Key events
President Donald Trump’s plan to impose a 25% tariff on imported cars and light trucks starting next week is “very bad news” and the only solution for now is for the European Union to raise its own tariffs, French finance minister Eric Lombard said on Thursday.
Lombard, who was speaking on France Inter radio, said he hoped be able to discuss soon with his US counterparts in view of lowering those tariffs, adding a trade war would lead “to nothing”, reports Reuters.
Trump, who sees tariffs as a tool to raise revenue to offset his promised tax cuts and to revive a long-declining US industrial base, said collections would begin on 3 April.
Private data of Trump officials in Signal scandal accessible online: report
The private data of top security advisers to US President Donald Trump can be accessed online, German news magazine Der Spiegel reported on Wednesday, adding to the fallout from the officials’ use of a Signal group chat to plan airstrikes on Yemen.
Mobile phone numbers, email addresses and in some cases passwords used by national security adviser Mike Waltz, defense secretary Pete Hegseth, and director of national intelligence Tulsi Gabbard can be found via commercial data-search services and hacked data dumped online, it reported. It is not clear in all cases how recent the details are.
The Trump administration has been facing calls for the resignation of senior officials amid bipartisan criticism after Monday’s embarrassing revelations. The chat group, which included vice-president JD Vance, Hegseth, the secretary of state, Marco Rubio, and others, discussed sensitive plans to carry out strikes on Houthi targets in Yemen via the Signal app, potentially threatening the safety of US servicemen and women taking part in the operation.
On Wednesday evening, Trump backed Hegseth, saying “He had nothing to do with this” and calling the scandal a “witch-hunt”.
The phone numbers and email addresses – mostly current – were in some cases used for Instagram and LinkedIn profiles, cloud-storage service Dropbox, and apps that track a user’s location.
Der Spiegel reported it was “particularly easy” to discover Hegseth’s mobile number and email address, using a commercial provider of contact information. It found that the email address, and in some cases even the password associated with it, could be found in more than 20 data leaks. It reported that it was possible to verify that the email address was used just a few days ago.
It said the mobile number led to a WhatsApp account that Hegseth appeared to have only recently deleted.
José Olivares
In rare signs of unrest, top Republican senators are calling for an investigation into the Signal leak scandal and demanding answers from the Trump administration, as they raise concerns it will become a “significant political problem” if not addressed properly.
“This is what happens when you don’t really have your act together,” the Alaska Republican senator Lisa Murkowski told the Hill.
The Trump administration has been facing criticism from Democrats – and now Republicans – after Monday’s embarrassing revelation that a team of senior national security officials accidentally added a journalist to a private group chat on Signal, an encrypted messaging app. The group, which included JD Vance, the defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, the secretary of state, Marco Rubio, and others, discussed sensitive plans to engage in military strikes on Houthi targets in Yemen.
On Wednesday, morning the Atlantic posted another tranche of messages that contained details of the attack on Yemen, including descriptions of targets, launch times and even the details of weather during the assault.
Senior national security officials testified before the Senate intelligence committee on Tuesday, where the national intelligence director, Tulsi Gabbard, and CIA director, John Ratcliffe, were grilled by lawmakers over the scandal. The national security officials said “no classified material” had been shared in the chat. Republicans are now calling for investigations, as well.
According to reporting from the Hill, top Republican senators are calling for various committees to investigate the leak, including the Senate armed services committee and the Senate intelligence committee. The Mississippi senator Roger Wicker, who chairs the armed services committee, told the Hill he would be asking the defense department’s inspector general to investigate the scandal.
Republican senators call for investigation of Signal scandal as messages released
Messages, released on Wednesday, from the Signal group chat discussing an attack on Yemen revealed details of US bombings, drone launches and other information about the assault, including descriptions of weather conditions and specific weapons.
“There is a clear public interest in disclosing the sort of information that Trump advisers included in nonsecure communications channels, especially because senior administration figures are attempting to downplay the significance of the messages that were shared,” the Atlantic wrote.
It reproduced numerous messages from the text chat between the Pentagon chief, Pete Hegseth – who said on Tuesday that “nobody was texting war plans” – and top intelligence officials.
US intelligence chiefs on Wednesday denied breaking the law or revealing classified information in a group chat where they discussed details of airstrikes on Yemen in the presence of a journalist, despite allegations from Democrats that the leak was reckless and possibly illegal.
Democrats used an intelligence committee hearing on Wednesday to demand an explanation of how operational military plans are not classified information.
In rare signs of unrest, top Republican senators called for an investigation into the Signal leak scandal and demanding answers from the Trump administration, as they raise concerns it will become a “significant political problem” if not addressed properly.
More on that in a moment, but first, here are some other developments:
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The private data of top security advisers to US President Donald Trump can be accessed online, German news magazine Der Spiegel reported, adding to the fallout from the Signal group chat scandal.
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Trump announced plans to impose sweeping 25% tariffs on cars from overseas on Wednesday, days before the president is expected to announce wide-ranging levies on other goods from around the world. Canadian prime minister Mark Carney called the move a “direct attack” on Canadian workers.
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The US supreme court upheld a federal regulation targeting largely untraceable “ghost guns” imposed by Joe Biden’s administration in a crackdown on firearms whose use has proliferated in crimes nationwide.
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The heads of National Public Radio and the Public Broadcasting Service testified in a heated congressional subcommittee hearing, helmed by conservative Marjorie Taylor Greene, amid a renewed Republican effort to defund US public media.
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Republican House speaker Mike Johnson suggested potentially defunding, restructuring or eliminating US federal courts as a means of pushing back against judicial decisions that have challenged Donald Trump’s policies.
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The Trump administration has paused the processing of certain green card applications as the US government continues to implement a hardline immigration agenda.
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Rumeysa Ozturk, a doctoral student in Boston detained on Tuesday by federal immigration agents in response to her pro-Palestinian activism, was on Wednesday evening being detained at the South Louisiana Ice processing center, according to the government’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) detainee locator page.