Close to 70,000 South Africans have expressed interest in moving to the US following Washington’s offer to resettle people from the country’s Afrikaner community, a business group has said. The South African Chamber of Commerce in the USA (Saccusa) said its website received tens of thousands of registrations from those seeking more information. In a February executive order, President Donald Trump said Afrikaners – descendants of mainly Dutch settlers who arrived in the 17th Century – could be admitted as refugees as they were “victims of unjust racial discrimination”. Relations between the US and South Africa have become increasingly strained…
Author: James Anderson
Elise Stefanik’s swift rise was a barometer of the power of Trumpism. But a sudden interruption in her ascent reveals warning signs for the White House and caps a tough week in which the inevitable reverberations of President Donald Trump’s political shock therapy began to threaten his agenda. Trump withdrew Stefanik’s nomination to serve as US ambassador to the United Nations on Thursday, indicating concern about a special election in her seat given the already-tiny Republican majority in the House. It was a bitter blow for the New York Republican that will deprive her of a platform she could have used…
Elon Musk says that his AI venture xAI has acquired his social media platform X, formerly known as Twitter. In an X post Friday, Musk said the all-stock transaction values xAI at $80 billion and X at $33 billion. Musk paid $44 billion for Twitter in 2022. “xAI and X’s futures are intertwined,” Musk wrote on X Friday. “Today, we officially take the step to combine the data, models, compute, distribution and talent.” The move may be aimed at protecting investors, who helped him buy purchase X, from losing money. Both X and xAI are privately held and share some…
President Donald Trump made multiple false claims in a Friday speech at the Department of Justice in which he discussed the legal system and crime but also a wide range of other topics, including immigration, the war in Ukraine and former President Joe Biden. Trump also made numerous allegations for which he provided no evidence, alleging unspecified “egregious crimes” in the government during the Biden administration, corruption among unspecified judges, illegality by media outlets that he claimed cover him too negatively and “crooked” behavior by law firms connected to cases involving Trump. rump’s prosecutions and Biden: Trump repeated his regular unsubstantiated claim that former President…
Columbia University’s interim president has resigned her role just one week after the Ivy League university agreed to change several policies to satisfy demands from the Trump administration. Katrina Armstrong had led the university since August, after the previous president resigned over her handling of protests against Israel’s military operation in Gaza. Columbia has drawn ire from Donald Trump, who claims that it and other schools have tolerated antisemitism and the harassment of Jewish students. Trump has already threatened to withhold some $400m (£309m) in federal funding for the school as his administration continues to target those involved in campus…
The existence of the US Agency for International Development hangs in the balance. President Donald Trump is racing to shut it down, declaring it a waste of money and run by “lunatics.” But experts warn this plays straight into the hands of the very country he considers to be the biggest threat to US interests — China. Efforts to dismantle the agency, which provides humanitarian and development aid, are moving at a frenetic pace. On the first day of Trump’s presidency, he ordered a 90-day freeze on almost all foreign aid. Elon Musk, head of Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency, said Monday that he was…
Wisconsin’s attorney general is seeking to stop Elon Musk from giving away $2m (£1.5m) to two voters ahead of the state’s supreme court election. In a lawsuit, attorney general Josh Kaul called the offer an “egregious attempt to buy votes” and alleged the tech billionaire and his political action committee violated Wisconsin election laws. The 1 April election, which has drawn national attention, will determine whether Wisconsin’s highest court will have a liberal or conservative majority. On 27 March, Mr Musk posted on X that he would give a talk in Wisconsin on Sunday and “personally hand over two checks…
JD Vance to lead plan as Trump says there’s been ‘concerted’ effort to rewrite US history with ‘distorted narrative’ Donald Trump has ordered a highly controversial reshaping of the US Smithsonian Institution, claiming he will eliminate what his administration regards as “improper, divisive, or anti-American ideology” from the world’s largest set of museums, educational and research entities grouped under one institutional umbrella. In an executive order issued late on Thursday, the president said there had been a “concerted and widespread” effort over the past decade to rewrite US history by replacing “objective facts” with a “distorted narrative driven by ideology rather than truth”.…
US Vice-President JD Vance has accused Denmark of leaving Greenland vulnerable to alleged incursions by China and Russia, as he asked its people to “cut a deal” with the US. Speaking during a visit to the Arctic island, Vance minimised recent threats by US President Donald Trump to take over the island by force. Instead, he urged Greenlanders to sever ties with Denmark, which has owned the island for more than 300 years, saying it had not invested enough to protect the semi-autonomous territory. An overwhelming majority of Greenlanders oppose the idea of annexation, a poll indicated in January. Greenland’s prime minister…
by Justin Elliott, Joshua Kaplan and Alex Mierjeski ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published. For a project explicitly designed to influence Congress, Steve Berger’s operation has left a scant paper trail. The archconservative evangelical pastor, who started a D.C. nonprofit a few years ago to shape national policy, does not file lobbying reports. His group does not show up in campaign finance records. There is a simple way to glimpse his effort’s expanding reach in Washington, however: Pay attention to who is walking out…