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The wreckage of a plane that went missing in Alaska has been found, US officials said Friday, with all 10 people aboard thought to have died.The US Coast Guard said it had discovered the remnants of the Bering Air Caravan around 34 miles (55 kilometers) from Nome.”Three individuals were found inside and reported to be deceased,” the Coast Guard posted on social media.”The remaining seven people are believed to be inside the aircraft but are currently inaccessible due to the condition of the plane.”Nome’s volunteer fire department, which had scrambled in the search for the plane, said on Facebook it was helping with recovery.”The Nome Search and Rescue Team is spooling up with assistance from the Alaska Air National Guard with recovery efforts,” a post said.”From reports we have received, the crash was not survivable. Our thoughts are with the families at this time.”The privately operated plane, with nine passengers and one pilot on board, was reported overdue Thursday on a flight from Unalakleet to Nome, Alaska state police said.The two cities are located roughly 150 miles apart across the Norton Sound, on the state’s west coast.According to publicly available information the plane’s last known position was over the water around 40 minutes after takeoff.The crash is the latest incident in a string of aviation disasters in the United States.On January 30, a passenger jet collided midair with a US Army helicopter in Washington, killing all 67 people aboard both aircraft. The disaster was followed closely by the crash of a medical plane into a busy Philadelphia neighborhood, killing seven and injuring 19. 

Donald Trump’s order to change the name of the highest mountain in the United States faced pushback Friday from members of his own party.Alaska’s Republican-dominated senate voted overwhelmingly against his plan to ditch the Indigenous name Denali for the huge peak, which Trump has rechristened Mount McKinley.The president has unleashed a flood of executive orders in his first few days in the White House as he attempts to remake the US government.Orders have included mass pardons for pro-Trump rioters, a federal hiring freeze and an attempt to overturn the constitutionally mandated practice of granting birthright citizenship.But his order to rename the 20,300-foot (6,200-meter) Denali drew the ire of Alaska’s state legislators.A resolution passed unanimously by the Alaska state senate on Friday urged Trump to rethink his plan.”The name Denali is deeply ingrained in the state’s culture and identity,” the motion said.”Residents of the state believe that the names of the geographic features in the state should be determined by state residents and representatives.”The motion, which earlier cleared the lower chamber by a sizable majority, notes that state lawmakers called for the mountain to be known by its Indigenous name as far back as 1975.Four decades later, then-president Barack Obama officially recognized that push and dropped the moniker Mount McKinley, which had been the peak’s official name since 1917.It was coined in honor of Republican president William McKinley who served in the Oval Office from 1897 until his assassination in 1901.The resolution by the state legislature appeared unlikely to change Trump’s mind, but was notable as a rare display of disobedience from members of his largely quiescent Republican Party.

US President Donald Trump announced Friday he will name himself to be chairman of the Kennedy Center, putting his aggressive rightwing stamp on Washington’s premier cultural venue.Trump broke the news in a post on his social media platform as he engages in a blizzard of policy changes upending the city and the country, attacking people, causes and policies he says are dangerously left wing.In a way, this appointment is another form of retribution, which Trump is seeking in his second term as he goes after perceived enemies: in his first term, from 2017 to 2021, the Republican regularly skipped the center’s yearly gala event because people in line to receive awards criticized him and said they would not show up if he did.In his post, Trump suggested that the Kennedy Center, the stately white marble entertainment complex overlooking the Potomac River and named for the late president John F Kennedy, offered entertainment that did not reflect his own values.Several members of the board will be replaced, including the current chairman, the billionaire philanthropist David Rubenstein, Trump wrote.”I have decided to immediately terminate multiple individuals from the Board of Trustees, including the Chairman, who do not share our Vision for a Golden Age in Arts and Culture. We will soon announce a new Board, with an amazing Chairman, DONALD J. TRUMP!” the president said  on Truth Social.”Just last year, the Kennedy Center featured Drag Shows specifically targeting our youth — THIS WILL STOP. The Kennedy Center is an American Jewel, and must reflect the brightest STARS on its stage from all across our Nation. For the Kennedy Center, THE BEST IS YET TO COME!” Trump said.Trump did not say what show he was referring to.In December, the center hosted concerts by a band called Bertha that featured some of its musicians dressed in drag.The Kennedy Center is the home of the National Symphony Orchestra and also offers theatre, opera, comedy and other productions.Rubenstein served as an advisor to the late president Jimmy Carter and also has ties to former president Joe Biden, who regularly attended the venue’s top gala, the Kennedy Center Honors, every year.

US President Donald Trump said Friday he was revoking Joe Biden’s security clearance, ending his predecessor’s right to receive intelligence briefings after leaving office.”There is no need for Joe Biden to continue receiving access to classified information,” Trump said on his Truth Social network.”Therefore, we are immediately revoking Joe Biden’s Security Clearances, and stopping his daily Intelligence Briefings.”In a reference to the catchphrase of his former reality TV show “The Apprentice,”  Trump added in capitals: “JOE, YOU’RE FIRED.”US presidents are traditionally given the right to receive intelligence briefings even after they step down. Trump said he was making the move because Democrat Biden had removed his own security clearance after winning the 2020 election.Biden at the time cited Trump’s “erratic behavior” both before and after the January 6, 2021 attack on the US Capitol by protesters trying to overturn Trump’s election loss. In his post on Friday, Trump claimed that Biden “could not be trusted” with intelligence briefings because a special counsel’s report into classified documents found at the Democrat’s home found that Biden, 82, suffered from “poor memory.”Trump was also prosecuted for mishandling classified documents but the Justice Department ended the case after the Republican won the 2024 election.

US President Donald Trump said Friday that Japan’s Nippon Steel will make a major investment in US Steel, but will no longer attempt to take over the troubled company.Trump, referring to the Japanese car company Nissan but apparently meaning Nippon Steel, said “they’ll be looking at an investment rather than a purchase.”Spokespeople for Nippon Steel and US Steel did not respond to a request for comment. US Steel’s shares closed down 5.8 percent on the news.The announcement marks a shift in tone from Trump, who heavily criticized Nippon’s $14.9 billion takeover offer during the 2024 presidential election campaign. Former US president Joe Biden blocked the deal shortly before he left office last month on national security grounds, sparking a joint lawsuit from the two firms — and condemnation from Japanese Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba.In the suit filed on January 6, Nippon Steel and US Steel said Biden had improperly used his influence and blocked the deal “for purely political reasons” to gain favor with workers’ unions.In response, the US authorities announced they had extended the deadline for the Japanese firm to abandon its acquisition of US Steel until June 18, extending an initial 30-day deadline.Trump’s remarks suggest his administration is open to Nippon Steel’s investment in the US steel giant so long as it does not assume overall control — a step that could in theory ensure it remains in American hands. “Our concerns regarding Nippon’s continued interest in US Steel remain unchanged,” United Steelworkers international president David McCall said in a statement. “Nippon has proven itself to be a serial trade cheater with a history of dumping its products into our markets,” he said, adding that the US steelworkers’ union had not been in contact with either company or the Trump administration about Nippon’s proposed investment.  “While we await the details of the proposed investment, we encourage President Trump to continue safeguarding the long-term future of the domestic steel industry by instead seeking American alternatives,” he added.

Donald Trump said at his inauguration that he had been “saved by God.” Now he appears to be returning the favor with an increasingly conservative, religious focus in his second term as US president.The three-times-married billionaire signed an executive order on Friday to open a “Faith Office” at the White House, led by the televangelist Paula White, Trump’s so-called spiritual advisor.A day earlier Trump had unveiled a task force under new Attorney General Pam Bondi to root out what he called the “persecution” of Christians in the United States.The Republican has also appointed several cabinet members with links to Christian nationalists, including Vice President JD Vance and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth.All of this comes despite the fact that Trump has long had an ambiguous relationship with religion. Unlike his predecessor Joe Biden, a devout Catholic, Trump rarely appears in Church. He was confirmed into the Presbyterian church but said he was “non-denominational.”Then there are the sexual scandals — and a criminal conviction for in a porn star hush money case — and the selling of $60 Trump-branded Bibles on the campaign trail.Yet evangelical Christians continued to back him in the 2024 election, just as they did in 2016.- ‘Changed something’ -During his first term Trump certainly dabbled with religion. He posed with a Bible outside a church near the White House after security forces cleared out “Black Lives Matter” protesters, and had prayer meetings in the Oval Office with evangelicals.But now Trump claimed to have had what amounts to a religious awakening.The 78-year-old said that he had become more religious since he narrowly escaped death when a gunman’s bullet hit him in the ear at an election rally in Butler, Pennsylvania last year.”It changed something in me,” Trump told a prayer breakfast at the US Capitol on Thursday. “I believed in God, but I feel much more strongly about it.”Not that this stopped Trump lashing out at the bishop who gave the sermon at his inauguration service, Mariann Budde, after she called on him to show “mercy” to immigrants and LGBTQ people.But the people Trump has chosen to surround himself in the White House are also telling.A number have ties to the New Apostolic Reformation church — a Christian nationalist movement that calls for the levers of government and society to come under Christian control.Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson has been linked to the movement, as has Paula White, who will head up his new Faith Office.White hit the headlines in 2020 when she led a marathon — and widely mocked — prayer session to call for Trump to win the US election against Joe Biden.Vance converted to Catholicism in his 30s and appeared at a town hall hosted by a leading figure in the New Apostolic Reformation Church.- ‘Bring religion back’ -Former Fox contributor and military veteran Hegseth, meanwhile, belongs to a church affiliated to the right-wing Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches (CREC), a Christian nationalist group.The movement wants to reestablish Biblical law, with some of its adherents calling for the repeal of women’s right to vote, US media reported.While Trump has not expressed support for such views, he has increasingly adopted positions that have delighted America’s religious right.He repeatedly boasted that the Supreme Court justices he picked in his first term helped lead to the 2022 overturning of the nationwide right to abortion.Since his inauguration he has sent a video message to a huge anti-abortion march attended by far-right groups and signed a series of executive orders tackling liberal causes, from diversity to transgender rights and abortion.His prayer breakfast speech at the US Capitol this week was unusually explicit in its call for an increased role for religion.”We have to bring religion back,” said Trump. “Let’s bring God back into our lives.”

Yeilis Torres, a 38-year-old Cuban woman, knows all too well the loneliness and anguish facing the migrants flown by the United States this week to its notorious military base in Guantanamo Bay in Cuba.Torres was picked up at sea by the US Coast Guard while fleeing Cuba in mid-2022 and held for seven months at Guantanamo Bay before being transferred to the United States, where she was eventually granted asylum.In a rare firsthand account of life at the base, Torres, who now lives in Miami, told AFP: “The hardest part…is the uncertainty and the wait for the long process” of seeking asylum.For the past two decades Guantanamo Bay naval base, leased by Washington from Havana under a 1903 treaty, has been synonymous with the Pentagon prison, where the United States kept hundreds of people it suspected of being “terrorists” for years after the September 11, 2001 attacks by Al-Qaeda.Some suffered waterboarding, sleep deprivation and other forms of torture. Fifteen people, including 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, are still imprisoned there.President Donald Trump’s plans to detain up to 30,000 migrants at a separate center on the base has caused an outcry, with rights groups fearing they could be kept there indefinitely, far from public scrutiny.The NGO Human Rights Watch warned that prolonged detention without proper oversight “violates human rights and may amount to torture.”- No legal aid -During her seven months at Guantanamo Bay, surrounded by the sea on one side and a mined buffer zone separating the base from communist Cuba on the other three, Torres claims she was never given access to a lawyer.She was allowed calls of just “five or six minutes every three days” with her two young children, who stayed behind with her parents in Havana.She was part of a group of 17 Cubans that set sail across the Gulf of Mexico on a makeshift raft in mid-2022, fleeing Cuba’s economic meltdown or, in her case, persecution by the authorities.The group’s raft had been adrift for days when they were picked up by a Coast Guard ship.She was the only member of the group to be brought to Guantanamo Bay, which has for decades been used to hold Caribbean migrants intercepted at sea.- Handcuffs and black goggles -The other migrants were returned directly to Cuba — a fate she avoided by pleading she was in danger in her homeland, where she was jailed on charges of assaulting a Communist Party grandee.On arrival at Guantanamo Bay, she said migrants were handcuffed and forced to wear black goggles “so that we couldn’t see anything” while being transferred around the site.They were kept in isolation while waiting to be interviewed by State Department officials — in her case for three days but “some people were confined to their rooms for around three, four months.”Of the 21 migrants who were held alongside her, 18 were Cubans, two were Haitian and one from the Dominican Republic. There were two families with children and one pregnant woman.The children faced especially harsh conditions, Torres said, with no schooling provided for them and no interaction allowed with the children of US troops stationed at the base. – ‘Opportunity to work’ -Despite the grim conditions, Torres opposes calls to close the migrant center, fearing that without it, Caribbean migrants would never get a chance to make their case for asylum.”They gave us the opportunity to work,” she added, describing how she earned money by taking part in beach clean-ups.After seven months at the base, Torres was transferred to a migrant detention center in Broward County, Florida where she was held for a further four months before being granted asylum.The trained manicurist, who now works in a Florida cotton factory, was one of the few of the 21 migrants from her group in Guantanamo to gain entry to the United States, where she hopes to be reunited with her family.The other migrants accepted asylum offers from third countries such as Canada and Australia.

President Donald Trump on Friday called for USAID to be shuttered, escalating his unprecedented campaign to dismantle the humanitarian agency.”THE CORRUPTION IS AT LEVELS RARELY SEEN BEFORE. CLOSE IT DOWN!” Trump wrote on his Truth Social app as part of a drive that has triggered chaos in the agency’s global network and allegations of weakening American influence on the world stage.In the three weeks since he began his new term, Trump has launched a crusade led by his top donor and world’s richest person, Elon Musk, to downsize or dismantle swaths of the US government.The most concentrated fire has been on the United States Agency for International Development, which distributes US humanitarian aid globally.On Friday, Musk — who along with Trump has spread blatantly false information about USAID’s finances — reposted photos on social media of the agency’s signage being taken down from its Washington headquarters.The Trump administration has already frozen foreign aid and ordered thousands of foreign-based staff to return to the United States, with reported impacts on the ground steadily growing.On Thursday, a union official confirmed reports that the USAID headcount of 10,000 employees would be reduced to around only 300.Labor unions are challenging the legality of the onslaught, including a separate government-wide offer of buyouts by Musk’s team.Democrats in Congress say it would be unconstitutional for Trump — who has also expressed intent to close the Department of Education — to shut down government agencies without the legislature’s greenlight.- Soft power -The United States’ current budget allocates about $70 billion for international assistance.However while Washington is the biggest aid donor in the world, the money has only amounted to between 0.7 and 1.4 percent of total US government spending in the last quarter century, according to the Pew Research Center.USAID runs health and emergency programs in around 120 countries, including the world’s poorest regions.It is seen as a vital source of soft power for the United States in its struggle for influence with rivals including China.Samantha Power, the USAID chief under former president Joe Biden, dubbed the agency “America’s superpower” in a scathing New York Times opinion piece Friday.”We are witnessing one of the worst and most costly foreign policy blunders in US history,” said Power.Unless the dismantling is halted, Power wrote, “future generations will marvel that it wasn’t China’s actions that eroded US standing and global security” but rather “an American president and the billionaire he unleashed to shoot first and aim later.”Hard-right Republicans and libertarians have long questioned the need for USAID and criticized what they say is wasteful spending abroad.Those criticisms have been supercharged since Trump’s return with the administration demonizing USAID employees and claiming — without evidence — that the aid agency is rife with fraud.- Racist social posts -Musk and his so-called Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, have rampaged through agencies that most Americans have for decades taken for granted or ignored.While Democrats have struggled to find footing to halt the moves, court challenges are slowly taking shape.An attempt by Trump to overturn the constitutional guarantee to birthright citizenship has been blocked by a judge, and on Thursday another judge paused the federal worker buyouts program, pending arguments on Monday.Musk, the South African-born CEO of SpaceX and Tesla, ran into controversy last week with reports he and his team were accessing sensitive Treasury Department data and systems.An internal assessment from the Treasury called the DOGE team’s access to federal payment systems “the single biggest insider threat the Bureau of the Fiscal Service has ever faced,” US media reported.Adding to the drama, one member of the DOGE team resigned after it emerged that he had advocated racism and eugenics on social media.On Friday, following backing for the sacked 25-year-old from Trump, Musk said he would reinstate the staffer.The staffer, according to posts uncovered by the Wall Street Journal, said just last year that he was “racist before it was cool.”Vice President JD Vance weighed in Friday saying he did not not think “stupid social media activity should ruin a kid’s life,” while criticizing the reporter for trying to “destroy people.””So I say bring him back.”

Donald Trump will make history on Sunday when he becomes the first sitting US President to attend the Super Bowl, writing a new chapter in an often-strained relationship with the NFL that has been marked by decades of animosity.A keen sports fan, Trump’s links to America’s most popular sport stretch back to the early 1980s, when he first sought to join the exclusive club of NFL team owners by attempting to purchase the Baltimore Colts.Thwarted on that occasion, he went on to buy a team in the United States Football League (USFL), set up as a spring-summer alternative to the autumn-winter NFL. Trump was subsequently the driving force behind an acrimonious lawsuit filed by the USFL which accused the NFL of operating a monopoly, with the goal of forcing a USFL-NFL merger.Although a jury found in favor of Trump’s USFL, the league was awarded only $3 in damages, effectively leading to the league’s decision to close in 1986 amid multi-million dollar losses.Trump’s first presidential term, meanwhile, witnessed a series of running battles against the NFL and its players, most notably following Colin Kaepernick’s decision to kneel during the playing of the US national anthem in protest at racial injustice.”Wouldn’t you love to see one of these NFL owners, when somebody disrespects our flag, to say, ‘Get that son of a bitch off the field right now. He’s fired!'” Trump roared at a September 2017 rally in Alabama.That led to a wave of player protests across the NFL, with more than 200 players kneeling during the national anthem in solidarity with Kaepernick and in defiance of Trump’s rhetoric.”Divisive comments like these demonstrate an unfortunate lack of respect for the NFL, our great game and all of our players,” NFL commissioner Roger Goodell said in response to Trump’s remarks.Several teams from the NFL and other sports opted to skip the traditional White House reception offered to championship-winning teams in a snub to Trump. The Philadelphia Eagles, Super Bowl winners in the 2017-2018 season, were disinvited by the White House after several players said they would not attend. – Sporting foothold -Yet just like the expansion of his electoral base during the presidential campaign, Trump has gradually found a foothold in sport over the past year.On Monday he welcomed the Florida Panthers ice hockey team to the White House in recognition of their National Hockey League championship victory last season.A day later, the White House confirmed that Trump would become the first US president to attend the Super Bowl in person, joining around 74,000 other fans at Sunday’s showpiece between the Kansas City Chiefs and Philadelphia Eagles.Amy Bass, a professor of sports studies at Manhattanville University in New York, says Trump’s decision to attend the Super Bowl is “political.””Even if he is going because he loves football … it is a political move because he is the president of the United States and everything he does is political,” Bass told AFP.Some have interpreted the NFL’s decision to remove the words “End Racism” from the end zone at this weekend’s Super Bowl as a concession to the “anti-woke” stance of the new Trump administration.However NFL chief Goodell insisted on Monday that the league remained firmly committed to diversity programs, despite the Trump administration’s calls for similar initiatives in government and elsewhere to be scrapped.”We got into diversity efforts because we felt it was the right thing for the National Football League … we’ve proven to ourselves that it does make the NFL better,” Goodell said.Players at Sunday’s Super Bowl have reacted positively to Trump’s attendance, with Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce calling it a “great honor.”That could potentially lead to some awkwardness between Kelce and his pop icon girlfriend, Taylor Swift. Swift endorsed Trump’s election rival Kamala Harris last year, prompting Trump to write on social media: “I hate Taylor Swift.”The Super Bowl’s high-profile halftime concert on Sunday could also be an opportunity for anti-Trump sentiment, with rapper Kendrick Lamar, who has been critical of the president in the past, headlining the show.  Bass wonders how fans at the Superdome might respond on Sunday, given the Eagles’ recent history with Trump following the 2018 row.”Here’s the thing about using a stadium or a ball park as a political arena: you have absolutely no idea what the crowd is going to do, because you, the politician, are not why anyone is there,” Bass said.”You’d be hard pressed to find a city that hates Donald Trump more than Philadelphia, so….might they be disrespectful? Yes. And that’s a shame. Because the office of the president deserves respect.”But Donald Trump changed the rules on respect, so all’s fair.”

US tech billionaire Elon Musk said Friday he was reinstating a deputy who quit a job giving him access to the sensitive personal data of millions of Americans after the staffer was linked to a racist social media account.Marko Elez, 25, resigned from Musk’s self-styled Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) Thursday when The Wall Street Journal uncovered a welter of offensive posts on the account, including a boast from last July that “I was racist before it was cool.” Musk — US President Donald Trump’s close confidante and point man on spending cuts — asked his 216 million X followers if he should reinstate “@DOGE staffer who made inappropriate statements via a now deleted pseudonym.” More than three-quarters of the 385,000 respondents voted “yes,” prompting Musk to announce: “He will be brought back. To err is human, to forgive divine.”X relaxed its enforcement of offensive rhetoric — reinstating many banned far-right figures — after it was acquired in 2022 by Musk, whose infamous raised-arm salute during Trump’s inauguration drew comparisons to a Nazi salute.The world’s richest man has drawn criticism at home and in Europe for his vocal support for the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party and repeatedly insulting the US ally’s political leaders.”Normalize Indian hate,” the account associated with Elez posted in September, as Musk was facing a barrage of criticism from the Trumpist far right for his support for hiring skilled foreign workers in the tech sector.In another post, it reportedly said it “would not mind at all if Gaza and Israel were both wiped off the face of the Earth.”Elez’s resignation came after a court ruled that he and another DOGE worker could continue to access the personal information of millions of Americans kept in Treasury payment systems.His prospects for redemption quickly improved as Vice President JD Vance — whose wife and children have Indian heritage — wrote a post blaming the media for the disgraced official’s downfall.”Here’s my view: I obviously disagree with some of Elez’s posts, but I don’t think stupid social media activity should ruin a kid’s life,” said Vance. “We shouldn’t reward journalists who try to destroy people. Ever. So I say bring him back. If he’s a bad dude or a terrible member of the team, fire him for that.”Trump — who has embarked on an aggressive purge of initiatives to counter discrimination in government — later told reporters in the White House he supported Vance’s stance.