WASHINGTON: President-elect Joe Biden selected New Mexico Rep. Deb Haaland as his nominee for interior secretary on Thursday, a historic pick that would make her the first Native American to lead the powerful federal agency that has wielded influence over the nation’s tribes for generations.
Tribal leaders and activists around the country, along with many Democratic figures, cheered Haaland’s selection after urging Biden for weeks to choose her to lead the Department of Interior. They stood behind her candidacy even when concerns that Democrats might risk their majority in the House if Haaland yielded her seat in Congress appeared to threaten her nomination.
With Haaland’s nomination, Indigenous people will for the first time in their lifetimes see a Native American at the table where the highest decisions are made — and so will everyone else, said OJ Semans, a Rosebud Sioux vote activist who was in Georgia on Thursday helping get out the Native vote for two Senate runoffs. “It’s made people aware that Indians still exist,” he said.
Haaland, 60, is a member of the Pueblo of Laguna and, as she likes to say, a 35th-generation resident of New Mexico. The role of interior secretary would put her in charge of an agency that has tremendous sway not only over the nearly 600 federally recognized tribes, but also over much of the nation’s vast public lands, waterways, wildlife, national parks and mineral wealth.
Haaland tweeted after the news was made public that “growing up in my mother’s Pueblo household made me fierce.
“I’ll be fierce for all of us, our planet, and all of our protected land,” she pledged.
Biden plans to introduce Haaland — and other picks for his Cabinet — at an event Saturday in Wilmington, Delaware.
Her selection breaks a 245-year record of non-Native officials, mostly male, serving as the top federal official over American Indian affairs. The federal government often worked to dispossess Native Americans of their land and, until recently, to assimilate them into white culture.
“You’ve got to understand — you’re taking Interior full circle,” said Arizona Rep. Raul Grijalva, chair of the House Natural Resources Committee and a champion of Haaland for the job. “For years, its legacy was the disenfranchisement of the Native people of this country, of displacement, of cultural genocide.”
With Haaland’s nomination, “that in itself is a huge message,” Grijalva said.
Navajo Nation President Jonathan Nez called it “truly a historic and unprecedented day for all Indigenous people.”
“I am SO ELATED,” the head of progressive Democrats’ Sunrise Movement, Varshini Prakash, tweeted. “This will be the first time an Indigenous person — and a badass climate champion woman at that — will hold any presidential cabinet position. Congratulations to @JoeBiden for making history.″
Get-out-the-vote activists believe their efforts, and the Native vote, helped flip Arizona in particular for Biden and secure the presidency.
“There’s a feeling something is changing,” said Ashley Nicole McCray, a member of the Absentee Kiowa tribe of Oklahoma and of an indigenous environmental coalition. “Finally, we’ve come to this point where Indigenous sentiment is no longer being silenced.”
But Biden’s pick could further deplete, at least temporarily, the narrow majority Democrats maintain in the House. Biden has already selected several lawmakers from the chamber, including Louisiana Rep. Cedric Richmond and Ohio Rep. Marcia Fudge, to serve in his administration.
Some on Biden’s transition team had expressed concerns about dipping further into the already thinned Democratic House majority for another senior administration posting. But Biden decided that the barrier-breaking aspect of her nomination and her experience as vice chair of the House Committee on Natural Resources made her the right pick for the moment.
The president-elect has been methodically filling the posts in his Cabinet, adding North Carolina environmental official Michael Regan as his nominee to lead the Environmental Protection Agency. Biden introduced former South Bend, Indiana, mayor Pete Buttigieg earlier this week as his transportation secretary and announced Thursday that former Michigan Gov. Jennifer Granholm was his nominee for energy secretary.
In a statement Thursday night, Biden said he had assembled a “brilliant, tested, trailblazing team” that “will be ready on day one to confront the existential threat of climate change.”
“They share my belief that we have no time to waste to confront the climate crisis, protect our air and drinking water, and deliver justice to communities that have long shouldered the burdens of environmental harms,” the president-elect said.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi made it clear Wednesday that Biden had her blessing to choose Haaland, saying she would make an “excellent choice” as interior secretary. South Carolina Rep. James Clyburn, the No. 3 Democrat in the House and a close Biden ally, also supported Haaland for the job.
Haaland is one of the first two Native American women in the House. She told The Associated Press before her nomination that see the difference her position in Congress made for ordinary Native Americans who came to her with business before the federal government.
“They felt comfortable just launching into the issues they wanted,” Haaland told the AP in an interview before her appointment. They would say, for example, “Oh, we don’t have to explain tribal sovereignty to you,” meaning tribes’ constitutionally guaranteed status as independent nations.
Haaland previously worked as head of New Mexico’s Democratic Party, as tribal administrator and as an administrator for an organization providing services for adults with developmental disabilities.
Born to a Marine veteran father and a Navy veteran mother, Haaland describes herself as a single mother who sometimes had to rely on food stamps. She says she is still paying off student loans after college and law school for herself and college for her daughter.
New Mexico Sen. Tom Udall, who is retiring after 22 years in Congress and was initially considered the front-runner for interior secretary, congratulated Haaland on her selection, calling it “momentous and well-earned.’’
Previously, the highest-ranking administration official known to have Native American heritage was Charles Curtis, who served as Herbert Hoover’s vice president and whose mother was one-quarter Kaw tribe.
In historic pick, Biden taps native American as interior secretary
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In historic pick, Biden taps native American as interior secretary
- Haaland's selection breaks a 245-year record of non-Native officials serving as the top federal official over American Indian affairs
- Haaland, 60, is a member of the Pueblo of Laguna and, as she likes to say, a 35th-generation resident of New Mexico
Britain and France try again to tackle English Channel migrant crossings
At a UK-France summit on Thursday that caps Macron’s three-day stay, senior officials from the two countries will try to seal deals on economic growth, defense cooperation and – perhaps trickiest of all – unauthorized migration.
Macron and Starmer also will visit a military base and dial in to a planning meeting of the ” coalition of the willing, ” a UK- and France-backed plan for an international force to guarantee a future ceasefire in Ukraine.
During a meeting inside 10 Downing St. on Wednesday, the two leaders agreed that tackling small boat crossings “is a shared priority that requires shared solutions, including a new deterrent to break the business model” of people-smuggling gangs, Starmer’s office said.
It said they would aim for “concrete progress” on Thursday.
Channel crossings are a longstanding challenge
Britain receives fewer asylum-seekers than Mediterranean European countries, but sees thousands of very visible arrivals each year as migrants cross the 20-mile (32 kilometer) channel from northern France in small, overcrowded boats.
About 37,000 people were detected crossing the channel in 2024, and more than 20,000 made the crossing in the first six months of 2025, up by about 50 percent from the same period last year. Dozens of people have died trying to reach the English coast.
Britain and France agree the dangerous and unregulated crossings are a problem, but have long differed on how to address it.
The UK wants France to do more to stop boats leaving the beaches, and has paid the Paris government hundreds of millions of pounds (dollars, euros) to increase patrols and share intelligence in an attempt to disrupt the smuggling gangs.
“We share information to a much greater extent than was the case before,” Starmer told lawmakers in the House of Commons on Wednesday. “We’ve got a new specialist intelligence unit in Dunkirk and we’re the first government to persuade the French to review their laws and tactics on the north coast to take more effective action.”
Macron says Britain must address “pull factors” like the perception it is easy for unauthorized migrants to find work in the UK Many migrants also want to reach Britain because they have friends or family there, or because they speak English.
Solutions have proved elusive
As far back as 2001, the two countries were discussing ways to stop migrants stowing away on trains and trucks using the tunnel under the channel.
Over the following years, French authorities cleared out camps near Calais where thousands of migrants gathered before trying to reach Britain. Beefed up security sharply reduced the number of vehicle stowaways, but from about 2018 people-smugglers offered migrants a new route by sea.
“You see that pattern again and again, where smuggling gangs and migrants try to find new ways to cross from France to the UK,” said Mihnea Cuibus, a researcher at the University of Oxford’s Migration Observatory. “The authorities crack down on that, and then gradually you see migrants and gangs try to adapt to that. And it becomes a bit of a game of cat and mouse.”
Cooperation on stopping the boats stalled after Britain’s acrimonious split from the European Union in 2020, but in the past few years the countries have struck several agreements that saw the UK pay France to increase police and drone patrols of the coast.
Britain’s previous Conservative government came up with a contentious plan in 2022 to deport asylum-seekers arriving by boat to Rwanda. Critics called it unworkable and unethical, and it was scrapped by Starmer soon after he took office in July 2024.
Britain hopes for a returns deal with France
Starmer is staking success on closer cooperation with France and with countries further up the migrants’ routes from Africa and the Middle East.
British officials have been pushing for French police to intervene more forcefully to stop boats once they have left the shore, and welcomed the sight of officers slashing rubber dinghies with knives in recent days.
France is also considering a UK proposal for a “one-in, one-out” deal that would see France take back some migrants who reached Britain, in return for the UK accepting migrants seeking to join relatives in Britain.
Macron said the leaders would aim for “tangible results” on an issue that’s “a burden for our two countries.”
Cuibus said irregular cross-channel migration would likely always be a challenge, but that the measures being discussed by Britain and France could make an impact, “if they’re implemented in the right way.
“But that’s a big if,” he said.
EU chief von der Leyen faces no confidence vote
- A major complaint is that von der Leyen’s center-right camp has increasingly teamed up with the far-right to further its agenda, most notably to roll back environmental rules
STRATSBOURG: EU chief Ursula von der Leyen faces a confidence vote Thursday that has little chance of succeeding but has exposed frictions between her backers and complaints about her leadership style.
European lawmakers will vote on the rare challenge pushed by a far-right faction against the European Commission president at around midday (1000 GMT) in Strasbourg.
Addressing parliament this week, von der Leyen dismissed the no-confidence motion as a conspiracy theory-laden attempt to divide Europe, dismissing its supporters as “anti-vaxxers” and Russian President Vladimir “Putin apologists.”
She urged lawmakers to renew confidence in her commission arguing it was critical for Europe to show unity in the face of an array of challenges, from US trade talks to Russia’s war in Ukraine.
The no-confidence motion was initiated by Romanian far-right lawmaker Gheorghe Piperea.
He accuses von der Leyen of a lack of transparency over text messages she sent to the head of the Pfizer pharmaceutical giant when negotiating Covid vaccines.
The commission’s failure to release the messages — the focus of multiple court cases — has given weight to critics who accuse its boss of centralized and opaque decision-making.
That is also a growing refrain from the commission chief’s traditional allies on the left and center, who have used the vote to air their grievances.
A major complaint is that von der Leyen’s center-right camp has increasingly teamed up with the far-right to further its agenda — most notably to roll back environmental rules.
Centrist leader Valerie Hayer told parliament this week that von der Leyen’s commission was “too centralized and sclerotic” before warning that “nothing can be taken for granted.”
“Pfizergate” aside, Romania’s Piperea accuses the commission of interfering in his country’s recent presidential election, in which pro-European Nicusor Dan narrowly beat EU critic and nationalist George Simion.
That vote came after Romania’s constitutional court scrapped an initial ballot over allegations of Russian interference and massive social media promotion of the far-right frontrunner, who was barred from standing again.
Piperea’s challenge is unlikely to succeed.
It has support from some groups on the left and part of the far right — including the party of Hungary’s nationalist Prime Minister Viktor Orban.
“Time to go,” Orban tweeted on Wednesday alongside a photo of von der Leyen.
But Piperea’s own group, the ECR, is split. Its largest faction, the party of Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, said it would back the EU chief.
The two largest groups in parliament, the center-right EPP and the center-left Socialists and Democrats, have also flatly rejected the challenge, which needs two-thirds of votes cast, representing a majority of all lawmakers to pass.
UK, France to enable ‘co-ordinated’ nuclear deterrent
- Western Europe's two nuclear powers agree to “refresh” their defense ties
- Vow to jointly respond to any “extreme threat to Europe”
LONDON: The UK and France will declare that the two nations’ nuclear deterrents, while independent, can be co-ordinated and that they will jointly respond to any “extreme threat to Europe,” both countries said Wednesday.
The declaration, to be signed Thursday, will state that the respective deterrents of both countries remain under national control “but can be co-ordinated, and that there is no extreme threat to Europe that would not prompt a response by both nations,” the UK’s Ministry of Defense (MoD) and the French presidency said in an overnight statement.
French President Emmanuel Macron will sign the agreement Thursday as he wraps up his three-day state visit to the UK with a bilateral summit, where the allies will “reboot” defense ties with a focus on joint missile development and nuclear co-operation.
France’s leader and UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer will co-host the London summit, with the two sides also expected to discuss maintaining support for Ukraine and curbing undocumented cross-Channel immigration.
Ahead of the gathering, which follows two days of varied events spanning pomp and politics, trade and culture, France and Britain announced their “defense relationship” will be “refreshed.”
It will see London and Paris order more Storm Shadow cruise missiles — long-range, air-launched weapons jointly developed by the two countries and called SCALP by the French — while stepping up work on a replacement system.
The missiles have been shipped to Ukraine in significant numbers in recent years to help Kyiv in its war with Russia.
The new partnerships herald a new “Entente Industrielle” making “defense an engine for growth,” said the MoD.
“As close partners and NATO allies, the UK and France have a deep history of defense collaboration and today’s agreements take our partnership to the next level,” Starmer said in the statement.
Starmer and Macron will also on Thursday dial into a meeting of the so-called “coalition of the willing” on Ukraine, a group of countries backing the embattled nation.
AI giant Nvidia becomes first company to reach $4 tn in value
- Nvidia now has a market value greater than the GDP of France, Britain or India
- The California chip company’s latest surge is helping drive a recovery in the broader stock market
NEW YORK: Nvidia became the first company to touch $4 trillion in market value on Wednesday, a new milestone in Wall Street’s bet that artificial intelligence will transform the economy.
Shortly after the stock market opened, Nvidia vaulted as high as $164.42, giving it a valuation above $4 trillion. The stock subsequently edged lower, ending just under the record threshold.
“The market has an incredible certainty that AI is the future,” said Steve Sosnick of Interactive Brokers. “Nvidia is certainly the company most positioned to benefit from that gold rush.”
Nvidia, led by electrical engineer Jensen Huang, now has a market value greater than the GDP of France, Britain or India, a testament to investor confidence that AI will spur a new era of robotics and automation.
The California chip company’s latest surge is helping drive a recovery in the broader stock market, as Nvidia itself outperforms major indices.
Part of this is due to relief that President Donald Trump has walked back his most draconian tariffs, which pummeled global markets in early April.
Even as Trump announced new tariff actions in recent days, US stocks have stayed at lofty levels, with the tech-centered Nasdaq ending at a fresh record on Wednesday.
“You’ve seen the markets walk us back from a worst-case scenario in terms of tariffs,” said Angelo Zino, technology analyst at CFRA Research.
While Nvidia still faces US export controls to China as well as broader tariff uncertainty, the company’s deal to build AI infrastructure in Saudi Arabia during a Trump state visit in May showed a potential upside in the US president’s trade policy.
“We’ve seen the administration using Nvidia chips as a bargaining chip,” Zino said.
Challenged by DeepSeek
Nvidia’s surge to $4 trillion marks a new benchmark in a fairly consistent rise over the last two years as AI enthusiasm has built.
In 2025 so far, the company’s shares have risen more than 21 percent, whereas the Nasdaq has gained 6.7 percent.
Taiwan-born Huang has wowed investors with a series of advances, including its core product: graphics processing units (GPUs), key to many of the generative AI programs behind autonomous driving, robotics and other cutting-edge domains.
The company has also unveiled its Blackwell next-generation technology allowing more super processing capacity. One of its advances is “real-time digital twins,” significantly speeding production development time in manufacturing, aerospace and myriad other sectors.
However, Nvidia’s winning streak was challenged early in 2025 when China-based DeepSeek shook up the world of generative AI with a low-cost, high-performance model that challenged the hegemony of OpenAI and other big-spending behemoths.
Nvidia’s lost some $600 billion in market valuation in a single session during this period.
Huang has welcomed DeepSeek’s presence, while arguing against US export constraints.
At the forefront of “AI agents”
In the most recent quarter, Nvidia reported earnings of nearly $19 billion despite a $4.5 billion hit from US export controls limiting sales of cutting-edge technology to China.
The first-quarter earnings period also revealed that momentum for AI remained strong. Many of the biggest tech companies — Microsoft, Google, Amazon and Meta — are jostling to come out on top in the multi-billion-dollar AI race.
A recent UBS survey of technology executives showed Nvidia widening its lead over rivals.
Zino said Nvidia’s latest surge reflected a fuller understanding of DeepSeek, which has ultimately stimulated investment in complex reasoning models but not threatened Nvidia’s business.
Nvidia is at the forefront of “AI agents,” the current focus in generative AI in which machines are able to reason and infer more than in the past, he said.
“Overall the demand landscape has improved for 2026 for these more complex reasoning models,” Zino said.
But the speedy growth of AI will also be a source of disruption.
Executives at Ford, JPMorgan Chase and Amazon are among those who have begun to say the “quiet part out loud,” according to a Wall Street Journal report recounting recent public acknowledgment of white-collar job loss due to AI.
Shares of Nvidia closed the day at $162.88, up 1.8 percent, finishing at just under $4 trillion in market value.
Trump promises West African leaders a pivot to trade as the region reels from sweeping aid cuts
- Trump described the nations represented at the meeting as “all very vibrant places with very valuable land, great minerals, and great oil deposits, and wonderful people”
- West African countries are among the hardest hit by the dissolution of USAID
WASHINGTON: President Donald Trump promised West African leaders a pivot from aid to trade during a White House meeting Wednesday as the region reels from the impact of sweeping US aid cuts.
Trump said he sees “great economic potential in Africa” as the leaders of Liberia, Senegal, Gabon, Mauritania and Guinea-Bissau boasted of their countries’ natural resources and heaped praise on the US president, including their thanks for his help in settling a long-running conflict between Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo.
Trump described the nations represented at the meeting as “all very vibrant places with very valuable land, great minerals, and great oil deposits, and wonderful people” — a definite shift from his first term, when he used a vulgar term to describe African nations.
The meeting comes amid a shift in US global and domestic priorities under Trump’s leadership. Earlier this month, US authorities dissolved theUS Agency for International Development and said it was no longer following what they called “a charity-based foreign aid model” and instead would focus on partnerships with nations that show “both the ability and willingness to help themselves.”
The five nations whose leaders were meeting Trump represent a small fraction of US-Africa trade, but they possess untapped natural resources. Senegal and Mauritania are important transit and origin countries when it comes to migration and along with Guinea-Bissau are struggling to contain drug trafficking, both issues of concern for the Trump administration.
In their speeches, each African leader adopted a flattering tone to commend Trump for what they described as his peace efforts across the world and tried to outshine one another by listing the untapped natural resources their nations possess.
“We have a great deal of resources,” said Mohamed Ould Ghazouani, president of Mauritania, listing rare earths, as well as manganese, uranium and possibly lithium. “We have a lot of opportunities to offer in terms of investment.”
Last month, the US administration facilitated a peace deal between Rwanda and Congo to help end the decadeslong deadly fighting in eastern Congo, while enabling the US to gain access to critical minerals in the region. But analysts said it won’t end the fighting because the most prominent armed group said it does not apply to it.
During the meeting, Trump described trade as a diplomatic tool. Trade “seems to be a foundation” for him to settle disputes between countries, he said.
“You guys are going to fight, we’re not going to trade,” Trump said. “And we seem to be quite successful in doing that.”
He added, addressing the African leaders: “There is a lot of anger on your continent.”
As he spoke, the US administration continued sending out notifications to developing countries about higher tariff rates effective from August 1. The five Western African nations were not among them.
The portion of the lunch meeting that was open to the press didn’t touch much on the loss of aid, which critics say will result in millions of deaths.
“We have closed the USAID group to eliminate waste, fraud and abuse,” Trump said Wednesday. “And we’re working tirelessly to forge new economic opportunities involving both the United States and many African nations.”
West African countries are among the hardest hit by the dissolution of USAID. The US support in Liberia amounted to 2.6 percent of the country’s gross national income, the highest percentage anywhere in the world, according to the Center for Global Development.
Liberian President Joseph Nyuma Boakai in a statement “expressed optimism about the outcomes of the summit, reaffirming Liberia’s commitment to regional stability, democratic governance and inclusive economic growth.”
During the meeting, Trump reacted with visible surprise to Boakai’s English-speaking skills, which he praised. English is the official language of Liberia, which was established in the early 1800s with the aim of relocating freed African slaves and free-born Black citizens from the United States.
Gabon, Liberia, Mauritania and Senegal are among 36 countries that might be included in the possible expansion of Trump’s travel ban.
Experts said that the meeting highlighted the new transactional nature of the relationship between the US and Africa.
“We are likely to see a trend where African countries will seek to leverage resources such as critical minerals, or infrastructure such as ports, to attract US commercial entities in order to maintain favorable relations with the current US administration,” aid Beverly Ochieng, an analyst at Control Risks, a security consulting firm. “Each of the African leaders sought to leverage natural resources in exchange for US financial and security investments, and appeared to view the US intervention in the Democratic Republic of Congo as a model to further cooperation.”
