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After the Trump rocked the continent with his threat to take Greenland, the prime minister praises Europe as a ‘sleeping giant’

Britain’s “Brexit years” are over, Sir Keir Starmer will tell world leaders on Saturday as he calls for closer security ties with Europe – and less reliance on Donald Trump’s United States.

After transatlantic tensions flared following the US president’s repeated threats to take Greenland from Denmark, the prime minister will call for Europe to curb its dependence on the US, while praising the continent as a “sleeping giant” whose economic and military might can defeat its enemies.

After surviving the most tumultuous week of his premiership so far, including an attempt to oust him from office, Sir Keir will also warn that turning inwards, as the UK did during Brexit, would amount to “surrender” in a perilous era.

On paper, the Americans are getting what they’ve long demanded.

A Europe that spends much more on defense and is much less reliant on Washington for its security. But Donald Trump may not like what American pressure is creating.

Leader after leader from Europe took to the podium of the Munich Security Conference on Friday and talked about boosting military budgets and reframing the transatlantic alliance as a “NATO 3.0.”

But then they followed that with hard-edged appeals to European patriotism and calls for the continent to boost its own arms, space and tech sectors to be less dependent on outsiders — including the United States.

Strike appears to be first in Caribbean since November, with vast majority of recent strikes happening in the Pacific

The US military’s Southern Command, which oversees operations in Latin America and the Caribbean, said it had carried out its second deadly boat strike this week. The command said the latest strike killed three suspected drug smugglers in the Caribbean on Friday.

“Intelligence confirmed the vessel was transiting along known narco-trafficking routes in the Caribbean and was engaged in narco-trafficking operations,” the Southern Command said in a statement.

The command included a video of the strike with its announcement, which shows a boat traveling through the water as it explodes into flames after being hit with what looks like a missile.

President of Protect Our Care issues one-word statement to US health and human services secretary: ‘Resign’

A prominent healthcare advocacy group is calling for the US health secretary, Robert F Kennedy Jr, to step down from his post after he downplayed Covid risks by saying: “I’m not scared of a germ. I used to snort cocaine off of toilet seats.”

Kennedy, who was appointed secretary of the federal health and human services (HHS) department despite his avowed anti-vaccine activism, made that remark on the 12 February episode of Theo Von’s podcast This Past Weekend.

The president of Protect Our Care, Brad Woodhouse, issued a one-word statement on Kennedy’s comments: “Resign.”

Lawmakers left Washington for a long weekend without resolving an impasse over much-criticized agency’s funding

The Department of Homeland Security has begun a partial shutdown, after funding for the much-criticized agency expired, with a range of services, including domestic flights and the US Coastguard, now vulnerable to disruption.

The shutdown was all but confirmed on Thursday, after the Senate failed to clear the 60-vote threshold needed to pass the DHS appropriations bill and lawmakers left Washington for a long weekend without resolving the impasse.

Democrats say they won’t help approve more funding until new restrictions are placed on federal immigration operations after the fatal shooting of Alex Pretti and Renee Good in Minneapolis last month.

Wendy’s is closing several hundred U.S. restaurants and increasing its focus on value after a weaker-than-expected fourth quarter.

The Dublin, Ohio-based company said Friday that its global same-store sales, or sales at locations open at least a year, fell 10% in the October-December period. That was worse than the 8.5% drop expected by analysts polled by FactSet.

U.S. same-store sales fell even further in the fourth quarter. Wendy’s said late last year that it planned to close underperforming U.S. restaurants, but it gave more details about those closures Friday.

Leqaa Kordia was taken into custody last March, nearly a year after being arrested at a protest at Columbia

Calls are mounting for the release of a Palestinian woman who has been held in immigration detention for nearly a year following her arrest at a pro-Palestine protest, with several elected officials weighing in after a medical emergency renewed attention to her case.

Leqaa Kordia, a 33-year-old originally from the West Bank, was arrested in April 2024 at a protest against Israel’s war in Gaza outside Columbia University. (She was not a student there.) The charges against her were dismissed the following day, but last March, nearly a year after the protest, she was taken into custody when she checked into an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) office in New Jersey.

Kordia has been held at the Prairieland detention facility in Texas since then, despite a judge twice ruling that she poses no threat and may be released on bond.

New website lists only limited number of medications – and many of them cost less in generic form elsewhere

The Trump administration has launched TrumpRx, but there are other sites offering discounts on more medications, and the new government site will appeal to a very limited group of patients, experts say.

Trump has promised reforms on the unusually high drug prices in the US, and he called the announcement “the largest reduction in prescription drug prices in history” at a press conference on Thursday. Yet the site only lists 43 medications, more than half of which are available in generic form at significantly cheaper prices elsewhere.

The site may make some weight loss and fertility drugs not covered by insurance more accessible, but overall “it is not a solution for high drug prices in the United States”, said Sean Sullivan, professor of health economics and policy and former dean of pharmacy at the University of Washington.

“Consumers can probably get a cheaper version of these medicines through insurance and their pharmacies, or via cash pay services like Cost Plus Drugs than by the deals offered through TrumpRx,” Sullivan said.

Nikhil Gupta faces up to 40 years over alleged India-backed attempt to kill Gurpatwant Singh Pannun

The Indian man who US prosecutors accused of plotting to kill a prominent US-based activist after being recruited by an agent of the Indian government has pleaded guilty to three criminal charges, according to a spokesperson for the US attorney’s office in Manhattan.

Nikhil Gupta faces a maximum 40 years in prison after he pleaded guilty to murder-for-hire, conspiracy to commit murder-for-hire, and money-laundering charges in connection to the failed attempt to assassinate Gurpatwant Singh Pannun, a US resident who is an advocate for a sovereign Sikh state in northern India.

“Nikhil Gupta plotted to assassinate a US citizen in New York City,” said US attorney Jay Clayton. “He thought that from outside this country he could kill someone in it without consequence, simply for exercising their American right to free speech. But he was wrong, and he will face justice. Our message to all nefarious foreign actors should be clear: steer clear of the United States and our people.”

Images confirm xAI is continuing to defy EPA regulations in Mississippi to power its flagship datacenters

Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence company is continuing to fuel its datacenters with unpermitted gas turbines, an investigation by the Floodlight newsroom shows. Thermal footage captured by Floodlight via drone shows xAI is still burning gas at a facility in Southaven, Mississippi, despite a recent Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) ruling reiterating that doing so requires a state permit in advance.

State regulators in Mississippi maintain that since the turbines are parked on tractor trailers, they don’t require permits. However, the EPA has long maintained that such pollution sources require permits under the Clean Air Act.

Any exemption for these machines “could leave these engines subject to no emission standards at all”, the agency wrote in a January final ruling.

Congressperson says US president and Marco Rubio are tearing apart transatlantic alliance

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has accused Donald Trump of tearing apart the transatlantic alliance with Europe and of seeking to introduce an “age of authoritarianism”, as she condemned his administration’s foreign policy in front of its allies’ top policymakers at the Munich Security Conference.

Speaking at a panel on populism on Friday, Ocasio-Cortez outlined what she called an “alternative vision” for a leftwing US foreign policy, challenging the Trump administration’s shift to the right in front an audience of US allies who have grown increasingly wary of the US’s increasingly nationalist – and militaristic – global posture.

In her remarks, Ocasio-Cortez said Trump and Marco Rubio, the secretary of state, were “looking to withdraw the United States from the entire world so that we can turn into an age of authoritarianism”, as they sought to “carve out a world where Donald Trump can command the western hemisphere and Latin America as his personal sandbox, where Putin can saber rattle around Europe and try to bully our own allies there”.

Agency says application rejected due to lack of ‘adequate and well controlled’ trial, but experts say ‘they’re just coming up with reasons’

A senior US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) official says Moderna’s clinical trial on a new, potentially more effective flu vaccine was a “brazen failure” and that the FDA is now calling it into question.

The FDA unexpectedly refused to consider Moderna’s application for a flu shot based on messenger RNA (mRNA) technology in a decision that experts say is already having a chilling effect on vaccine development.

Officials say the issue is the design of the study, in which control group participants over the age of 65 should have received a high-dose flu shot instead of a standard flu shot.

Outside experts say the reasons seem to go deeper. “It’s all pretext and obfuscation when the real agenda is rejecting conventional science and serving a predetermined anti-vaccine agenda,” said Richard Hughes IV, a partner with Epstein Becker Green and law professor at George Washington University.