With midterms looming some in Congress have dissented from the president – but it still falls well short of a rebellion

Donald Trump pulled back from the brink on Greenland but not before causing untold damage to the Nato alliance. The US president’s sabre-rattling may also have shaken the faith of his own Republican party.

Trump’s fleeting threat to conquer the Danish territory prompted the most strident Republican opposition to anything he has done since taking office a year ago. It came on the heels of challenges to his authority over military powers, healthcare legislation and the Jeffrey Epstein files.

Alex Pretti’s death could be a moment of reckoning for Democrats to call time on Trump waging war on his people

Wearing helmets, gas masks and camouflage fatigues, the federal agents took aim and prepared to open fire. “It’s like Call of Duty,” one could be heard saying via a TV mic, referring to a first-person shooter military video game. “So cool, huh?”

This was the scene on the streets of Minneapolis on Saturday after armed agents, wearing masks and tactical vests, wrestled 37-year-old Alex Pretti to the ground and shot him dead. The killing took place just over a mile from where Renee Good was fatally shot on 7 January, a scene that itself was less than a mile from where police murdered George Floyd in May 2020.

In the search for stability, some western nations are turning to a country that many in Washington see as an existential threat

If geopolitics relies at least in part on bonhomie between global leaders, China made an unexpected play for Ireland’s good graces when the taoiseach visited Beijing this month. Meeting Ireland’s leader, Micheál Martin, in the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, China’s president, Xi Jinping, said a favourite book of his as a teenager was The Gadfly, by the Irish author Ethel Voynich, a novel set in the revolutionary fervour of Italy in the 1840s.

“It was unusual that we ended up discussing The Gadfly and its impact on both of us but there you are,” Martin told reporters in Beijing.

Maxwell Alejandro Frost says attacker ‘told me Trump was going to deport me’ as police say suspect arrested

The Florida congressman Maxwell Alejandro Frost said he was assaulted by a man who said Donald Trump would deport him at a party during the Sundance film festival in Utah.

“Last night, I was assaulted by a man at Sundance Festival who told me that Trump was going to deport me before he punched me in the face,” Frost said in a Saturday post on X. “He was heard screaming racist remarks as he drunkenly ran off. The individual was arrested and I am okay.”

Career public servant and former chief of staff to Malcolm Turnbull to represent Australia’s interests with Trump administration from April, including progression of Aukus agreement

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The head of the department of defence, Greg Moriarty, will succeed Kevin Rudd as Australia’s ambassador to the United States.

The prime minister, Anthony Albanese, and foreign affairs minister, Penny Wong, announced Moriarty’s appointment to the role on Sunday. A former chief of staff to Malcolm Turnbull and former Australian envoy to Iran and Indonesia, he has led the defence department since 2017. He will take up the posting in Washington from April.