Joe Biden “continues to be fit for duty” after his annual physical exam, which did not include a cognitive test, according to his doctor
Dr Kevin O’Connor found that the 81-year-old is in fine condition after he examined the US president at Walter Reed National Military Medical Centre for more than two and a half hours.
He wrote in a memo that Mr Biden “is a healthy, active, robust, 81-year-old male who remains fit to successfully execute the duties of the presidency”.
He added that Biden “feels well and this year’s physical identifies no new concerns”, after last year’s examination turned up a cancerous lesion.
Returning to the White House with the medical all-clear, Mr Biden said at an event on combating crime “there is nothing different than last year” with regard to his health.
Image: Joe Biden leaves Walter Reed National Military Medical Centre after his annual examination. Pic: AP
The oldest ever US president also joked about his age, saying “they think I look too young” to police leaders while gesturing to reporters looking on.
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While Mr Biden underwent a physical exam, questions were raised about why the 81-year-old did not undergo a cognitive test as part of the annual appointment.
Speaking on Wednesday, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said Dr O’Connor and Biden’s neurologist “don’t believe he needs” a cognitive exam, and added: “He passes a cognitive test every day, every day as he moves from one topic to another topic, understanding the granular level of these topics.
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“This is a very rigorous job, and the president has been able to do this job every day for the past three years.”
Image: At 81, Joe Biden is the oldest ever US president. Pic: Reuters
But his checkup came after a report on Mr Biden’s handling of classified documents called the president’s memory “hazy,” “fuzzy,” “faulty,” “poor” and having “significant limitations”.
Special counsel Robert Hur chose not to bring criminal charges against Mr Biden, but claimed that he could not remember in interviews when he was vice president or when his son, Beau Biden, had died.
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Polls show Americans disagree with the president’s defence of his memory and age, with only 37% of Democrats saying Mr Biden should run again in a poll from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research.
Those numbers are down from 52% before the 2022 midterm elections.
Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney has apologised to Donald Trump over an anti-tariff advert featuring a clip of Ronald Reagan.
Speaking at the Asia-Pacific summit in South Korea, he also said he had reviewed the commercial and told Ontario Premier Doug Ford not to air it.
“I did apologise to the president,” Mr Carney said on Saturday, confirming earlier comments made by the US president on Friday.
“I told [Doug] Ford I did not want to go forward with the ad,” he added.
The private conversation with Mr Trump happened at a dinner hosted by South Korea’s president on Wednesday.
The commercial, commissioned by Mr Ford, included a quote from Republican former president Ronald Reagan saying that tariffs cause trade wars and economic disaster.
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In a post on Truth Social, he wrote: “Because of their serious misrepresentation of the facts, and hostile act, I am increasing the Tariff on Canada by 10% over and above what they are paying now.”
The ad by the Ontario government has a voiceover of Ronald Reagan criticising tariffs on foreign goods while saying they cause job losses and trade wars.
The video uses five complete sentences from a five-minute weekly address recorded in 1987, but edited together out of order.
The ad does not mention that the former US president was explaining that tariffs imposed on Japan by his administration should be seen as a sadly unavoidable exception to his basic belief in free trade as the key to prosperity.
Meanwhile, Mr Carney said his talks with Chinese President Xi Jinping on Friday were a turning point in relations after years of tensions.
He also met Japan’s Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi on the sidelines of the summit.
Donald Trump has said he is designating Nigeria a “country of particular concern” as “thousands of Christians” are being killed there.
Posting on Truth Social, he said radical Islamists are committing “mass slaughter” and Christianity is “facing an existential threat” in the West African nation.
The US president said he was asking officials to “immediately look into this matter, and report back to me”.
Mr Trump quoted figures suggesting 3,100 Christians had been killed in Nigeria, but did not state any source for the numbers or timeframe.
He stated: “We stand ready, willing, and able to save our Great Christian population around the World!”
Nigeria now joins North Korea, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Pakistan and China on a list of countries “of particular concern” due to violations of religious freedom.
The move is one step before possible sanctions – which could mean a ban on all non-humanitarian aid.
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The Nigerian government has vehemently rejected the claims. Analysts have said that, while Christians are among those targeted, the majority of victims of armed groups are Muslims in the country’s Muslim-majority north, where the most attacks take place.
Mr Trump’s move follows efforts by Republican senator Ted Cruz to get fellow evangelical Christians to lobby Congress over claims of “Christian mass murder” in Nigeria.
Boko Haram – which kidnapped more than 270 schoolgirls in 2014 – is the main group cited in previous warnings by US and international governments.
The group has committed “egregious violations of religious freedom”, according to a 2021 report by the bipartisan US Commission on International Religious Freedom.
It said more than 37,000 people had been killed by Islamist groups in Nigeria since 2011.
Churches and Christian neighbourhoods have been targeted in the past, but experts say Muslims are the most common victims of Boko Haram attacks, which routinely target the police, military and government.
Other groups operating said to be operating in the country include Boko Haram offshoot Islamic State in West Africa Province (ISWAP).
About half of Nigeria’s population is estimated to be Muslim, who mostly live in the north, with roughly the other half following Christianity.
US travellers are currently urged to “reconsider” travel to Nigeria due to a threat of terrorism, crime, kidnapping and armed gangs. The UK advises its citizens along similar lines.
The US is drastically cutting the number of refugees it will allow into the country to 7,500, and giving priority to white South Africans.
The new figure, announced on Thursday in a memo in the Federal Registry, the official journal of the US administration, is a dramatic reduction from last year’s 125,000, set by former president Joe Biden.
No reason was given for the decrease, but the note said the admission of the 7,500 refugees during the 2026 fiscal year was “justified by humanitarian concerns or is otherwise in the national interest”.
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The notice posted to the register’s website said the 7,500 admissions would “primarily” be allocated to Afrikaner South Africans and “other victims of illegal or unjust discrimination in their respective homelands”.
It is half the 15,000 total set for 2021 during Donald Trump’s first term in office at the height of the COVID pandemic, which reports said was the previous lowest refugee admissions cap.
Refugee rights groups were quick to condemn the proposal, with International Refugee Assistance Project (IRAP) president Sharif Aly, saying that by “privileging Afrikaners while continuing to ban thousands of refugees who have already been vetted and approved, the administration is once again politicising a humanitarian programme”.
Krish O’Mara Vignarajah, CEO of Global Refuge, said: “Concentrating the vast majority of admissions on one group undermines the programme’s purpose as well as its credibility.”
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Human Rights First president, Uzra Zeya, called it a “new low point” in US foreign policy, which will “further destabilise front-line states that host over two-thirds of the world’s nearly 43 million refugees, undermining US national security in tandem”.
Image: US President Donald Trump showed South Africa’s President Cyril Ramaphosa printed-out articles in the Oval Office. Pic: AP
In May, Mr Trump confronted South Africa’s President Cyril Ramaphosa in the White House, claiming white farmers in his nation were being killed and “persecuted”.
A video purporting to show burial sites for murdered white farmers was played but was later shown to be scenes from a 2020 protest in which the crosses represented farmers killed over multiple years.
The South African government has vehemently denied that Afrikaners and other white South Africans are being persecuted.
In January, the US president suspended the US Refugee Admissions Programme (USRAP) to, in his words, allow US authorities to prioritise national security and public safety.
During the Oval Office meeting, Mr Ramaphosa said only that he hoped that Trump officials would listen to South Africans about the issue, and later said he believed there is “doubt and disbelief about all this in [Mr Trump’s] head”.