfully close to life-saving assistance: main roads, a cluster of factories, residential neighborhoods. Looking north from the border fence, the desert appears flat, the bare Franklin Mountains in the distance to the northeast. New Mexico's two-lane Highway 9 parallels the border about three miles to the north. The proximity to the urban footprint is in part what made this region such a heavily trafficked crossing point. But within minutes of hiking into the desert, creosote bushes and mesquite pull the sand into disorienting mounds that can, without warning, block the view in every direction. Should a tired migrant collapse in their scant shade, the sand can run as hot as 150 degrees in the summer. "We were wondering why these individuals, or these bodies, were found very close to the border," Border Patrol Agent Claudio Herrera, a sector spokesman, told USA TODAY. "The saddest thing," he said, is that migrants who survived told us "they'd been in a stash house for weeks ... without proper food and without water. So by the time they made the illegal entry, they were already dehydrated." An 'open graveyard' New Mexico's Office of the Medical Investigator is tasked with investigating reports of unattended deaths, including those in the desert near the border. In 2023, the agency officially began tracking remains that could belong to a "probable migrant." Last year, the agency positively identified 75% of migrant remains recovered in southern New Mexico, or 112 individuals, according to data provided to USA TODAY. Carpenter and her partner, Marine veteran James Holeman, organize the desert searches through a nonprofit, Battalion Search and Rescue. On a Saturday in May, as temperatures climbed toward 90 degrees, nine volunteers met Carpenter and Holeman at a Love's truck stop. They donned fluorescent orange-and-yellow shade hats. They readied their radios and turned on a cellphone GPS-tracking app, for safety and to map the terrain they covered. "It is a straight-up open graveyard," Holeman said of the 10- by 20-mile section of border they've been covering little by little since late 2023. Mary Mackay, a local school teacher, volunteered with Carpenter for the first time that day. "Emotionally, it was more than I expected," she later told USA TODAY. "You feel like you would be prepared to see a body, but then you actually see it and you realize that's a real person with an entire back story and family and wishes and dreams. And it all just ended there alone in the desert." The Battalion's search for migrant remains in New Mexico follows the footsteps of other volunteer teams working in deadly stretches of Arizona and California. Search volunteers typically try to comb through areas Border Patrol or local law enforcement might otherwise miss. The volunteers don't touch the bones, said Carpenter, also a former college administrator. They mark the sites with brightly colored tape tied to the brush. They record the precise location and alert local law enforcement in hopes that officials will come to collect the bones that remain. Sometimes they do; too often they don't, Carpenter said. Animals or wind sometimes scatter the remains, before volunteers or officials can reach them. Still, she said, each one matters in the quest to identify a missing migrant. A chipped bone could hold a clue. "It takes some time and effort to work wider circles around the site to identify everything," Carpenter said. "But that's important. Which family member wouldn't want all of their family's remains recovered?" Lauren Villagran can be reached at lvillagran@
