Trump's White House: Five takeaways from Tuesday

Washington. President Donald Trump on Tuesday won a victory in Congress with the confirmation of his fiercely-contested education secretary -- and earned tongue-in-cheek praise from Iran's supreme leader for his travel ban. Meanwhile, the Justice Department rolled out its legal arguments in a push for the controversial immigration order to be reinstated by the courts.

The Justice Department faced tough questioning as it urged a federal court of appeals in San Francisco to reinstate Trump's travel ban targeting citizens of seven predominantly Muslim countries -- put on hold by the courts last week.

In an hour-long hearing, an attorney for the government argued that the immigration restrictions were motivated by national security concerns and that a federal judge had overstepped his authority in suspending them. "This is a traditional national security judgment that is assigned to the political branches and the president," said the Justice Department lawyer, August Flentje.

The three-judge panel often appeared skeptical, with one saying the government's argument was "pretty abstract." The ruling is expected later this week. When the White House published a list of several dozen terror attacks - including those in Paris and Orlando - as evidence that the media were underreporting the global jihadist threat, it laid itself open to some feisty pushback. Sure enough, the next morning some of the world's leading media set methodically about the task of illustrating - attack by attack, story by story - just how flawed that assertion was.

The Guardian, the BBC, CNN and The New York Times were just a few of the news outfits that rolled out annotated lists of the often exhaustive coverage most of the 78 attacks cited by the White House had received. Many of the atrocities listed held global headlines for days, if not weeks, and were so well known they are short-handed by the cities where they occurred: Paris, Brussels, San Bernardino, Orlando.  (AFP)