This concludes our live coverage of the second Trump administration for the day. Here are the latest developments:

• Donald Trump delivered an angry, poorly judged and deeply partisan speech of more than an hour to the rescheduled White House correspondents’ association dinner. The president began with some light banter, but later trotted out mockery of Democrats that thrills his fans at rallies but fell entirely flat in the room.

• Among the oddest moments of the event was the presentation of awards to journalists for their coverage of the Trump White House as the president sat on stage and initially congratulated the winners. Later in the evening, he scolded two of the winners by name for their work.

• California’s attorney general, Rob Bonta, has praised an agreement reached on Friday with Warner Bros and Paramount that halts their proposed merging until 1 June 2027, or until a court rules on a challenge to the merger filed by a coalition of 12 attorneys general, whichever comes first.

• The Democratic National Committee (DNC) voted on Friday to select South Carolina to lead the party’s 2028 presidential primary calendar. While the Palmetto state will kick off the calendar, five other states will follow with nominating contests ahead of Super Tuesday.

• A ⁠federal appeals court declined on Friday to halt a judge’s order that blocks the Trump administration from imposing a $100,000 fee on new H-1B visas for highly skilled foreign workers.

Donald Trump just, finally, concluded more than an hour of remarks, in a speech which devolved from light, after-dinner banter into a bitter series of complaints and attacks on political rivals and journalists.

Having initially played the good sport, by shaking the hands of White House correspondents who won awards for tough coverage of his administration earlier in the evening, Trump used the later portion of his remarks to single out for attack two reporters whose work irked him: Kaitlan Collins of CNN and Josh Dawsey of the Wall Street Journal.

“I want to personally congratulate CNN’s Kaitlan Collins on receiving her award. It’s all about me. It’s a fake. She shouldn’t get the award,” Trump said of the correspondent’s coverage of his ill-tempered confrontation with Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy in 2025.

“It was a fake, but I didn’t mind,” Trump said, unconvincingly. “I said, Caitlyn, congratulations, but it was fake. There’s no question about it.”

The president then repeated the same sexist attack he has made on Collins previously, telling her that she should smile more when she questions him on subjects like the victims of Jeffrey Epstein, the late sex offender Trump socialized with for nearly two decades.

“But she’s a young, attractive woman. She never smiles,” Trump said. “I said, ‘Kaitlan, do you have a smile? Smile. You have a nice position. You’re at CNN fake news. You should be a happy person.’ So smile, Kaitlan, just smile.”

“Then you have writer Josh Dawsey,” Trump said at another point. “He’s been killing me for years … and yet tonight, he shakes my hand. He hugs me. Everything nice. He kills me.”

“He writes more stories than any human being. There’s nobody that writes more than Josh. He’ll write four stories about me a day,” Trump went on. “He’s hit the big time and he’s a workhorse, and yet he’s almost unhireable.”

“He’s almost unhireable,” the president repeated, despite acknowledging that Dawsey, a former Washington Post reporter, had, in fact, been hired by the Wall Street Journal

As he nears the hour mark, Donald Trump’s speech has turned more and more into a rehash of the rally speeches he gives to acclaim from his fondest supporters, with a series of nasty comments about journalists and bitter attacks on political rivals mixed in with complaints about his press coverage.

The room is notably silent as he rambles on and on, mixing lame prepared gags that kill with his fans, but elicit close to no laughter from a room of nonpartisan reporters.

The president almost entirely abandoned the traditional self-deprecating remarks his predecessors have delivered at this event, choosing instead to attack Democrats, boast about what he calls his accomplishments, repeat false claims about investment figures and put on a “Trump 2028” cap.

A typical example of his humor was calling James Talarico, “Tal-a-freako”, a political attack line masquerading as a gag.

While Donald Trump’s speech turned into a long rant, attacking a string of Democrats in the same deeply partisan tone he uses at rallies and in rightwing media appearances, with much of the same material he uses habitually to attack political figures including Gavin “Newscum”, Kamala Harris, Ilhan Omar, Elizabeth Warren and Chuck Schumer, he was oddly conciliatory to his predecessor Barack Obama, as he recalled being roasted by the then-president at the 2011 White House correspondents’ association dinner.

“I have been here actually quite a few times, people don’t realize, and there’s one time in particular when Barack Hussein Obama hosted it,” Trump said. “Do you know who that is? And he hit me hard, but actually he hit me with respect.”

“I have watched this clip thousands of times,” Trump said. “They keep playing it because they think that was the evening I decided to run for president. It was not. In fact, I loved the evening. I looked at my wife, I said, ‘Can you believe it? All these people, that’s all they’re doing, is talking about me. I love this dinner.’

“It’s true, and Obama was nice. He, you know, it’s amazing how things work out. He actually showed a picture of the White House with a big Trump on top. Like I put a sign and, you know, I’m sort of doing that when you think about it, right? I mean, I think he wasn’t really wrong, but no, he was respectful. He was good.”

The roast, Trump insisted, “had nothing to do” with his decision to run for president five years later.

Trump’s speech includes a few canned jokes, one at the expense of Robert F Kennedy, before turning into a generally quite nasty roast of his political rivals and media figures he dislikes.

“I hope that everyone finally got to enjoy their entire very delicious beef tenderloin, very special beef. And I want you all to know that Bobby Kennedy, who’s right here personally, ran over the cow in his car. And he cut it up, and he brought it here for you to eat tonight,” Trump said. “So it’s very fresh. And Bobby also suggested an appetizer featuring his favorite cut of male raccoon roadkill. But we drew the line at that.”

The president then turned to his rivals, with a series of jabs that elicited little laughter, and felt personal.

Among his targets: Chris Christie and Jerry Nadler, who were mocked for being overweight.

“For the heaviest of the heavyweights,” he said, imagining a fight, “we will have sloppy Chris Christie, one of the sloppiest … human beings you’ll ever meet, fighting. I would say I could mention the governor of Chicago, but I’m going to mention instead Jerry Nadler. And they’re fighting for a big piece of cheesecake. Big fat piece of cheesecake,” Trump said.

He then mocked in deeply partisan ways that would go over at Republican events but fell flat here congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, for pausing before responding to a question on foreign policy at the Munich Security Conference, and Adam Schiff, the Democratic senator from California who led the first impeachment inquiry into Trump, over his attempt to force Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelenskyy into opening a sham investigation of Joe Biden.

The president also repeated familiar attacks on Don Lemon, Rosie O’Donnell and Bruce Springsteen.

As he often does, Donald Trump has turned his remarks to the White House correspondents’ association into an excuse to argue for the ballroom he is building on the site of the destroyed East Wing of the White House.

“Everyone is now really warming up the new White House military center, drone port, highly protected ballroom,” Trump said.

“We have our ballroom. The windows are this thick,” Trump said. “I said to the people, ‘Well, if a bullet hits, what happens?’ ‘Nothing. Nothing. It bounces right off. Sir, this is the greatest bulletproof glass.’”

“We’re building something’s going to be amazing, and in light of what we went through, I think, people understand it,” Trump said, suggesting that the attack on the previous dinner could have been prevented by hosting it in his ballroom.

“It’s going to be amazing, a phenomenal– one of the biggest drone ports anywhere in the world, right on the roof,” Trump went on, and on. “Protecting the White House, not only the ballroom and what’s underneath. You know, it’s supposed to be a top military secret, what’s underneath.”

“Very complex stuff. It was the military’s dream to have it built,” Trump added. “I wanted to have a ballroom because for 150 years they wanted it. And then the generals came to see me and they said, ‘Sir, you’re building something. This gives us an opportunity to do something that will be so unbelievable’.”

In his remarks to the White House Correspondent’s Association dinner, Donald Trump began by lightly jabbing at the journalists in the room, saying: “Many of you were there with me and some showed extreme bravery, like Pete Hegseth, Steve Miller, Tom Homan.”

“They were standing on tables, and most of you were under the tables,” the president said.

He moved on to praising the Secret Service officer who confronted the man charged attacking the dinner in April, Cole Allen.

Trump mentioned that he had been “psyched” before the previous dinner to deliver the stinging critique of the correspondents he had prepared, but said he had decided to give a more gentle speech at the rescheduled event. This speech, he said, “is going to be such a letdown”.

His remarks so far have been generally light, after-dinner speaker fare.

“This place is the, really, the largest group of Trump derangement syndrome people ever put together at one time,” the president said.

“Your lives were really in danger the last time,” Trump said. “But on the plus side, your careers were saved.”

Donald Trump just started his remarks to the White House correspondents’ association dinner, which is being live-streamed, by saying that the journalists are “amazing people. A lot of people that I like, some I don’t like at all, but I respect most of them. I must say that you do a great job, amazing job, and it’s an honor.”

He then moved on to bragging about having previously run the hotel the dinner is being held in. He followed with a joke about running for a third term, before adding: “I’m only kidding.”

A series of awards for reporting on the Trump White House have just been handed out to journalists Donald Trump has harangued and threatened for their unflattering portrayals of him and his administration.

At one stage, Trump theatrically shrugged as the CNN anchor Wolf Blitzer mentioned that the president had filed a $20bn lawsuit “revealing the reporter Khadeeja Safdar’s home address” after the Wall Street Journal revealed the bawdy birthday letter sent in his name to Jeffrey Epstein, the late sex offender Trump socialized with for nearly two decades.

Trump acted the good sport, shaking hands with all of the award winners, including Kaitlan Collins, the CNN correspondent he once criticized for not smiling as she tried to ask him about Epstein’s victims.

Another award went to the Getty Images photographer Andrew Harnik, for his Oval Office photo of Trump standing impassive as a man who had fainted during an event was cared for by others. The photograph inspired a Saturday Night Live sketch recreating the moment in which the comedian who played Trump, James Austin Johnson, said the president’s response was to “just stand there and stare like a sociopath”.

Across town, the American Civil Liberties Union is holding its own awards ceremony on Friday night at another Washington DC venue.

In what sounds like a dispatch from a parallel universe, while Donald Trump attends a ceremony in support of the press corps he routinely derides, the ACLU ceremony is honoring Bruce Springsteen and Colin Kaepernick, for their “profound contributions to American thought and culture”, and the civil rights lawyers Vanita Gupta, Erwin Chemerinsky and Elizabeth Foster.

Earlier this year, Springsteen allowed the ACLU to use his song Born in the USA for an ad explaining what was at stake in Trump v Barbara, the US supreme court case that later overturned Trump’s attempt to deny birthright citizenship to the children of noncitizens.

The awards ceremony is hosted by Laverne Cox, the actor and advocate for transgender rights.

Before Donald Trump speaks to the White House Correspondents’ Association, a post-dinner ceremony celebrating journalism and the first amendment began with praise for journalists in the room who covered the attack on the prior dinner in April from Weija Jiang, the WHCA president.

After Jiang said “no matter how complicated or tense the relationship is between the press and the presidency, what we share is far more important than anything else and that is our duty: to serve the American people”, her remarks were met with polite applause from most of the people room, but when the camera cut to Trump, he was not clapping.

The rescheduled White House correspondents’ dinner is under way at the Waldorf Astoria in Washington DC, three months after the original event in April was interrupted by gunfire, after a man rushed through a security checkpoint outside the ballroom.

Donald Trump was on stage for the opening remarks by the White House Correspondents’ Association president, CBS News correspondent Weija Jiang.

“Let’s try this again, because one thing about this press corps is, we always have a follow-up,” she began. “Many of you were also with us in April. You came as guests, but within moments, you went to work.”

“An assassination attempt on our president is an attack on democracy itself,” she said. “Tonight, our message is this: we are back. We will not be intimidated. We refuse to let an act of violence have the final word.”

Trump is expected to speak soon. His press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, promised that the president who attacks the non-partisan media relentlessly as “the enemy of the people” would deliver “a combination of unifying yet vicious, and serious yet hilarious” remarks.

The Democratic National Committee (DNC) voted on Friday to select South Carolina to lead the party’s 2028 presidential primary calendar. While the Palmetto state will kick off the calendar, five other states will follow with nominating contests ahead of Super Tuesday – the biggest single day of voting in the presidential primary season in early March.

The order is as follows:

• South Carolina, 22 January 2028

• Nevada, 1 February 2028

• New Hampshire, 8 February 2028

• New Mexico, 15 February 2028

• Michigan, 22 February 2028

• Virginia, 29 February 2028

The vote from the Rules and Bylaws Committee, in which South Carolina beat its nearest rival, Nevada, by 26-19, has to be ratified by the full DNC next month.

Christale Spain, the South Carolina Democratic Party chair welcomed the decision.

“South Carolina Democrats are grateful to the DNC Rules and Bylaws Committee for again selecting South Carolina to lead off the 2028 Democratic presidential primary,” the Spain said in a statement. “This decision demonstrates our party’s commitment to competing in the South and recognizes the importance of black and rural voters in shaping the Democratic Party’s future.”

The news was less welcome to Democrats in New Hampshire, where a state law requires presidential primaries to be held “7 days or more immediately preceding the date on which any other state shall hold a similar election”.

“The Democratic National Committee’s decision today is wrong for Democrats, wrong for New Hampshire, and wrong for the country,” New Hampshire’s two senators and two members of Congress, all Democrats, said in a joint statement.

“New Hampshire’s First in the Nation primary is a tested proving ground in a closely contested swing state that forges better candidates and better presidents and despite what DNC insiders say, that hasn’t changed,” they added. “As a state with highly engaged voters, we put candidates through their paces and thoroughly vet them. And our small size means that actually meeting and talking to voters takes precedence over super PACs or mega-donor-fueled campaigns.”

A ⁠federal appeals court declined on Friday to halt a judge’s order that blocks the Trump administration from imposing a $100,000 fee on new H-1B visas for highly skilled foreign workers.

The court’s order, from a three-judge panel of the US court ‌of appeals for the first Circuit, in Boston, declined to put on ​hold a lower court judge’s 8 June ⁠ruling that struck down an effort by the Department of Homeland Security and the state department to to implement a presidential proclamation by Donald Trump requiring that a $100,000 payment accompany all H-1B visa applications. The lower court found that the fee constituted ‌an ​unlawful ​tax Congress never authorized.

Stephen Miller, the White House deputy chief of staff for policy, was asked on Friday why Donald Trump waited until the day after the US signed a nuclear cooperation agreement with Saudi Arabia to announce that the deal was contingent on the kingdom agreeing to normalize relations with Israel by joining the Abraham accords.

The Saudis have repeatedly said that they will not establish diplomatic relations with Israel until a Palestinian state is established in the West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza, territories Israel has occupied since 1967.

“The president has been very clear with Saudi Arabia,” Miller said, adding that he expects “their normalization of relations with Israel and their entry in the Abraham accords”.

“The president, better than any American alive, understands the psychology of the kingdom, the players in the kingdom and what that relationship looks like,” he went on.

“So he understands Saudi psychology. He understands the Saudi plan, the future,” Miller added. “So we should just assume and trust that the president knows exactly what to do and how to do it.”

Speaking to reporters in the Oval Office on Friday, Donald Trump repeated his claim that Israel would not exist today had he lost the 2024 presidential election to Kamala Harris.

Asked about his comment on Thursday that he was “considering a massive attack” on Iran, Trump renewed his threat and said: “If I thought they were anywhere near getting a nuclear weapon – if I wasn’t elected, Israel would, in my opinion, not be around any more. They would have been hit by a nuclear weapon.”

The president went on to claim, as he has previously, that “Barack Hussein Obama’s nuclear deal” with Iran “was a road to a nuclear weapon”. That claim is contradicted by the preamble to the 2015 agreement, which said: “Iran reaffirms that under no circumstances will Iran ever seek, develop or acquire any nuclear weapons” and by the mechanism spelled out in the deal for rigorous international inspections Iran agreed to as a condition of the agreement.

Trump then claimed that only his order to bomb nuclear sites in Iran in 2025 had prevented that nation from building nuclear weapons and using them to destroy Israel.

“If that didn’t happen, they would have a nuclear weapon and there would be no Israel,” Trump said. “If they had a nuclear weapon, they would have used that. There might not be a Middle East as we know it today.”

Trump’s claim that Iran was about to build nuclear weapons is contradicted by the 2025 US intelligence assessment presented to Congress by his own director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, before the strikes he ordered, which clearly stated that the collective assessment of 18 US intelligence agencies was “that Iran is not building a nuclear weapon and Supreme Leader Khamenei has not authorized the nuclear weapons program he suspended in 2003”.

Trump’s claim that Iran would have used nuclear weapons to destroy Israel also clashes with the logic of deterrence, specifically the doctrine known as mutually assured destruction, since Iran is aware that Israel already has nuclear weapons it could use to destroy Iran.

The fact that Israel’s Jewish population is intertwined with a Palestinian population of similar size across a very small geographical area also makes it hard to see how the Jewish state could be destroyed in a nuclear attack that did not also kill vast numbers of Palestinians, and lay waste to Islam’s third holiest site, Jerusalem’s al-Aqsa mosque.

Still, Trump’s comments do echo claims his partner in the war on Iran, Benjamin Netanyahu, has made for decades, and repeated last month at a policy summit in Jerusalem.

“We have prevented Iran from carrying out a plan to annihilate us, and today they would have had a nuclear weapon, an atomic bomb to do so,” Israel’s prime minister said. “We removed an existential danger. And had we not acted … Iran would have had atomic bombs. And let me tell you something, they would have used them.”

Asked by a Fox News correspondent in the Oval Office on Friday where he stands on the question of whether LeBron James or Michael Jordan is the greatest-ever basketball player, Donald Trump chose to answer an entirely different question: which NBA great likes him better?

“Well, Michael Jordan’s a guy that’s a friend of mine,” Trump began, turning the subject to himself.

“I play golf with him. He’s a really good guy. And I think LeBron is – maybe he’s a racist. But maybe he doesn’t like Trump, I don’t know,” the president continued, clearly still irked by LeBron James having called him a “bum” nine years ago in a social media post, after Trump cancelled a White House visit by that year’s NBA champions, the Golden State Warriors, because their star guard, Steph Curry, said he would not go. “Going to White House was a great honor until you showed up!” James posted at the time.

“I only like people that like me, so I would say Michael Jordan all the way,” Trump said.

Asked at the time why he did not want to go to the Trump White House, Curry said the message was: “That we don’t stand for basically what our president has – the things that he’s said and the things that he hasn’t said at the right times, that we won’t stand for it.”

“By acting and not going, hopefully that will inspire some change when it comes to what we tolerate in this country, what is accepted and what we turn a blind eye toward,” he added.

Donald Trump batted down concerns that the ongoing Iran war – which has seen 13 days of consecutive strikes – could cost Republicans control of Congress in the upcoming midterms.

“Despite what everybody says about the election, I’m not in a hurry,” Trump told reporters at the White House. “We have to do it right. Elections take care of themselves.”

Two US small businesses have sued the Trump administration over its latest round of tariffs, affecting more than 80 countries and aimed at targeting countries that engage in forced labor.

These, in effect, replace the blanket 10% tariff that Trump imposed in February, right after the supreme court declared many of his earlier tariffs were illegal.

However, according to the lawsuit filed in the US court of international trade by Liberty Justice Center – the same organization that challenged Trump’s tariffs that the top court struck down –the plaintiffs argue that Trump’s latest round of duties require more ‌detailed ⁠country-specific findings about “forced labor” to be legally justified.

The businesses pursuing the case are Burlap and Barrell, a spice importer based in New York, and Collective Horology, a watchmaker based in California.

The complaint argues that Section 301 of the 1974 Trade Act, which the administration has used to implement the tariffs, is “arbitrary and capricious” and asks the court to order the US trade representative to “set aside” and block the levies under the statute.

Donald Trump has threatened the European Union with “substantial” tariffs after Brussels imposed a series of steep fines on US tech giants.

In a post on his Truth Social platform, the US president wrote: “The United States of America is not a ‘PIGGYBANK’ for Europe, nor will we allow it to be!”

It comes days after Google was fined €890m ($1bn) by the EU after its search and app store services were found to have breached online competition laws.

The US will “immediately” launch an investigation “into the practice of ‘ROBBING’ American Companies and, in turn, the American Taxpayer”, Trump said. “The European Union will pay a very big price for this illegal and highly unethical conduct, which I have consistently warned them about.”

Donald Trump said that in recent meetings with Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin, both leaders assured the US president separately that they would not sell weapons to Iran.

“Considering our relationship, I take him at his word,” Trump said of the Chinese leader. Meanwhile, the US president said that the Kremlin made the same guarantees, despite the ongoing war in Ukraine. Putin understands that the US does not sell weapons to Ukraine, “but to Nato countries”, Trump said in a post on Truth Social on Friday. “They pay full price, and how those weapons are distributed, I have no idea.”

The president added: “Two major countries that people speak of often in terms of Iran are, in my opinion, not participating. If they did, it would be very bad for them – certainly not in their best interests.”

On Saturday, Maine Democrats will hold a special convention to select a nominee to replace Graham Platner for the US Senate race in November.

Troy Jackson – a logger, longtime legislator and former president of the Maine senate – is now poised to clinch the nomination. When Platner dropped out of the race earlier this month, following sexual assault allegations, it set off a frantic scramble inside the Maine Democratic party. Several contenders filed paperwork to be considered at a 25 July special convention of 601 delegates tasked with selecting a new nominee. But last weekend, all of Jackson’s serious challengers dropped out one after another, clearing a swift and unobstructed path for him.

I’ll be in Bangor for the convention and bring you the latest from the glamorous Cross Insurance Center where the delegates will gather!

Morris Katz, the former adviser to Graham Platner, has said that “knowing what we know now”, many of the ex-nominee’s controversies throughout the year “should have been enough” to end his campaign for the US Senate in Maine.

His comments are part of an interview with the New York Time, his first major-sitdown since Platner’s campaign imploded earlier this month.

Katz, as well as two other consultants who helped cherrypick Platner as the insurgent Democratic candidate, were left defeated when Platner dropped out of the race two weeks ago, after a former partner accused him of rape. Questions also circled around how thoroughly vetted the oysterman and marine veteran with no political experience was.

“The conversation around the vetting – there is no standard vetting process that would have found the credible allegation that ended the campaign. Eric Swalwell served on the House Intelligence Committee for about a decade and then saw similar allegations end his campaign,” Katz said in an interview with the New York Times.

“That being said, in hindsight, knowing what we know now, the Reddit posts alone probably should have been enough – or should have been enough. The tattoo should have been enough. The initial New York Times story on troubling behavior should have been enough,” the media strategist said, referring to the litany of controversies that plagued Platner’s run ahead of Politico story which alleged that Platner forced a woman he dated to have sex nearly five years ago, despite repeated objections.

President Donald Trump ⁠will address the White House Correspondents’ Association at a rescheduled dinner later today, nearly three months after a shooting at the Washington Hilton hotel interrupted the event.

The black-tie gathering of journalists, politicians and administration officials ⁠was called off on 25 ⁠April after a ​man tried to force his way through a security checkpoint and fired a shotgun outside the ballroom where Trump and members of his cabinet were taking their seats.

The suspect, Cole Allen, pleaded ⁠not guilty in May to charges including attempting to assassinate the president. The dinner has been moved to the Waldorf Astoria hotel and will take place under heightened security.

Secret Service director Sean Curran told reporters that an ⁠advance team was implementing a comprehensive security plan at the hotel.

“We do expect bad people to show up,” Curran said. “It’s just a reality ​of where we are, but we’re treating it no differently ‌than any other site that the ‌president goes to.”

The April incident occurred during Trump’s first presidential appearance at the correspondents’ dinner. He had boycotted ​the event in his previous years in office.

Just before a temporary levy on global imports was set to expire, the Trump administration issued a fresh wave of tariffs on more than 80 countries late on Thursday, ranging from 10% to 12.5%. The new tariffs take effect Friday morning.

It’s Donald Trump’s latest effort to continue imposing global levies without congressional approval, despite the supreme court ruling in February that found the US president had illegally used his executive power to implement his global trade policies. Trump has long maintained that the US has been paying more than its fair share in tariffs, and that increased duties are necessary to boost American manufacturing and jobs.

Here’s what to know about Trump’s latest round of tariffs:

Donald Trump has once again inspired anger and confusion in US allies and trading partners as he imposed a wave of tariffs on more than 80 countries, replacing an expiring global duty introduced earlier this year.

The new measures effectively replace blanket 10% tariffs that Trump imposed in February. The US supreme court ruled many of those were illegal. The new levies come in at between 10% and 12.5% on countries including the UK, Mexico, Canada, Australia, India, China and the 27 countries that make up the EU.

They are imposed under section 301 of the US Trade Act of 1974, and the Trump administration has said the new measures are due to the dozens of countries failing to enforce bans on goods produced by forced labor.

The imposition of the new tariffs led to Asian stock markets taking a hammering overnight. The Japanese Nikkei 225 fell 3.1%, while the Chinese SSE Composite dropped 1.4%.

Hong Kong’s Hang Seng index was the most heavily hit, down 11.4%, while the South Korean Kospi, which is dominated by its major semiconductor companies, slumped 6.2%.

It was more of a mixed picture in Europe as trading began on Friday, with the Stoxx 600, which tracks the biggest companies on the continent, dropping 0.7% before steadying to a fall of 0.1%. France’s Cac 40 initially fell almost 1% before moving into positive territory, up 0.12%.

Similarly, Germany’s Dax fell 8% before erasing losses to climb 0.51%. In the UK the FTSE 100 index rose 0.28% in early trading. For many officials digesting the news on Friday, the US rationale was hard to swallow.

“You can’t say that ⁠for the European Union,” its foreign policy chief, Kaja Kallas, said ​on the sidelines ‌of the Asean ‌meeting in Manila. “If you compare our ‌labour laws to the ones of the United States, I mean, we have paid vacations, we have very good labour conditions for our employees, so ‌it’s not really grounded.”

Hello and welcome to the US politics live blog.

Donald Trump’s move to impose a fresh round of tariffs on more than 80 countries has drawn criticism from both Democratic politicians and his own allies.

Jamieson Greer, the US trade representative, announced that the Trump administration “is imposing tariffs on more than 80 countries for their failure to impose and effectively enforce a prohibition on the importation of goods produced with forced labor”.

The tariffs will replace a 10% global duty that was due to expire for supposedly failing to crack down on forced labor. However, congresswoman Linda Sánchez, a California Democrat, denounced the pretext for the new tariffs as a sham.

“President Trump isn’t serious about combating forced labor. He’s trying to make an end-run around the Supreme Court and Congress to reimpose his illegal tariffs,” Sánchez wrote on social media.

She continued:

If he was serious, he would not be applying the same tariff rate to China, one of the worst forced labor abusers in the world, as he does to countries like Australia. Then again, unlike China, Australia, doesn’t manufacture any Trump corporation products.

This is the same administration that gutted funding to combat forced labor through cuts to the Bureau of International Labor Affairs and rolled back worker protections here at home, while encouraging companies to profit off some of the world’s worst forced labor abusers through his proposed US-China Board of Trade.

We need to take forced labor seriously. But that includes addressing our problems here at home, including by taking on the export of goods made with American prison labor. Slapping more tariffs on every country that upsets the president isn’t the way to do it.

“Trump is hell-bent on raising your prices,” congressman Brendan Boyle, a Pennsylvania Democrat said in a statement on Trump’s lastest tariffs. “His new tariffs are a nationwide sales tax that will only serve to make life harder for Americans just trying to make ends meet.”

And even the president’s own allies have raised concerns over the latest round of tariffs, Politico is reporting.

One person close to the White House, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said:

Everything that you do that’s not focused on affordability is not helpful. This might not be a negative five, but it’s a negative 0.5. Anything that you’re doing that is not on the plus side of the scale is a problem.

When you announce new tariffs, it’s not like, okay, well, let’s see what they do. It’s, ‘Oh crap, those are the bad things.’

Another White House source told Politico:

I think Republicans are comfortable with the threat, even though that has some market impacts. But actual revenue coming away from people’s pocketbooks is not what Republicans are happy with.

Any conversation about tariffs, unless it’s reducing them, is a bad conversation for Republicans.

Read the full story here:

In other developments:

• The government of Brazil has rejected the Trump administration’s claim that it, and 84 other nations, failed to enforce a ban on forced labor, and called the new 12.5% US tariff on imports from Brazil “completely arbitrary and unjustified”.

• The Pentagon’s official online list of service members killed in the ongoing Iran war does not include the four soldiers who died during renewed fighting over the weekend, despite the fact that their names were included in a Pentagon press release on the formal transfer of their remains back to the United States on Wednesday.

• The premier of Ontario, Doug Ford, said “it’s very hard to deal with President Trump when he changes his mind every single day. One day the prime minister [Canada’s Mark Carney] is with him side by side, and next thing you know, President Trump turns on him like a rabid dog.”