Senate postpones Casey Means confirmation hearing after she goes into labor
The Senate has postponed its confirmation hearing for Donald Trump’s nominee for surgeon general, Casey Means, after she went into labor with her first child, CNN reported, citing a Senate committee spokesperson.
Means was due to be the first nominee ever to appear by video link before the health, education, labor and pension committee due to her pregnancy.
The hearing is understood to have been scheduled two days after her due date for giving birth.
Means, the author of a bestselling book, Good Energy, has become a public symbol of the make America healthy again movement championed by Robert F Kennedy Jr, the health and social services secretary, by promoting holistic health based on natural foods, exercise and avoiding pharmaceutical prescription drugs for chronic ailments.
Key events
The Guardian’s Patrick Wintour has analyzed the South Korea meeting between Donald Trump and Xi Jinping. He writes:
When Donald Trump launched his trade war against China in April, threatening tariffs as high as 145%, the Chinese government said it would never bow to blackmail and vowed to “fight to the end”.
The question now is whether the consensus reached between Trump and Xi Jinping in Busan, South Korea, on Thursday means that the fight really has come to an end, and if so on whose terms.
In the same Fox Business Network interview, US Treasury secretary Scott Bessent said China had agreed to buy 12m metric tons of American soya beans during the current season through January and has committed to buying 25m tons annually for the next three years as part of a larger trade agreement with Beijing.
Bessent told Fox Business Network’s Mornings with Maria programme that other countries in Southeast Asia have agreed to buy another 19m tons of US soya beans, but did not specify a timeframe for those purchases.
“So our great soybean farmers, who the Chinese used as political pawns, that’s off the table, and they should prosper in the years to come,” Bessent said.
China-US trade deal could be signed next week, US Treasury’s Bessent says
The US and China could sign a trade agreement as soon as next week, US Treasury secretary Scott Bessent said on Thursday after President Donald Trump’s meeting with his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping.
“The Kuala Lumpur agreement was finished in the middle of the night last night, so I expect we will exchange signatures possibly as soon as next week,” Bessent said in an interview on Fox Business Network.
US to halt entity restrictions for one year after Trump-Xi meeting, Bessent says
US Treasury secretary Scott Bessent on Thursday said that the US would enact a one-year suspension of Entity List restrictions that make it harder for Chinese firms to use affiliates to buy off-limits technology.
The moratorium comes after President Donald Trump and Chinese leader Xi Jinping were able to discuss big picture issues with great respect at their meeting earlier in the day in South Korea, Bessent said in an interview on Fox Business Network.
Wall Street futures were slightly lower on Thursday as investors assessed the Federal Reserve’s remarks, Big Tech earnings, and a newly announced US-China trade deal, reports Reuters
The Fed delivered the expected quarter-point cut on Wednesday, but flagged gaps in official data amid the federal shutdown, which could impact its future decisions. Chair Jerome Powell said policymakers may turn more cautious if jobs and inflation data stay scarce.
Powell’s comments prompted traders to unwind some bets on another similar-sized move at the Fed’s December meeting to about 70% from 90% earlier this week.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said on Thursday he was confident that US president Donald Trump and Chinese leader Xi Jinping had a good conversation during a meeting in South Korea earlier in the day.
Huang was speaking as he arrived at a restaurant in Seoul with Samsung Electronics chair Jay Y Lee and Hyundai Motor Group executive chair Euisun Chung, reports Reuters.
Huang said he was looking forward to meeting South Korea’s president on Friday and that his company and the country had many announcements to make.
Kremlin reacts cautiously to Trump’s nuclear testing remarks
The Kremlin on Thursday reacted cautiously to US president Donald Trump’s remarks about the resumption of nuclear weapons testing, saying that Russia had not tested but that Moscow would follow suit if Washington did.
Trump ordered the US military on Thursday to immediately resume testing nuclear weapons after a gap of 33 years, minutes before beginning a meeting with Chinese president Xi Jinping. Trump said that because of “other countries testing programmes” the US would start testing “on an equal basis”.
According to Reuters, Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov told reporters:
President Trump mentioned in his statement that other countries are engaged in testing nuclear weapons. Until now, we didn’t know that anyone was testing.
Russia, he said, had received no prior notification from the US about a change to Washington’s position on nuclear testing.
Asked if the Kremlin felt that a new nuclear arms race had been triggered by Trump’s remarks, Peskov said: “Not really.”
Peskov underscored that Russia’s test of the Burevestnik cruise missile on 21 October and the Poseidon nuclear-powered super torpedo on 28 October were most definitely not nuclear weapons tests.
Vladimir Putin, who commands the world’s biggest nuclear arsenal, has repeatedly said that if any country tests a nuclear weapon then Russia will do so too. Peskov said:
I want to recall President Putin’s statement, which has been repeated many times: if someone departs from the moratorium, Russia will act accordingly.
Post-Soviet Russia has never tested a nuclear weapon. The Soviet Union last tested in 1990, the US last tested in 1992 and China in 1996.
Lisa O’Carroll
With Donald Trump heading back to the US after striking an agreement with China’s president Xi Jinping, the focus now switches to the EU, with a senior delegation heading to Brussels for crunch talks over the choking off of supplies of rare earths to semiconductors.
Yesterday, the car industry said it was “days away” from assembly line stoppages after Beijing’s ban on exports of chips from Nexperia in China in a row over the Dutch government’s decision to take control of its Netherland’s operations amid security fears.
The EU is now questioning whether its policy, drawn up in 2023, to “derisk” from China rather than “decouple” is working as Beijing’s stranglehold on rare earths and critical raw materials allows it to turn off and on supplies according to its political will.
“This is all part of a new strategy where China is repeatedly now taking steps that bring European industry and other industries around the world to the point of choking them off,” Andrew Small, senior fellow at the German Marshall Fund.
“It is no longer that Europe is collateral damage, it is China targeting Europe and I think people are beginning to understand that now,” he said.
Lisa O’Carroll
Donald Trump has used his Truth Social platform to declare the trade tensions with China are “very close to being resolved” as he urges US farmers to go out and buy “more land and bigger tractors” as Beijing ends its soya bean embargo.
The US exports about £18bn worth of soya bean a year, half of which goes to China, but China stopped buying the product leaving Trump contemplating a multi-billion dollar bailout for farmers.
Trump said on Truth Social:
I had a truly great meeting with President Xi of China. There is enormous respect between our two Countries, and that will only be enhanced with what just took place.
We agreed on many things, with others, even of high importance, being very close to resolved. I was extremely honored by the fact that President Xi authorized China to begin the purchase of massive amounts of Soybeans, Sorghum, and other Farm products.
Our Farmers will be very happy! In fact, as I said once before during my first Administration, Farmers should immediately go out and buy more land and larger tractors.
The deal covers Fentanyl, rare earths and critical minerals such as refined lithium used in electric vehicle car batteries – a sector in which China dominates the world.
China has also agreed to liberalise the sale of magnets used in everything from dishwasher doors to car window openings, he said.
It will also buy oil and gas from Alaska, Trump added.
Donald Trump had first laid out his intention to pursue nuclear arms control efforts in February, saying he wanted to begin discussions with both Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping about imposing limits on their arsenals, reports Reuters.
Most major nuclear powers except North Korea stopped explosive nuclear testing in the 1990s. North Korea conducted its last nuclear test in 2017. Russia’s last confirmed test was in 1990, followed by the last US test in 1992, and by China’s in 1996.
The reaction to Donald Trump’s announcement on nuclear testing was swift in the US also.
Representative Dina Titus, a Democrat from Nevada, said on X:
I’ll be introducing legislation to put a stop to this.
Daryl Kimball, director of the Arms Control Association, said it would take the US at least 36 months to resume contained nuclear tests underground at the former test site in Nevada. Kimball said on X:
Trump is misinformed and out of touch. The US has no technical, military, or political reason to resume nuclear explosive testing for the first time since 1992.
Apart from providing technical data, a US test would be seen in Russia and China as a deliberate assertion of Washington’s strategic power. Russian president Vladimir Putin has repeatedly said that Russia will test if the US does.
In August, Trump said he had discussed nuclear arms control with Putin and wanted China to get involved. Beijing responded by saying it was “unreasonable and unrealistic” to ask the country to join in nuclear disarmament negotiations with the two countries, since its arsenal was much smaller.
Source link
