“No More Trans @ DoD,” Pete Hegseth, the US defense secretary, posted after the supreme court allowed the Trump administration’s ousting of transgender troops to go forward. As of Thursday, the orders have been issued to identify and involuntarily force trans people out of service.
Department officials have said it is difficult to determine exactly how many transgender service members there are, but medical records will show those who have been diagnosed with gender dysphoria, show symptoms or are being treated. Those troops would then be forced out.
Separately, Britain has become the first country to strike a trade agreement with Donald Trump since his announcement of global tariffs on what he called “liberation day”.
Here are the key stories at a glance:
Up to 1,000 trans troops to be removed
The Pentagon will immediately begin moving as many as 1,000 service members who identify as transgender out of the military and give others 30 days to self-identify, under a new directive issued on Thursday.
Buoyed up by Tuesday’s supreme court decision allowing the Trump administration to enforce a ban on transgender individuals in the military, the defense department will then begin going through medical records to identify others who have not come forward.
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US and UK agree ‘breakthrough’ trade deal
The UK and US have agreed a “breakthrough” trade agreement slashing some of Donald Trump’s tariffs on cars, aluminium and steel. The UK prime minister said the deal would save thousands of British jobs.
Keir Starmer said it was a “fantastic, historic day” as he announced the agreement, the first by the White House since Trump announced sweeping global tariffs last month.
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Vance says Kashmir crisis ‘none of our business’
JD Vance has said that the US will not intervene in the conflict between Pakistan and India, calling fighting between the two nuclear powers “fundamentally none of our business”.
The remarks came during an interview with Fox News, where the US vice-president said that the US would seek to de-escalate the conflict but could force neither side to “lay down their arms”.
“Our hope and our expectation is that this is not going to spiral into a broader regional war or, God forbid, a nuclear conflict,” Vance said. “Right now, we don’t think that’s going to happen.”
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Trump names Fox host to replace pick for DC’s top prosecutor
Donald Trump on Thursday said he would look for a new candidate for the role of top federal prosecutor in Washington DC, after a key Republican senator said he would not support the loyalist initially selected for the job.
He then named Fox News host and former judge Jeanine Pirro for the job.
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US House approves Trump’s renaming of Gulf of Mexico
Republicans in the House of Representatives on Thursday approved legislation to codify Donald Trump’s policy of renaming the Gulf of Mexico to the “Gulf of America”. The measure was sponsored by rightwing Georgia lawmaker Marjorie Taylor Greene and passed nearly along party lines, with all Democrats opposed and almost every Republican, with the exception of Nebraska representative Don Bacon, voting in favour.
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Trump invokes state secrets in case of wrongly deported man
The Trump administration is invoking the “state secrets privilege” in an apparent attempt to avoid answering a judge’s questions about its erroneous deportation of Kilmar Ábrego García to El Salvador.
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What else happened today:
Trump’s top trade adviser Peter Navarro told reporters that British consumers will like chicken and beef imported from the US despite the use of chlorine and hormones. “Let’s see what the market decides,” Navarro said, adding: “We don’t believe that once they taste American beef and chicken that they would prefer not to have it.”
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa) will no longer track the cost of climate crisis-fuelled weather disasters, including floods, heatwaves, wildfires and more. It is the latest example of changes to the agency and the Trump administration limiting federal government resources on climate change.
Catching up? Here’s what happened on 7 May.
Source: US Politics - theguardian.com
