Trump claims US is global ‘laughing stock’ following attacks; Johnson prepares for crucial House speaker vote: Live – UK Times

The Green Beret who was driving a Tesla Cybertruck that blew up outside the Trump International Hotel Las Vegas on New Year’s Day “was a 100 percent patriot,” his bewildered uncle said Thursday.

Matthew Livelsberger, 37, was “like a Rambo-type, for lack of a better word,” Dean Livelsberger told The Independent.

Dean, whose older brother is Livelsberger’s father, Roger, himself an Air Force veteran who served in Vietnam, said his nephew “loved the Army.”

“He used to have all patriotic stuff on Facebook, he was 100 percent loving the country,” he continued. “He loved Trump, and he was always a very, very patriotic soldier, a patriotic American. It’s one of the reasons he was in Special Forces for so many years. It wasn’t just one tour of duty.”

The president-elect, who has jested numerous times about serving a third term, will not be on the ballot in 2028.

Ariana Baio has the story.

Johnson, a Republican from Louisiana, has faced pushback from some Republicans after he supported a recent spending bill that the president-elect and Elon Musk opposed.

That could pose a problem for him this week because Johnson can only afford to lose two Republican votes – assuming all Democrats vote against him – if he wants to keep the top Congressional job. At least one Republican has already signaled they are not voting for Johnson.

As of now, Johnson is the only official speaker candidate, in part thanks to Turmp’s endorsement. However, several other names floated around before Johnson’s nomination was made official, providing some potential backups if Republicans have a repeat of last year’s fiasco.

Speaker Mike Johnson is in the US Capitol working the phones to shore up votes for tomorrow’s vote on his speakership, CNN reports.

His allies are preparing for the potential that the speaker’s race will go into multiple rounds, according to GOP sources — a scenario that could lead to a drawn-out floor fight in a similar fashion to that experienced by his predecessor, Kevin McCarthy.

New York Republican Rep Nicole Malliotakis told CNN’s John Berman: “I don’t know if he has the votes right now, but I do believe that he will have the votes and I’m not sure that it will be on the first round, but I do think that by tomorrow we will have a speaker and that speaker will be Mike Johnson.”

“100 percent Trump is annoyed,” a source who worked on Trump’s re-election campaign told the outlet. “There’s a Chinese saying: ‘two tigers cannot live on one mountaintop.’”

Whatever the truth of the New Year atrocity in New Orleans, it will serve as a reminder of how foreign conflicts, and specifically Middle East conflicts, can play out at home, to fatal effect.

It may be that the driver of the pick-up truck, who was killed in a shoot-out with police, was a troubled individual using the Isis emblem as no more than a flag of convenience, even if his background, his past military career, his contacts and the weapons at his disposal might suggest otherwise.

But the connections have been drawn. The spectre conjured up is not of the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, but of a rather similar pick-up truck attack in New York City in 2017, conducted in the name of Isis, and the ever-looming memory of 9/11.

And the effect, intended or not, will be as a destructive rebuke to the largely failed Middle East policy of the outgoing president Joe Biden, and a warning to the incoming administration of Donald Trump.

Gustaf Kilander reports from Washington, D.C.

More than a third of US states have now introduced restrictions for online adult content, blocking access to popular pornographic websites such as Pornhub.

From 1 January, 2025, there are 17 states with restrictions in place after Florida, South Carolina and Tennessee became the latest to enforce over-18 age verification laws for viewing porn sites.

Anthony Cuthbertson reports.