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      Trump says he has spoken with Putin about ending Ukraine war

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      Donald Trump has said he held talks with the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, over a negotiated end of the three year Russia-Ukraine war, indicated that Russian negotiators want to meet with US counterparts.Trump told the New York Post that he had spoken to Putin, remarking that “I better not say” just how many times.In comments to the outlet on Friday aboard Air Force One, Trump said he believed Putin “does care” about the killing on the battlefield but did not say if the Russian leader had presented any concrete commitments to end the nearly three-year conflict.Trump revealed that he has a plan to end the war but declined to go into details. “I hope it’s fast. Every day people are dying. This war is so bad in Ukraine. I want to end this damn thing.”Last month, Trump estimated that approximately 1 million Russian soldiers and 700,000 Ukrainian troops have been killed since the invasion began – an estimate far in excess of numbers that Ukrainian officials or independent analysts have presented.The Post said the national security adviser, Michael Waltz, joined the president during for the interview.“Let’s get these meetings going,” Trump said. “They want to meet. Every day people are dying. Young handsome soldiers are being killed. Young men, like my sons. On both sides. All over the battlefield”.Waltz would not confirm that Trump had spoken with Putin, telling NBC’s Meet the Press on Sunday that “there are certainly a lot of sensitive conversations going on” and that senior US diplomats would be in Europe this week “talking through the details of how to end this war and that will mean getting both sides to the table”.Ending the war, Waltz added, had come up in conversations with India’s prime minister Narendra Modi, China’s president Xi Jinping and leaders across the Middle East. “Everybody is ready to help President Trump end in this war,” Waltz said, and repeated Trump’s comments that he is prepared to tax, tariff and sanction Russia.“The president is prepared to put all of those issues on the table this week, including the future of US aid to Ukraine. We need to recoup those costs, and that is going to be a partnership with the Ukrainians in terms of their rare earth (materials), their natural resources, their oil and gas, and also buying ours.”But Waltz reiterated what he said was the Trump administration’s “underlying principle” that the Europeans “have to own this conflict going forward. President Trump is going to end it, and then in terms of security guarantees that is squarely going to be with the Europeans.”During his presidential campaign, Trump made repeated vows to end the war quickly if he was re-elected, often pointing to the loss of life on the battlefield.Last month, Trump said “Most people thought this war would last about a week, and now it’s been going on for three years,” and said the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, had expressed interest in a negotiated peace deal.During the interview on Friday, Trump again expressed sorrow for the loss of life in the war and compared the young men dying to his own sons.“All those dead people. Young, young, beautiful people. They’re like your kids, two million of them – and for no reason,” Trump told the Post, adding that Putin also “wants to see people stop dying”.The Kremlin on Sunday declined to confirm or deny the report of the phone call. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told TASS state news agency he was unaware of any such call.“What can be said about this news: as the administration in Washington unfolds its work, many different communications arise. These communications are conducted through different channels. And of course, amid the multiplicity of these communications, I personally may not know something, be unaware of something. Therefore, in this case, I can neither confirm nor deny it.”The Kremlin has previously said it is awaiting “signals” on a possible meeting between Trump and Putin. The head of the State Duma Committee on International Affairs, Leonid Slutsky, has said that work on preparing contacts between Moscow and Washington “is at an advanced stage”.The US president also ventured into the current stand-off between Israel and Iran, saying he “would like a deal done with Iran on non-nuclear” and would prefer a negotiated deal to “bombing the hell out of it… They don’t want to die. Nobody wants to die.”If there was a deal with Iran, he said, “Israel wouldn’t bomb them”. But he declined to go further on any approach to Iran: “In a way, I don’t like telling you what I’m going to tell them. You know, it’s not nice.”“I could tell what I have to tell them, and I hope they decide that they’re not going to do what they’re currently thinking of doing. And I think they’ll really be happy,” Trump added. More

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      Relief for immigrants as legal services restored after Trump-induced chaos

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      Immigrants and asylum seekers caught up in Donald Trump’s mass enforcement crackdown will at least have a better chance at knowing their legal rights – for now – after a court intervened to restore some vital advice services.Last month, the federal government issued a stop-work order targeting programs that provide information and guidance to people facing deportation, via services such as independent legal help desks.But the administration was promptly sued and a temporary court order was issued that restarted four programs that had been abruptly halted by the Department of Justice.Even though short-lived, that unexpected break in legal services took its toll, after a chaotic week and a half of furloughs, cancelled detention visits and general confusion created a domino effect of inefficiencies within the US’s overloaded immigration court system.The temporary court order restoring business as usual may be just that – temporary – as the Trump administration and its allies continue to fixate on attacking the few federal programs that secure some semblance of due process for immigrants.“Often the people providers meet with are fleeing violence. They are just trying to protect their families and stay with their communities. They’re just trying to attend church, they’re just trying to attend school. So I don’t know in what world this makes sense,” said Kel White, associate director of learning and development at the Acacia Center for Justice, which administers the four programs targeted by the justice department’s stop-work order.Across the US, about two-thirds of people fighting in the courts against being forced to repatriate are unrepresented. Some are behind bars in remote, isolated facilities with restricted access to the internet. And they have no right to appointed counsel, like in the criminal court system, which makes hiring an attorney a costly and often untenable prospect.So when contracted legal service providers received the justice department’s order to pause three federally funded legal orientation programs and one legal representation program on 22 January, some of the country’s most vulnerable people lost access to their first or only touchpoints with credible legal advice.“What we’re really concerned about is that this is perhaps more intentional and part of a broader effort to ensure that people don’t have access to information, and don’t have access to counsel,” said Laura St John, legal director for the Florence Immigrant and Refugee Rights Project.On the ground, fallout was swift: posters with details about where to receive legal help were pulled down at detention centers. Organizations serving immigrants were denied permission to do group presentations for detainees, even on their own dime.Vulnerable children traveling alone were no longer being assigned lawyers. And even as affected legal service providers sued for reinstatement of the programs – in a separate lawsuit from one that ultimately restored operations – some were also being forced to consider layoffs.“Why create these inefficiencies? Why impact our communities in this way?” White asked. “These are very basic, simple programs that provide essential information about due process.”When, for example, the Florence project gives group legal orientations to detainees in Arizona, presenters start with the fundamentals: why people are detained, what they should expect in the courtroom, and what the judge’s and government attorney’s roles are. They also describe non-citizens’ rights during hearings. Then they explain eligibility requirements for a vast array of immigration pathways – all the way up to US citizenship.“It’s making sure people understand what’s available to them, but also when there is nothing available, which does happen with some regularity, that people don’t waste their time, effort and energy fighting for a case that doesn’t exist,” St John said.Similarly, in Chicago, the National Immigrant Justice Center (NIJC) runs a court help desk – one of many nationwide – where people in immigration proceedings arrive knowing very little. So help desk staff do information sessions, file mandatory forms before deadlines and keep immigrants from being wrongly deported through appeals. Overwhelmed judges and court personnel often refer confused families their way.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“Taking away the immigration court help desk, the legal orientation programs, all of this is really engineered to create the kind of chaos that will lead to unlawful deportations,” said Azadeh Erfani, policy director at the NIJC.One of the documents the NIJC’s staffers often help to file updates someone’s outdated or erroneous court location, so that, for instance, a mother with a five-year-old child doesn’t have to drop everything and travel from Chicago to Denver for court – or worse, miss her court date and be ordered to leave the country as a no-show.Without programs like the NIJC’s, untold numbers of immigrants and asylum seekers would probably be deported without ever seeing a judge, all because of an unfiled form.“I think what’s lost sometimes is that people have risked their lives to get to this point,” said Adela Mason, director for two of the targeted orientation programs at Acacia. “They’ve traveled across multiple countries, often in life-threatening circumstances. People aren’t trying to evade their court date. They’ve fought for sometimes years to get before a judge and present their claim.“And so for them to lose that opportunity … because they didn’t know that they had to fill out X form as part of asking to change their case to X city, it’s just so unjust.”During the programs’ freeze, legal service providers got very little information from the justice department. Even now, some detention centers have delayed rescheduling visits. Legal providers are having to renegotiate to get their informational posters back on the walls, and they are still waiting for rosters to know who is new to the facilities where they are contracted for orientations.Meanwhile, some organizations are bringing back whiplashed staff members who were just furloughed, and judges will need to reschedule court dates after missed consultations.“We’re celebrating that we are back providing services to our immigrant community who needs those services, and to our courts who need that efficiency,” White said. “But we are living in a world of uncertainty now.” More

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      ‘I’m picturing my death’: alarm as RFK Jr closes in on health secretary role

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      Americans suspicious of modern medicine and the status quo are watching Robert F Kennedy Jr’s nomination to secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS) with a mixture of glee, astonishment and skepticism.Last week, Kennedy used his confirmation hearing before the Senate Finance Committee to demonstrate how fully his wellness agenda, Make America Healthy Again, and Trumpism had fused – often to the delight of supporters.“I leaned conservative anyway, but when Kennedy came on – it was the icing on the cake,” said Hilda Labrada Gore, a 63-year-old mother of four, fitness coach and purveyor of wellness advice who attended Kennedy’s hearing – she was all smiles afterward. In business, she goes by Holistic Hilda. She said she does not have health insurance.“We are looking to pills and prescriptions, programs and physicians for good health, when actually it can be found through much simpler ancestral health ways.”Culturally a world away from Washington, Amy Fewell spoke from her homestead, Refuge of Liberty. A mother of three expecting a fourth, she lives in rural Virginia, home-schools her children and runs Homesteaders of America.“Most of our family hasn’t seen a doctor in over a decade, because we just don’t have to – we’re healthy people,” said Fewell. To her, the most concerning thing about the confirmation hearing was Kennedy distancing himself from anti-vaccine views.“One of the things that I feel like the libertarian Christian moms are concerned about is hearing Robert F Kennedy say, ‘Well, if the science shows that vaccines are safe, then, yes, we should be fine with it.’ Just because the science says it’s OK – I still want the option to say no to it … We just don’t believe that’s God’s design for our life.”Kennedy has long held support among naturopaths, the supplement industry, homesteaders and the Christian back-to-the-land movement – many of whom distrust not only vaccines but modern medicine.“This is our shot,” Karen Howard said she kept thinking about Kennedy’s nomination. She is executive director of the Organic and Natural Health Association, a trade group for the “nutraceuticals” and supplement industry. The group endorsed Kennedy in late January.“No administration has ever publicly supported what we do – ever,” said Howard. She said she “never” envisioned an administration like Trump’s putting up a nominee friendly to her businesses, and that she feels being “neither” Republican nor Democrat “benefits the work I do”.Labrada Gore, Fewell and Howard illustrate a potent new mix of wellness and conservatism – people who have adopted the alternative lifestyles once associated with the left, politically support the right, and advocate for a mix of the unobjectionable and potentially harmful.“It used to be seen as the whole hippie, left-leaning movement from the 60s, which is funny, because homesteading doesn’t have anything to do with politics – until it does,” Fewell said.Howard also recognized that “we definitely are on the fringe on this” in endorsing Kennedy. “We are not mainstream even amongst our own peer organizations.”Influencers such Labrada Gore push for less screen time, more exercise, and fewer chemicals, dyes and preservatives in the food supply. Other favored causes are implacably resistant to evidence of potential harm – such as unregulated supplements, raw milk and vaccine refusal.Like a growing minority of Republicans – about 20%, according to Gallup – Labrada Gore now believes vaccines are more dangerous than the diseases they are designed to prevent.“They’re more dangerous,” she said, acknowledging this is a “spicy” perspective – the overwhelming majority of Americans still support childhood vaccinations.Her theory is that vaccines go “directly into your bloodstream” and “giving it an easy path to bypass the body’s defenses”. She then espoused what many researchers regard as a fraught misunderstanding of the danger of measles, a disease rarely encountered now by Americans. Measles was declared eliminated from the US in 2000, but has since made a resurgence amid vaccine hesitancy.“Some diseases like measles – they are kind of natural rites of passage, I would say, for children to develop naturally. It’s like a hurdle, and when they do they are stronger afterward,” said Labrada Gore.Today, the CDC estimates measles kills between 1-2 people per 1,000 sickened – though mortality varies by country. That is higher than historical rates, which are generally considered an underestimation. By contrast, the World Health Organization (WHO) estimates the risk of adverse reaction from the measles vaccine at about one in a million. It is widely accepted that measles vaccines have saved millions of lives globally.According to a large systematic review, the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine (MMR) is not associated with brain swelling, autism spectrum disorders, “cognitive delay, type 1 diabetes, asthma, dermatitis/eczema, hay fever, leukaemia, multiple sclerosis, gait disturbance, and bacterial or viral infections”.Notably, many of Kennedy’s supporters aren’t fazed by conflicts and suggestions that left Democrats aghast. For example, Kennedy trademarked Maha for use in the supplement industry. Howard said she was “a bit surprised” but that “from a business perspective, it certainly makes sense”.Orn his suggestions that he might cut Medicaid, Labrada Gore said: “I don’t know many people on Medicaid, so I don’t really have a reference point.”If Kennedy is confirmed to lead HHS – an agency with a $1.8tn budget and a remit across health health insurance, biomedical research and the investigation and containment of infectious disease outbreaks – it would take place in spite of fevered opposition.“My perspective is, and I happen to be a Christian in the south … It is my duty to get vaccinated because I should be helping those who can’t help themselves – those with compromised immune systems or who don’t have the resources to get vaccinated,” said Kristin Matthews, a fellow at the Baker Institute for Public Policy at Rice University in Houston, Texas. Her recent report documented bills to limit vaccine access supported by state Republicans.“You can’t be a good Christian and then want to skip out on all vaccines for no reason – if you have as medical reason I completely support it.”Public health researchers, clinicians and even his own cousins have worked to stop the nomination. Their sentiments are summed up by a statement by consumer advocate and Public Citizen co-president Rob Weissman: “There is not one senator who believes Robert F Kennedy is qualified to be secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services and no senator should vote for his confirmation.”The confirmation may also come amid the noted silence of some of Washington’s most powerful groups, such as the American Medical Association and PhRMA. In 2024, pharmaceutical companies and their trade groups spent $293m lobbying Congress – more than any industry by a long shot.Few Republican doubters remain. Those that do, such as polio survivor and Kentucky senator Mitch McConnell, may not do enough to stop Kennedy’s confirmation.Olga Irwin, a 57-year-old Aids patient and activist from Youngstown, Ohio, also attended Kennedy’s hearing. Irwin, who uses a wheelchair, has lived with HIV for 25 years. Like most people, she has spent little time dwelling on her own demise.That changed last week, after she attended Kennedy’s confirmation hearing.She fears the nominee’s history of HIV-denialism and suggestions of cutting Medicaid, the public health insurance program for the low-income that she and 79 million other Americans rely on. Without it, her prescriptions would cost roughly $7,000 per month.She called her husband after the hearing and said: “‘Sam, I’m gonna fucking die.’ Not because I’m not taking my meds – I’m not going to have access to them. I’m picturing my death.” More

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      Trump’s sanctions against the ICC are disgraceful | Kenneth Roth

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      Donald Trump’s executive order reauthorizing sanctions against international criminal court (ICC) personnel reflects a disgraceful effort to ensure that no American, or citizen of an ally such as Israel, is ever investigated or prosecuted. Quite apart from this warped sense of justice – that it is only for other people – the president’s limited view of the court’s powers was rejected in the treaty establishing the court and repudiated by the Joe Biden administration and even the Republican party. But that didn’t stop Trump.The US government traditionally has had no problem with two of the three ways that the court can obtain jurisdiction because it could control them. Washington is fine with the court prosecuting citizens of states that are members of the court because it has no intention of joining them. And it accepts that the United Nations security council can confer jurisdiction because it can exercise its veto to block prosecutions it doesn’t like.But the court’s founding document, the Rome Statute, allows a third route to jurisdiction. The court can investigate or prosecute crimes that occur on the territory of a member state, even if the perpetrator is the citizen of a non-member state. That was why Trump in his first term objected to an ICC preliminary examination in Afghanistan (and imposed sanctions – freezing assets and limiting travel – on the chief prosecutor at the time, Fatou Bensouda, and one of her deputies) because the investigation might have implicated CIA torturers in that country under George W Bush. Trump in his new executive order alludes to the prosecutor’s actions in Afghanistan, but it is a non-issue because the current ICC chief prosecutor, Karim Khan, has made clear that those past crimes are not his priority.The real issue is Israel. That same territorial jurisdiction is how the ICC was able to charge Benjamin Netanyahu and his former defense minister, Yoav Gallant, for their starvation strategy targeting Palestinian civilians in Gaza. Israel never joined the court, but Palestine did, conferring jurisdiction for crimes committed on Palestinian territory, including Gaza, regardless of the perpetrator’s citizenship.Referring to the United States and Israel, Trump’s executive order says: “Neither country has ever recognized the ICC’s jurisdiction, and both nations are thriving democracies with militaries that strictly adhere to the laws of war.” These claims are legally irrelevant.The US opposition to territorial jurisdiction was rejected by the drafters of the ICC treaty by an overwhelming vote of 120-7. The only governments to join the United States in opposing it were China, Iraq, Israel, Libya, Qatar and Yemen.Moreover, there is no ICC exception for “thriving democracies” or governments that purport to respect the laws of war. As any justice institution should, its jurisdiction applies to governments regardless of their character or stated policy. The sole exception is under what is known as the “principle of complementarity”, in which the court defers to good-faith national investigations and prosecutions.But Israel has no history of prosecuting its leaders for war crimes, and despite the ICC charges against Netanyahu and Gallant, it has announced no investigation of their starvation strategy in Gaza. To the contrary, Israel’s Mossad intelligence agency threatened Bensouda – the former ICC prosecutor – and her husband. That hardly reflects good-faith pursuit of possible war crimes.For two decades, the US government objected to territorial jurisdiction, but when the ICC charged Vladimir Putin, it abandoned that position. Putin was charged for kidnapping Ukrainian children and taking them to Russia. Russia has never joined the court, so the sole basis for the court acting was territorial jurisdiction – Putin’s alleged crime took place in Ukraine, which had conferred jurisdiction.That was a game-changer. Biden called the charges “justified”. Even prominent Republicans such as Lindsey Graham, one of the foreign policy leaders in the Senate, shifted. Joined by a long bipartisan list of sponsors, he secured unanimous adoption in March 2022 of a resolution endorsing the ICC’s prosecution of war crimes in Ukraine. Graham said that Putin’s “war crimes spree” had “rehabilitate[d] the ICC in the eyes of the Republican party and the American people”. Other Republicans visited the ICC prosecutor to support the prosecution of Putin.Yet this shift turned out to be only tactical. It did not survive the Israel exception to human rights principles. Now that senior Israeli officials have been charged, Trump has resurrected the objection to the ICC’s territorial jurisdiction.There is nothing the least bit radical about asserting jurisdiction over people who commit a crime on foreign territory. If I, an American citizen, murdered someone in London, Washington could hardly object if British authorities prosecuted me. By the same token, Britain would have every right to delegate that power to the ICC if, because of a crisis such as an occupation, it were unable to pursue the matter itself.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionTrump is inviting trouble with his unprincipled stand. Article 70 of the Rome Statute authorizes prosecution for what Americans call “obstruction of justice” if anyone tries to impede or intimidate an official of the court because of their official duties. Bensouda essentially turned the other cheek when Trump sanctioned her. I would be surprised if Khan, the current prosecutor, were so understanding. The court would have jurisdiction over Trump because he is interfering with a pending prosecution.Trump might try to shrug off ICC charges, figuring that no one would dare to arrest him, but he would face other consequences. Because all 125 ICC member states would have a legal duty to arrest him were he to show up, they would probably tell him quietly that he is not welcome. Trump should ask Putin, who had to skip the August 2023 Brics summit in Johannesburg for the same reason, what it feels like to be a global pariah.Israel has other options. It could open a genuine, independent investigation of the starvation strategy and let the chips fall where they may. Netanyahu and Gallant, if they have a defense, could show up in the Hague and contest the charges, the way former Kenyan president Uhuru Kenyatta did. But Trump obstructing justice is not the answer.

      Kenneth Roth, former executive director of Human Rights Watch (1993-2022), is a visiting professor at Princeton’s School of Public and International Affairs. His book, Righting Wrongs, will be published by Knopf on February 25 More

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      ‘Stand up for what’s right’: Melville House co-founder on publishing Jack Smith and Tulsa reports

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      A US publishing house has decided to publish official reports into sensitive matters in US politics and history against the backdrop of a new Donald Trump administration committed to a radical rightwing agenda of reshaping American government and fiercely aggressive against its opponents, especially in the media.The publisher, Melville House, will on Tuesday release The Jack Smith Report, a print and ebook edition of the special counsel’s summation of his investigation of Donald Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election.Later in February, the company will then publish another report the Department of Justice issued shortly before Trump returned to power, concerning the Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921.Dennis Johnson, co-founder of Melville House with his wife, Valerie Merians, said The Jack Smith Report would be published with no frills: “It is just a report, and we’re just reprinting it. We’re not doing anything to it. We’re not adding anything in the front or back. We’re not getting star introductions or anything. We just wanted it to speak for itself.”But he also described an urgent need to put out physical copies, in light of Trump’s push to revenge himself on prosecutors who worked for Smith and FBI agents who investigated the January 6 attack on Congress.Johnson said the same for the Tulsa report, amid a drive to stamp out diversity, equity and inclusion policies which has resulted in the disappearances of official online resources related to the history of racism and civil rights.Johnson has published federal reports before, achieving notable sales for the CIA Torture Report (2014) and the Mueller Report (2019), the latter concerning Russian election interference and links between Trump and Moscow.Melville House has always been “mission-driven”, Johnson said, describing a company “founded as a minor but sincere attempt to stand up to the [election] of George Bush”.Nonetheless, after Trump’s victory over Kamala Harris in November, Johnson and his staff found themselves “just stumped. We had no ideas … we just felt totally defeated … and then there was this murmuring about the Jack Smith report coming. And when we heard that, after two or three months of being in a bunk and a daze, we just immediately thought we should do that.”Smith was appointed in November 2022, under the Biden administration. He investigated “whether any person or entity violated the law in connection with efforts to interfere with the lawful transfer of power following the 2020 presidential election”, as well as Trump’s retention of classified documents after leaving power.Ultimately, Smith filed four criminal charges relating to election subversion and 40 concerning retention of classified records. Trump pleaded not guilty but his lawyers and a compliant Florida judge secured delays, meaning neither case reached trial before November.After Trump’s election win, Smith closed his cases. Before Trump returned to power, the Department of Justice released part one of Smith’s report, covering his work on Trump’s election subversion. Part two, on Trump’s retention of classified information, remains under wraps.Melville House has moved fast. Johnson said such “crash publishing” required hard work and help from printers, retailers and more. But the Jack Smith Report, he said, would “launch into a very different book culture than the last time we were in this predicament, in 2016. People are very afraid.“We did the Mueller Report and there were two other significant publications. There was Simon and Schuster, they’re one of the biggest publishers in the world, and there was Skyhorse, which is independent but much bigger than us … and yet we got our book on the bestseller list.“We knew that wasn’t going to happen this time, because the big houses, we’re guessing, are intimidated – don’t want any hard feelings with the White House. Trump has already informed Penguin he’s going to sue them about a critical biography they published last year [Lucky Loser, by Susanne Craig and Russ Buettner.] And the publisher with Skyhorse [Tony Lyons] actually worked on the presidential campaign of Robert F Kennedy Jr [now Trump’s nominee for health secretary] so we knew he wasn’t going to put [the Smith report] out. So we’d have the field to ourselves, which is good.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“I think there’s a world of independent booksellers who are eager to be supporting something that speaks to the moment, that somehow stands up for what’s right.”It took the Department of Justice more than 100 years to stand up a proper investigation of the Tulsa Race Massacre – one of the most unjustly obscure episodes in US history, in which hundreds were killed when Greenwood, Oklahoma, a prosperous Black neighborhood, was destroyed by a white mob.No charges were brought. Under Joe Biden, a new investigation was carried out by a cold case unit of the justice department civil rights division named for Emmett Till, a Black teen murdered by white men in Mississippi in 1955. The Tulsa report was released on 10 January. Ten days later, Trump returned to power – and announced sweeping changes at the civil rights division.Calling the new Tulsa report “nauseating and gripping”, Johnson said: “We went to the Library of Congress and found a lot of the photos which might have been part of the initial report when the massacre happened, that the predecessor of the FBI did, the investigation this report criticizes. They supplement the information but it only takes a few pictures to make the point. They’re just aerial shots of devastation. It’s like Munich in world war two. Hiroshima. Total devastation.”Johnson hopes his editions of the Jack Smith and Tulsa reports will find places in “libraries and classrooms” as well as homes. When he was a boy, he said, adults he knew “had the Pentagon Papers paperback in their home, they might have had the Warren Commission and later the Starr Report. I want people to feel these reports are part of the American historic record.”

      The Jack Smith Report is published in the US on Tuesday More

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      Trump administration to cut billions in medical research funding

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      The Trump administration is cutting billions of dollars in medical research funding for universities, hospitals and other scientific institutions by reducing the amount they get in associated costs to support such research.The National Institutes of Health (NIH) said that it was reducing the amount of “indirect” medical research funding going to institutions, which will cut spending by $4bn a year.A limit of 15% of grants awarded to institutions will be allowed for associated costs such as buildings, equipment and support staff. This is a major reduction on what was previously allowed under the NIH grant system.“The United States should have the best medical research in the world,” the NIH said in a statement on Friday. “It is accordingly vital to ensure that as many funds as possible go towards direct scientific research costs rather than administrative overhead.”In the financial year of 2023, $9bn out of $35bn in awarded grants went to cover overheads, the NIH said, adding that the new rate will be more in line with requirements of private foundations.The move has been hailed by supporters of Trump’s attempts to slash government spending. The “department of government efficiency”, headed by billionaire Trump supporter Elon Musk, welcomed the funding cut, tweeting that it was an “amazing job” by the NIH.However, researchers warned that the cut will imperil vital medical research. “This is a surefire way to cripple lifesaving research and innovation,” said Matt Owens, president of the Council on Government Relations, which represents universities and academic medical centers. “Reimbursement of facilities and administrative expenditures are part and parcel of the total costs of conducting world-class research.“America’s competitors will relish this self-inflicted wound. We urge NIH leaders to rescind this dangerous policy before its harms are felt by Americans.”Democrats also criticized the decision, which follows a broader freeze on some research grants imposed by the Trump administration.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe impact of the funding cut will “be nothing short of catastrophic for so much of the lifesaving research patients and families are counting on”, said Patty Murray, a Democratic senator.“Sick kids may not get the treatment they need. Clinical trials may be shut down abruptly with dangerous consequences. Just because Elon Musk doesn’t understand indirect costs doesn’t mean Americans should have to pay the price with their lives.” More

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      The Observer view: Vengeful and reckless, Donald Trump must not go unchallenged | Observer editorial

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      The 47th president of the United States is a danger to his country, Britain and the world. Who would have thought that sentence would ever be written? And yet, less than three weeks into Donald Trump’s second term, it is barely controversial to many people looking on from shell-shocked democracies beyond America’s shores. By his destructive, vindictive, illegal and irrational actions, Trump sets himself beyond the pale. In place of American exceptionalism, the world must now learn to manage, and if necessary confront, a gross American objectionablism.Proof of these assertions is to be found in the White House’s daily outpourings. Seeking revenge against those who tried to punish his attempted 6 January 2021 electoral coup, Trump is weaponising the justice department by executive order. Political opponents, FBI agents, prosecutors, media outlets and journalists are in his sights. In contrast, about 1,500 convicted Capitol Hill rioters have been pardoned. He has even had the gall to withdraw the security clearance of his predecessor, Joe Biden, citing mental incapacity.Trump is treating federal government agencies like enemy territory to be stormed and purged of deep state, so-called woke and liberal elements. To this end, he has recruited the sycophantic billionaire, Elon Musk, and teams of youthful, unaccountable acolytes to physically take over offices and computer systems, suspend, lock out or sack civil servants and seize control of programmes and budgets. The treasury, the education department, the federal election commission and independent government watchdogs are all under the hammer wielded, principally, by Musk’s so-called “department of government efficiency”. Nor has the CIA and the wider “intelligence community” escaped Trump’s vendetta. It, too, faces mass firings under the proposed leadership of Tulsi Gabbard, a Russia apologist. Putting the anti-vax conspiracy theorist, Robert F Kennedy Jr, in charge of health and human services demonstrates how little Trump really cares about ordinary people’s welfare.Trump’s arbitrary, often unlawful orders indulge other far-right obsessions. Diversity, equity and inclusion polices, in particular transgender rights, are under siege. He has demanded a halt to the rollout of EV charging stations, declared open season on wildlife and the environment by relaxing oil and gas drilling regulations, and withdrawn from the Paris climate agreement. He even wants to ban paper straws, preferring plastic. From an immediate international perspective, Trump’s decision to eviscerate USAid, the world’s biggest foreign aid provider, and the attempted sacking of nearly all its staff, is the most savagely objectionable misdeed of all.His freezing of USAid’s $42.8bn (£34.5bn) budget spells death or renewed suffering for millions of dependent people, from Sudan to Bangladesh to Ukraine. The US accounts for about $4 in every $10 spent globally on humanitarian aid. To the instant human toll, as Britain’s former prime minister Gordon Brown points out, must be added a loss of US global influence that will benefit authoritarian rivals China and Russia. “The era when American leaders valued their soft power is coming to an end,” Brown wrote. His view was echoed by foreign secretary David Lammy, who described Trump’s mindless aid vandalism as a “big strategic mistake”.Trump’s egotistic rampage is causing widespread additional international damage and confusion. His on-off tariff wars with China, Canada and, prospectively, the EU; his militarisation of migration policy along the US border with Mexico; his imperialistic vow to seize Greenland by force from Nato ally Denmark; and his disdain for the UN, typified by his withdrawal from the World Health Organization and the UN Human Rights Council, are all decisions underscoring his broader contempt for the multilateralist, rules-based international order. Nothing more damningly illustrates that contempt than yet another outrageous executive order sanctioning the international criminal court (ICC).Trump’s ICC attack was prompted in part by a wish to protect Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister and court-indicted war crimes suspect, who was feted at the White House last week. He used this occasion to unveil his most absurd, most dangerous idea to date: a forcible “clean-out” of the 2 million inhabitants of Gaza and a US-owned “Riviera” real estate development amid the ruins of their Palestinian homeland. This wheeze is too ignorant, too insulting and too inhumane to be taken entirely seriously. Yet that has not stopped Israeli and US rightwingers using it as potential justification for wrecking the ceasefire, resuming the war and laying the ground for annexations in Gaza and the West Bank.Trump, the convicted felon, proves each day that he is unfit for the high office he holds. He aims to destroy the fundamentals of American democracy: the separation of powers, civil and voting rights, secularism, free speech and equality under the law. He is a menace to global peace, stability and prosperity. Pushback has begun, largely through the courts. Yet a few defiant judges cannot win this huge, rapidly developing struggle. The Democrats, stunned into virtual silence, must wake up. Meanwhile, Britain and the western democracies must take a united stand. So far, Keir Starmer and his ministers have been too circumspect. They must be bolder and braver in their criticism and in upholding British values.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe rise of Trump and like-minded far-right populists, lawless bullies and anti-democratic autocrats around the world is the great challenge of our age. Trump the objectionable is setting the world on fire. More

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      Who is helping Elon Musk gut the US government?

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      Elon Musk’s rapid attempt to defund and depopulate the federal government has thrown US politics into chaos while the billionaire’s so-called “department of government efficiency” seizes control of operations at key agencies. Carrying out this hostile takeover are a team of staffers made up of wealthy executives, far-right ideologues and young engineers that have come to make up “Doge”.At government institutions such as the treasury department, General Services Administration and United States Agency for International Development, Musk’s allies have gained access to computer systems, including the sensitive personal data and payment information of tens of millions of Americans. His team is working to shut down USAid, the world’s largest single supplier of humanitarian aid, and members have been spotted at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Department of Education and National Institutes of Health.To undertake this unprecedented and potentially illegal gutting of public funding, Musk has assembled loyalists who largely lack government experience and who range from tech elites to Maga diehards, according to a review of the people publicly associated with Doge.Doge has not released any detailed account of who is working at the unofficial agency, and Musk, along with other staff, is technically a “special government employee”, which allows him and others to evade ethics and financial disclosures that would normally apply to government workers. The Doge team has taken steps to avoid public scrutiny, including limiting their online footprints.A lawsuit filed by unions of federal workers alleges that Musk’s allies in Doge have held calls and interviews in which they have withheld their last names in an effort to escape media scrutiny. These interviewers have also allegedly refused to answer questions while talking to federal employees.Musk shared a letter on X sent to him from the Trump-appointed federal prosecutor for Washington DC that vowed to pursue “any and all legal action against anyone who impedes your work or threatens your people”, which includes identifying them.As hundreds of employees were put on administrative leave at USAid, several sources told the Guardian that Musk was directing Doge’s day-to-day operations personally.“This was just the Doge dudes just literally on the phone with Musk just getting directions from him,” one USAid employee said.Within the White House, Musk appears to be running Doge with a high degree of independence and with Donald Trump’s backing. The president briefly praised Musk’s team on Monday, although he said that he had not met with them personally.“They work, actually, out of the White House,” Trump said. “They’re smart people.”A Doge spokesperson did not respond to a list of questions concerning its staff and operations.Tech executives and engineers take over major agenciesSeveral people at Doge come directly from Musk’s private companies, including the Boring Company, Tesla and xAI. One executive taking a lead role overseeing the effort, according to multiple outlets, is Musk’s longtime lieutenant Steve Davis.Davis has worked for Musk in different capacities for about 20 years and is president of the tunnel-digging Boring Company. He was present on Saturday night at USAid when Doge staffers and agency security officials clashed over Musk’s team’s demands for access to restricted areas, multiple sources told the Guardian. When USAid officials attempted to block the team, two sources said that Davis threatened to bring in US marshals to the agency. The Guardian granted anonymity to those sources to protect them from retaliation.Davis is known for cost cutting and running fast-paced operations, which have at times resulted in clashes with safety regulators. While he was president of Boring in 2023, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (Osha) found that 15 to 20 Boring employees in Las Vegas had been burned with chemical accelerants due to hazardous working conditions at the site. The company’s former safety manager told Fortune that Davis had undercut and isolated him in ways that prohibited him from doing his job, while former employees said Davis imposed difficult deadlines and encouraged a breakneck pace. One Boring employee emailed the safety manager warning that workers “consistently flirted with death” while in the tunnels, according to Fortune. The Boring Company did not return a request for comment on these allegations.Another former Musk employee, Amanda Scales, worked at the billionaire’s artificial intelligence startup xAI before becoming chief of staff at the office of personnel management, which functions as the government’s human resources agency. Shortly after Trump’s inauguration, the acting head of OPM instructed heads of agencies to send Scales a list of employees on probationary periods or administrative leave as the new administration seeks to make drastic cuts to the federal workforce.Allies of the world’s richest man have also been placed in key positions at the General Services Administration – which handles government real estate and federal IT structure – and the treasury department. The former Tesla engineer Thomas Shedd is now in charge of the GSA’s Technology Transformation Services, with 404 Media reporting that Shedd told workers he wants to implant artificial intelligence throughout government systems to write software and automate services. Musk himself has said he wants to deploy AI to review government payments for potential waste.Tom Krause, the CEO of the multibillion-dollar tech company Cloud Software Group, and a Musk ally, is now working within the treasury department. A judge ruled on Thursday that he was one of two “special government employees” associated with Doge who can access sensitive treasury data.View image in fullscreenSeveral tech moguls have said they are collaborating with Doge, though it’s not always clear in what capacity. The billionaire venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, who donated $2.5m to a pro-Trump political action committee and celebrated his re-election, told the New York Times last month that he was “helping Doge”. Andreessen did not go into detail on what his help entailed and said he was not speaking for Musk, but he appeared to have advance knowledge of Doge’s goals and told the Times it had plans for “the money side”, head count and regulation. Weeks after the interview, Musk’s lieutenants went after the money side of the federal government – the treasury department.In addition to the more established executives working at Doge or collaborating with the group, Wired reported that Musk had hired a group of young engineers fresh out of college or high school who possess little experience outside of tiny tech firms. These Doge staffers, who according to the outlet range from 19 to 25 years old, have at times been given huge amounts of access and power over the federal government – including sources telling Wired that the engineer Marko Elez had gained direct “write access” to treasury department payment systems.Elez resigned on Thursday after the Wall Street Journal asked the White House about his links to a now-deleted social media account that promoted eugenics and racism. Among other racist posts, the account posted on X that “you could not pay me to marry outside my ethnicity” and called for repealing the Civil Rights Act, according to the Journal. Earlier that day, a judge had granted Elez and one other Doge employee the power to see sensitive treasury department data.Elez was reinstated on Friday.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionAnother young Doge staffer with access to sensitive government systems, 19-year-old Edward Coristine, has gone by the username “Big Balls” online and founded a company called “Tesla.Sexy LLC”, according to Wired. He has reportedly been on calls with GSA employees as they are asked to defend their jobs.“These people are clueless, given how smart they’re supposed to be,” one USAid employee currently on administrative leave said of the young Doge team. “They’re under the impression that if you just say [to do something], then it will magically happen.”Maga world gets a role in DogeAlong with the staff working with Doge full-time, with some even sleeping in government buildings, Musk’s team has worked in tandem with Trump hardliners to dismantle or exert control over government agencies. Doge staffers showed up to USAid in the past week with Peter Marocco, who briefly served at several agencies during Trump’s first term and was accused by multiple staffers of poor leadership and toxic workplace behavior.Marocco was allegedly photographed inside the Capitol building during the January 6 riot, according to a widely cited, citizen-led investigation that has accurately named numerous other rioters. When Dallas’s D Magazine asked him about the allegations last year, Marocco did not deny them but called the reports “smear tactics”.The secretary of state, Marco Rubio, has now tapped Marocco to run USAid and review its programs as Musk continues work to shut down the agency entirely. Current and former USAid staffers told the Guardian last week that Marocco represented a disaster for the agency, with one former official calling him “a destroyer”.“He’s the most unqualified person to be sitting in any seat of government, let alone the person who has the keys to our foreign assistance,” another former colleague at USAid who still works at the agency said.Also working with Doge is the far-right Georgia representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, who is head of a “delivering on government efficiency” group within the House oversight committee. Greene, who has espoused numerous extremist conspiracies and in 2022 spoke at a white nationalist event, has used her power to demand that NPR and PBS testify about their operations. Greene cited a PBS report that stated Musk gave “what appeared to be a fascist salute” during a speech last month as one of the reasons to compel the news outlet’s executives to appear at the hearing.The conservative ideology extends to Doge’s human resources department, where the head of HR is an employment attorney and consultant who has promoted a “non-woke” alternative to diversity, equity and inclusion programs, 404 Media reported. Stephanie Holmes told the rightwing Federalist Society in 2022 that she started her firm to counter the “really progressive ideology that HR was pushing into corporate America”.The spokesperson for Doge is Katie Miller, who is married to the deputy White House chief of staff, Stephen Miller. Before working at Doge, Miller was Mike Pence’s press secretary and a spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security, where she defended Trump’s anti-immigration policies, including during the period when it was separating families at the border. During Doge’s takeover of agencies on Sunday, Miller issued a statement on X claiming that no violations of security protocol had taken place. On Wednesday night, she told reporters that Musk would decide for himself when his actions constituted a conflict of interest.Stephen Miller has also begun working closely with Musk in the new Trump administration, according to the New York Times, and on Monday went on Fox News to defend the shutdown of USAid by decrying it as a “swamp nest of bureaucrats”. During Trump’s first term, Miller served as a key policy adviser and pushed for extreme policies such as banning immigration and travel from Muslim-majority countries. In 2019, more than 50 civil rights organizations and 20 Democratic senators called for Miller’s resignation after it emerged that he had sent hundreds of emails to far-right editors at Breitbart that included him citing information from prominent white nationalist websites.Changing staff and hidden identitiesSome of the people who had been associated with Doge in the months before Trump’s official order on 20 January have either been given roles elsewhere in the administration or pushed out entirely. The former presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy was originally slated to co-lead Doge with Musk, trumpeting the agency in posts on X. He left after reportedly facing internal tensions with the Tesla CEO and announced a run for Ohio governor.The former Trump tech adviser Michael Kratsios was helping interview hires for Doge, according to Bloomberg, but has since been nominated as the president’s science adviser. The top Silicon Valley investment banker and Musk ally Michael Grimes was also reportedly in discussions about joining Doge. He’s now expected to join the commerce department.Others hold unclear roles within Musk’s unofficial agency, such as the Silicon Valley venture capitalist Baris Akis, who, the New York Times reported, has become close to Musk and an integral part of Doge in recent weeks. Akis is a Turkish national who does not hold US citizenship, according to the Atlantic, which reported that Trump’s advisers declined Musk’s request to officially hire him because of his immigration status. It is unclear in what capacity, if any, he is still involved in the effort. The Doge spokesperson, Katie Miller, did not respond to a request for comment on whether Akis is still involved in Doge.Government watchdog groups have condemned the lack of transparency around Doge’s operations.“It’s inappropriate for the federal government to purposely hide the identities of senior officials who are shaping the policies and servicing the public,” said Scott Amey, the general counsel of the Project on Government Oversight. “These officials must be held accountable for their work, both by their colleagues and the public. It’s also crucial that these officials abide by ethics and transparency requirements to assure the public they are serving in the best interest of our communities.”Andrew Roth contributed reporting More