France will ban smoking on beaches, in public gardens and near schools starting from July 1st in an effort to protect young people from tobacco and limit the influence of smokers upon them.

Elon Musk's time in the Trump administration has come to an end with a news conference in the Oval Office in which he and the US president defended the work of DOGE - and vowed it would continue, even without Musk.

According to Trump, Musk is "not really leaving" and will continue to be "back and forth" to the White House.

The Trump White House is typically game to spin any narrative lobbed its way, but reports about Elon Musk’s rampant drug use appear to be another story.

Following The New York Times’ shocking report that Musk, while acting as a senior adviser to Donald Trump, was regularly consuming large amounts of drugs, reporter Megan Twohey appeared on MSNBC to discuss the story. In the process, she revealed that the White House had refused to answer questions put to them about whether or not they had administered drug tests to Musk during his tenure.

Musk’s SpaceX similarly did not respond to questions from the Times, specifically about whether the company gave Musk advance notice of the “random” drug tests it administers to its employees, something it reportedly began doing after he infamously smoked weed during his appearance on Joe Rogan’s podcast. SpaceX, as a large government contractor, is required to maintain a drug-free workforce.

Trump has nominated 30-year-old conservative lawyer Paul Ingrassia, to lead the U.S. Office of Special Counsel, a government ethics office, despite Ingrassia's ties to multiple antisemitic extremists.

If confirmed by the Senate, Ingrassia would oversee the agency that enforces the Hatch Act, which limits government employees from engaging in certain partisan political activities, and provides protections to whistleblowers. (The agency is separate and distinct from special counsels appointed by the Department of Justice, such as Robert Mueller or Jack Smith, who investigate sensitive cases.)

An undocumented migrant arrested on suspicion of threatening to kill Donald Trump may have been the victim of a setup, according to an explosive report.

Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, dubbed ICE Barbie for her stylized anti-immigration photo ops, has accused 54-year-old Mexican national Ramon Morales-Reyes of writing a letter explicitly threatening to assassinate the president.

Investigators now think Reyes did not write the letter and it may have been penned instead by someone else attempting to frame him in connection to a separate robbery and assault case in which Reyes is the victim, unnamed law enforcement sources told CNN.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is still recommending COVID-19 vaccines for healthy children, according to its latest published immunization schedule, contradicting Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s announcement on Tuesday that the agency will stop recommendations.

The schedule, published late on Thursday, comes after Kennedy, a long-time vaccine skeptic, and heads of the FDA and the National Institutes of Health said the CDC would stop recommending routine COVID-19 vaccines for healthy children and pregnant women.

KEY POINTS

• PBS sued Donald Trump to block his effort to cut off federal funding for the public broadcaster.

• The lawsuit from PBS and one of its member stations in Minnesota came three days after NPR filed a similar suit against Trump and his administration.

• Trump had signed an executive order accusing both PBS and NPR of failing to present “a fair, accurate, or unbiased portrayal of current events to taxpaying citizens.”

Florida and Utah have already removed fluoridation from public water systems. What if the rest of the country follows?

The long-term effects of banning fluoride from public drinking water across the country could cost families billions of dollars and result in millions of rotten teeth, a new analysis predicts. 

The study, published Friday in JAMA Health Forum, shows that if all 50 states stopped community water fluoridation programs, kids in the U.S. could expect to develop 25.4 million more cavities within the next five years. 

That’s the equivalent of a decayed tooth in 1 out of every 3 children.

The number of cavities would more than double in 10 years, to 53.8 million.

French president delivers veiled warning to Beijing during speech in Singapore.

French President Emmanuel Macron warned China that NATO could become more deeply involved in Asia if Beijing does not do more to stop North Korea from taking part in Russia's war on Ukraine.

"North Korea in Ukraine is a big question for all of us. If China doesn’t want NATO to be involved in Southeast Asia, it should prevent [North Korea] from being engaged on European soil," Macron said Friday during an address at a major defense summit in Singapore.

Multinational team monitoring sanctions says 20,000 container loads of missiles, artillery, rocket launchers and other munitions illegally supplied

Russian forces have used North Korean weapons to intensify missile attacks against critical civilian infrastructure in Ukraine and “terrorised” entire cities, according to a report by UN members that reveals the extent of Moscow’s dependence on the regime in Pyongyang.

The Multilateral Sanctions Monitoring Team, comprising 11 countries including the US, Britain, EU states and Japan, said Kim Jong-un’s dictatorship had supplied Russia with more than 20,000 containers of munitions since September 2023.

The team said the evidence it had gathered showed that North Korea and Russia had engaged in “myriad unlawful activities” prohibited by UN sanctions resolutions.

After historic seasons in last two years, blazes continue trend of warm, dry conditions intensified by climate crisis

Enormous early-season wildfires have erupted across the prairie provinces of Canada this week, taxing local emergency response and threatening a long stretch of dangerous air quality across eastern North America.

The country’s largest fires – the Bird River fire and the Border fire – remain completely uncontained in northern Manitoba. In Manitoba alone, wildfires have burned about 200,000 hectares already this year – already about three times the recent full-year average for the province.

More than 17,000 people are in the process of being airlifted out of wildfire zones by the Canadian military, some of which now have no safe overland roads connecting them to the rest of the country. Wab Kinew, the Manitoba premier, declared a province-wide state of emergency on Wednesday, and Saskatchewan’s premier, Scott Moe, declared the same on Thursday.

Wall Street is increasingly betting that Trump will blink first in the tariffs stand-off

Trump Always Chickens Out – or TACO for short. Investors like narratives to explain the financial world, and they appear to have seized on this one: whenever Donald Trump faces a market backlash, he will back down.

It would be fair to say the US president did not take kindly to the suggestion that he was being a “chicken” when asked by a reporter at the White House about the term that is gaining traction on Wall Street.

“But don’t ever say what you said,” he added to the reporter. “That’s a nasty question.” Apparently riled, he later returned to the theme, insisting that he was no chicken, and that often people accused him of being too tough.

But recurrent retreats by Trump have become the basis for stock markets rebounding after falls, even as the US president has raised tariffs to their highest level in more than a century.