Donald Trump has announced he will be imposing a five percent tariff on all goods incoming from Mexico that will gradually increase unless America’s southern neighbour moves to bring an end to US-bound illegal immigration.
Ahead of his visit to the UK next week, Mr Trump has praised Conservative leadership contender Boris Johnson and Brexit Party leader Nigel Farage as “good guys” and said he “may” meet with them in London.
The president has meanwhile continued his criticism of outgoing FBI special counsel Robert Mueller and accused him of nurturing a personal vendetta while also contradicting the White House regarding the USS John S McCain, a US Navy destroyer he denies asking to have moved “out of sight” in Japan during his recent tour as a snub to the late war hero the vessel is named after.
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He's now bashing Mexico AND the Democrats.
Under proposed rule changes by the Trump administration to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), formerly known as food stamps, junk snack items like canned spray cheese, beef jerky, nacho dip, pimento-stuffed olives and frozen burritos could be reclassified as daily staples, according to The Washington Post.
Changes by Trump's Food and Nutrition Service would represent a rollback of an Obama-era mandate ordering shops to provide SNAP recipients with access to healthier foods. The 2014 Farm Bill authorised the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) to draft regulations that would require participating stores to stock a wider variety of healthy products in an attempt to promote improved standards of nutrition in low-income neighborhoods, where families often lack access to fresh fruits and vegetables.
SNAP retailers were required to stock seven kinds of qualifying foods in four staple groups: dairy products, fruits and vegetables, breads and cereals, and meats, poultry and fish. Congress, however, prevented the USDA from implementing the new stocking rules until the agency had agreed its definition of what foods qualified.
The Trump administration is now pressing ahead with changes would that see items previously deemed "accessory foods" - i.e. ice cream, crisps, sodas, whipped cream, pastries and other snacks - shunted into the staple category.
That's more like it.
Dull breakfast tweets from Trump so far - a quote from Tucker Carlson's Fox show and a montage of last night's Colorado Springs address.
Come on Don, you can do better than that.
Maggie Haberman of The New York Times suggests the reason he was so animated about Mueller yesterday was because he hasn't actually read the man's report so only seeing him speak publicly "made it real".
Here's Elizabeth Warren on ABC's The View, talking tough on impeachment but sailing perilously close to saying "Lock him up!"
Professor and American political historian Allan Lichtman, who has correctly predicted the outcome of the last nine presidential elections, says Trump will be re-elected in 2020 unless Democrats "grow a spine" and press ahead with impeachment proceedings against him.
“It’s a false dichotomy to say Democrats have a choice between doing what is right and what is constitutional and what is politically right. Impeachment is also politically right,” Lichtman told CNN’s Brooke Baldwin on Wednesday.
Check out the man's psychedelic tie.
In a rare and surprising showing of bipartisan bonding, New York congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Texas senator Ted Cruz - two people with very little in common - have agreed on the need for a new law banning ex-members of Congress from leveraging their political experience into lucrative lobbying gigs.
Another pop legend, Nancy Sinatra, considers this development "Groovy".
In more left-field news, pop icon Cher has been heavily criticised on Twitter for saying Donald Trump deserves to be sexually assaulted in prison and made a "Toy Boy of Big Bubba".
Hillary Clinton has joined in Nancy Pelosi's attack on Facebook after the site refused to take down a doctored video of the House speaker in which her speech appeared slurred and incoherent, Clinton branding it "sexist trash".
"I think they have proven - by not taking down something they know is false - that they were willing enablers of the Russian interference in our election," Pelosi told KQED News regarding the video.
"We have said all along, poor Facebook, they were unwittingly exploited by the Russians. I think wittingly, because right now they are putting up something that they know is false. I can take it... but [Facebook is] lying to the public."
"We have said all along, poor Facebook, they were unwittingly exploited by the Russians. I think wittingly, because right now they are putting up something that they know is false. I can take it... but [Facebook is] lying to the public."
China is to set up a blacklist of "unreliable" foreign firms causing harm to its interest, apparently a direct retaliation to President Trump's attacks on Chinese technology giant Huawei.
The move could affect hundreds of major firms including Google, Apple and UK-based chip maker ARM.
China will set up a mechanism listing foreign enterprises, organisations and individuals that don’t obey market rules, violate contracts and cut off supplies for non-commercial reasons or severely damage the legitimate interests of Chinese companies, its Ministry of Commerce said.
Here's Ben Chapman's report.
Also on the border wall, North Dakota construction firm Fisher Sand & Gravel - favoured for the job by President Trump after it promised to complete the project quicker and cheaper than any of its competitors - turns out to have a history of red flags against it, including more than $1m (£795,000) in fines for environmental and tax violations, according to CNN.
"A decade ago, a former co-owner of the company pleaded guilty to tax fraud, and was sentenced to prison", the network reports.
"The company also admitted to defrauding the federal government by impeding the IRS. The former executive, who's a brother of the current company owner, is no longer associated with it."
The Washington Post says Trump has "aggressively" pressured the Army Corps of Engineers to award Fisher a contract, apparently more concerned with getting a "deal" than the firm's checkered history.
CEO Tommy Fisher has, naturally, guested regularly on Fox News, SiriusXM Patriot and Breitbart News to promote the wall in principle and lobby for the gig. Well, he would, wouldn't he?
New Mexico landowner Brian Kolfage has been served a "cease and desist" order by the city of Sunland Park after attempting to build a private border wall in support of President Trump with $20m (£15.9m) raised through a crowdfunding website.
Kolfafge was accused of failing to fill out an application for the project and ranted on Twitter: "Here we go!! Liberals trying to intimidate us!" Mr Kolfage tweeted. "SOUND THE ALARM."
The architect of the Trump administration’s effort to add a controversial citizenship question to the 2020 US census once wrote in near-explicit terms that the addition would benefit white people and Republicans while hurting minorities, according to newly uncovered documents.
Asking census respondents whether they are US citizens "would clearly be a disadvantage to the Democrats" and "advantageous to Republicans and Non-Hispanic Whites", wrote Tom Hofeller, the mastermind behind the effort and an expert on redistricting for the Republican National Committee.
The boundaries of political maps are based upon district populations and critics of the citizenship question have estimated it would lead to an "undercount" of some 4.2m Hispanic residents across the country.
Here's Clark Mindock with more.
Israel's prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu has had a humbling week, forced to concede defeat in his bid to form a coalition government and agree to a new general election.
But here he is posing with a print-out map of his country signed by his dear friend, Donald Trump.
That scrawl next to the Golan Heights - which the US recently moved to recognise as Israeli territory in defiance of the international community, who argue it has been merely occupied since 1967 - says "Nice".
Trump's national security adviser John Bolton is set to to present evidence of Iranian complicity in the attacks on oil tankers in the Gulf to the United Nations.
Speaking in London, the veteran hawk warned "threat was not over" from Iran, that the country "will be held accountable" and that there will be a "strong response" from the US should further acts of violence be carried out.
Bolton made his charge amid rising tension in the region after the US dispatched an aircraft carrier strike group and B-52 bombers and ordered the deployment of additional ground troops.
Here's our diplomatic editor Kim Sengupta.
Pete Buttigieg, the popular Democratic 2020 contender, Indiana mayor and war veteran, has taken President Trump to task over the USS John S McCain affair.
"This is not a show. Our military is not a prop", he tweeted. "Ships and sailors are not to be toyed with for the benefit of a fragile president’s ego."
A scandal that apparently will not leave Trump alone - not least because he keeps reviving it - is his feud with the late war hero, Arizona senator and Republican presidential candidate John McCain.
The latest installment of the president's heated running battle with a man who died in August 2018 is over his team's request that an American destroyer, the USS John S McCain, stationed in Yokosuka be "kept out of sight" on his recent trip to Japan.
The story, arising from an email exchange between US Indo-Pacific Command and the White House, was first reported by The Wall Street Journal and his since been confirmed by several aides.
Trump told reporters on the South Lawn yesterday that he "was not a big fan" of the deceased "in any way, shape or form" but: "I would never do a thing like that."
"Now, somebody did it because they thought I didn't like him, OK? And they were well-meaning, I will say," he added, insisting he was kept in the dark.
His subsequent tweet regarding the matter, in which he dismissed it as "Fake News", saw him contradict his own press office.
His acting defence secretary Patrick Shanahan has likewise said he did not authorise attempts to move the ship and has asked his staff to investigate.
Joe Biden, by contrast, made light work of the question of McCain's legacy when asked about it, as surely any reasonable person would have.
Trump continued his eccentric patter in Colorado Springs, shaking hands with 1,000 graduates, squeezing the muscles of one like a weird uncle and expressing his apparent belief that stealth fighter planes are in fact invisible. You know, like Wonder Woman's jet.
On Mueller's decision not to offer a verdict on whether or not the president obstructed justice - despite listing 11 possible instances of indictable behaviour in the second volume of his report - attorney general William Barr has told CBS This Morning: "I personally felt he could've reached a decision".
Rather than do so, which he concluded was outside of the remit of his office, Mueller left that up to Barr and his former deputy AG Rod Rosenstein, who moved quickly to rule out any charges against President Trump when they took delivery of the 448-page dossier in late March, several weeks before a redacted version of the report was put before the public.
During the clip released on Thursday, Barr pushed back on the idea that Mueller was handing over to Congress the decision on whether to take action against Trump.
"I am not sure what he was suggesting, but you know the Department of Justice (DOJ) doesn’t use our powers of investigating crimes as an adjunct to Congress," Barr said, sitting beside a log fire in clothing Alan Partridge might have described as "sports casual".
He also told the show he did not believe Obama-era DoJ officals committed treason "as a legal matter".
Trump also had plenty to say about Mueller to reporters gathered on the South Lawn of the White House ahead of his flying visit to address graduating cadets at an Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs.
After rowing back on his Russia gaffe and suggesting the Kremlin would have preferred Hillary Clinton in power (Vladimir Putin said otherwise at their summit in Helsinki last summer)...
...He accused Mueller of being a "never-Trumper" and took him to task for failing to investigate systemic Democratic bias within the Justice Department, a Republican pet theme.
On impeachment, he said the following, revealing his apparent ignorance about how the process might work.
