Trump congratulates Fox News hosts Sean Hannity and Ainsley Earhardt on engagement: Live updates

Russia, the US and China are all undertaking major modernisations of their nuclear weapons just as the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) of the Cold War era between the Soviet Union and the US is starting to fall apart.

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Elon Musk, the world’s richest man and President-elect Donald Trump’s“first buddy,” revealed on Christmas night that he was using the medication Mounjaro for weight loss while dubbing himself “Ozempic Santa” in a holiday-themed social media post.

The revelation also comes just a couple of weeks after he clashed with Trump’s designated Health and Human Services chief Robert F. Kennedy Jr. over the widespread use and long-term benefits of GLP-1 inhibitors in battling obesity.

Posting to his social media platform X (formerly Twitter), Musk shared an image of himself dressed as Santa Claus next to a Christmas tree alongside the caption “Ozempic Santa.” The post quickly went viral, gathering over 200,000 likes and 26 million views.

“Like Cocaine Bear, but Santa and Ozempic!” Musk added in a separate tweet.

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The Trump administration is planning to jail immigrant families together in detention centers before they are removed from the country.

“We’re going to need to construct family facilities,” Tom Homan told The Washington Post in a recent interview. “How many beds we’re going to need will depend on what the data says.”

Trump and Homan have repeatedly said that even U.S. citizen children of non-citizen parents are expected to be deported along with their families.

“Here’s the issue,” Homan told The Post. “You knew you were in the country illegally and chose to have a child. So you put your family in that position.”

Trump has nominated Miami-Dade Commissioner Kevin Marino Cabrera for U.S. ambassador to Panama, “a Country that is ripping us off on the Panama Canal, far beyond their wildest dreams,” the president-elect Trump announced on Christmas Eve.

“Few understand Latin American politics as well as Kevin,” Trump said.

Cabrera also served as state director for Florida in Trump’s 2020 campaign and is vice chair of Miami-Dade’s International Trade Consortium.

His nomination follows a seemingly random attack suggesting that the U.S. would seize control of the Panama Canal, part of a series of statements aimed at other countries in a signal that his administration is threatening U.S. territorial expansion to bully sovereign nations to his economic demands.

Panamanian President José Raúl Mulino fired back, emphasizing the canal would remain under Panama’s control.

“The sovereignty and independence of our country is non-negotiable,” he said.

Some of Donald Trump’s most prominent critics are bracing for impact.

“By going after me they’re just going to give me a platform,” George Conway told The Independent.

More from The Independent’s White House correspondent Andrew Feinberg on the critics preparing for a fight:

President Joe Biden spent Christmas Eve signing 50 bills into law, including one piece of legislation supported by Paris Hilton and another designating the bald eagle as the U.S. national bird.

Gustaf Kilander breaks them down:

A video from aspiring Republican political figure Valentina Gomez shows her firing a handgun into the back of the head of a dummy tied to a chair with a black bag over its head.

“It’s that simple, public executions for any illegal that rapes or kills an American. They don’t deserve deportation, they deserve to be ended,” she says.

The widely derided video has been condemned for glorifying “the type of vigilantism that has led to deadly consequences in our nation and feeds into the anti-immigrant lie,” according to League of United Latin American Citizens, the nation’s largest Latino civil rights group.

“LULAC denounces violent crime in our nation and expresses its deepest condolences to its victims and their loved ones,” the group’s presidet Roman Palomares said in a statement.

“However, we believe in the Christian principles of justice, not retribution. Using public executions as a hook to a politically motivated message fuels blind hatred. This kind of language is intended to appeal to an extreme base of individuals who believe the lie that all immigrants are here to harm others.”

More on the backlash to the Gomez’s latest stunt:

Vivek Ramaswamy, one of the leaders of the Trump administration’s incoming Department of Government Efficiency, blamed a series of 1990s TV sitcoms for what he saw as a decline in U.S. dynamism in science and technology, leading tech companies to hire more qualified foreign-born and first-generation workers over their mentally lazy American counterparts.

His comments follow wider tensions within the Trump coalition, which includes both far-right anti-immigration views, and an increasing embrace of the tech industry, whose workforce is highly diverse and made up of many immigrants and first-generation Americans.

The Independent’s Josh Marcus reports:

Trump’s inaugural fund is projected to raise more than $150 million, breaking the previous $107 million inauguration fundraising record that was set during the president-elect’s first inauguration.

Trump acolyte and self-proclaimed “proud Islamophobe” Laura Loomer is threatening to tell MAGA to “stay home” during the next midterm elections amid an escalating feud with “tech bros” Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy over Silicon Valley’s reliance on foreign-born workers.

Justin Baragona reports: