Former US President Joe Biden recently underwent surgery to remove cancer cells from his skin, NBC News reported last night, citing his spokesman, Reuters reported.
The procedure, known as Mohs surgery, is often used to treat the most common forms of skin cancer.
Biden's office announced earlier this year that his doctors had diagnosed him with prostate cancer, announcing on May 18 that it was a more aggressive and advanced, but treatable, form of the disease, DPA recalls.
Biden left office in January and is the oldest president in US history.
Biden initially planned to run for office again on behalf of The Democratic Party in the 2024 elections, but during the election campaign experienced frequent breakdowns and performed disastrously against Republican Donald Trump in a televised debate. This raised growing doubts about his physical and mental fitness to be president, and he withdrew from the race.
US President Donald Trump signed an executive order implementing the US-Japan trade agreement, which provides for lower tariffs on imports of Japanese cars and other goods announced in July, the White House said, quoted by Reuters.
"Under the agreement, the US will apply a base tariff of 15% on virtually all Japanese goods imported from Japan into the US, along with separate, sector-specific treatment for cars and car parts, aerospace products, generic pharmaceuticals, and natural resources that do not occur naturally or are not produced in the US," the executive order said.
The lower tariffs on Japanese car imports into the US will take effect 7 days after the order is published. Part of the tariff relief is retroactive to August 7.
Trump's order also means that the reduced US tariff on Japanese cars from the current 27.5% to 15% will take effect by the end of this month, Reuters notes, citing a Japanese government official.
US and Taiwanese defense officials held talks in Alaska last week, a US official said yesterday, quoted by Reuters.
The agency notes that this is likely to anger China. The United States is Taiwan's most important international backer and arms supplier, despite the lack of formal diplomatic relations between the two countries.
China, which has never shied away from using force to bring the island under its control, regularly identifies Taiwan as the most important and sensitive issue in its relations with Washington.
The talks included Jed Royal, the top U.S. Defense Department official for the Indo-Pacific region, who held talks with a senior Taiwanese national security official in Anchorage, Alaska, the U.S. official said.
Chinese President Xi Jinping warned that the world faced a choice between peace and war during a grand parade in Beijing on Wednesday, standing alongside Russian President Vladimir Putin and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un in an unprecedented show of military might, Reuters noted.
South Korea, Japan and the United States will hold annual defense drills aimed at improving their air, sea and cyber operational capabilities against North Korea's nuclear and missile threats, the South Korean military said in a statement this morning, quoted by Reuters.
The joint maneuvers will begin on September 15, the statement said.
US President Donald Trump plans to sign an executive order today to rename the US Department of Defense to the "Department of War", a White House official said last night, Reuters reported.
The agency notes that the move would put Trump's stamp on the largest institution in the US government.
The executive order will authorize Defense Secretary Pete Hegsett, the Department of Defense and his subordinates to use secondary titles such as "Secretary of "War," "Department of War," and "Undersecretary of War" in official correspondence and public communications, a White House news release said.
The step would instruct Hegseth to recommend legislative and executive actions necessary to make the renaming permanent.
Since taking office in January, Trump has moved to rename a number of places and institutions, including the Gulf of Mexico, and restore the original names of military bases that were changed after protests for racial justice.
Changing the name of departments is rare and requires approval from the U.S. Congress. However, Trump's Republican allies have a slim majority in both the Senate and the House of Representatives, and the party's leaders in Congress have shown little willingness to oppose Trump's initiatives.
The U.S. Department of Defense was called the War Department until 1949, when the U.S. Congress merged the Army, Navy, and Air Force after World War II. The name was chosen in part to show that in the nuclear age the United States is focused on preventing wars, historians say.
The renaming of the Defense Department would be costly and would require updating the signs and forms used not only by Pentagon employees in Washington but also by U.S. military bases around the world, Reuters notes.
A U.S. State Department employee was sentenced on Wednesday to four years in prison on charges of conspiring to collect and transmit national defense information to individuals he believed were working for the Chinese government, the U.S. Justice Department said in a statement, cited by Reuters.
The convicted Michael Skina, 42, of Alexandria, Virginia, a suburb of Washington, worked at the State Department headquarters in the U.S. capital. He had access to top-secret information and used information at the "secret" level, the Justice Department said in a statement.
Since April 2022, Skina has communicated with individuals he met online through various platforms, providing them with sensitive information to the U.S. government in exchange for money, the department's statement said.
Two of these individuals posed as employees of international consulting companies. Believing they were working for the Chinese government, Skina continued to maintain contact with them, the U.S. Department of Justice added.
In August 2024, Skina met with an individual at a hotel in Peru who gave him $10,000 and a cellphone intended for him to use to receive assignments and transmit information, prosecutors said in the case.
In October 2024, while at work, Skina used the cellphone he had received in Peru to photograph and transmit at least 4 classified documents containing U.S. national defense information and classified as "secret," according to prosecutors.
A surveillance camera video at the State Department building captured Skina again using the cellphone to photograph 7 more documents, marked "secret," that contained U.S. national defense information. The US in February this year, the Justice Department said. The department added that FBI agents seized the phone before the employee could hand over the documents and arrested him.