📌 Tariff Respite, Ecuador Election, More

The exemption of smartphones, laptops and other electronic products from import tariffs on China will be short-lived.

“There was no tariff ‘exception,’ Trump said in a social media post on Sunday. “These products are subject to the existing 20% fentanyl tariffs, and they are just moving to a different tariff ‘bucket.’”

In the post on his Truth Social platform, Trump promised to launch a national security trade investigation into the semiconductor sector and the “whole electronics supply chain.” “We will not be held hostage by other countries, especially hostile trading nations like China,” he added.

The White House announced Friday the exclusion of some electronic products from steep reciprocal tariffs on China. Trump’s commerce secretary, Howard Lutnick, said Sunday critical technology products from China would face separate duties along with semiconductors within the next two months.

Lutnick said Trump will soon enact “a special tariff” on smartphones, computers and other electronics, alongside sectoral tariffs on semiconductors and pharmaceuticals. He said the levies would likely bring production to the US. “These are things that are national security that we need to be made in America.”

Ecuadorean President Daniel Noboa and the country's electoral authority said he had secured a full four-year term on Sunday.

Leftist rival Luisa Gonzalez denounced Noboa's unexpectedly expansive victory as "grotesque" fraud. Gonzalez told supporters she did not accept the results — a steady 56% support for 37-year-old business heir Noboa compared to her 44% — and that she would demand a recount.

Noboa, who focused his second-round campaign on the populous coastal provinces, which have suffered significant violence, notched the surprising lead of more than a million votes after a tight February first round where he came ahead by just over 16,700.

Gonzalez offered no details of her recount demand when she spoke to supporters on Sunday night, nor did she immediately call for protests.

Murders, gun smuggling, fuel theft, extortion and other crimes carried out by local criminal groups allied with Mexican cartels and the Albanian mafia have spiked over the last five years. The economy has struggled to recover post-pandemic and unemployment has risen.

Noboa has pledged to continue military deployments, job creation, more seizures of drugs and guns, an increase in tax revenues and efforts to attract more private investment to the oil sector during his full term, after beating Gonzalez in the 2023 race to serve out the remainder of his predecessor's mandate.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth cut $5.1 billion in consulting contracts at the Pentagon, calling them “wasteful."

The memo canceled Defense Health Agency contracts for consulting services from Accenture, Deloitte and Booz Allen, among other firms, as well as an Air Force contract with Accenture to resell third-party enterprise cloud IT services.

Specifically, the canceled contracts include $1.8 billion in consulting, $1.4 billion in enterprise cloud IT services and a $500 million Navy contract for business process consulting. Hegseth said the work can be performed by the Pentagon's civil workforce.

“We need this money to spend on better health care for our warfighters and their families, instead of $500 an hour for a business process consultant," he said. "That's a lot of consulting.”

He also noted cutting a $500 million contract to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency for IT help desk services the Defense Information Systems Agency already provides, 11 contracts related to diversity, equity and inclusion, climate change, and the department's response to Covid.

”If you're keeping score at home, today's cuts bring our running total to nearly $6 billion in wasteful spending over the first six weeks of the Department of Government Efficiency effort here at the Defense Department," Hegseth said.

An at-home spit test appears to perform better at predicting prostate cancer risk than traditional tests, a study suggests.

The test assesses 130 genetic variants to provide a risk score for prostate cancer. This “polygenic risk score” was found to be a more powerful predictor of aggressive prostate cancer than the standard blood test that measures a protein called prostate-specific antigen (PSA).

Prof Ros Eeles, who led the research at the Institute of Cancer Research, London, said: “We have shown that a relatively simple, inexpensive spit test to identify men of European heritage at higher risk due to their genetic makeup is an effective tool to catch prostate cancer early.”

Since carrying out the trial, called Barcode 1, the team has developed an updated version of the test based on more recently identified risk variants for men of Asian and African ancestry and is assessing this in a new study.

The PRS saliva test also identified a higher proportion of aggressive cancers. Of the 187 cancers detected, 55.1% were aggressive cancers, compared with 35.5% identified by a PSA test, in a recent study.

A 17-year-old allegedly killed his parents as part of a plot to assassinate President Donald Trump, federal authorities said.

Unsealed court documents report Nikita Casap called for the assassination of the president and overthrow of the US government in written documents and text messages found by investigators, a federal affidavit says.

The Wisconsin teen faces nine felony charges, including two counts of first-degree murder and two counts of hiding a corpse, say online court records and a Waukesha County criminal complaint filed in late March.

Federal investigators are pursuing three charges: presidential assassination, conspiracy and use of weapons of mass destruction, the affidavit says. Casap is scheduled to appear for arraignment on May 7, the Waukesha County court docket says.

Police believe the suspect’s mother, Tatiana Casap, and his stepfather, Donald Mayer, were killed on February 11. Both were found dead from gunshot wounds more than two weeks later, on February 28, when Waukesha County Sheriff’s deputies performed a welfare check at the family’s home.

Police picked up the suspect in his vehicle. They found $14,000 in $100 bills, over $14,000 of jewelry and a .357 Magnum revolver. Material was found on Casap’s phone referencing “a self-described manifesto regarding assassinating the president, making bombs, and terrorist attacks,” the federal affidavit says.

Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky invited Donald Trump to visit his country before any deal with Russia to end the war.

"Please, before any kind of decisions, any kind of forms of negotiations, come to see people, civilians, warriors, hospitals, churches, children destroyed or dead," Zelensky said in an interview for CBS's 60 Minutes program.

The interview was recorded before Sunday's devastating Russian missile attack on the Ukrainian city of Sumy, which killed 34 people — including two children — and injured 117 others.

Trump described the attack as a "horrible thing" while Germany's chancellor-in-waiting, Friedrich Merz, accused Russia of committing a war crime. There was no immediate official comment on the attack from Russia, whose forces across the nearby border are said to be preparing for a major offensive.

Earlier, Trump's special envoy to Ukraine, retired Lt-Gen Keith Kellogg, said the attack had crossed "any line of decency.” French President Emmanuel Macron accused Russia of "blatant disregard of human lives, international law, and the diplomatic efforts of President Trump.”

The UN estimates that nearly seven million Ukrainians are living as refugees.

A pet tortoise has been reunited with its family in Mississippi after disappearing in March after a deadly tornado outbreak.

“He’s been through a lot,” said Myrtle’s grateful owner, Tiffany Emanuel. “I know that he knows just as much as I do that every step of the way I’m going to be there helping him, caring for him, making sure he gets, you know, the help that he needs.”

The Emanuel family fled their home in the rural Kokomo area as a tornado hit on March 15. They returned to find two pine trees had fallen on top of their tortoise’s backyard home. Myrtle was missing.

Weeks later, a neighbor found the injured tortoise. He was taken to the Central Mississippi Turtle Rescue for medical treatment on April 4. Emanuel is now nursing Myrtle back to health. “It feels good to kind of have some kind of happiness out of so much sad and grief and loss,” Emanuel said.