China pledges support for overseas students after Trump’s latest attack on Harvard – US politics live | US news

President Donald Trump said on Friday that he is recommending a straight 50% tariff on goods from the European Union starting on 1 June, saying the EU has been hard to deal with on trade.

“The European Union, which was formed for the primary purpose of taking advantage of the United States on TRADE, has been very difficult to deal with,” Trump said on Truth Social. “Our discussions with them are going nowhere!”

President Donald Trump said on Friday that Apple would have to pay a 25% tariff if phones sold in the country were not made within its borders.

Shares of Apple dropped 2.5% in premarket trading on Trump’s warning, dragging down U.S. stock index futures lower.

“I have long ago informed Tim Cook of Apple that I expect their iPhones that will be sold in the United States of America will be manufactured and built in the United States, not India, or anyplace else,” Trump said in a post on Truth Social.

“If that is not the case, a Tariff of at least 25% must be paid by Apple to the U.S.”

It is not clear if Trump can levy a tariff on an individual company.

The Department of Veterans Affairs, the nation’s largest integrated healthcare system, has been plunged into crisis amid canceled contracts, hiring freezes, resignations, layoffs and other moves by the Trump administration and Elon Musk’s so-called “department of government efficiency” (Doge), internal agency documents obtained by the Guardian show.

The documents paint a grim picture of chaos across the department’s sprawling network of 170 veterans affairs (VA) hospitals and more than 1,300 outpatient clinics, which serve 9 million US military veterans.

At the Danville VA medical center, in rural Illinois near the Indiana border, so many nurses resigned that hospital administrators were forced to close the acute care unit to new patients.

The dysfunction has also included a backlog of 2,298 unread radiology exams in Orlando, Florida, and the cancellation of a dozen rheumatology appointments in Montrose, New York. In Battle Creek, Michigan, a spate of resignations, early separation offers and a hiring freeze has led to a “critical” shortage of police officers responsible for protecting VA patients.

The Guardian’s investigation, based on a review of “issue briefs” filed within the last month to the agency’s central office by staff at more than a dozen hospitals, comes at a time of increased scrutiny of the Trump administration’s handling of the VA.

Iranian and US negotiators will resume talks on Friday in Rome to resolve a decades-long dispute over Iran’s nuclear ambitions, despite Tehran’s supreme leader warning that clinching a new deal might be insurmountable amid clashing red lines.

The stakes are high for both sides, Reuters reports. President Donald Trump wants to curtail Tehran’s potential to produce a nuclear weapon that could trigger a regional nuclear arms race. The Islamic Republic, for its part, wants to be rid of devastating sanctions on its oil-based economy.

Iranian foreign minister Abbas Araqchi and Trump’s Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff will hold a fifth round of talks, through Omani mediators, despite both Washington and Tehran taking a tough stance in public over Iran’s uranium enrichment.

Although Iran insists the talks are indirect, US officials have said the discussions – including the latest round on 11 May in Oman – have been both “direct and indirect”.

Araqchi, who arrived in Rome with his two deputies, wrote on X: “ … Zero nuclear weapons = we Do have a deal. Zero enrichment = we do NOT have a deal. Time to decide”.

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters on Thursday that Trump believes negotiations with Iran are “moving in the right direction”.

Tehran and Washington have both said they prefer diplomacy to settle the impasse, but remain deeply split on several red lines that negotiators will have to circumvent to reach a new nuclear deal and avert future military action.

A federal judge extended on Thursday a temporary block on a bid by president Donald Trump’s administration to lay off hundreds of thousands of federal employees, saying he needed permission from Congress before restructuring the US government.

In her order, US district judge Susan Illston barred agencies from mass layoffs, a key piece of Trump’s plans to downsize or eliminate many federal agencies, pending the outcome of a lawsuit by unions, nonprofits and municipalities, Reuters reported.

On 9 May, Illston had blocked about 20 agencies from making mass layoffs for two weeks and ordered the reinstatement of workers who had already lost their jobs.

In Thursday’s order, she largely continued the relief provided in the temporary restraining order, with some refinement.

The administration has asked the US supreme court to pause Illston’s temporary ruling, saying she improperly infringed on Trump’s constitutional powers to control the executive branch.

That bid is likely to be moot after Thursday’s ruling, which the Trump administration can immediately appeal.

President Donald Trump’s trade negotiators are pushing the EU to make unilateral tariff reductions on US goods, saying without concessions the bloc will not progress in talks to avoid additional 20% “reciprocal” duties, the Financial Times reported on Friday.

US trade representative Jamieson Greer is preparing to tell European trade commissioner Maroš Šefčovič on Friday that a recent “explanatory note” shared by Brussels for the talks falls short of US expectations, the newspaper said citing unnamed sources.

The FT added that the European Union has been pushing for a jointly agreed framework text for the talks but the two sides remain too far apart.

The US imposed 25% tariffs on EU cars, steel and aluminium in March and 20% tariffs on other EU goods in April.

It then halved the 20% rate until 8 July, setting a 90-day window for talks to reach a more comprehensive tariff deal.

South Korea’s defence ministry said on Friday that Seoul and Washington had not had discussions about the withdrawal of some US troops stationed in the country.

The ministry made the comment in response to a report by the Wall Street Journal that said the US was considering pulling out roughly 4,500 troops from South Korea, Reuters reported.

One option being considered was to relocate some of the troops to other locations in the Indo-Pacific region including Guam, according to the report, which cited unnamed US military officials.

There are currently 28,500 US troops stationed in South Korea.

Good morning and welcome to the US politics live blog. I’m Tom Ambrose and I will be bringing you the latest news lines over the next few hours.

The Trump administration revoked Harvard University’s ability to enroll international students in its escalating battle with the Ivy League school, saying thousands of current students must transfer to other schools or leave the country.

The Department of Homeland Security announced the action Thursday, saying Harvard has created an unsafe campus environment by allowing “anti-American, pro-terrorist agitators” to assault Jewish students on campus. It also accused Harvard of coordinating with the Chinese Communist Party, saying it hosted and trained members of a Chinese paramilitary group as recently as 2024.

“This means Harvard can no longer enroll foreign students and existing foreign students must transfer or lose their legal status,” the agency said in a statement.

Harvard enrolls almost 6,800 foreign students at its campus in Cambridge, Massachusetts, accounting for more than a quarter of its student body. Most are graduate students, coming from more than 100 countries.

It comes as China’s foreign ministry said today that it will safeguard the legitimate rights and interests of its overseas students and scholar.

US actions will undoubtedly affect its image and credibility, said Mao Ning, spokesperson for the ministry, during a regular press briefing, adding that educational cooperation between China and the US benefits both parties.

In other news:

• The US justice department charged the lone suspect in a brazen attack that killed two young Israeli embassy staff members outside the Jewish museum in downtown Washington DC with murder of foreign officials and other crimes. Court documents released on Thursday charged Elias Rodriguez, 31, of Chicago, with the Wednesday night killings that left the US capital in shock and were condemned by world leaders as “horrible” and “antisemitic”. According to the filing, the suspect told police after his arrest: “I did it for Palestine, I did it for Gaza.”

• Mahmoud Khalil, the detained Palestinian activist, was allowed to hold his one-month-old son for the first time after a federal judge blocked the Trump administration’s efforts to keep the father and infant separated by a plexiglass divider, reports the Associated Press. The visit today came ahead of a scheduled immigration hearing for Khalil, a legal permanent resident and Columbia University graduate who has been held in a Louisiana jail since 8 March.

• The North Dakota governor Kelly Armstrong accidentally vetoed $35m for the state’s housing budget. When Armstrong took up an agency budget bill approved by the legislature, he thought he vetoed a couple of line items. But he vetoed millions for North Dakota’s housing budget. Now the state is figuring out how to deal with the unusual problem of a mistaken veto.

• The supreme court declined to reinstate independent agency board members fired by Donald Trump. The court’s action extended an order chief justice John Roberts issued in April that had the effect of removing two board members whom Trump fired from agencies that deal with labor issues, including one with a key role for federal workers as the president aims to drastically downsize the workforce. The decision Thursday keeps on hold an appellate ruling that had temporarily reinstated Gwynne Wilcox to the National Labor Relations Board and Cathy Harris to the Merit Systems Protection Board.

• Donald Trump announced on Truth Social that Bernie Navarro, the founder of the Miami lender Benworth Capital, will be the ambassador to Peru. Navarro is an ally and donor to secretary of state, Marco Rubio. Benworth was sued last year by the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco.

• Donald Trump showed a screenshot of a Reuters video taken in the Democratic Republic of Congo as part of what he falsely presented on Wednesday as evidence of mass killings of white South Africans, Reuters itself reports. “These are all white farmers that are being buried,” said Trump, holding up a print-out of an article accompanied by the picture during a contentious Oval Office meeting with South African President Cyril Ramaphosa. In fact, the video published by Reuters on February 3 and subsequently verified by the new agency’s fact check team, showed humanitarian workers lifting body bags in the Congolese city of Goma. The image was pulled from Reuters footage shot following deadly battles with Rwanda-backed M23 rebels.