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President attacks New York Times over reporting as backlash over billonaire’s role in administration grows
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Donald Trump has awarded the sixth-generation F-47 fighter jet program contract to Boeing, a much-needed win for the troubled aviation giant.
In an Oval Office announcement alongside Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, the president also again denied claims in a report that Elon Musk was to receive a briefing about the U.S. military’s top-secret plans for combating aggression from China, saying he was at the Pentagon on Friday morning for DOGE.
Earlier on Truth Social, he raged: “The Fake News is at it again, this time the Failing New York Times. They said, incorrectly, that Elon Musk is going to the Pentagon tomorrow to be briefed on any potential ‘war with China,’” he said, adding: “How ridiculous?”
On Thursday, the president signed an executive order directing Education Secretary Linda McMahon to “begin eliminating” the Department of Education in favor of leaving decision-making up to individual states.
Trump said on Friday that special needs and nutrition programs will now come under the health department and student loans will become the remit of the Small Business Administration.
Republican Senator Eric Schmitt is thrilled with the decision to award Boeing the contract for the next generation of U.S. fighter jet, which will be built in his state.
He wrote on X: “President Trump and Secretary Hegseth just announced that Boeing in St. Louis will build the new 6th generation fighter, the F-47 – a huge win for Missouri and for the country. I’m proud to have fought for the NGAD program, and proud that Missouri will play a critical role in our national defense.”
The heated hearing over the future of transgender service members in the U.S. military continued, and Judge Ana Reyes grew increasingly impatient with the lack of argument from the Trump administration’s lawyers.
Government attorneys have given up after failing to answer any of the judge’s questions about why, exactly, the administration is banning trans people from the military.
Jean Lin, a lawyer for the Justice Department, characterized the judge’s ruling this week that blocked the policy as “your opinion about what the policy should be.” Judge Reyes snapped.
“Every single sentence in my opinion was supported by a case cite or a record cite,” Judge Reyes said.
he invited lawyers to find any instance of her ruling that wasn’t supported by evidence.
“Fair enough, your honor,” Lin said.
A long painfully awkward silence followed.
Judge Reyes discussed one of the plaintiffs, a trans service member with a history of treatment for gender dysphoria who is in active combat. Why would she be recalled and discharged?
Lin said, basically, that it’s the policy of the administration, and the concern is “what kind of impact that would have.”
Reyes has had enough.
“We have potentially hundreds if not thousands of people in the military … and they’ve had no problem,” she said. New Pentagon policy tells them they are “inherently, mentally and physically unfit to serve,” and yet the Justice Department can’t say how they determined that or who decided.
Lin, admitting defeat, and unable to say anything else, asks the judge to extend a pause on the judge’s order that blocks the policy. She immediately fired back: “I’m not extending the stay.”
Reyes is further ordering, immediately, that any of the 20 plaintiffs who have been put on administrative leave be returned to work.
“Now. That’s what I want. I’m not staying any order as to them,” she said.
Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin have both insisted that Ukraine’s forces in Kursk are surrounded by Russian troops and are in imminent danger, but U.S. intelligence reports have contradicted those claims.
A trio of U.S. and European officials familiar with intelligence details of the ongoing war between Russia and Ukraine told Reuters that the situation on the ground does not reflect the comments made by Trump and Putin.
Gustaf Kilander has the story.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, in a rare move, is beefing up the Navy warship presence in the Middle East, ordering two aircraft carriers to be there next month as the U.S. increases strikes on the Yemen-based Houthi rebels, according to a U.S. official.
It will be the second time in six months that the U.S. has kept two carrier strike groups in that region, with generally only one there. Prior to that it had been years since the U.S. had committed that much warship power to the Middle East.
According to the official, Hegseth signed orders on Thursday to keep the USS Harry S. Truman in the Middle East for at least an additional month. The official spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss ongoing military operations.
The ship has been conducting operations in the Red Sea against the Houthis and was scheduled to begin heading home to Norfolk, Virginia, at the end of March.
And Hegseth has ordered the USS Carl Vinson, which has been operating in the Pacific, to begin steaming toward the Middle East, which will extend its scheduled deployment by three months.
The Vinson is expected to arrive in the region early next month. It had been conducting exercises with Japanese and South Korean forces near the Yellow Sea and the Sea of Japan and was slated to head home to port in San Diego in three weeks.
The presence of so much U.S. naval power in the region not only gives commanders additional ships to patrol and launch strikes, but it also serves as a clear message of deterrence to Iran, the Houthis’ main benefactor.
A judge has blocked the deportation of a Colorado immigrants’ rights organizer who was arrested Monday.
Read the ruling here
Here’s the background to the case:
President Donald Trump on Friday said the Pentagon was awarding a contract to Boeing to build and support a sixth-generation fighter jet that will be known as the F-47, calling the new manned warplane “something the likes of which nobody has seen before.”
Speaking in the Oval Office alongside Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and top Air Force leaders, Trump said the planned fighter had “been in the works for a long period of time” and would be built by Boeing after “a rigorous and thorough competition between some of America’s top aerospace companies” for a program that the Defense Department has been calling the “Next Generation Air Dominance” platform.
Andrew Feinberg reports from Washington, D.C.
Judge Ana Reyes is laying into government attorneys who — after asking to block her order that temporarily strikes down the Trump administration’s ban on trans service members in the military — cannot answer her questions about who even came up with the rule.
She has absolutely lost her patience after three hours-long hearings on this and has yelled over a Justice Department attorney several times.
Reyes is asking them for any bit of evidence that a ban on trans service members is addressing any problem in the military or is just being used as a pretext for discrimination. They can’t say.
“Everything in the record is that it’s a pretext. There is nothing in the record that this was a deliberative process,” she said.
“I’m not doing it for sport,” she said. “As of today, you can’t even tell me if Secretary Hegseth looked at this. … You won’t tell me because you don’t know.”
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