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Key events
US and Ukraine sign minerals deal that solidifies investment in Kyiv’s defense against Russia
Andrew Roth
The US and Kyiv have signed an agreement to share profits and royalties from the future sale of Ukrainian minerals and rare earths, sealing a deal that Donald Trump has said will provide an economic incentive for the US to continue to invest in Ukraine’s defense and its reconstruction after he brokers a peace deal with Russia.
The minerals deal, which has been the subject of tense negotiations for months and nearly fell through hours before it was signed, will establish a US-Ukraine Reconstruction Investment Fund that the Trump administration has said will begin to repay an estimated $175bn in aid provided to Ukraine since the beginning of the war.
“This agreement signals clearly to Russia that the Trump administration is committed to a peace process centered on a free, sovereign, and prosperous Ukraine over the long term,” said Scott Bessent, the US treasury secretary, in a statement.
“President Trump envisioned this partnership between the American people and the Ukrainian people to show both sides’ commitment to lasting peace and prosperity in Ukraine. And to be clear, no state or person who financed or supplied the Russian war machine will be allowed to benefit from the reconstruction of Ukraine.”
Ukraine’s first deputy prime minister, Yulia Svyrydenko, confirmed in a social media post that she had signed the agreement on Wednesday. “Together with the United States, we are creating the fund that will attract global investment into our country,” she wrote. The deal still needs to be approved by Ukraine’s parliament.
Nick Robins-Early
One hundred days after Elon Musk entered the White House as Donald Trump’s senior adviser and the de facto leader of the so-called “department of government efficiency” (Doge), the Tesla CEO has left little of the federal government unscathed. Over the course of just a few months, he has gutted agencies and public services that took decades to build while accumulating immense political power.
Musk’s role in the Trump administration is without modern precedent. Never before has the world’s richest person been deputized by the US president to cull the very agencies that oversee his businesses. Musk’s attempts to radically dismantle government bureaux have won him sprawling influence. His team has embedded its members in key roles across federal agencies, gained access to personal data on millions of Americans and fired tens of thousands of workers. SpaceX, where he is CEO, is now poised to take over potential government contracts worth billions. He has left a trail of chaos while seeding the government with his allies, who will likely help him profit and preserve his newfound power.
The billionaire’s newfound sway has not come without pushback and a cost. Doge’s blitz through the government has sparked furious nationwide backlash, as well as dozens of lawsuits challenging Musk’s mass firings and accusing his task force of violating numerous laws. Musk’s personal popularity has sunk to record lows, and Tesla’s profits have tanked.
A look back at the first 100 days of the Trump administration shows the extent to which Musk’s efforts have changed the US government:
Musk says Doge ‘should definitely’ look at Federal Reserve costs – report
Elon Musk is considering sending his “department of government efficiency” (Doge) to the Federal Reserve, Bloomberg News reported on Thursday, citing a costly renovation of the central bank’s Washington DC headquarters as an example of potential government waste.
“Since at the end of the day, this is all taxpayer money, I think we certainly – we should definitely – look to see if indeed the Federal Reserve is spending $2.5bn on their interior designer,” Musk told reporters Wednesday at the White House, reports Bloomberg News.
The central bank said the increased $2.5bn headquarters renovation cost (as of 2022), is down to higher costs of building materials and labor since the project started in 2021. Musk, however, called it “an eyebrow raiser”.
The Fed’s chair, Jerome Powell, has faced attacks from Donald Trump, who has threatendto fire the head of the central bank. “Powell’s termination cannot come fast enough!” Trump said on social media last week.
Speaking to business leaders at the White House on Wednesday, Trump once again criticized Powell for not lowering interest rates. Powell has cited Trump’s massive tariffs on imports from nearly every country, except Russia, as a reason to fear inflation and so not lower rates.
“Mortgage rates are actually down slightly, even though I have a guy in the Fed that I’m not a huge fan of”, Trump said, apparently departing from his prepared remarks. “But that’s alright, these are minor details. Don’t tell him I said that please”.
“I mean, he should reduce the ener– he should reduce interest rates” the president, who has relied on loans to finance his real estate purchases for decades, said. He added:
I think I understand interest a lot better than him, because I’ve had to really use interest rates. But we should have interest rates go down, it would be positive, but it’s not going to matter that much, because ultimately what we’re creating has much more to do with other things than it does just pure interest rates, but it would be nice for people wanting to buy homes and things.
Lauren Almeida
Tesla has denied a report that its board sought to replace Elon Musk as its chief executive amid a backlash against his rightwing politics and declining car sales.
Robyn Denholm, the chair of the board at the electric carmaker, said in a statement on Tesla’s social media account on X:
Earlier today, there was a media report erroneously claiming that the Tesla Board had contacted recruitment firms to initiate a CEO search at the company.
This is absolutely false (and this was communicated to the media before the report was published). The CEO of Tesla is Elon Musk and the Board is highly confident in his ability to continue executing on the exciting growth plan ahead.
It followed a Wall Street Journal story published on Wednesday that claimed “board members” had contacted headhunters to recruit a successor about a month ago.
The reported move came as tensions grew at Tesla around falling profits and criticism of Musk for spending much of his time in Washington, where he has been helping Donald Trump slash federal spending as de facto head of the “department of government efficiency” (Doge).
It is unclear in the report whether these members were acting on behalf of the board as a collective, or if it was only some of them taking steps to find a new chief executive. The Tesla board is made up of eight people, including Elon Musk himself, his brother, Kimbal Musk, and James Murdoch, son of media mogul Rupert Murdoch.
Here is a video of Kamala Harris’s speech in San Francisco:
Lauren Gambino
Kamala Harris delivered a searing indictment of Donald Trump’s first 100 days in power, warning in her first major address since leaving office that the nation was witnessing a “wholesale abandonment of America’s highest ideals” by its president.
Speaking to an audience of Democrats in San Francisco, the former vice-president struck a defiant posture as she praised the leaders and institutions pushing back against Trump and his aggressive agenda – from the members of Congress acting boldly to the judges “who uphold the rule of law in the face of those who would jail them”, the universities defying the administration’s “unconstitutional demands”, and the everyday Americans rallying to protect social security.
The speech – her most forceful since Trump returned to power – marked a notable reemergence for Harris. The former vice-president, who now lives in Los Angeles and is weighing her next move – a possible run for California governor next year or another bid for the presidency in 2028 – has mostly kept a low profile since leaving office in January following her devastating loss to Trump in November.
In her remarks, she accused Trump of deliberately sowing fear and chaos to consolidate his own executive power, in a “high velocity” start to his presidency that hurled the country toward a constitutional crisis.
“They are counting on the notion that, if they can make some people afraid, it will have a chilling effect on others,” she said. “But what they’ve overlooked is that fear isn’t the only thing that’s contagious. Courage is contagious.”
Urging Americans to keep organizing, running for office and standing up for fundamental rights and values, she declared: “Let’s lock it in.”
‘I don’t really believe I’ve made mistakes’, Trump tells NewsNation town hall
Donald Trump declined to say when trade moves will pay off, as he too part in a NewsNation town hall via phone last night.
According to the Hill, Trump would not be drawn on when new trade deals would be announced either. In the same interview, when asked to name the biggest mistake he had made so far, the US president said he did not think he had made any.
“I’ll tell you, that’s the toughest question I can have because I don’t really believe I’ve made mistakes,” he said, arguing that the country is in a “transition period” and will see “tremendous economic victories” ahead.
Talking about tariff moves, Trump said: “And I know what I’m doing perfectly … it’s a little complicated subject”.
In the town hall, Trump said there was “a very good chance” that the US would make a deal with China on tariffs.
“Now, will we make a deal? There’s a very good chance we’re going to make a deal, but we’re going to make it on our terms,” Trump said, after calling China “the king of ripping off the United States”.
Trump blames Biden for US economy shrinking as Harris says US president’s America is ‘self-serving’
President Donald Trump continued to blame Joe Biden as the US economy shrank in the first three months of the year, according to official data. While it has triggered fears of an American recession and a global economic slowdown, Trump has sought to blame Biden for the figure.
“This is Biden’s Stock Market, not Trump’s,” the Trump wrote on Truth Social, adding that the contraction “has NOTHING TO DO WITH TARIFFS”.
Meanwhile, former US vice-president Kamala Harris hit out at Trump and his backers on Wednesday, in her first major speech since losing November’s election.
The defeated Democrat told supporters the apparent “chaos” of the last three months was actually the realization of a long-cherished plan by conservatives who are using Trump to twist the US to their own advantage.
“What we are, in fact, witnessing is a high velocity event, where a vessel is being used for the swift implementation of an agenda that has been decades in the making,” she told an audience in San Francisco.
She continued:
An agenda to slash public education. An agenda to shrink government and then privatize its services. All while giving tax breaks to the wealthiest.
A narrow, self-serving vision of America where they punish truth-tellers, favor loyalists, cash in on their power, and leave everyone to fend for themselves.
Harris was a guest speaker at an event run by Emerge, a political organization that recruits and trains Democratic women to run for public office.
She told the crowd that Trump was targeting universities and courts because he wanted to cow the opposition.
More on this story in a moment, but first, here are some other key developments:
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The US and Kyiv have signed an agreement to share revenues from the future sale of Ukrainian minerals and rare earths, sealing a deal that Donald Trump has said will provide an economic incentive for the US to continue to invest in Ukraine’s defense and its reconstruction after he brokers a peace deal with Russia.
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The Trump administration has been in touch directly with the Salvadorian president Nayib Bukele in recent days about the detention of Kilmar Ábrego García, the man wrongly deported to a notorious prison in El Salvador, according to two people familiar with the matter. The nature of the discussion and its purpose was not clear because multiple Trump officials have said the administration was not interested in his coming back.
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Kristi Noem, the US homeland security secretary, said that if Ábrego García was sent back to the US, the Trump administration “would immediately deport him again”. Noem’s comments come as a federal judge again directed the Trump administration to provide information about its efforts so far, if any, to comply with her order to retrieve Ábrego García from an El Salvador prison.
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Trump dismissed concerns about the need for trade with China during a cabinet meeting on Wednesday. “You know, somebody said, ‘Oh, the shelves are going to be open’”, the president said, confusing empty shelves with open ones. “Well, maybe the children will have two dolls instead of 30 dolls” he continued. “And maybe the two dolls will cost a couple of bucks more than they would normally”.
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A Senate resolution to overturn Donald Trump’s tariffs, by declaring that there is no national emergency as the president says there is, narrowly failed to pass on Wednesday, with the vote count deadlocked at 49-49 as two senators who supported the move failing to vote.
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Mohsen Mahdawi walked out of immigration detention after a federal judge in Vermont ordered his release. The Palestinian green-card holder and student at Columbia University had been detained and ordered deported by the Trump administration on 14 April despite not being charged with a crime.
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The Trump administration is moving to cancel $1bn in school mental health grants, saying they reflect the priorities of the previous administration.