Thursday morning news: June 5, 2025

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Trump travel restrictions » President Trump on Wednesday, citing Sunday’s terror attack in Boulder, signed an executive order to ban travel to the U.S. from 12 countries.

TRUMP: On my first day back in office. I directed the Secretary of State to perform a Security review of high-risk regions. and make recommendations for where restrictions should be imposed.

He said his administration chose those countries on criteria including: The "large-scale presence of terrorists. Failure to cooperate on visa security, persistently high rates of people overstaying their visas in the U.S., among other things.

On that list, nine countries located in the Middle East or Africa, as well as Afghanistan, Myanmar, and Haiti.

Zelesnskyy on Russian offer » President Trump says he spoke with Russian leader Vladimir Putin for more than an hour on Wednesday. He posted on Truth Social that the conversation was good, but that it wasn't likely to lead to an immediate peace with Ukraine.

State Department spokeswoman Tammy Bruce:

BRUCE: It is perhaps the least optimistic I've heard him regarding the nature of what was possible in a phone call and the peace or ceasefire with Ukraine, but this is part of, obviously, negotiations.

Trump said Putin plans to retaliate against Ukraine for its massive drone strike earlier this week. That strike destroyed dozens of Russian aircraft.

Meanwhile, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy is rejecting Moscow’s proposal to end the war. He is still calling for face-to-face talks with Putin.

He said he does not believe Putin is interested in peace, but adds that a ceasefire agreement may still be possible…

ZELENSKYY:...if United States will stay strong and if Russia will be ready for some steps to peace.

Zelenskyy says Ukraine is not interested in any kind of deal that would ban its entry to NATO, or would require it to acknowledge Russia's right to any Ukrainian land it has annexed.

Canada-U.S. 'intensive' trade talks » Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent is reporting steady progress toward new trade deals with many global partners. Bessent says the U.S. is engaged in 18 active negotiations.

European Union officials just met with the U.S. trade representative Jamieson Greer in Paris on Wednesday. And EU Trade Commissioner Maroš Šefčovič said talks with the US are "advancing in the right direction at pace."

SEFCOVIC:  Our goal, of course, is to maintain, uh, uh, the momentum. And, uh, we agree that after these technical talks … it will come again back, uh, to our video conferencing and assess the progress and, and chart the way forward.

He expressed optimism, but voiced displeasure over President Trump’s decision to double tariffs on foreign steel to 50%, saying such measures complicate negotiations.

CBO on GOP budget bill » On Capitol Hill, Republicans and Democrats are sparring over the GOP budget bill passed by the House which President Trump dubbed his ‘big beautiful bill.’

Democrats pounced after a report from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office projected that the bill would add about two-and-a-half trillion dollars to the national debt over a decade and could endanger healthcare benefits for nearly 11-million Americans.

Democratic Congressman Ted Lieu said the job of the federal government …

LIEU:  Is to make the lives of Americans better, and clearly this big ugly bill is not going to do that.

But House Majority Leader Steve Scalise says the Congressional Budget Office has it wrong.

SCALISE:  You don't need to go back that far to see how wrong the CBO has been. When it comes time to make prognostications on economic growth, they've always been wrong and they've always ignored what tax cuts will do to grow the American economy.

Republican leaders argue that it's critical to pass the bill to, among other things, lock in President Trump’s 2017 tax cuts.

Musk’s criticism of GOP budget bill » But criticism of the GOP budget bill isn’t only coming from the other side of the aisle.

Elon Musk, who for several months led the Trump administration's efforts to slash government spending, has taken a public stand, calling the bill a "disgusting abomination" with bloated spending. And he’s urging Congress to kill it.

House Speaker Mike Johnson responded:

JOHNSON:  I think he's, he's flat wrong. I think he's, um, he's way off on this and I've told him as much, and, and, uh, I've said it publicly and privately. I'm very consistent in that.

Johnson argues that the bill would make the largest spending cut ever seen in a piece of legislation. That amount, he says, would be $1.6 trillion dollars.

Many Republicans also argue that more spending cuts would follow independent of this bill.

Japan population woes » New numbers from the Japanese government show that what the country’s prime minister refers to as “a silent emergency” is only getting worse. WORLD’s Benjamin Eicher has details.

BENJAMIN EICHER: Japan’s population is aging rapidly. It’s a problem leaders there have long recognized, but it’s not getting any better. In fact, new data show that the number of newborns in Japan just fell below 700,000 last year for the first time since the government began keeping records in 1899.

The decline comes about 15 years faster than the government predicted.

Last year’s figure is only about one-quarter of the peak of 2.7 million births in 1949 during the postwar baby boom.

Some analysts say younger people are reluctant to marry and raise children due to economic concern, as well as societal factors.

Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba has promised to promote more family-friendly measures.

For WORLD, I’m Benjamin Eicher.

I'm Kent Covington.

Straight ahead: how Ukraine’s low tech battle strategy may change the war. Plus, standing up against local government overreach.

This is The World and Everything in It.

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