As the ceasefire in the Gaza Strip stretches on, more and more reports have emerged of growing strains between US President Donald Trump and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Axios last week indicated that Trump’s top aides believe that Netanyahu is sabotaging the ceasefire process. According to the report, Trump’s team is convinced that Netanyahu is delaying progress toward the second phase of the president’s Gaza plan, and could ultimately resume the war against Hamas. Trump, meanwhile, wants to unveil the new technocratic government for Gaza, backed by the international peacekeeping force, and to convene the Board of Peace.
There were disagreements over Syria reported in the news as well. According to the Kan public broadcaster, Netanyahu asked Trump to retain some American sanctions on Syria as he prepared to repeal them last week, in the hope that they could be used as a bargaining chip in future negotiations, but the request was refused.
Trump and Netanyahu present united stance on Gaza, but will Hamas agree to go along?
Russia says it has moved its nuclear-capable Oreshnik missiles into Belarus – as it happened
Putin has claimed the weapons are impossible to intercept because the missile speeds are supposedly more than 10 times the speed of sound.
The move could feasibly allow Russian nuclear missiles to reach European targets faster, if stored at a base in Belarus. Intermediate missiles have a range of around 5,500km (3,415 miles) which mean they could strike anywhere in Europe or the US’s west coast from Russia.
The video released by both Russian and Belarus defence ministries on Tuesday didn’t specify where the missile systems are being placed in Belarus- but it showed them being transported into forests and being camouflaged with netting.
Federal appeals court judge is accused of bullying her clerks
A nonprofit group that advocates for law clerks has taken the rare step of filing a misconduct complaint against a federal appeals court judge, alleging that she bullies and mistreats law clerks and that the courts' process for fielding such claims is broken.
The complaint from the Legal Accountability Project against Judge Sarah Merriam of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit states that it is based on conversations with multiple former law clerks who fear retaliation if they come forward themselves.
"She is a bully, in all the ways one might bully their employees: yelling, berating clerks, sending all-caps unhinged emails," said Aliza Shatzman, president and founder of the Legal Accountability Project.
The Legal Accountability Project complaint, which has not been previously reported, was filed earlier this month and reviewed by NPR. The group says it marks the second publicly known complaint in four years about Merriam. Such complaints are not usually made public. Instead, they tend to be handled internally, by courts that police themselves, in part to protect the judiciary's independence and balance of power.
In a nearly yearlong investigation, NPR found a culture of fear about reporting judges and concluded that the courts' internal system often fails to result in meaningful change.
Tilting at windmills: Trump laments death of bald eagle in the US … which was really a falcon in Israel
Even while on holiday at his Florida resort, Donald Trump has refused to take a break from his unrelenting war on wind energy.
Late Tuesday, the US president posted an image of a dead bird beneath a turbine on social media, accompanied by the lament: “Windmills are killing all of our beautiful Bald Eagles!”
The post was immediately amplified by an official White House account on X with more than a million followers.
Unfortunately for Trump’s effort to sow outrage among American patriots at what he proclaimed to be an image of the national bird laid low, closer inspection reveals the photograph does not show a bald eagle and was not taken in the United States. The image actually shows a falcon that was killed at a wind farm in Israel eight years ago.
In his rush to post the image on his social media platform, Trump overlooked a pair of visual clues that might have given him pause. The first is that the bird is missing the distinctive markings of a bald eagle. The second is that the turbine blamed for its death appears to have Hebrew writing on it.
A quick survey of Israeli wind farms blamed for bird deaths reveals that the image in question was indeed taken by Hedy Ben Eliahou, an employee of Israel’s Nature and Parks Authority, and was featured in a 2017 report in Haaretz, the Tel Aviv news outlet.
US judge halts ending of temporary protected status for South Sudanese migrants
A federal judge on Tuesday blocked plans by the Trump administration to end temporary protections from deportation that had been granted to hundreds of South Sudanese nationals living in the United States.
US district judge Angel Kelley in Boston granted an emergency request by several South Sudanese nationals and an immigrant rights group to prevent the temporary protected status they had been granted from expiring as planned after 5 January.
The ruling is a temporary victory for immigrant advocates and a setback for the Trump administration’s broader effort to curtail the humanitarian program. It is the latest in a series of legal challenges to the administration’s moves to end similar protections for nationals from several other countries, including Syria, Venezuela, Haiti and Nicaragua.
Kelley, who was appointed by the Democratic former president Joe Biden, issued the order after four migrants from South Sudan along with African Communities Together, a non-profit group, sued. The lawsuit alleged that action by the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) was unlawful and exposed them to being deported to a country facing a series of humanitarian crises.
Kelley issued an administrative stay that temporarily blocks the policy pending further litigation.
Trump administration freezes childcare funding to Minnesota in wake of fraud scheme allegations
The Trump administration announced on Tuesday that it is freezing federal funding for childcare programs in Minnesota after allegations of fraud – first exposed and prosecuted during the Biden administration – recently became the focus of conservative influencers and media outlets.
Jim O’Neill, the deputy secretary of health and human services, said in a video statement that the funding freeze was in response to what he called “blatant fraud that appears to be rampant in Minnesota and across the country … We have turned off the money spigot and we are finding the fraud.”
The announcement comes one day after homeland security officials followed the new wave of attention generated by a rightwing influencer’s video dispatch from Minneapolis by going to businesses in the city to question workers over alleged fraud.
Despite claims by conservatives on social media that the allegations of fraud were ignored until now, there have been years of fraud investigations that began with the indictments in 2022 of 47 defendants for their alleged roles in a $250m scheme that exploited a federally funded child nutrition program during the Covid-19 pandemic.
Prosecutors eventually secured the conviction of 57 people who stole federal funds granted to the nonprofit Feeding Our Future.
Judge Stops Trump's Agency Exterminator From Kneecapping The CFPB
The White House cannot lapse in its funding of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, a federal district court judge ruled on Tuesday, only days before funds at the bureau would have likely run out and the consumer finance agency would have no money to pay its employees.
Judge Amy Berman ruled that the CFPB can continue to get its funds from the Federal Reserve, despite the Fed operating at a loss, and that the White House’s new legal argument about how the CFPB gets its funds is not valid.
At the heart of this case is whether Russell Vought, President Donald Trump’s budget director and the acting director of the CFPB, can effectively shut down the agency and lay off all of the bureau’s employees.
The CFPB has largely been inoperable since President Trump has sworn into office nearly a year ago. Its employees are mostly forbidden from doing any work, and most of the bureau’s operations this year has been to unwind the work it did under President Biden and even under Trump’s first term.
Border Patrol commander: We’re going to be in Chicago ‘for years’
U.S. Border Patrol commander Gregory Bovino said Tuesday federal immigration enforcement officers would remain in Chicago “for years,” even after months of controversy surrounding the Trump administration’s crackdown on immigrants in the Windy City.
“If you think we’re done with Chicago, you’d better check yourself before you wreck yourself,” Bovino wrote in a statement on social platform X.
“Don’t call it a comeback; we’re gonna be here for years,” he added.
The post included a video of immigration officers chasing, tackling and arresting people, with an overlay of the song “Mama Said Knock You Out” by LL Cool J.
In the clip, one officer could be seen waving his finger through the hole of his pants, mocking the Chicago arrests. Some Chicago residents strongly oppose the Trump administration’s immigration operations, leading to mass demonstrations.
7 Kennedy Center acts that canceled amid Trump’s takeover
President Trump has overseen a series of dramatic changes at the Kennedy Center since taking office at the beginning of the year.
The most significant shifts came in two waves, both of which resulted in artists canceling performances in protest of Trump’s takeover of the cultural institution.
In February, Trump replaced multiple board members with allies, who then elected Trump chair of the board, days after the president first announced on social media that he would serve in the position. He then named longtime ally Richard Grenell the center’s interim executive director.
This month, the board voted to rename the center “The Donald J. Trump and the John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts.” The president also hosted the Kennedy Center Honors ceremony, which aired last week.
Here are some of the performances that were canceled:
More Articles...
- Democrat wins Iowa state Senate race, blocking GOP from regaining supermajority
- Uncle Sam is asking fliers to dress better at airports. Are we?
- Tatiana Schlossberg, John F. Kennedy's granddaughter, has died
- Epstein and Leviathan: How the Financier Opened Doors to Netanyahu and Ehud Barak Amid Israel's Offshore Gas Fight
Page 1 of 1166
