WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump’s national security adviser has sidelined about 160 National Security Council staffers, telling them to work from home while the administration reviews staffing and tries to align it with Trump’s agenda, administration officials told The Associated Press on Wednesday.

A National Security Council spokesperson has denied that NSC staffers are being vetted for political affiliations

The National Security Council began a “full review” of aides as President Donald Trump clears its ranks to align the White House team with his “America First” agenda.

WASHINGTON (AP) — Job-seekers hoping to join the new Trump administration are facing a series of intense loyalty tests, with White House screening teams fanning out to government agencies to check for “Make America Great Again” bona fides and carefully parsing applicants’ politics and social media posts.

Partisan loyalty tests have no place in national security,” one House Democrat said. It appears the president's team has come to a different conclusion.

The secrecy surrounding Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin’s hospitalizations in late 2023 and early 2024 “increased unnecessarily” the risks to US national security, the Pentagon’s inspector general concluded in a report released on Wednesday.

She kinda marketed it as a celebration of her and her tenure and unfortunately that took precedence over huge breaking news,” one source told The Post.

Investors sold technology stocks across the globe over the emergence of the low-cost Chinese artificial intelligence model. Read more at straitstimes.com.

The spotlight on DeepSeek comes amid rising tensions over trade, geopolitics and other issues between the two superpowers. The U.S. has already imposed significant export controls on China in an effort to rein in Beijing's production of semiconductors used in developing advanced AI, with the most recent curbs coming in December.

Senate Democrats blocked consideration of legislation sanctioning the International Criminal Court for issuing arrest warrants against Israeli leaders after failing to reach an agreement with Republicans to narrow the legislation.

Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer called the firings a “chilling purge,” while GOP Sen. Lindsey Graham, a top Trump ally, acknowledged that the firings may have violated the law but said: “Just tell them you need to follow the law next time.”