President Donald Trump said Friday that he’s revoking former President Joe Biden’s security clearance and ending the daily intelligence briefings he’s receiving in payback for Biden doing the same to him in 2021.

Trump made the announcement on social media shortly after arriving at Mar-a-Lago for the weekend.

“There is no need for Joe Biden to continue receiving access to classified information. Therefore, we are immediately revoking Joe Biden’s Security Clearances, and stopping his daily Intelligence Briefings,” Trump wrote. “He set this precedent in 2021, when he instructed the Intelligence Community (IC) to stop the 45th President of the United States (ME!) from accessing details on National Security, a courtesy provided to former Presidents.”

Biden didn’t immediately comment on the move.

Biden ended Trump’s intelligence briefings after Trump helped spur efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election and incited the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol. At the time, Biden said Trump’s “erratic” behavior should prevent him from getting the intel briefings.

In his post, Trump cited the special counsel report last year into Biden’s handling of classified documents, saying, “The Hur Report revealed that Biden suffers from ‘poor memory’ and, even in his ‘prime,’ could not be trusted with sensitive information.”

Trump relaxes some China tariffs

President Donald Trump signed an executive order Friday that will temporarily allow low-cost products from China to continue coming into the United States tariff-free.

The order reverses, at least for now, a decision that he made last Saturday, when he signed an executive order eliminating so-called de minimis treatment for goods from China. The de minimis rule had allowed products under $800 to come into the United States without being subject to tariffs and with less information given to customs.

That change, which went into effect Tuesday, meant that hundreds of thousands of packages coming into the United States each day from China were suddenly subjected to tariffs and requirements for much more information.

The swift change sowed confusion among retailers and shippers. Many sellers on e-commerce platforms were taken by surprise. The U.S. Postal Service temporarily stopped accepting packages from China on Wednesday, though by Thursday morning it said it would once again accept them.

Trump makes himself Kennedy Center chair

President Donald Trump announced his intention Friday to bring the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington more firmly under his control, saying he would dismiss several board members and install himself as chair.

“At my direction, we are going to make the Kennedy Center in Washington D.C., GREAT AGAIN,” Trump wrote on Truth Social, his social media platform.

Trump said he would “immediately terminate multiple individuals from the Board of Trustees, including the Chairman, who do not share our Vision for a Golden Age in Arts and Culture.”

He added: “We will soon announce a new Board, with an amazing Chairman, DONALD J. TRUMP.”

The news stunned the world of arts and culture but was not a surprise to people who speak with Trump. In the weeks after his election win, Trump has been saying to people that he wants to be the chair of the storied Kennedy Center.

U.S. pushes $7B arms sale to Israel

The State Department has formally told Congress that it plans to sell more than $7 billion in weapons to Israel, including thousands of bombs and missiles, just two days after President Donald Trump met with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at the White House.

The massive arms sale comes as a fragile ceasefire agreement between Israel and Hamas holds, even as Trump continues to tout his widely criticized proposal to move all Palestinians from Gaza and redevelop it as an international travel destination.

The sale is another step in Trump’s effort to bolster Israel’s weapons stocks. In late January, soon after he took office, he lifted the hold on sending 2,000-pound bombs to Israel. The Biden administration had paused a shipment of the bombs over concerns about civilian casualties, particularly during an assault on the southern Gaza city of Rafah.

Trump told reporters that he released them to Israel, “because they bought them.”

Trump suggests Nippon invest in U.S. Steel

President Donald Trump on Friday suggested that Nippon Steel would no longer buy U.S. Steel as planned, but the Japanese company would instead invest in the symbolically important American business.

The U.S. president mistakenly referred to Nippon Steel as “Nissan,” the Japanese automaker. But it’s Nippon Steel’s bid that generated controversy as both Trump and his predecessor in the White House, Joe Biden, vowed to block the merger.

Nippon Steel “is going to be doing something very exciting about U.S. Steel,” Trump said at a news conference with Japanese Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba. “They’ll be looking at an investment rather than a purchase.”

It was unclear what the details of the investment would be, but Trump said he would meet with the head of Nippon Steel next week and he would be involved “to mediate and arbitrate.”

Ishiba described the investment as mutually beneficial and said Japanese technology would be provided to U.S. Steel mills.

Nippon Steel in December 2023 made what was a nearly $15 billion bid to buy U.S. Steel, creating a sudden political issue in the 2024 presidential election as the Pittsburgh-headquartered steelmaker was key to the identity of the political swing state of Pennsylvania.

Alaska prefers Denali to Mount McKinley

The Alaska Legislature passed a resolution Friday urging President Donald Trump to reverse course and retain the name of North America’s tallest peak as Denali rather than change it to Mount McKinley.

Trump, on his first day in office, signed an executive order calling for the name to revert to Mount McKinley, an identifier inspired by President William McKinley, who was from Ohio and never set foot in Alaska.

He said he planned to “restore the name of a great president, William McKinley, to Mount McKinley, where it should be and where it belongs. President McKinley made our country very rich through tariffs and through talent.”

The 19-0 vote in the state Senate came just over a week after the House passed the measure 31-8.

The Interior Department late last month announced efforts were underway to implement Trump’s renaming order, even though state leaders haven’t seen the matter as settled. An Interior spokesperson, J. Elizabeth Peace, earlier this week said the agency did not have any further updates.

Third judge to take up birthright order

A federal judge in Boston said on Friday he would take under advisement a request from 18 state attorneys general to block President Donald Trump’s executive order ending birthright citizenship for the children of parents who are in the U.S. illegally.

U.S. District Judge Leo Sorokin was the third federal judge this week to hear arguments in lawsuits seeking to block the order. It was unclear when Sorokin, who was appointed by former President Barack Obama, would issue a decision on the request but it was not expected to come Friday.

The state attorneys general, along with the cities of San Francisco and Washington, asked Sorokin to issue a preliminary injunction.

“Millions of Americans who were born to immigrant parents and hundreds of millions can trace their citizenship back to immigrant ancestors — ancestors who built our country and fueled our economy under the protections of the 14th Amendment of the United States Constitution,” Massachusetts Attorney General Andrea Campbell told reporters ahead of the hearing. “The president cannot change the Constitution with a sharpie or a sham executive order.”

Trump freezes aid to South Africa

President Donald Trump signed an executive order Friday formalizing his announcement earlier this week that he’ll freeze assistance to South Africa for a law aiming to address some of the wrongs of South Africa’s racist apartheid era — a law the White House says amounts to discrimination against the country’s white minority.

“As long as South Africa continues to support bad actors on the world stage and allows violent attacks on innocent disfavored minority farmers, the United States will stop aid and assistance to the country,” the White House said in a summary of the order. The White House said Trump is also going to announce a program to resettle white South African farmers and their families as refugees.

Trump was responding to a new law in South Africa that gives the government powers in some instances to expropriate land from people. The White House said the law “blatantly discriminates against ethnic minority Afrikaners.”

Hamas to release 3 more hostages

Hamas identified three more Israeli hostages it plans to free as part of the fragile ceasefire agreement, a sign the deal was moving forward Friday even as U.S. and Israeli officials continued calls to relocate Gaza’s population after the war.

The three men, captured by Hamas during its Oct. 7, 2023, attack on southern Israel, are set to be freed Saturday, in the fifth exchange of Israeli hostages for Palestinians jailed in Israel.

An Israeli official, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive material, confirmed that the hostages scheduled for release are: Eli Sharabi, 52; Ohad Ben Ami, 56; and Or Levy, 34.

Israel is set to release 183 Palestinian prisoners on Saturday to fulfill its side of the agreement, according to the Hamas-linked prisoners’ office in Gaza. The terms of the deal’s first six-week phase call for Hamas to gradually free a total of 33 Israeli hostages in exchange for hundreds of Palestinian prisoners.

Sharabi was taken captive from Kibbutz Beeri, a communal farm that was one of the hardest hit in the Hamas attack. His wife, Lianne, and their teenage daughters were killed by militants.

Plane wreckage found with all 10 dead

A small commuter plane that crashed in western Alaska on its way to the hub community of Nome was located on sea ice and all 10 people on board died, authorities said.

Mike Salerno, a spokesperson for the U.S. Coast Guard, said rescuers were searching the aircraft’s last known location by helicopter when they spotted the wreckage. They lowered two rescue swimmers to investigate.

The Bering Air single-engine turboprop plane was traveling from Unalakleet on Thursday afternoon with nine passengers and a pilot, according to Alaska’s Department of Public Safety.

N.Y. mayor’s former aide pleads guilty

A former City Hall aide charged last year with witness tampering tied to the federal corruption case against Mayor Eric Adams of New York has agreed to plead guilty and prosecutors Friday identified him in court papers as a co-conspirator in the case against the mayor.

It was not clear from the court papers whether the aide, Mohamed Bahi, who had served as the mayor’s liaison to the Muslim community, was cooperating with the prosecutors against the mayor.

But in a letter to the judge presiding over the mayor’s bribery and fraud case, the prosecutors asked the court to join the cases of Bahi and another man to the case against the mayor. The other man, a Turkish American businessperson who had been charged separately, pleaded guilty last month to conspiracy to commit fraud related to straw donations to the mayor’s 2021 campaign.

-- From news service reports