Key events
Friedrich Merz, whose mainstream conservative party has won Germany’s national election, has vowed to do everything in his power to continue a good transatlantic relationship with the US, even if the Trump administration appears to have waning interest in Europe, the AP reports.
“If those who really do not just make ‘America First,’ but almost ‘America Alone’ their motto prevail, then it will be difficult,” he told reporters on Monday in his first post-election news conference. “But I remain hopeful that we will succeed in maintaining the transatlantic relationship.”
He warned that if the good relationship “is destroyed, it will not only be to the detriment of Europe, it will also be to the detriment of America.”
The election took place against a background of growing uncertainty over the future of Ukraine and Europe’s alliance with the US. In a week that left European leaders reeling, Trump launched a shocking attack on Volodymyr Zelesnkyy whom he called “a dictator” after the Ukrainian president called him out for repeating disinformation and blaming Ukraine for Russia’s invasion. That had followed a crisis meeting of European leaders after the US took the seismic step of holding bilateral talks with Russia in Riyadh on ending the war in Ukraine and on future cooperation between the two countries, with neither Ukraine nor Europe offered a seat at the table.
European leaders have been left scrambling to make the continent relevant to the Trump administration, with the French president, Emmanuel Macron, holding talks with Trump at the White House today and British prime minister Keir Starmer following suit on Thursday.
Merz said his top priority is to unify Europe in the face of challenges coming from the US and Russia. Both US vice-president JD Vance and Trump ally Elon Musk openly supported the far right AfD, which came second in the national election, and Vance left the Munich Security Conference stunned as he launched an ideological attack on Europe, with his remarks condemned by the EU and Germany and praised on Russian state TV.
Merz said he remains “hopeful that the Americans will see it as in their own interests to be involved in Europe as well.”
Still, he warned that it would be unacceptable “if the Americans strike a deal with Russia over the heads of the Europeans, over the heads of Ukraine.”
For more on the aftermath of the German election head to our Europe live blog:
Donald Trump will meet the French president, Emmanuel Macron, at the White House today, on the third anniversary of Russia’s illegal invasion of Ukraine and in a moment of deep uncertainty about the future of the transatlantic alliance.
In the first visit to the White House by a European leader since Trump’s inauguration and amid alarm in Europe over Trump’s hardening stance toward Ukraine and overtures to Moscow on the three-year war, Macron will use the meeting to try to convince the US president not to rush to a ceasefire deal with Russian president Vladimir Putin, to keep Europe involved, and to maintain some degree of military involvement in Ukraine – and indeed across Europe.
In a call on Sunday, Macron and the British prime minister, Keir Starmer, who will also meet Trump at the White House on Thursday, agreed to “show leadership in support of Ukraine” and on the importance of Ukraine being at the centre of any peace negotiations.
Macron will make the case for Europe to have a seat at the negotiating table, and float proposals for a 30,000-strong European peacekeeping force in Ukraine once the fighting ends. Starmer has urged Trump to provide a US “backstop” to any such force in Ukraine, saying it is the only way to deter Russia from attacking the country again, and Macron will emphasise this at the meeting. The US president has so far refused to offer any postwar security guarantees to Ukraine.
Macron has said agreeing to a bad deal with Russia would amount to a capitulation of Ukraine and would signal weakness to the US’ foes, including China and Iran. In an hour-long Q&A session on social media ahead of his trip to the White House, the French president said:
I will tell him: deep down you cannot be weak in the face of President [Putin]. It’s not you, it’s not what you’re made of and it’s not in your interests.
Macron and Trump are due to hold bilateral talks and a working lunch ahead of a joint press conference at 2pm ET. We’ll bring you more on what comes out of the meeting as we get it.
‘A true free-speech emergency’: alarm over Trump’s ‘chilling’ attacks on media
Adam Gabbatt
The Trump administration is waging a “disturbing” attack on the freedom of the press that amounts to a “true free-speech emergency”, media experts have warned, as the Federal Communications Commission recently launched an investigation into a series of media organizations, including the owner of NBC News.
The FCC, led by Donald Trump appointee and Project 2025 author Brendan Carr, has ordered investigations into NPR and PBS in the first month since Trump took office, while also scrutinizing a CBS News interview and a San Francisco radio station.
In a letter to Comcast, which owns NBC News, Carr said he had asked the FCC’s enforcement bureau to “open an investigation” into the corporation, stating: “I am concerned that Comcast and NBCUniversal may be promoting invidious forms of DEI in a manner that does not comply with FCC regulations.”
It came after Carr, who was appointed to FCC chair by Trump, said he did not “see a reason why Congress should continue sending taxpayer dollars” to PBS and NPR, publicly funded organizations Trump has threatened to defund.
“It’s really quite disturbing,” said Matthew Gertz, a senior fellow at Media Matters, a watchdog group.
What we’re seeing is really an attack on freedom of speech and freedom of the press from all aspects of the Trump administration right now.
You can read Adam’s full story here.
Donald Trump’s sweeping foreign aid freeze has stalled a United Nations programme in Mexico aimed at stopping imported fentanyl chemicals from reaching the country’s drug cartels, according to eight people familiar with the situation, Reuters reports.
It is one of several US counternarcotics efforts in Mexico derailed in recent weeks by the stop-work order.
The initiative provided Mexico’s navy with training and equipment to improve screening of cargo entering and exiting the Port of Manzanillo, the nation’s busiest container port.
Two additional Mexican seaports — Lázaro Cárdenas and Veracruz — were to be added this month, a rollout that’s now on hold due to the funding cutoff, six of the people said.
White House deputy press secretary Anna Kelly did not answer emailed questions from the news agency about the administration’s decision to halt funding for the Mexican port programme. She did say that Trump is acting to secure the border and cut federal spending.
A federal judge on Monday is set to consider a request by the Associated Press (AP) to restore full access for the news agency’s journalists after Donald Trump’s administration barred them for continuing to refer to the Gulf of Mexico in coverage.
US District Judge Trevor McFadden, a Trump appointee, is scheduled to hear the AP’s motion for a temporary restraining order against the administration at 3pm ET in Washington federal court.
The AP sued three senior Trump aides on Friday, arguing that the decision to block its reporters from the Oval Office and Air Force One violates the US Constitution’s First Amendment protections against government abridgment of speech by trying to dictate the language they use in reporting the news.
The news agency is seeking to immediately restore its access to all areas available to the White House press pool.
The AP said in January it would continue to use the gulf’s long-established name in stories while also acknowledging Trump’s efforts to change it.
The White House banned AP reporters in response. The ban prevents the AP’s journalists from seeing and hearing Trump and other top White House officials as they take newsworthy actions or respond in real time to news events.
Trump halts medical research funding in apparent violation of judge’s order
Hannah Harris Green
The Trump administration has blocked a crucial step in the National Institutes of Health (NIH) process for funding medical research, likely in violation of a federal judge’s temporary restraining order on federal funding freezes.
The NIH has stopped submitting study sections – meetings in which scientists peer review NIH grant funding proposals – to the Federal Register after the Trump administration paused health agency communications. By law, study sections must appear on the register 15 days in advance of meetings.
“The idea is that the public has the right to know who’s giving advice to the federal government and when they’re meeting,” said Jeremy Berg, a biochemist who has overseen NIH funding in the past.
These meetings are integral in the funding process for scientists at institutions around the country researching virtually all elements of disease and medicine, including drug development, cancer, heart disease and aging.
You can read the full report here:
Government workers to be put on administrative leave if they fail to return to the office – Musk
Elon Musk said on Monday that starting this week, government workers would be put on administrative leave if they fail to return to the office.
Musk, who is leading a downsizing effort at the US government wrote on X:
Those who ignored President Trump’s executive order to return to work have now received over a month’s warning.
Starting this week, those who still fail to return to office will be placed on administrative leave.
Confusion at US agencies over whether to comply with Elon Musk email demanding workers justify their jobs
Hello and welcome to our US politics rolling coverage.
Elon Musk’s email demanding all 2.3 million government workers justify their work has caused confusion with several administration officials telling workers not to reply to the missive.
On Saturday the tech billionaire sent an email titled: “What did you do last week?” requesting a bullet-point summary of what they had achieved in their working week. It gave employees a deadline of 11.59pm ET on Monday and was the latest move by Musk to slash the size of federal government.
The Drug Enforcement Administration and the Federal Communications Commission have told employees to comply. But many others, including the departments of Defense, Homeland Security, Education and Commerce, have ordered workers not to respond, Reuters reported.
The Department of Health and Human Services told its workers to cooperate, then later told them to hold off while it figured out how to “best meet the intent” of Musk’s directive.
Meanwhile, the president of the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE) issued a statement criticising Elon Musk and the Trump Administration, for “their utter disdain” for federal employees.
He added it was “cruel and disrespectful” for staff to be forced to justify their job duties to “this out-of-touch, privileged, unelected billionaire who has never performed one single hour of honest public service in his life.”
In other news:
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French President Emmanuel Macron will meet with Donald Trump in Washington on Monday, saying he will present “proposals for action” to counter the “Russian threat” in Europe and ensure peace in Ukraine.
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Conservative podcaster Dan Bongino has been appointed as FBI deputy director. Bongino, a former Secret Service agent and NYPD officer turned conservative radio host, puts a second Trump ally at the top of the agency. Trump announced the appointment on Sunday night in a post on his Truth Social platform, praising Bongino as “a man of incredible love and passion for our country”.
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The Trump administration on Sunday said it was placing all but a handful of USAid personnel around the world on paid administrative leave and eliminating about 2,000 of those positions in the US, according to a notice sent to agency workers and posted online.
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More than 150,000 people from Canada have signed a parliamentary petition calling for their country to strip Elon Musk’s Canadian citizenship because of the tech billionaire’s alliance with Donald Trump, who has spent his second US presidency repeatedly threatening to conquer its independent neighbor to the north and turn it into its 51st state.