Key events
Joanna Walters
The press conference is now underway and Donald Trump is currently giving compliments to his counterpart.
Just before the two leaders came out, US vice president JD Vance turned up in the room.
Trump said the US worked well together with Japanese prime minister Shigeru Ishiba’s predecessor, Shinzo Abe.
Joanna Walters
The scene is set at the White House for the forthcoming press conference between Donald Trump and Shigeru Ishiba.
The press has gathered in the East Room and podium sound checks are complete as the US president and the Japanese prime minister prepare to make remarks and take questions from media representatives.
The countries’ respective flags alternate behind the area where the leaders will station themselves and senior aides are chatting nearby.
The press conference was due to get under way an hour ago. The two are having a working lunch. Ishiba is the second foreign leader to visit Trump here since he became the 47th president. Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu was the first, earlier this week, and the visit made huge waves with Trump’s comments that the US should take over Gaza.
Democratic lawmakers turned away from Department of Education
Around a dozen Democratic members of Congress attempted to enter the Department of Education today in response to reports that Donald Trump would soon order it dismantled, but were denied access.
“Today we went to the Department of Education and demanded answers in defense of our students, in defense of our teachers, in defense of families and communities that are built around public education. We’re not going to let them destroy our public school system and destroy the futures of millions of kids across this country,” said congressman Maxwell Frost, who was part of the group.
The group tried for about 10 minutes to get in, but were informed they would not be allowed access. Police were called, and were positioned inside the building’s lobby.
You can see video of the attempt here.
Only a few hundred employees will remain at USAid once Donald Trump’s dismantling of the aid agency is complete, the Guardian’s Anna Betts reports:
Donald Trump’s administration is reportedly planning to keep just more than 600 essential workers at USAid, according to a notice sent to employees of the US foreign aid agency on Thursday night.
The notice, shared with Reuters by an administration official on Friday, reportedly stated that 611 essential workers would be retained at USAid, which had more than 10,000 employees globally.
Earlier, it was reported that the administration intended to retain fewer than 300 staff members at USAid.
The USAid staff reductions are set to take effect at midnight on Friday, as indicated on the agency’s website. But a lawsuit filed on Thursday by the American Foreign Service Association (AFSA) and the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE) seeks to prevent the administration from dismantling USAid, which was established as an independent agency by a law passed by Congress in 1998.
Trump says he will announce reciprocal tariffs next week
Donald Trump said he plans to announce reciprocal tariffs on many countries next week.
Trump was asked about his plans for further restrictions on trading partners during a bilateral meeting with the Japanese prime minister, Shigeru Ishiba. Trump replied:
I’ll be announcing that next week, reciprocal trade, so that we’re treated evenly with other countries, we don’t want any more, any less.
Trump warned repeatedly during his campaign that he would impose a universal tariff on imports into the US.
Trump also threatened tariffs on Japanese goods if the US trade deficit with Japan is not equalized.
“Should be pretty easy to do,” he said, according to Reuters. “I don’t think we’ll have any problem whatsoever. They want fairness too.”
The Trump administration has agreed not to publicly release the names of FBI agents and employees who investigated the January 6 attack on the US Capitol.
The justice department agreed to a temporary deal not to immediately make public the names of agents who worked on investigations related to the 6 January 2021 insurrection until at least late March.
The deal was struck after acting head of the FBI, Brian Driscoll, turned over to the justice department a list of FBI employees involved in the January 6 investigations.
The data, submitted to at least partially comply with an order from the acting deputy attorney general, Emil Bove, last month demanding information, included employee numbers, job titles and job roles.
The demand prompted days of internal resistance from Driscoll and the bureau and prompted two lawsuits from groups of anonymous FBI agents who said the move endangered their safety.
Trump says he is in ‘no rush’ on his Gaza plan
Donald Trump said he is in no rush to implement his plan for the US to take over the Gaza Strip and move out its Palestinian population.
“We’re in no rush on it,” Trump told reporters at the White House.
Richard Luscombe
Despite once calling cryptocurrency “a scam”, Donald Trump made a theoretical fortune of billions after launching a self-named and highly controversial meme coin immediately before his second inauguration in January.
Now an army of digital imposters is trying to cash in on the president’s name and online presence to make their own crypto killing, according to a report in the Financial Times that details hundreds of “copycat and spam coins” uploaded to Trump’s official wallet in cyberspace.
Creators sent more than 700 new meme coins to the wallet in recent weeks, many named after Trump or his family members – but none of them have any formal connection.
Experts say speculators can be easily duped by names that make it seem the fake coins are allied to the real $Trump cryptocurrency – which itself has seen a precipitous collapse in value – and risk the digital equivalent of being taken to the cleaners.
Immigrant rights groups demand immediate access to migrants deported to Guantánamo Bay
Immigrant rights groups, including the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), have sent a letter to the Trump administration demanding immediate access to immigrants recently transferred to Guantánamo Bay.
The Trump administration has transferred nearly two dozen migrants from immigration detention centers to the US naval base in Cuba.
It comes after Trump signed an executive order to prepare a huge detention camp at the navy base at Guantánamo that he said could house up to 30,000 people deported from the US.
“The Constitution, and federal and international law prohibit the government from using Guantánamo as a legal black hole,” the letter says.
We therefore request that the government provide our organizations access to the noncitizens detained at Guantánamo so that those individuals will have access to legal counsel, and so advocates and the public can understand the conditions under which the government is detaining them.
The letter comes ahead of homeland security secretary Kristi Noem’s planned visit to Guantánamo on Friday.
“It is unlawful for our government to use Guantánamo as a legal black hole, yet that is exactly what the Trump administration is doing,” ACLU deputy director of the immigrants’ rights project, Lee Gelernt, said.
Netanyahu invites House speaker Johnson to Israel
Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has invited House speaker Mike Johnson to visit Jerusalem this year.
“I know you’re busy but find space to do that. You’ll be welcomed with a red carpet,” Netanyahu told Johnson during a press conference following their meeting at the Capitol.
Netanyahu said he had developed a “close personal bond” with Johnson, and noted Donald Trump’s executive order on Thursday sanctioning the international criminal court (ICC) over its arrest warrants for him and his former defense minister, Yoav Gallant.
Johnson thanked the Israeli leader for his “unrelenting commitment to making the region and the world a safer place”, adding:
What Israel has done in the past seven months really is a testament to what can be accomplished when we do not let the enemy set the rules.
Ben Makuch
Some extremists who were recently the targets of the FBI are applauding Donald Trump’s appointment of Maga loyalist Kash Patel as its new director.
Experts are warning their support is a sign of an emboldened far right now seen as a diminishing existential threat inside the nation’s top law enforcement agency.
In what was a fraught and contentious Senate confirmation hearing last week, Patel, Trump’s pick to head the FBI, made a point to describe some of the racism he has faced in the US as the son of Indian Gujarati immigrants.
But Patel is garnering some unlikely fans among the racist and xenophobic far right.
“I like Kash fr, he is based af,” wrote one Telegram user on a post about Patel from a neo-Nazi account with thousands of followers. “I’d buy him curry anytime.”
Patel is known for peddling various conspiracy theories on podcasts popular among Maga followers, and he is a polarizing figure. He’s not expected to garner any Democratic votes on the way to a likely confirmation as the new head of the FBI.
Donald Trump said he will sign an executive order to end federal support for paper straws, a Biden-era policy that was part of a broader plan to phase out single-plastics.
In a Truth Social post this morning, Trump wrote:
I will be signing an Executive Order next week ending the ridiculous Biden push for Paper Straws, which don’t work. BACK TO PLASTIC!
Trump has previously railed against paper straws, selling thousands of Trump-branded plastic straws during his 2020 presidential campaign as an alternative to “liberal” paper straws.
Job creation across the US has slowed at the start of Donald Trump’s second term, after a blistering finish to 2024.
New data from the labor department released on Friday showed 143,000 jobs added to the economy in January, short of the 168,000 expected by economists.
It is also a sharp slowdown on December, where the Bureau of Labor Statistics has revised up its estimates and now says payrolls rose by 307,000, 51,000 more than its initial estimate of 256,000.
The White House’s press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, blamed the pace of hiring on Joe Biden’s administration in a statement.
“Today’s jobs report reveals the Biden economy was far worse than anyone thought, and underscores the necessity of President Trump’s pro-growth policies,” she wrote.
Senior Democrat demands inquiry into Musk’s government blitz
Michael Sainato
Elon Musk’s blitz through the federal government has triggered a “constitutional emergency”, a senior Democrat has warned, demanding the launch of an impartial investigation into billionaire tycoon’s access to sensitive data.
Robert C “Bobby” Scott, ranking member of the House committee on education and workforce and the Democratic leader on the committee, sounded the alarm over a “void of oversight” as the so-called “department of government efficiency” (Doge), led by the world’s richest man, accesses information within a string of agencies including the Departments of Education, Labor, and Health and Human Services.
In a letter seen by the Guardian, Scott demanded that the Government Accountability Office, a nonpartisan federal watchdog agency, launch an immediate investigation into “interventions” by Musk and his team into the departments’ IT systems, the legality of such moves and what it means “for children and vulnerable workers”.
Scott calls for the agency to provide answers into the legality and impacts of Doge infiltrating private and sensitive data at these federal departments. It comes after senior Democrats on the House oversight committee demanded an investigation into potential national security breaches by the unit.
As we reported earlier, the largest US government workers’ union and an association of foreign service workers sued the Trump administration on Thursday over “catastrophic” cuts to USAid.
Donald Trump, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent are among the named defendants, but the text of the suit focuses extensively on actions, and statements on social media, by Elon Musk and his “department of government efficiency” initiative.
Among the actions called illegal are Trump’s order on 20 January, the day he was inaugurated, pausing all US foreign aid. That was followed by orders from the state department halting USAid projects around the world, agency computer systems going offline and staff abruptly laid off or placed on leave.
The gutting of the agency has largely been overseen by Musk, the world’s richest man and a close Trump ally spearheading the president’s effort to shrink the federal bureaucracy and replace career civil servants with politically loyal appointees.
USAid shutdown has ripple effects on aid around the world and cedes ground to China – analysts
If there’s an immediate beneficiary to Donald Trump’s shutdown of USAid, it’s probably China, the Guardian’s Helen Davidson and Amy Hawkins reports:
Donald Trump’s shutdown of USAid has already had disastrous effects on humanitarian aid and development programmes around the world, but it has also ceded ground to the US’s chief rival, China, analysts have said.
The result of the sudden 90-day suspension of USAid funding – which accounts for 40% of global foreign aid – has been chaos: employees locked out of offices, humanitarian shipments left to rot, and lifesaving assistance stopped.
Around the world, development programmes previously assisted by the USAid are panicking, warning of disastrous risks of escalating famine, death and disease.
Trump’s plan involves the merger of the more than 60-year-old USAid into the state department, shrinking its workforce and aligning its spending with his priorities. But analysts say it is working against one key priority – countering China.
“[The US is handing] on a silver platter to China the perfect opportunity to expand its influence, at a time when China’s economy is not doing very well,” said Prof Huang Yanzhong, senior fellow for global health at the Council on Foreign Relations.
What Trump is doing is basically providing China a perfect opportunity to rethink, to renew soft power projects, and get back on track to transglobal leadership.
