President Donald Trump and Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese signed a critical-minerals deal at the White House on Monday as the U.S. eyes the continent’s rich rare-earth resources at a time when China is imposing tougher rules on exporting its own critical minerals abroad.
The two leaders described the agreement as an $8.5 billion deal between the allies. Trump said it had been negotiated over several months.
“In about a year from now we’ll have so much critical mineral and rare earth that you won’t know what to do with them,” said Trump, a Republican, boasting about the deal. “They’ll be worth $2.”
Albanese added that the agreement takes the U.S.-Australia relationship “to the next level.”
Earlier this month, Beijing announced that it will require foreign companies to get approval from the Chinese government to export magnets containing even trace amounts of rare-earth materials that originated from China or were produced with Chinese technology. The Trump administration says this gives China broad power over the global economy by controlling the tech supply chain.
“Australia is really, really going to be helpful in the effort to take the global economy and make it less risky, less exposed to the kind of rare earth extortion that we’re seeing from the Chinese,” Kevin Hassett, the director of the White House’s National Economic Council, told reporters Monday morning ahead of Trump’s meeting with Albanese.
Hassett noted that Australia has one of the best mining economies in the world, while praising its refiners and its abundance of rare earth resources. Among the Australian officials accompanying Albanese are ministers overseeing resources and industry and science, and Australia has dozens of critical minerals sought by the U.S. because they are needed in everything from fighter jets and electric vehicles to laptops and phones.
The agreement could have an immediate impact on rare earth supplies in the United States if American companies can secure some of what Australian mines are already producing, although it will take years — if not decades — to develop enough of a supply of rare earths outside of China to reduce its dominance.
Pini Althaus, who founded USA Rare Earth back in 2019 and is now working to develop new mines in Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan as CEO of Cove Capital, said it will be crucial that the contracts to buy materials from Australian mines include price floors, similar to what the U.S. government promised MP Materials this summer, to protect against China manipulating prices.
For decades, China has used the tactic of dumping excess critical minerals onto the market to drive prices down to force mining companies in the rest of the world out of business to eliminate any competition.
“I think taking away that arrow in the quiver of China to manipulate pricing is an absolute crucial first step in Australia and the West being able to develop critical minerals projects to meet our supply chain demands,” said Althaus, who has spent nearly a quarter-century in the mining business.
The agreement underscores how the U.S. is using its global allies to counter China, especially as it weaponizes its traditional dominance in rare earth materials. Top Trump officials have used the tactics from Beijing as a rallying cry for the U.S. and its allies to work together to try to minimize China’s influence.
The Supreme Court is beginning a new term with a sharp focus on President Donald Trump’s robust assertion of executive power.
Pivotal cases on voting and the rights of LGBTQ people also are on the agenda. On Tuesday, the justices will hear arguments over bans passed by nearly half of U.S. states on therapy aimed at changing sexual orientation or gender identity.
The opening session on Monday has lower-profile cases, including a dispute over the right of a criminal defendant to consult with his lawyer during an overnight break in his testimony. The judge in a Texas murder trial ordered defense lawyers not to talk to their client about his testimony.
A major thrust of the next 10 months, however, is expected to be the justices’ evaluation of Trump’s expansive claims of presidential power.
The court’s conservative majority has so far been receptive, at least in preliminary rulings, to many emergency appeals from Trump’s Republican administration. But there could be more skepticism, however, when the court conducts in-depth examinations of some Trump policies, including the president’s imposition of tariffs and his desired restrictions on birthright citizenship.
The justices are hearing a pivotal case for Trump’s economic agenda in early November as they consider the legality of many of his sweeping tariffs. Two lower courts have found the Republican president does not have the power to unilaterally impose wide-ranging tariffs under an emergency powers law.
In December, the justices will take up Trump’s power to fire independent agency members at will, a case that probably will lead the court to overturn, or drastically narrow, a 90-year-old decision. It required a cause, like neglect of duty, before a president could remove the Senate-confirmed officials from their jobs.
The outcome appears to be in little doubt because the conservatives have allowed the firings to take effect while the case plays out, even after lower-court judges found the firings illegal. The three liberal justices on the nine-member court have dissented each time.
Another case that has arrived at the court but has yet to be considered involves Trump’s executive order denying birthright citizenship to children born in the United States to parents who are in the country illegally or temporarily.
The administration has appealed lower-court rulings blocking the order as unconstitutional, or likely so, flouting more than 125 years of general understanding and an 1898 Supreme Court ruling. The case could be argued in the late winter or early spring.
An Arizona man was convicted Thursday on eight murder charges for a string of fatal shootings that targeted random victims and his own mother and stepfather over a three-week span.
The crimes in late 2017 happened during a time of unease in metro Phoenix when people were scared to go out at night or drive on freeways because of two other serial shooting cases in the summer of 2015.
While details trickled out on those cases, the killings Cleophus Cooksey Jr. was accused of generated no publicity until his arrest in 2018 — a surprising development given that the public hadn’t been told about investigators trying to find a serial killer.
Cooksey, 43, is now facing the death penalty when he is sentenced Monday on murder convictions, as well as on kidnapping, sexual assault and armed robbery in a trial that has spanned months.
Cooksey’s victims in Phoenix and nearby Glendale included two men found dead in a parked car, a security guard shot while walking to his girlfriend’s apartment and a woman who was kidnapped, her body found in an alley after she was sexually assaulted.
Cooksey, an aspiring musician, knew some of the victims but wasn’t acquainted with others, police said. Authorities never offered a motive.
Cooksey looked down at the defense table as the verdicts were read. He has maintained his innocence.
Adriana Rodriguez, the daughter of victim Maria Villanueva, said after the verdict that her family was finally getting closure, a day they had feared would never come.
“He took my mom, the only support system that I had,” Rodriguez added as she broke into tears.
The killings started four months after Cooksey was released from prison on a manslaughter conviction for his participation in a 2001 strip club robbery in which an accomplice was fatally shot.
A friend of Cooksey’s mother, Rene Cooksey, and stepfather, Edward Nunn, said the defendant deserved a death sentence. Eric Hampton said he watched Cooksey grow up and attended Thursday’s hearing to see if the defendant showed sympathy for his victims.
“I thought maybe he had a little heart. But he doesn’t have any heart at all, you know, to actually do these things to people and actually the worst part, kill your own mom,” Hampton said outside the courthouse.
“He’s a monster, and I’m just hoping that when the sentencing phase of this is over that, you know, that they put him to sleep,” he added.
The Maricopa County Attorney’s Office, which prosecuted Cooksey, declined to comment on the verdict.
Cooksey’s arrest followed two other serial shooting cases in metro Phoenix.
In 2015, 11 shootings occurred on Phoenix-area freeways between late August and early September. No one was seriously injured, and charges were later dismissed against the only person charged.
The next case occurred over nearly a one-year period ending in July 2016. Bus driver Aaron Juan Saucedo was arrested in April 2017 and charged with first-degree murder in attacks that killed nine people.
Prosecutors are seeking the death penalty against Saucedo with a trial scheduled for December. He has declared his innocence.
The first domino in a growing national redistricting battle is likely to fall Wednesday as the Republican-controlled Texas legislature is expected to pass a new congressional map creating five new winnable seats for the GOP.
The vote follows prodding by President Donald Trump, eager to stave off a midterm defeat that would deprive his party of control of the House of Representatives, and weeks of delays after dozens of Texas Democratic state lawmakers fled the state in protest. Some Democrats returned Monday, only to be assigned round-the-clock police escorts to ensure their attendance at Wednesday’s session. Those who refused to be monitored were confined to the House floor, where they protested on a livestream Tuesday night.
Furious national Democrats have vowed payback for the Texas map, with California’s legislature poised to approve new maps adding more Democratic-friendly seats later this week. The map would still need to be approved by that state’s voters in November.
Normally, states redraw maps once a decade with new census figures. But Trump is lobbying other conservative-controlled states like Indiana and Missouri to also try to squeeze new GOP-friendly seats out of their maps as his party prepares for a difficult midterm election next year.
In Texas, Democrats spent the day before the vote continuing to draw attention to the extraordinary lengths the Republicans who run the legislature were going to ensure it takes place. Democratic state Rep. Nicole Collier started it when she refused to sign what Democrats called the “permission slip” needed to leave the House chamber, a half-page form allowing Department of Public Safety troopers to follow them. She spent Monday night and Tuesday on the House floor, where she set up a livestream while her Democratic colleagues outside had plainclothes officers following them to their offices and homes.
Dallas-area Rep. Linda Garcia said she drove three hours home from Austin with an officer following her. When she went grocery shopping, he went down every aisle with her, pretending to shop, she said. As she spoke to The Associated Press by phone, two unmarked cars with officers inside were parked outside her home.
“It’s a weird feeling,” she said. “The only way to explain the entire process is: It’s like I’m in a movie.”
The trooper assignments, ordered by Republican House Speaker Dustin Burrows, was another escalation of a redistricting battle that has widened across the country. Trump is pushing GOP state officials to tilt the map for the 2026 midterms more in his favor to preserve the GOP’s slim House majority, and Democrats nationally have rallied around efforts to retaliate.
House Minority Leader Gene Wu, from Houston, and state Rep. Vince Perez, of El Paso, stayed overnight with Collier, who represents a minority-majority district in Fort Worth.
On Tuesday, more Democrats returned to the Capitol to tear up the slips they had signed and stay on the House floor, which has a lounge and restrooms for members.
Dallas-area Rep. Cassandra Garcia Hernandez called their protest a “slumber party for democracy,” and she said Democrats were holding strategy sessions on the floor.
“We are not criminals,” Houston Rep. Penny Morales Shaw said.
Collier said having officers shadow her was an attack on her dignity and an attempt to control her movements.
Burrows brushed off Collier’s protest, saying he was focused on important issues, such as providing property tax relief and responding to last month’s deadly floods. His statement Tuesday morning did not mention redistricting, and his office did not immediately respond to other Democrats joining Collier.
“Rep. Collier’s choice to stay and not sign the permission slip is well within her rights under the House Rules,” Burrows said.
Under those rules, until Wednesday’s scheduled vote, the chamber’s doors are locked, and no member can leave “without the written permission of the speaker.”
To do business Wednesday, 100 of 150 House members must be present. The GOP plan is designed to send five additional Republicans from Texas to the U.S. House. Texas Democrats returned to Austin after Democrats in California launched an effort to redraw their state’s districts to take five seats from Republicans.
Democrats also said they were returning because they expect to challenge the new maps in court.
The director of the agency that produces the nation’s jobs and inflation data is typically a mild-mannered technocrat, often with extensive experience in statistical agencies, with little public profile.
But like so much in President Donald Trump’s second administration, this time is different.
Trump has selected E.J. Antoni, chief economist at the conservative Heritage Foundation, to be the next commissioner at the Labor Department’s Bureau of Labor Statistics. Antoni’s nomination was quickly met with a cascade of criticism from other economists, from across the political spectrum.
His selection threatens to bring a new level of politicization to what for decades has been a nonpartisan agency widely accepted as a producer of reliable measures of the nation’s economic health. While many former Labor Department officials say it it unlikely Antoni will be able to distort or alter the data, particularly in the short run, he could change the currently dry-as-dust way it is presented.
Antoni was nominated by Trump after the BLS released a jobs report Aug. 1 that showed that hiring had weakened in July and was much lower in May and June than the agency had previously reported. Trump, without evidence, charged that the data had been “rigged” for political reasons and fired the then-BLS chair, Erika McEntarfer, much to the dismay of many within the agency.
Antoni has been a vocal critic of the government’s jobs data in frequent appearances on podcasts and cable TV. His partisan commentary is unusual for someone who may end up leading the BLS.
For instance, on Aug. 4 — a week before he was nominated — Antoni said in an interview on Fox News Digital that the Labor Department should stop publishing the monthly jobs reports until its data collection processes improve, and rely on quarterly data based on actual employment filings with state unemployment offices.
The monthly employment reports are probably the closest-watched economic data on Wall Street, and can frequently cause swings in stock prices.
When asked at Tuesday’s White House briefing whether the jobs report would continue to be released, press secretary Karoline Leavitt said the administration hoped it would be.
“I believe that is the plan and that’s the hope,” Leavitt said.
Leavitt also defended Antoni’s nomination, calling him an “economic expert” who has testified before Congress and adding that, “the president trusts him to lead this important department.”
Yet Antoni’s TV and podcast appearances have created more of a portrait of a conservative ideologue, instead of a careful economist who considers tradeoffs and prioritizes getting the math correct.
“There’s just nothing in his writing or his resume to suggest that he’s qualified for the position, besides that he is always manipulating the data to favor Trump in some way,” said Brian Albrecht, chief economist at the International Center for Law and Economics.
Antoni wrongly claimed in the last year of Biden’s presidency that the economy had been in recession since 2022; called on the entire Federal Reserve board to be fired for not earning a profit on its Treasury securities holdings; and posted a chart on social media that conflated timelines to suggest inflation was headed to 15%.
His argument that the U.S. was in a recession rested on a vastly exaggerated measure of housing inflation, based on newly-purchased home prices, to artificially make the nation’s gross domestic product appear smaller than it was.
“This is actually maybe the worst Antoni content I’ve seen yet,” Alan Cole of the center-right Tax Foundation said on social media, referring to his recession claim.
On a 2024 podcast, Antoni wanted to sunset Social Security payments for workers paying into the system, saying that “you’ll need a generation of people who pay Social Security taxes but never actually receive any of those benefits.” As head of the BLS, Antoni would oversee the release of the consumer price index by which Social Security payments are adjusted for inflation.
Many economists share, to some degree, Antoni’s concerns that the government’s jobs data has flaws and is threatened by trends such as declining response rates to its surveys. The drop has made the jobs figures more volatile, though not necessarily less accurate over time.
“The stock market moves clearly based on these job numbers, and so people with skin in the game think it’s telling them something about the future of their investments,” Albrecht said. “Could it be improved? Absolutely.”
Katharine Abraham, an economist at the University of Maryland who was BLS Commissioner under President Bill Clinton, said updating the jobs report’s methods would require at least some initial investment.
