Trump transition live updates: Latest news on cabinet picks – UK Times

Katie Hawkinson has the story.

On Friday, NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte met with President-elect Donald Trump at Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach, Florida.

According to a statement, they discussed the range of global security issues facing the Alliance.

The Secretary-General and his team also met with Congressman Mike Waltz and members of the President-elect’s national security team.

On the campaign trail over the summer, Donald Trump claimed that North Korean leader Kim Jong Un “misses me,” and that relations between their two countries would improve with a second Trump term.

At a defense expo in Pyongyang this week, the North Korean dictator had a very different message, as Josh Marcus reports.

A source told The Bulwark that the president-elect called Gaetz just hours before his withdrawal, warning him that he didn’t have enough support in the Senate.

“You don’t have the votes,” Trump told Gaetz, according to the source. “These senators aren’t moving.”

According to a second source, the former Florida lawmaker is said to have acknowledged that he was four to six Republican votes shy from the threshold needed.

He could only afford to lose two GOP votes to maintain the majority in the 100-seat upper chamber – with Republicans holding a 53 to 47 seat majority.

Pam Bondi, the woman Trump has tapped to be his next attorney general, found herself caught up in a canine custody battle where she was accused of stealing a pet dog.

Bondi, 59, adopted a St. Bernard after it was separated from its family by Hurricane Katrina in 2005 from Florida’s Pinellas County Humane Society. She changed its name from Master Tank to Noah.

When the animal’s true owners, Louisiana couple Steve and Dorreen Couture, tracked Master Tank down to Bondi’s home in Tampa Bay in January 2006 and found him in the lawyer’s custody, their request for his return was refused.

Instead, Bondi accused the grandparents of neglecting the animal.

“I took a dog who was a walking skeleton,” she told The St Petersburg Times at the time.

“If I thought I was sending him to a stable environment, where he would be cared for, as hard as it would be, I’d put him in my car and drive him back myself.

The Coutures denied her accusation, revealing that Master Tank had suffered from heartworms since he was 10 months old and continued to demand his return.

The family sued and a 16-month legal battle ensued, which ended with the two sides settling before the dispute came to trial.

Bondi eventually returned Master Tank to the Coutures with a supply of food and medication.

The Texas State Board of Education has approved the use of Bible-based lessons in public elementary schools.

Officials voted 8-7 on the measure during a hearing in Austin on Friday. The new curriculum, developed by Bluebonnet Learning and the Texas Education Agency, pertains to reading and language arts lessons for kids in grades K-5 and math lessons for kids in grades K-8.

The teachings call into question the constitutionally of such tax-payer-funded instruction. It remains unclear if the curriculum would violate the Establishment Clause in the First Amendment, which prohibits the government from establishing a religion or providing official support for a religion.

The instruction includes lessons on Biblical beliefs, including the stories of Moses, the Good Samaritan, the Golden Rule and readings from the Book of Genesis.

The curriculum is optional but schools could get additional funding if they implement the teachings, set to be available to educators in August 2025.

The incoming Trump administration didn’t waste any time on Thursday after Matt Gaetz said that he was dropping his bid to become attorney general. Soon afterward it announced that Pam Bondi, the former attorney general of Florida, would seek the top position at the Justice Department instead.

Bondi, 59, who served as Florida’s attorney general from 2011 to 2019 and represented the president-elect at his first impeachment trial in the Senate, is both an experienced public official and a long-time Trump ally.

Read more from Josh Marcus and Joe Sommerlad