Starmer meets Trump, Musk at cabinet, Gene Hackman and Andrew Tate
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Today, Britain's Keir Starmer hopes to persuade President Trump to offer a security backstop for Ukraine. Trump himself shares a spotlight with Elon Musk at his first cabinet meeting. And we dig into why Musk's Doge activities are confounding U.S. courts. It's Thursday, February 27th. This is Reuters World News, bringing you everything you need to know from the front lines in 10 minutes every weekday.

I'm Christopher Waljasper in Chicago. And I'm Tara Oakes in Liverpool.

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Award-winning actor Gene Hackman and his wife Betsy Arakawa have been found dead in their home in New Mexico. A county sheriff says the couple died along with their dog and that there is no immediate indication of foul play. Hackman, who was 95, was a Hollywood legend thanks to star turns in The French Connection, Mississippi Burning and The Royal Tenenbaums.

Internet personality Andrew Tate, along with his brother Tristan, have left Romania on a private flight bound for the US. The Tate brothers are under criminal investigation in Romania on accusations of human trafficking. They have denied all wrongdoing. Buses carrying hundreds of freed Palestinians arriving in Gaza's Khan Yunus.

an overnight swap after a standoff. The first phase of Gaza's ceasefire is set to end this week, and the fate of phase two and the remaining 59 Israeli hostages remains unclear. Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts has paused a federal judge's order requiring the Trump administration to pay out foreign aid funds. Roberts gave no explanation for the order, which will ultimately give the top court more time to consider the administration's request to block the judge's ruling.

An unvaccinated child in West Texas has died of measles. It's the first reported US death from the highly contagious disease in 10 years. A Texas outbreak has grown from a handful of cases to more than 130. Jailed PKK militant leader Abdullah Ercalan is expected to give a statement later today. It's one that Ankara hopes will pave the way for the group to disarm an end-of-four-decade insurgency against Turkey.

You can follow along with the expected statement and developments on Reuters.com and the Reuters app. Chipmaker NVIDIA has beaten expectations with a 78% jump in revenue year over year. Investors were on the lookout for signs of slowing demand for NVIDIA's wares and a slowdown in the AI-fueled market boom.

Amanda Cooper is here to break down the Q4 numbers for us. Bear in mind, NVIDIA routinely beats analyst expectations, but the scope of that beat has narrowed as, of course, competition has heated up from other market players. I think the take home from NVIDIA, judging by the very muted reaction in the stock price, suggests that the absence of any major surprises are basically good news.

Results haven't gone far enough, perhaps, to soothe some of the concerns that people had about overspending in the industry in light of the emergence of China's deep-seat model in late January, which got everybody thinking that perhaps the race for AI dominance can be won by spending less money and using less sophisticated chips.

There's a whole galaxy of stocks that react to whatever Nvidia does or says or to perceptions around what demand might look like for Nvidia. But even those are on a very even keel this morning, which suggests that no bad news is good news. British Prime Minister Keir Starmer is meeting US President Donald Trump later today. It's their first in-person meeting since the Republican leader upended US policy on Ukraine, the Middle East and global trade.

UK Bureau Chief Kate Houlton is here to tell us what Starmer's hoping for from the meet. He is hoping to build on what so far is a relatively solid relationship with Donald Trump. The men have met before and they've spoken, I think, three times since Trump was re-elected. So far, Trump has been quite complimentary about Starmer in public, saying he's a very nice guy and that the UK on tariffs may not be as bad as Europe.

The key thing really is though about Ukraine, what Starmer has said is that he fully accepts what the US has long said, which is that European nations should be spending more on defence. And Starmer has responded by saying he will increase UK spending on defence going to 2.5% of GDP by 2027. He has also floated the idea of offering UK troops in some kind of peacekeeping role if there is an

an established peace in Ukraine. But he says that in order for that to work and in order for it to have any teeth, it has to have some kind of US backstop. So what that would mean would be the Americans providing perhaps air cover or logistics support. So he's hoping to build on that. Donald Trump said overnight that he didn't see the US giving much on

any kind of security role, security guarantee that he expects the Europeans to do that. So that's really where the difficult part of the conversation will come. While Starmer's in Washington hoping for some movement on Ukraine, Trump has hosted his first full cabinet. It turned into a lengthy Q&A session with reporters, with Trump saying his administration will soon announce 25% tariffs on Europe.

The European Union was formed in order to screw the United States. That's the purpose of it. He also made comments on Mexico and Canada's tariffs. You know, on April 2nd, I was going to do it on April 1st, but I'm a little bit superstitious. I made it April 2nd. The tariffs go on. And a new immigration pathway, if you can afford the $5 million price tag. It's sort of a green card plus, and it's a path to citizenship. We're going to call it the gold card.

And I think it's going to be very treasured. And while not an official member of Trump's cabinet, Elon Musk was standing off to the side in his now-signature black Make America Great Again hat and a T-shirt that read Tech Support. Because this is actually...

As crazy as it sounds, that is almost a literal description of the work that the Doge team is doing. Musk made the case for the Department of Government Efficiency and its massive slashes to the federal workforce and even whole agencies.

He also explained his email recently asking all government workers to tell him what they did last week. I think that email perhaps was best interpreted as a performance review, but actually it was a pulse check review. Do you have a pulse? Do you have a pulse and two neurons? Which Trump then doubled down on. I wouldn't say that we're thrilled about it. You know, they haven't responded. Now, maybe they don't exist.

But even as Musk got the thumbs up from Trump and his cabinet, Doge has been the subject of a flurry of lawsuits attempting to slow down Musk's cuts. And even as unions and democratic state attorneys general say that Doge is violating privacy laws and even the Constitution, the courts have been more circumspect.

Our legal correspondent, Tom Halls, has been digging into why holding Doge accountable has proven to be so difficult.

The Department of Justice attorneys have repeatedly told judges that Musk is a kind of just a consultant to the president. They have described Doge as a kind of just like a service that provides advice to the president. It's not really an agency because Doge wasn't created by Congress and Musk wasn't confirmed by the Senate. So these are like pretty important questions and judges aren't getting very good answers.

for a judge to step in and order Musk and Doge to stop doing whatever it is they're doing, the plaintiffs would have to show a imminent irreparable harm. And usually the courts like to use the analogy of a wrecking ball about to knock down a building. There was one case in particular where the judge said, but all you're giving me is media reports. You need to show me you have concrete examples of a program that's about to be cut. And

Of course, they don't have that because we have no insight really at all what's happening at these various agencies and departments. Okay, so does Musk have any formal authority to make decisions in the government if he doesn't actually work for Doge? They've thoroughly embraced Musk as the face of all this. That does contradict what they actually say, tell judges and say in court filings, where they've just declined to identify who runs Doge. And this followed some pointed questioning of

of the White House spokeswoman when she declined at the podium in front of the reporters to say who the administrator was. Interestingly, on Tuesday, the administration did identify Amy Gleeson as the administrator of Doge, but at this point, we don't know anything about her. So what's the administration's response been? Yeah, the White House, Musk, everyone else has declined to comment when we've reached out. But last week, President Trump was asked to describe Elon Musk's role, and he said, you can call him an employee, you can call him a consultant.

But in the end, he said, whatever you want to call him, he's a patriot. Every day, thousands of Comcast engineers and technologists like Kunle put people at the heart of everything they create. In the average household, there are dozens of connected devices. Here in the Comcast family, we're building an integrated in-home Wi-Fi solution for millions of families like my own.

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Archaeologists have uncovered rare frescoes that offer fresh insight into the initiation rites for followers of Dionysus, the ancient Greek god of wine, fertility, theatre and religious ecstasy. You can find out more about them by following the link in our description. For more on any of the stories from today, check out Reuters.com or the Reuters app.

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