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President Trump signed an executive order Thursday declaring Lake Ontario will now be known as Lake America, effective immediately. Speaking in the Oval Office after the signing, he tied the move directly to the escalating trade fight with Ottawa, saying Canada "has been ripping us off for a long time on trade." Canadian officials have no obligation to recognize the change on their side of the border.
Leavitt closed out her tenure Thursday, calling the exit "very bittersweet" in a farewell round of interviews. She's departing to spend more time with her young children and will move to the Trump-aligned super PAC MAGA Inc. while continuing to advise the president from the outside. No permanent successor has been formally named yet.
The administration has halted immigrant visa interviews at U.S. embassies and consulates globally while consular officers complete mandatory training on the revived public charge rule. It's the latest sign the immigration crackdown has expanded well beyond illegal crossings into legal pathways. Applicants already in the pipeline face indefinite delays.
Crude has held near $82 a barrel for a third straight day, but retail gasoline hasn't followed it down, and the White House is feeling the squeeze. Trump is meeting with American refiners and fuel retailers to press on the gap between wholesale and pump prices. Inflation is still running well above the Fed's 2 percent target, driven largely by energy.
An oil tanker was hit by an unknown projectile near Oman and caught fire, the second vessel strike in the strait this week after a Liberian-flagged ship took a hit to its engine room Monday. The crew extinguished the blaze. It landed as Tehran and Muscat announced progress on a temporary navigational corridor through the waterway.
What began as a campaign against Iran's nuclear program has narrowed to one overriding objective: reopening Hormuz. Trump says there will be no direct talks with Tehran, leaning instead on economic pressure through what Treasury calls Operation Economic Outcast. Meanwhile the Iranian rial hit an all-time low past two million to the dollar, with inflation topping 100 percent.
Under Secretary of War Elbridge Colby was in Brussels Thursday meeting NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte, praising several European allies for raising defense spending. The visit comes as Washington reassesses its footprint on the continent through the Europe Posture Review, following announced troop drawdowns. Allies are watching closely for how deep the reorientation goes.
The Justice Department and FBI seized three domains running QTFY, a China-based outfit that allegedly sold hacking services to Beijing's Ministry of State Security and the PLA. Investigators say the group stole data from more than 300 organizations, including defense contractors, universities and financial institutions, and breached three Energy Department national laboratories plus NIH. Its tools scanned the internet for weak systems and laundered traffic through hijacked routers and cameras.
Regulators cleared Rasonque, generic name daraxonrasib, from Revolution Medicines for metastatic pancreatic adenocarcinoma, roughly six and a half months ahead of schedule. In a 500-patient trial, median overall survival reached 13.2 months versus 6.7 months on standard chemotherapy. The tablet targets multiple forms of the RAS protein that drives tumor growth.
The Russian cybergang Qilin says it breached the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, an incident the Justice Department has formally designated a major cybersecurity event. ATF says the affected system sits apart from its enterprise network, that eForms is unaffected, and that operations haven't been disrupted. Second Amendment groups are still uneasy, given the volume of firearms records the agency holds.
