U.S. President Joe Biden announced $2.5 billion in additional security assistance for Ukraine on Monday as he uses his final weeks in office to surge military aid to Kyiv before President-elect Donald Trump takes power.

"At my direction, the United States will continue to work relentlessly to strengthen Ukraine’s position in this war over the remainder of my time in office," Biden said in a statement.

In the weeks following the Democrats’ Waterloo, academics and journalists were quick to point to the body count of foreign leaders who have been felled by their electorates’ fickle loyalties over the last few years. After the defenestration of the Conservatives in the U.K., the once unbeatable ANC in South Africa, and even North Macedonia’s Social Democratic Union, Donald Trump’s return to power struck some commentators as simply the American adaptation of an unstoppable global trend.

President Biden is considering commuting the death sentences of most — if not all — of the 40 men currently on federal death row for murder, according to a new report.

In addition to a handful of well-known notorious killers, five of the men murdered children, nine butchered fellow inmates and one killed a prison guard with a hammer while serving a life sentence for raping and murdering his wife, a US Marine.

Officials in the Biden administration are taking credit for creating conditions in Syria that enabled opposition forces to overthrow the Syrian government.

The U.S. Commerce Department is moving to further crack down on China Telecom's (601728.SS) U.S. unit over concerns it could exploit access to American data through their U.S. cloud and internet businesses by providing it to Beijing, a source told Reuters.

The source confirmed a New York Times report that the department last week sent China Telecom Americas a preliminary determination that its presence in U.S. networks and cloud services poses U.S. national security risks and gave the company 30 days to respond.

The Biden administration has taken its first step to retaliate for China’s broad hack of American telecommunications firms, moving to ban the few remaining operations of China Telecom in the United States.

In a notice issued last week to China Telecom Americas — the U.S. subsidiary of one of China’s largest communications firms — the Commerce Department detailed a preliminary finding that the company’s presence in American networks and its provision of cloud services posed a national security risk to the United States.

A federal appeals court has declined to delay a law that would force TikTok’s Chinese parent company to divest the social-media app or else face a ban, paving the way for the latter option to take effect January 19.

A U.S. appeals court on Friday rejected an emergency bid by TikTok to temporarily block a law that would require its Chinese parent company ByteDance to divest the short-video app by January 19 or face a ban on the app.

TikTok and ByteDance on Monday filed the emergency motion with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, asking for more time to make its case to the U.S. Supreme Court. Friday's ruling means that TikTok now must quickly move to the Supreme Court in an attempt to halt the pending ban.

TikTok faces a US ban next month after an appeals court declined to pause the measure, which takes effect if the popular video-sharing app isn’t sold by its China-based parent ByteDance Ltd.

The company’s request for the pause came after a federal appeals court panel in Washington upheld a law that bans the social media platform in the US unless ByteDance divests itself of the app by Jan. 19. TikTok asked for a delay while it appeals the decision and as it waits for President-elect Donald Trump’s incoming administration to weigh in.