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    Pentagon Is Reviewing Deal to Equip Australia With Nuclear Submarines

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    The 2021 pact, meant to help counter China’s ambitions in the Asia Pacific, will be examined to ensure that it meets “America First criteria,” a U.S. official said.The Trump administration is reviewing whether a security pact between the United States, Britain and Australia meant to equip Australia with nuclear submarines is “aligned with the president’s America First agenda,” a U.S. defense official said on Wednesday.When the deal was reached under President Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s administration in 2021, it was billed as crucial for countering China’s growing military influence in the Asia Pacific. Now, its review appears to reinforce President Trump’s skeptical and transactional approach to longstanding alliances, including demands that allies spend more on their own defense.The Pentagon official said the review would ensure that the pact, known as Aukus, met “common-sense, America First criteria,” including ensuring that U.S. forces are at “the highest readiness,” that allies are doing their part, and that “the defense industrial base is meeting our needs.” The review was first reported by The Financial Times.Australia’s defense minister, Richard Marles, said both Australia and Britain had been notified about the review and that all three nations were still committed to the deal.“We’ve been aware of this for some time. We welcome it,” Mr. Marles said in a radio interview with ABC Melbourne on Thursday, Australia time. “It’s something which is perfectly natural for an incoming administration to do.”Australia sees the Aukus agreement as central to its defense strategy in the coming decades in a region increasingly shaped by China’s assertive military posturing. Nuclear submarines can travel much farther without detection than conventional ones can and would enable the Australian Navy to greatly extend its reach.Under the pact, Australia is scheduled to receive secondhand Virginia-class nuclear submarines from the United States in the 2030s while scaling up the capacity to build its own, using a British design. But there has been concern in both Washington and Canberra about whether the United States can build new submarines to replenish its fleet quickly enough for the older ones to be transferred to Australia.Elbridge Colby, the U.S. under secretary of defense for policy, said during his Senate confirmation hearing in March that he was skeptical about the pragmatic feasibility of the deal. The Financial Times reported that Mr. Colby was heading up the Pentagon review.“So if we can produce the attack submarines in sufficient number and sufficient speed, then great,” Mr. Colby said at the hearing. “But if we can’t, that becomes a very difficult problem.”Even before the review was announced, concern and anxiety had been building in Australia over whether it could continue to depend on its longstanding relationship with the United States, given the Trump administration’s treatment of allies.Mr. Marles, the Australian defense minister, said in the radio interview that he was confident the Aukus deal would proceed because “it’s in the interests of the United States to continue to work with Australia.”Michael D. Shear More

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      Trump Orders Investigation of Biden and His Aides

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      The executive order is the latest effort by President Trump to stoke outlandish conspiracy theories about his predecessor and question the legality of his actions in office.President Trump ordered his White House counsel and the attorney general on Wednesday to investigate former President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and his staff in Mr. Trump’s latest attempt to stoke outlandish conspiracy theories about his predecessor.In an executive order, Mr. Trump put the power and resources of the federal government to work examining whether some of Mr. Biden’s presidential actions were legally invalid because his aides had enacted those policies without his knowledge.The executive order came after Mr. Trump shared a social media post over the weekend that claimed Mr. Biden had been “executed in 2020” and replaced by a robotic clone, following a pattern of suggestions by the president and his allies that Mr. Biden was a mentally incapacitated puppet of his aides.The former president called such claims “ridiculous and false” in a statement on Wednesday after the order’s release.“Let me be clear: I made the decisions during my presidency,” he said. “I made the decisions about the pardons, executive orders, legislation and proclamations.”The order comes after disclosure in recent weeks that Mr. Biden, 82, had received a diagnosis of advanced prostate cancer and in the wake of renewed scrutiny of his health during his presidency.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Justice Dept. Drops Biden-Era Push to Obtain Peter Navarro’s Emails

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      The department’s move is one of many recent actions taken to dismiss criminal and civil actions against Trump allies such as Mr. Navarro, the president’s trade adviser.The Justice Department has abruptly dropped its effort to force Peter Navarro, President Trump’s trade adviser, to turn over hundreds of his emails dating to the first Trump administration to the National Archives, according to a court filing on Tuesday.The decision to drop the civil lawsuit was disclosed in a one-page notice filed in Federal District Court in the District of Columbia. The department offered no explanation for the move, but it is one of many recent actions it has taken to dismiss criminal and civil actions taken against Trump allies.Mr. Navarro, 75, had long resisted the government’s request that he give the archives emails from his personal ProtonMail account relating to his role as a White House adviser, as required by the Presidential Records Act.Defiance is Mr. Navarro’s default. He served about four months in the geriatric unit of a federal prison in Miami after refusing to comply with a subpoena to appear before a congressional committee investigating his false claims about the 2020 election.In 2022, the Biden Justice Department sued Mr. Navarro, one of the main architects of Mr. Trump’s second-term tariff policy, to retrieve the communications. The lawsuit charged him with “wrongfully retaining presidential records that are the property of the United States, and which constitute part of the permanent historical record of the prior administration.”The lawsuit accused Mr. Navarro of using his private email account to conduct public work, including an effort to influence the White House response to the pandemic. Those emails were needed to preserve the historical record, officials at the archives said.Mr. Navarro unsuccessfully petitioned the Supreme Court to dismiss the suit last year.A federal magistrate judge earlier reviewed about 900 messages, determining that more than 500 were not presidential records. He ordered additional hearings to decide how many of the remaining 350-plus emails needed to be turned over to the government.Mr. Navarro’s lawyer did not immediately return a request for comment.Stanley Woodward, who represented Mr. Navarro in both his civil and criminal cases, recused himself after Mr. Trump appointed him in April to serve as associate attorney general. More

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      Trump Amplifies Another Outlandish Conspiracy Theory: Biden Is a Robotic Clone

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      President Trump reposted another user’s false claim that the former president had been “executed” in 2020 and replaced by a robotic clone.President Trump shared an outlandish conspiracy theory on social media on Saturday night saying former President Joseph R. Biden had been “executed in 2020” and replaced by a robotic clone, the latest example of the president amplifying dark, false material to his millions of followers.Mr. Trump reposted a fringe rant that another user had made on the president’s social media platform, Truth Social, just after 10 p.m. on Saturday. The White House did not respond to requests for comment on the post about Mr. Biden, whom Mr. Trump has targeted for criticism almost daily since the start of his second term.The president has blamed Mr. Biden for all manner of societal ills and assailed his mental acuity, including with the specious theory that Mr. Biden’s aides used an autopen to enact policies and issue pardons without Mr. Biden’s knowledge. (Mr. Trump has acknowledged that his administration uses the autopen system on occasion.)Mr. Trump has long had a penchant for sharing debunked or baseless theories online, but his embrace of conspiracies is not limited to social media. He has also elevated false claims inside the White House and surrounded himself with cabinet officials promoting such theories.Last month, while sitting next to the president of South Africa in the Oval Office, Mr. Trump claimed that white South African farmers were victims of mass killings and displayed an image intended to back up his assertion; the image was actually of the conflict in eastern Congo. Mr. Trump has falsely asserted that white South Africans are victims of genocide, even though police statistics do not show that white people in the nation are any more vulnerable than other groups.Mr. Trump’s first four years in the White House were filled with false or misleading statements — according to one tally, he made 30,573 of them, or 21 a day on average — and he repeatedly shared conspiracy theories in the lead-up to the 2024 election.A New York Times analysis of thousands of Mr. Trump’s social media posts and reposts over a six-month period in 2024 found that at least 330 of them described both a false, secretive plot against Mr. Trump or the American people and a specific entity supposedly responsible for it. They included suggestions that the F.B.I. had ordered his assassination and accusations that government officials had orchestrated the Capitol riot on Jan. 6, 2021.Mr. Trump’s repost of the robot conspiracy theory came a day after Mr. Biden told reporters that he was feeling good after beginning treatment for an aggressive form of prostate cancer. Mr. Trump has suggested that Mr. Biden’s diagnosis last month was not new and had been concealed from the public. More

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      Trump Pledges to Double Tariffs on Foreign Steel and Aluminum to 50%

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      President Trump made the announcement at a U.S. Steel factory outside Pittsburgh.President Trump said on Friday that he would double the tariffs he had levied on foreign steel and aluminum to 50 percent, a move that he claimed would further protect the industry.The announcement came as Mr. Trump traveled to a U.S. Steel factory outside Pittsburgh to hail a “planned partnership” that he helped broker between U.S. Steel and Nippon Steel, a corporate merger that he opposed last year as a presidential candidate. Although the details of the U.S. Steel deal are still murky — and Mr. Trump later admitted he had not yet seen or signed off on it — the president used the moment to cast himself as a champion of the embattled industry.Speaking to a crowd of steel workers, Mr. Trump claimed that foreign countries had been able to circumvent the 25 percent tariff he put in place this year. The higher tariffs would “even further secure the steel industry in the United States,” Mr. Trump said.It is not clear how much doubling the tariff rate would actually bolster the domestic steel sector, but the move gave Mr. Trump the opportunity to wield tariffs at a time when his other import taxes have proved vulnerable to legal challenges.In a post on Truth Social, Mr. Trump said that the tariffs would take effect on June 4 and that they would provide a “big jolt” to American steel and aluminum workers.Mr. Trump has in recent weeks announced large tariffs only to quickly reverse himself and pause them. Analysts suggested on Friday that Mr. Trump could be seeking new ways to gain leverage over trading partners as the pace of negotiations has proved to be painfully slow.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Blow to Biden-era Program Plunges Migrants Into Further Uncertainty

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      A Supreme Court ruling on Friday ended temporary humanitarian protections for hundreds of thousands of people. But it is unclear how quickly many could be deported.For thousands of migrants from some of the world’s most unstable countries, the last several months in United States have felt like a life-or-death legal roller coaster.And after a Supreme Court ruling on Friday in favor of a key piece of the Trump administration’s deportation effort, hundreds of thousands of migrants found themselves plunged once again into a well of uncertainty. They face the prospect that after being granted temporary permission to live in the United States, they will now be abruptly expelled and perhaps sent back to their perilous homelands.“One court said one thing, another court said another, and that just leaves us all very confused and worried,” said Frantzdy Jerome, a Haitian who lives with his partner and their toddler in Ohio.Immigration lawyers reported that they had been fielding calls from families asking whether they should continue to go to work or school. Their clients, they say, were given permission to live and work temporarily in the United States.Now, with that permission revoked while legal challenges work their way through lower courts, many immigrants fear that any encounter with the police or other government agencies could lead to deportation, according to lawyers and community leaders.“Sometimes I have thought of going to Canada, but I don’t have family there to receive me,” said Frantzdy Jerome, who came to the United States from Haiti and lives in Ohio.Maddie McGarvey for The New York TimesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Biden Is ‘Optimistic’ About Cancer Treatment in First Remarks Since Diagnosis

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      The former president said on Friday that he was taking a single pill daily to treat aggressive prostate cancer.Former President Biden said on Friday afternoon that he was feeling good after beginning treatment for an aggressive form of prostate cancer.“The prognosis is good,” he said.“We’re working on everything. All the folks are optimistic,” he added, referring to his medical team. He said that one of the surgeons treating him was given the same diagnosis 32 years ago.Mr. Biden spoke to reporters after an event honoring veterans in New Castle, Del., making his first public remarks since May 18, when his office announced his illness and said the cancer had metastasized to the bone. Mr. Biden attended the event, which fell on the 10th anniversary of the death of his son Beau, with Beau’s son, Robert Biden II, who graduated from high school this week.Mr. Biden said that his treatment was “all a matter of taking a pill, one particular pill.”“The expectation is we’re going to be able to beat this,” he said.Mr. Biden’s cancer was given a Gleason score of 9. The score is used to describe how prostate cancers look under a microscope; 9 and 10 are the most aggressive.Mr. Biden, 82, left office in January as the oldest-serving president in American history.Asked about a new book, “Original Sin,” by the journalists Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson, which details how Mr. Biden’s advisers curbed discussion of his age-related limitations in the run-up to the 2024 election, he responded tongue-in-cheek, saying, “You can see that I’m mentally incompetent and I can’t walk.”He added that he “could beat the hell out of both of” the authors.Mr. Biden also said that he had no regrets for deciding to run for re-election, before ultimately dropping out. He responded to a question about Democrats who hold that he should not have by saying: “Why didn’t anyone run against me then?”“We have a lot going on, and I think we’re in a really difficult moment, not only in America, but in the world,” Mr. Biden quickly added. “I think that this is one of those inflection points in history.”He said that he was “very proud” of his time in office. “I put my record as president against any president at all,” he said. He added that leading presidential historians ranked his term highly, and that President Trump was rated last. More

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      Supreme Court Allows Trump Administration, for Now, to End Biden-Era Migrant Program

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      The Trump administration had asked the court to allow it to end deportation protections for more than 500,000 people facing dire humanitarian crises in their home countries.The Supreme Court on Friday allowed the Trump administration, for now, to revoke a Biden-era humanitarian program intended to give temporary residency to more than 500,000 immigrants from countries facing war and political turmoil.The court’s order was unsigned and provided no reasoning, which is typical when the justices rule on emergency applications.Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, joined by Justice Sonia Sotomayor, dissented, saying the majority had not given enough consideration to “the devastating consequences of allowing the government to precipitously upend the lives and livelihoods of nearly half a million noncitizens while their legal claims are pending.”The ruling, which exposes some migrants from Cuba, Nicaragua, Venezuela and Haiti to possible deportation, is the latest in a series of emergency orders by the justices in recent weeks responding to a flurry of applications asking the court to weigh in on the administration’s attempts to unwind Biden-era immigration policies.Friday’s ruling focused on former President Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s expansion of a legal mechanism for immigration called humanitarian parole, in which migrants from countries facing instability are allowed to enter the United States and quickly secure work authorization, provided they have a private sponsor to take responsibility for them.Earlier this month, the justices allowed the Trump administration to remove deportation protections from nearly 350,000 Venezuelan immigrants who had been allowed to remain in the United States under a program known as Temporary Protected Status.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Judge Blocks Shutdown of Biden-Era Migrant Entry Programs

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      The sweeping order applied to hundreds of thousands of people legally in the country through programs put in place for Ukrainians, Afghans and others.A federal judge on Wednesday temporarily blocked the Trump administration from pulling legal protections from hundreds of thousands of people who entered the United States through Biden-era programs, ordering the government to restart processing applications for migrants who are renewing their status.In a sweeping order that extended to Ukrainians and Afghans, as well as military members and their relatives, the judge, Indira Talwani of Federal District Court in Massachusetts, wrote that the Trump administration’s categorical termination of legal pathways for those groups was probably unlawful and had the potential to sow discord across the country.The decision is a major victory for civil and immigrant rights groups that had sued to stop the administration amid a wider campaign by President Trump to strip legal status from a variety of groups living, working and studying in the country on a temporary basis.Judge Talwani wrote that the overarching campaign to strip the protections from those who had already been granted them represented a major escalation by the Trump administration that would cause chaos once the programs were wound down.In April, she had issued a similar order that applied more narrowly to hundreds of thousands of Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans and Venezuelans with temporary legal status through another program. The government is seeking a reversal of that decision before the Supreme Court.“This court emphasizes, as it did in its prior order, that it is not in the public interest to manufacture a circumstance in which hundreds of thousands of individuals will, over the course of several months, become unlawfully present in the country, such that these individuals cannot legally work in their communities or provide for themselves and their families,” Judge Talwani wrote. “Nor is it in the public interest for individuals who enlisted and are currently serving in the United States military to face family separation, particularly where some of these individuals joined the military in part to help their loved ones obtain lawful status.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More