The British Broadcasting Corporation sent a personal apology to U.S. President Donald Trump on Thursday but said there was no legal basis for him to sue the public broadcaster over a documentary his lawyers called defamatory.

The documentary, which aired on the BBC’s “Panorama” news programme just before the U.S. presidential election in 2024, spliced together three parts of Trump’s speech on January 6, 2021, when his supporters stormed the Capitol. The edit created the impression he had called for violence, Reuters reported.

“While the BBC sincerely regrets the manner in which the video clip was edited, we strongly disagree there is a basis for a defamation claim,” the broadcaster said in a statement.

Lawyers for the U.S. president threatened on Sunday to sue the BBC for damages of up to $1 billion unless it withdrew the documentary, apologised to the president and compensated him for “financial and reputational harm.”

By asserting that Trump’s defamation case lacks merit, the BBC effectively signaled that it believes his claim for financial damages is equally untenable. But the broadcaster did not directly address Trump’s financial demand.

In its statement, the BBC said Chair Samir Shah on Thursday “sent a personal letter to the White House making clear that he and the corporation were sorry for the edit.” Shah earlier in the week apologised to a British parliamentary oversight committee and said the edit was “an error of judgement.”

In the Thursday statement, the BBC added that it has no plans to rebroadcast the documentary on any of its platforms.

Earlier on Thursday, the BBC said it was looking into fresh allegations, published in The Telegraph newspaper, over the editing by another of its programmes, “Newsnight,” of the same speech.

The BBC has been thrown into its biggest crisis in decades after two senior executives resigned amid allegations of bias, including about the edit of Trump’s speech. The claims came to light because of a leaked report by a BBC standards official.

Founded in 1922 and funded largely by a licence fee paid by TV-watching Britons, the BBC is without a permanent leader as the government weighs how it should be funded in the future.

It is a vital instrument of Britain’s “soft power” globally, and Prime Minister Keir Starmer said he believed in a “strong and independent” BBC on Wednesday.

President Donald Trump on Wednesday signed legislation ending the longest government shutdown in U.S. history, hours after the House of Representatives voted to restart disrupted food assistance, pay hundreds of thousands of federal workers and revive a hobbled air-traffic control system.

The Republican-controlled chamber passed the package by a vote of 222-209, with Trump’s support largely keeping his party together in the face of vehement opposition from House Democrats, who are angry that a long standoff launched by their Senate colleagues failed to secure a deal to extend federal health insurance subsidies, Reuters reported.

Trump’s signature on the bill, which cleared the Senate earlier in the week, will bring federal workers idled by the 43-day shutdown back to their jobs starting as early as Thursday, although just how quickly full government services and operations will resume is unclear.

“We can never let this happen again,” Trump said in the Oval Office during a late-night signing ceremony that he used to criticize Democrats. “This is no way to run a country.”

The deal extends funding through January 30, leaving the federal government on a path to keep adding about $1.8 trillion a year to its $38 trillion in debt.

“I feel like I just lived a Seinfeld episode. We just spent 40 days and I still don’t know what the plotline was,” said Republican Representative David Schweikert of Arizona, likening Congress’ handling of the shutdown to the misadventures in a popular 1990s U.S. sitcom.

“I really thought this would be like 48 hours: people will have their piece, they’ll get a moment to have a temper tantrum, and we’ll get back to work.”

He added: “What’s happened now when rage is policy?”

The shutdown’s end offers some hope that services crucial to air travel in particular would have some time to recover with the critical Thanksgiving holiday travel wave just two weeks away. Restoration of food aid to millions of families may also make room in household budgets for spending as the Christmas shopping season moves into high gear.

It also means the restoration in coming days of the flow of data on the U.S. economy from key statistical agencies. The absence of data had left investors, policymakers and households largely in the dark about the health of the job market, the trajectory of inflation and the pace of consumer spending and economic growth overall.

Some data gaps are likely to be permanent, however, with the White House saying employment and Consumer Price Index reports covering the month of October might never be released.

By many economists’ estimates, the shutdown was shaving more than a tenth of a percentage point from gross domestic product over each of the roughly six weeks of the outage, although most of that lost output is expected to be recouped in the months ahead.

NO PROMISES ON HEALTHCARE

The vote came eight days after Democrats won several high-profile elections that many in the party thought strengthened their odds of winning an extension of health insurance subsidies, which are due to expire at the end of the year.

While the deal sets up a December vote on those subsidies in the Senate, Speaker Mike Johnson has made no such promise in the House.

Democratic Representative Mikie Sherrill, who last week was elected as New Jersey’s next governor, spoke against the funding bill in her last speech on the U.S. House floor before she resigns from Congress next week, encouraging her colleagues to stand up to Trump’s administration.

“To my colleagues: Do not let this body become a ceremonial red stamp from an administration that takes food away from children and rips away healthcare,” Sherrill said.

“To the country: Stand strong. As we say in the Navy, don’t give up the ship.”

NO CLEAR WINNER FROM SHUTDOWN

Despite the recriminations, neither party appears to have won a clear victory. A Reuters/Ipsos poll released on Wednesday found that 50% of Americans blamed Republicans for the shutdown, while 47% blamed Democrats.

The vote came on the Republican-controlled House’s first day in session since mid-September, a long recess intended to put pressure on Democrats. The chamber’s return also set the clock ticking on a vote to release all unclassified records related to the late convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, something Johnson and Trump have resisted up to now.

Johnson on Wednesday swore in Democrat Adelita Grijalva, who won a September special election to fill the Arizona seat of her late father, Raul Grijalva. She provided the final signature needed for a petition to force a House vote on the issue, hours after House Democrats released a new batch of Epstein documents.

That means that, after performing its constitutionally mandated duty of keeping the government funded, the House could once again be consumed by a probe into Trump’s former friend whose life and 2019 death in prison have spawned countless conspiracy theories.

The funding package would allow eight Republican senators to seek hundreds of thousands of dollars in damages for alleged privacy violations stemming from the federal investigation of the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol by Trump’s supporters.

It retroactively makes it illegal in most cases to obtain a senator’s phone data without disclosure and allows those whose records were obtained to sue the Justice Department for $500,000 in damages, along with attorneys’ fees and other costs.

U.S. President Donald Trump vowed on Monday to do everything he can to make Syria successful after landmark talks with Syrian President Ahmed al-Sharaa, a former al Qaeda commander who until recently was sanctioned by Washington as a foreign terrorist, Reuters reported.

Sharaa’s visit capped a stunning year for the rebel-turned-ruler who toppled longtime autocratic leader Bashar al-Assad and has since travelled the world trying to depict himself as a moderate leader who wants to unify his war-ravaged nation and end its decades of international isolation.

One of Sharaa’s chief aims in Washington was to push for full removal of the toughest U.S. sanctions. While he met with Trump behind closed doors, the U.S. Treasury Department announced a 180-day extension of its suspension of enforcement of the so-called Caesar sanctions, but only the U.S. Congress can lift them entirely.

Trump met with Sharaa in the first-ever visit by a Syrian president to Washington, six months after their first meeting in Saudi Arabia, where the U.S. leader announced plans to lift sanctions, and just days after the U.S. said he was no longer a “Specially Designated Global Terrorist.”

In an unusually muted welcome, Sharaa, who once had a $10 million U.S. bounty on his head, arrived without the fanfare usually given to foreign dignitaries. He entered through a side door where reporters only got a glimpse instead of through the West Wing main door where cameras often capture Trump greeting VIPs.

Speaking to reporters, Trump praised Sharaa as a “strong leader” and voiced confidence in him. “We’ll do everything we can to make Syria successful,” he said.

But Trump also gave a nod to Sharaa’s controversial past. “We’ve all had rough pasts,” he said.

Promising “continued sanctions relief,” the Treasury Department announced a new order to replace its May 23 waiver on enforcement of the 2019 Caesar Act, which imposed sweeping sanctions over human rights abuses under Assad. The move essentially extended the waiver by another 180 days, Sharaa, 43, took power last year after his Islamist fighters launched a lightning offensive and overthrew longtime Syrian President Assad just days later on December 8, read the report.

Syria has since moved at a dizzying pace, away from Assad’s key allies Iran and Russia and toward Turkey, the Gulf – and Washington.

Security was also expected to be a top focus of Sharaa’s meeting with Trump, who in a major U.S. policy shift has sought to help Syria’s fragile transition.

The U.S. is brokering talks on a possible security pact between Syria and Israel, which remains wary of Sharaa’s former militant ties. Reuters reported last week that the U.S. is planning to establish a military presence at a Damascus airbase.

Syria recently signed a political cooperation declaration with the U.S.-led “Global Coalition to Defeat Islamic State,” the Syrian information minister said in a post on X on Monday.

Just hours before the landmark talks, word emerged of two separate Islamic State plots to assassinate Sharaa that had been foiled over the last few months, according to a senior Syrian security official and a senior Middle Eastern official.

Over the weekend, the Syrian interior ministry launched a nationwide campaign targeting Islamic State cells across the country, arresting more than 70 suspects, government media said.

Sharaa’s arrival at the White House was muted. Most heads of state are driven up the driveway festooned with their national flags. But on Monday there was none of that, Reuters reported.

Following the meeting, Trump sharply rebuked U.S. Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, who said on X that she would “really like to see nonstop meetings at the WH on domestic policy not foreign policy and foreign country’s leaders.”

Saying the Georgia Republican had “lost her way,” he added: “I have to view the presidency as a worldwide situation … We could have a world on fire where wars come to our shores very easily.”

As Sharaa left the compound, he exited his motorcade just in front of the White House and briefly greeted a cheering crowd of supporters, some waving Syrian flags.

Sharaa was expected to strongly advocate for a repeal of the Caesar Act, which will help spur global investment in a country ravaged by 14 years of war and which the World Bank estimates will take more than $200 billion to rebuild.

Several influential members of Congress have called for the lifting of the 2019 Caesar sanctions, passed in response to human rights abuses under Assad. A few of Trump’s fellow Republicans want the sanctions to stay in place, but that could change if Trump applies pressure.

Syria’s social fabric has been more recently tested. New bouts of sectarian violence left more than 2,500 dead since Assad’s fall, deepening civil war wounds and putting into question the new rulers’ ability to govern for all Syrians.

Trump’s focus on Syria comes as his administration seeks to keep intact a U.S.-brokered Gaza ceasefire deal between Israel and Hamas militants and push forward on his 20-point plan for an end to the two-year-old war there.

Sharaa’s own turnaround is no less impressive than his country’s. He joined al Qaeda in Iraq around the time of the 2003 U.S.-led invasion and spent years in U.S. prison there, before returning to Syria to join the insurgency against Assad.

In 2013, the U.S. designated Sharaa, then known as Abu Mohammad al-Golani, as a terrorist for his ties to al Qaeda. He broke ties with the group in 2016 and consolidated his influence in Syria’s northwest, read the report.

The U.S. removed the bounty on Sharaa in December, and just last week, the United Nations Security Council lifted terror-related sanctions designations on him and his Interior Minister Anas Khattab.