News Wrap: Trump signs executive orders focused on military

Amna Nawaz:

Also today, the Trump administration kicked off its second week with a flurry of activity involving his top team. This evening the Senate confirmed Scott Bessent as Mr. Trump's Treasury secretary. The hedge fund mogul will take a prominent role in implementing the president's economic agenda.

And President Donald Trump's newly sworn-in defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, arrived at the Pentagon this morning for his first day on the job. He said Trump plans to sign a flurry of new executive orders focused on the U.S. military and vowed to continue support for Trump's immigration policies after the Pentagon sent 1,500 troops and other resources to the border last week.

Pete Hegseth, U.S. Defense Secretary:

We helped move forward troops, put in more barriers, and also to ensure mass deportation, support of mass deportations in support of the president's objective. That is something the Defense Department absolutely will continue to do.

Amna Nawaz:

In the meantime, the Air Force says it will keep the storied Tuskegee Airmen in its curriculum for new recruits, along with the Women Airforce Service Pilots, or WASPs. Over the weekend, authorities had removed materials that featured these groups. Officials say it was only a temporary delay in order to purge diversity mentions from its training programs.

The acting U.S. attorney in Washington is reportedly opening an internal review of the Justice Department's January 6 prosecutions. According to multiple outlets, Ed Martin, who was appointed by Trump, has ordered prosecutors to turn over all files related to the decision to charge hundreds of defendants with felony obstruction offenses.

This follows a Supreme Court decision last year which found the department had overstepped its reach in bringing such charges. Also today, the Justice Department fired more than a dozen employees who worked on criminal investigations of the president. This included career prosecutors who worked on special counsel Jack Smith's team.

A federal judge now says that Stewart Rhodes and other members of the far right group the Oath Keepers are no longer barred from visiting Washington, D.C., and the U.S. Capitol. That comes just three days after Judge Amit Mehta imposed the restriction. Mehta concluded that President Trump's decision to commute their prison sentences also released them from court supervision.

Rhodes was spotted at the U.S. Capitol last week just a day after his release from prison, where he was serving an 18-year sentence for seditious conspiracies.

A 3.8-magnitude earthquake shook Northern New England this morning. The U.S. Geological Survey says the quake struck roughly six miles off the coast of Southern Maine at a depth of about eight miles. Officials say it could be felt across the region and as far away as Pennsylvania. Earthquakes in the Eastern U.S. are less frequent than those out West, but are typically felt across a much broader area. There have been no reports of injuries or significant damage.

In Southern California, a weekend of downpours is giving firefighters a much-needed break after weeks of dry and windy conditions, but the rain has actually caused a new problem. Ash, mud and other debris in the fire zones are sliding onto huge stretches of roads, like here in Topanga Canyon.

Meteorologists say hilly areas freshly scorched by wildfires are far more susceptible to toxic run-off. Landslides even caused a part of the famous Pacific Coast Highway to shut down. Fire officials say all the major blazes in the Los Angeles area are now more than 90 percent contained.

On Wall Street today, stocks ended mixed as new competition from China in the A.I. field rattled the tech sector. The Dow Jones industrial average managed to gain of nearly 300 points, but the Nasdaq sank 600 points, weighed down by a nearly 17 percent drop from A.I. heavyweight Nvidia. The S&P 500 also ended sharply lower on the day.

And the global community has been honoring International Holocaust Remembrance Day. The occasion marks the moment 80 years ago when Soviet troops liberated the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp, where more than one million Jews were murdered.

In Ukraine, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, who is Jewish, laid a candle for the Ukrainian Jews massacred by the Nazis. In Paris, French President Emmanuel Macron visited a memorial to the 76,000 Jews who were deported from France between 1942 and 1944.

In Budapest, mourners remembered the nearly half-a-million Hungarian Jews killed in Auschwitz, more than any other nationality. And world leaders joined survivors at a ceremony at Auschwitz itself today. We will have a deeper look at that later in the broadcast.