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      US imposes sanctions on Palestinians for requesting war crimes investigation

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      The United States has imposed sanctions against three Palestinian human rights groups that asked the international criminal court to investigate Israel over allegations of genocide in Gaza, according to a notice posted to the US treasury department’s website on Thursday.The three groups – the Gaza-based Palestinian Centre for Human Rights and Al Mezan Center for Human Rights, and the Ramallah-based Al-Haq – were listed under what the treasury department said were international criminal court-related designations.The groups asked the ICC in November 2023 to investigate Israeli air strikes on densely populated civilian areas of Gaza, the siege of the territory and displacement of the population.A year later, the ICC issued arrest warrants for Benjamin Netanyahu and his former defence chief, Yoav Gallant, as well as a Hamas leader, Ibrahim al-Masri, for alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity.Donald Trump’s administration has imposed sanctions against ICC judges as well as its chief prosecutor over the Israeli arrest warrants and a past decision to open a case into alleged war crimes by US troops in Afghanistan.The ICC, which was established in 2002, has jurisdiction over war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide in its 125 member countries. Some nations, including the US, China, Russia and Israel, do not recognise its authority.The US sanctions against the Palestinian groups come days after the world’s biggest academic association of genocide scholars passed a resolution saying the legal criteria had been met to establish Israel is committing genocide in Gaza.Israel called the announcement disgraceful and “entirely based on Hamas’s campaign of lies”.Israel launched its assault on the Gaza Strip in October 2023, after fighters from Hamas, the Palestinian militant group in control of the territory, attacked southern Israel, killing 1,200 people and taking 250 hostages back into Gaza.Since then, Israel’s war has killed 63,000 people, forced nearly all Gaza’s residents to flee their homes at least once, and set off a starvation crisis in parts of the enclave that a global hunger monitor describes as a famine. More

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      US conducts ‘lethal strike’ against drug boat from Venezuela, Rubio says

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      The US military has conducted “a lethal strike” against an alleged “drug vessel” from Venezuela, the secretary of state, Marco Rubio, has announced amid growing tensions between Washington and Caracas.Donald Trump trailed the announcement during an address at the White House on Tuesday afternoon, telling reporters the US had “just, over the last few minutes, literally shot out … a drug-carrying boat”.“And there’s more where that came from. We have a lot of drugs pouring into our country,” the US president added. “We took it out,” he said of the boat.Shortly after, Rubio offered further details of the incident on social media, tweeting that the military had “conducted a strike in the southern Caribbean against a drug vessel which had departed from Venezuela and was being operated by a designated narco-terrorist organization”.It was not immediately clear what kind of vessel had been targeted, or, crucially, if the incident had taken place inside the South American country’s territorial waters.“Everything is hinging on where this strike took place,” said Geoff Ramsey, a senior fellow on Venezuela and Colombia from the Atlantic Council’s Latin America Centre.“If this strike took place in Venezuelan waters, I think that will trigger a massive escalation from the Venezuelan side. However, from what I’ve heard … this took place in international waters, and that suggests that ultimately this is about drug interdiction.”Ramsey added: “This is a target-rich environment, after all. There are plenty of go-fast boats transporting cocaine through the southern Caribbean, and I think ultimately Washington is more interested in signalling than in actually engaging in any kind of military action inside Venezuela territory.”Even so, the development will add to fears over a possible military clash between Venezuelan and US troops after the US sent war ships and marines into the Caribbean last month as part of what Trump allies touted as an attempt to force Venezuela’s authoritarian leader, Nicolás Maduro, from power.Officially, Trump’s naval buildup is part of US efforts to combat Latin American drug traffickers, including a Venezuelan group called the Cartel de los Soles (Cartel of the Suns) which Trump officials accuse Maduro of leading.Last month the US announced a $50m reward for Maduro’s capture – twice the bounty once offered for Osama bin Laden. In July, Trump signed a secret directive greenlighting military force against Latin American cartels considered terrorist organizations, including the Venezuelan group.Republican party hawks and Trump allies have celebrated those moves as proof the White House is determined to end Maduro’s 12-year rule. “Your days are seriously numbered,” Trump’s former national security adviser Michael Flynn, declared recently, encouraging Maduro to flee to Moscow.Maduro’s allies have also claimed that a regime-change operation is afoot, with Maduro himself this week warning that White House hardliners were seeking to lead Trump into “a terrible war” that would harm the entire region.“Mr President Donald Trump, you need to take care because Marco Rubio wants to stain your hands with blood – with South American, Caribbean blood [and] Venezuelan blood. They want to lead you into a bloodbath … with a massacre against the people of Venezuela,” Maduro said.But many experts are skeptical the US is planning a military intervention. “The idea of there being an invasion, I don’t believe to be true,” James Story, the US’s top diplomat for Venezuela from 2018 to 2023, said last week. He said Trump generally opposed “meddling militarily in the affairs of other countries”.Ramsey agreed. ”This is not a deployment focused on regime change. This may be an attempt to signal to disaffected elements of the military in Venezuela that now is the time to rise up against Maduro. But we’ve seen that approach be tried and ​fail repeatedly over ​the last 25 years.”Ramsey said the tough talk belied the fact that Trump had actually relaxed its stance towards Venezuela. Sanctions had been softened in recent weeks. The Trump administration was “actively coordinating with ​the Maduro regime on deportation flights”, about two of which are landing at Venezuela’s main international airport each week.​Ramsey believed that the military mobilization was partly an attempt “to throw some red meat to a part of Trump’s base that has been dissatisfied with the reality of sanctions relief” and what it perceived as his soft policy towards Maduro. More

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      Trump says he wants to meet with Kim Jong-un as South Korea’s Lee Jae Myung visits US

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      Donald Trump said on Monday he wanted to meet with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un and that he was open to further trade talks with South Korea even as he lobbed new criticisms at the visiting Asian ally.South Korea’s new president, Lee Jae Myung, arrived for talks just after the US president criticized the South Korean government, apparently over its handling of investigations related to his conservative predecessor’s December attempt to impose martial law.The remarks cast a dark mood over high-stakes talks for Lee, who took office in June after a snap election that followed Yoon Suk Yeol’s impeachment and removal.Welcoming Lee to the White House’s Oval Office, Trump said he was open to negotiating aspects of the US-South Korean trade deal and to meeting Kim.“I’d like to have a meeting,” Trump told reporters. “I look forward to meeting with Kim Jong-un in the appropriate future.“Trump and Lee held their first meeting in tense circumstances. The US president lodged vague complaints about a “purge or revolution” in South Korea on social media before later walking the comments back as a likely “misunderstanding” between the allies.Despite clinching a trade deal in July that spared South Korean exports harsher US tariffs, the two sides continue to wrangle over nuclear energy, military spending and details of a trade deal that included $350bn in promised South Korean investments in the United States.North Korea’s rhetoric has ramped up, with Kim pledging to speed his nuclear program and condemning joint US-South Korea military drills. Over the weekend, Kim supervised the test firing of new air defense systems.Since Trump’s January inauguration, Kim has ignored Trump’s repeated calls to revive the direct diplomacy he pursued during his 2017-2021 term in office, which produced no deal to halt North Korea’s nuclear program. In the Oval Office, Lee avoided the theatrical confrontations that dominated a February visit by Volodymyr Zelenskyy, the Ukrainian president, and a May visit from Cyril Ramaphosa, the South African president.Lee, deploying a well-worn strategy by foreign visitors to the Trump White House, talked golf and lavished praise on the Republican president’s interior decorating and peacemaking. He told reporters earlier that he had read the president’s 1987 memoir, Trump: The Art of the Deal, to prepare.As the leaders met, the liberal South Korean encouraged Trump to engage with North Korea.“I hope you can bring peace to the Korean Peninsula, the only divided nation in the world, so that you can meet with Kim Jong-un, build a Trump World [real-estate complex] in North Korea so that I can play golf there, and so that you can truly play a role as a world-historical peacemaker,” Lee said, speaking in Korean.South Korea’s economy relies heavily on the US, with Washington underwriting its security with troops and nuclear deterrence. Trump has called Seoul a “money machine” that takes advantage of American military protection. More

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      ‘Debilitating consequences’ in Uganda after USAID cuts – photo essay

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      In northern Uganda, the unfolding consequences of US funding cuts to international humanitarian aid are palpable. Thousands of families have been living in refugee camps along the border with South Sudan for almost a decade, and newcomers are reported every day as the never-ending conflict within the country intensifies.Uganda has long been a crossroads of migration, shaped by historical and contemporary population movements. Today, it hosts over 1.9 million refugees and asylum seekers – one of the largest refugee populations in the world. Persistent violence in South Sudan and the eruption of armed conflict in Sudan have displaced millions. As both countries spiral further into instability, Uganda remains one of the few safe havens in the region.The decision by Donald Trump’s administration to cut support to USAID, a giant in the international humanitarian assistance network, disrupted the lives of millions of people across the continent, and other humanitarian groups were impacted. In March, the World Food Programme (WFP), an international non-profit, announced a cut to food distribution to 1 million refugees in Uganda.The AVSI Foundation, along with many other humanitarian actors, was forced to abandon a project that employed more than 200 local field officers, leaving their families without a steady income, and thousands of refugees unable to enroll in agricultural training, schools, or start small businesses. Before the end of 2024, they had identified 13,000 households to receive support that vanished just a few days after Trump’s inauguration day.View image in fullscreenView image in fullscreenAmong a slew of executive orders, and actions by the “department of governmental efficiency” (Doge), led then by Elon Musk, the funding cuts dashed people’s hopes and expectations of leaving extreme poverty. A general sentiment of failure and retreat spread among the refugee and host communities. In the following months, a consequent rise in suicides was reported, as Jatuporn Lee, a UNHCR local representative, explained.“Families are struggling to cope with the impact of reduced support, increased food insecurity, higher land rental costs, growing mental health and psychosocial challenges, surges in gender-based violence, school drop-outs, child neglect, abandonment, and child labor,” she said. “We would be cautious about drawing a direct link between funding cuts and suicide rates. As a non-clinical specialist, drawing such a correlation can be misleading. However, these concerning vulnerability trends are clear indicators of growing vulnerability and underscore the urgent need for sustained donor support to promote refugees’ protection, welbeing, and social and economic inclusion.”View image in fullscreenView image in fullscreenIn April and May, I spent two weeks in several northern Ugandan districts, including Lamwo, Kitgum, Madi-Okollo and Terego, at the very time when new refugees from South Sudan and Sudan were arriving at the border seeking safety. Olive Ngamita, the representative of AVSI Foundation in Kampala, said that 200 humanitarians in Kitgum had to leave, and that they had paid several months of rent in advance, relying on their upcoming salaries.The absence of international humanitarian support left a vacuum in the ecosystem of refugee settlements and host communities. Teachers who stop receiving their salary volunteer to maintain continuity in their students’ education, but struggle to support their families. Since the beginning of 2025, children and youth have been abandoning schools in large numbers, unable to afford the enrollment fees that were once subsidized. Small restaurants and street food vendors, who had looked forward to expanding their activities through loans and microcredit initiatives, have instead scaled back their operations.View image in fullscreenView image in fullscreenIn the quiet corners of these settlements, there is a visible loss of rhythm – routines once built around schooling, training sessions and market days have been disrupted. The absence of humanitarian programming leaves young people idle, exposing them to greater risks of recruitment, trafficking or exploitation.Trump and his cohorts replied to harsh criticism of the cuts from the agency’s officials and the humanitarian world, saying they would not cut life-saving aid. Massive humanitarian operations in critical situations have the primary goal of providing food and access to healthcare, indeed. But the bigger picture is to sustain a community, not to let it free fall.One of the first people I met in the Palabek camp in Lamwo was Viola, a 23-year-old pregnant woman who, unable to treat malaria and lower her fever, miscarried. Antimalarials were not delivered to the camp’s clinic. The supply chain, because of the freeze on international aid, had been interrupted. Her story is not an exception. In places where disease can spread fast, even short interruptions in supplies can be fatal.View image in fullscreenUSAID was meant to secure the United States’s dominance as part of a system aimed at stabilizing countries and strengthening diplomatic relations through cooperation. The long-term ramifications of this policy shift are only beginning to emerge. What is unfolding in Uganda today may soon reflect broader regional patterns, where donor disengagement risks creating power vacuums ripe for instability.As Nicholas Apiyo, a Ugandan lawyer and human rights defender, explains: “There is an absolute uncertainty in the future. National and international organizations that depended on USAID have either closed or scaled down their operations. People are left with no continuous care, and many have already lost their lives.“The USAID office in Kampala, is now closed, with debilitating consequences. Although funding for life-saving aid partially resumed, the disruption left a heavy toll on the beneficiaries of treatment to cure Ebola, HIV and malaria. A restoration enabling the supply chain to resume will take time, and lives will be lost in the process.”View image in fullscreenView image in fullscreenUganda will have to adjust to a new funding mechanism, which, according to Apiyo, must increase its national budget for assistance. African countries could now strengthen their ties with Russia, India, Iran and China – those countries are seen as more predictable and less “schizophrenic”, as Apiyo puts it.“You need soft power to rule the world. The colonial roots of the humanitarian system have always had their negative consequences in the majority world as a way to extend its dependency on the donor.”An example of successIn the Madi-Okollo and Terego districts, located near a triple border, hundreds of refugees from the DRC and South Sudan cross into Uganda daily at unofficial border crossing points, converging to form a growing community in established refugee settlements. There, interventions that received funding before the imposition of the new policies remain operational, promoting sustainable economic practices and creating job opportunities. However, educators are concerned that without further funding, those children, out of school without job opportunities, could be driven to illegal survival strategies and be at higher risk of forced recruitment in their country of origin, contributing to internal instability. Local teachers and social workers spoke of “a race against time”, where every month of consistent support can be the difference between a child learning to read or joining an armed group.View image in fullscreenView image in fullscreenAVSI Foundation implemented the Step – Transition from Emergency to Sustainable Development Program, a project funded by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation through the Italian Agency for Development Cooperation, in collaboration with the Office of the Ugandan Prime Minister, UNHCR, local leaders and partners. It aimed at improving the socioeconomic stability of refugees and host communities by addressing their priority needs through a multisectoral approach. The project reached 600 direct participants.The project promoted the use of renewable technologies among households, increasing adoption from 0% to 61%. These included briquette production, small-scale irrigation, water harvesting, energy-saving cooking solutions, and partnerships with private renewable energy providers.View image in fullscreenBy the end of the initiative, 92% of families reported higher agricultural production. This was supported through training, access to farming tools and seeds, and the establishment of backyard gardens with a reliable water supply. The program also formed 24 production and marketing groups, bringing together refugees and host community members to improve cooperation and create income opportunities.Support systems for the most vulnerable were strengthened, offering mental health and psychosocial services, gender-based violence prevention, and legal assistance through community dialogues, legal clinics and coordinated referral pathways. Cases of abuse and neglect were promptly referred as a result of child protection and birth registration initiatives.Special focus was placed on pregnant adolescents, young women and youth, who received life skills training, mentorship and sport therapy, resulting in 80% showing positive behavior change. Positive parenting sessions also improved family relationships, with follow-up home visits and group mentoring helping communities sustain these changes. These models – holistic, inclusive, and locally adapted – should guide future international efforts. What they demonstrate is clear: when investments are sustained, results follow.View image in fullscreen More

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      Russia says Europe’s leaders don’t want peace in Ukraine as Vance says US will keep trying

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      Russia accused western European leaders on Sunday of not wanting peace in Ukraine, as Moscow’s most senior diplomat praised efforts by Donald Trump to end the war, while Vice-President JD Vance said the US would “keep on trying” to broker talks in the absence of a deal.Sergei Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister, made the comments during a sometimes contentious interview on NBC on Sunday morning, during which he denied his country had bombed civilian targets in Ukraine.Trump, he said, had set himself above European leaders who accompanied Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelenskyy for talks at the White House last week, immediately after the summit between the US president and his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin in Anchorage, Alaska, on 15 August.“We want peace in Ukraine. He wants, President Trump wants, peace in Ukraine. The reaction to [the] Anchorage meeting, the gathering in Washington of these European representatives and what they were doing after Washington, indicates that they don’t want peace,” Lavrov said.The Alaska talks produced neither a ceasefire nor an agreement for Zelenskyy and Putin to meet, and was widely considered to be a public relations triumph for the Russian leader.Lavrov brushed aside Trump’s apparent frustration at the outcome and the US warning of “massive sanctions or massive tariffs or both” against Moscow. He said “yes” when asked if Putin wanted peace and said Putin and Trump respected each other, while assailing the alliance of leaders such as France’s Emmanuel Macron, Germany’s Friedrich Merz, Britain’s Keir Starmer and European Union president Ursula von der Leyen who came to the White House last week to bolster Zelenskyy’s visit.European leaders in recent days have pledged to support security guarantees as part of a peace agreement, although Russia has flatly rejected the prospect of troops from countries in Europe being positioned in Ukraine.Trump has ruled out sending the US military, and on Friday it was reported that his administration had blocked Ukraine’s use of US-supplied long-range missiles to attack Russia.Meanwhile, Canadian prime minister Mark Carney told Zelenskyy on Sunday that he backed Ukraine’s calls for robust security guarantees and that Canada would not rule out sending troops.Earlier, Lavrov became defensive when NBC asked him if Putin was “stringing along” Trump by appearing conciliatory to his peace overtures but continuing to bomb Ukraine, attacks which last week included an airstrike on an American electronics manufacturing company in the west of the country.“It is not for the lawmakers or for any media outlet to decide what President Trump is motivated by. We respect President Trump because President Trump defends American national interests. And I have reason to believe that President Trump respects President Putin because he defends Russian national interests,” he said.Critics, including some conservative voices, are alarmed by what they see as Putin manipulating Trump over Ukraine and US elections.Lavrov meanwhile denied that Russia attacks civilian targets including schools, hospitals and churches, hinting at Russia’s extraordinary claims throughout the war that Ukraine is attacking its own people.“Our intelligence has very good information, and we target only military enterprises, military sites or industrial enterprises directly involved in producing military equipment for [the] Ukrainian army,” he said.Vance appeared separately in the same Sunday morning program and insisted Russia deserved credit for indicating it was ready to end a conflict that Trump has said more than 50 times he would solve “in one day”, while in contrast the vice-president warned of a longer process.“I think the Russians have made significant concessions to President Trump for the first time in three and a half years of this conflict,” Vance said.“They’ve recognized that they’re not going to be able to install a puppet regime in Kyiv. That was, of course, a major demand at the beginning. And importantly, they’ve acknowledged that there is going to be some security guarantee to the territorial integrity of Ukraine.”Vance said historically that peace negotiations go “in fits and starts” and warned that he did not think ending the war was “going to happen overnight”.Vance said of Russia, in a comment that was not further clarified: “Should they have started the war? Of course, they haven’t. But we’re making progress”. Trump in February blamed Ukraine, saying, “you never should have started it.”Any sanctions against Russia, Vance said, would be on a “case by case basis”, but he remained hopeful that US efforts could bring Zelenskyy and Putin together.“It’s complicated, but we’re going to keep on trying to convince these parties to talk to each other and continue to play the game of diplomacy, because that’s the only way to get this thing wrapped up.”Lavrov remained adamant that Russia also wanted peace, and acknowledged “Ukraine has the right to exist”. But he said it “must let people go”, referring to Putin’s demand that it give up Crimea, the Ukrainian peninsula seized by Russia in 2014, as well as southern and eastern parts, such as the Donbas, captured since 2022, as part of a peace agreement.“In Crimea [they] decided that they belong to the Russian culture,” he said, citing a disputed 2014 referendum condemned by most of the world as illegal.On Friday, Senator Chris Coons, a Democrat of Connecticut, said on CNN that stronger US action was needed because “Putin is not going to stop until we stop him.”

      Reuters contributed reporting More

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      Trump’s presidential philosophy is government by shakedown | Steven Greenhouse

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      Americans have long glorified their constitution and the rule of law. But Donald Trump’s volatile and vindictive presidency has increasingly replaced that philosophy with something very different – call it “governing by shakedown”.Trump has often violated federal law, and sometimes the constitution, as he has sought to throttle his targets – whether universities, law firms or US trading partners – in the hope that they will cry uncle and agree to his demands. This style of governance would make any caudillo proud. But it should make anyone who cares about the rule of law – and avoiding authoritarian rule – very worried.By threatening to cripple this university’s finances or that country’s exports, Trump has become the global emperor of shakedowns. It has been great for him and his ego. He dominates negotiations and news cycles, and his White House cheerleaders rush to proclaim victory whenever he reaches a deal with one of his targets.Claiming that many universities haven’t done enough to combat antisemitism, Trump has demanded that Harvard, Columbia, Brown and other schools submit to his rightwing vision. Furious that some law firms have hired people or filed lawsuits he didn’t like, Trump has taken unprecedented steps to attack them unless they submitted to his demands. Trump has wreaked havoc on global diplomacy and supply chains by threatening America’s trading partners with stratospherically high tariffs unless they reached trade deals with Washington.Far too many Americans – whether senators, the media or the public – fail to realize that Trump’s attacks on these institutions evidently violate the law. Federal district courts have ruled in four cases that Trump’s broadsides against law firms violate their free speech rights. The US court of international trade ruled that Trump’s across-the-board tariffs against dozens of countries were illegal, concluding that Congress hadn’t given him “unbounded authority” to slap tariffs on nearly every country. (The administration is appealing that ruling.)As for Trump cutting off billions in aid and research grants to universities because of their alleged failures in responding to antisemitism, many legal experts say his administration has plainly failed to comply with anti-discrimination laws that require the government to follow specific procedures before penalizing universities, such as giving schools an opportunity for a hearing. Moreover, federal law says the government can halt funding to only particular university programs where noncompliance has been found, and not, for instance, to scientific research far afield from that.Last week, Trump expanded his shakedown efforts. He told the chipmaker Nvidia that he would let it sell high-end AI computer chips to China only if it paid 15% of the revenue from those sales to the US treasury. Nvidia agreed, even though Trump’s demand was of dubious legality; the constitution prohibits the government from placing a tax on exports.Trump also threatened Brazil with a 50% tariff unless it stopped prosecuting its rightwing former president, Jair Bolsonaro, for allegedly seeking to overturn Brazil’s presidential election. When Brazil’s current president rejected that demand, saying that Trump shouldn’t be telling a sovereign democracy how to run its justice system, Trump imposed the 50% tariff. Trump’s move is an outrage because he’s seeking to strong-arm a longtime US ally over how to run its justice system and because, as Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon said, this is “far outside his legal authority”.Many lawyers voiced shock and dismay when the law firm Paul, Weiss, a litigation powerhouse, reached a deal with Trump instead of fighting him. Paul, Weiss promised to provide Trump with $40m in pro bono legal services after he sought to cripple the firm by suspending its security clearances and barring its lawyers from federal buildings. All told, nine law firms have reached deals with Trump, promising nearly $1bn in pro bono services . Some legal experts call these deals illegal – one Yale law professor said “a contract that you make with a gun to your head is not a contract”.Columbia has reached a $221m settlement with the Trump administration, while Brown reached a $50m deal. While denying any liability, Columbia vowed to “work on multiple fronts to combat” antisemitism and other “forms of hatred and intolerance at Columbia”. The university also pledged not to use “race, color, sex, or national origin” in hiring decisions and said its admissions policies would be merit-based and wouldn’t “unlawfully preference applicants based on race, color, or national origin”.Columbia officials hailed one part of the deal – the Trump administration agreed to unfreeze $1.3bn in funding. That freeze was devastating Columbia’s research programs.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionBut David Pozen, a constitutional law professor at Columbia, denounced the deal, saying it “gives legal form to an extortion scheme”. Pozen described it as the “first-ever cutoff of congressionally appropriated funds to a university, so as to punish that university and impel it to adopt sweeping reforms, without any pretense of following the congressionally mandated procedures”. Pozen slammed this deal-by-deal style of governance as “coercive”, “arbitrary”, “deeply susceptible” to “corruption” and “corrosive to the democratic order and to law itself”.We shouldn’t be shocked that Trump acts this way. He loves dealmaking and lording it over others and he has long paid scant heed to following the law. But we should be shocked by the way the two other supposedly co-equal branches of government, Congress and the supreme court, have behaved. They have essentially rolled over in the face of Trump’s ruling by shakedown.Republican lawmakers in Congress have cravenly sat on their hands while Trump has boosted inflation and sabotaged economic growth by forcing tariffs on more than 90 countries, notwithstanding the strict restrictions Congress set on when and how a president can impose tariffs. Republicans have vowed never to raise taxes, but let’s not fool ourselves: Trump’s tariffs are a regressive sales tax that hits non-affluent Americans hardest. Republican lawmakers have also been quiet as mice while Trump has used a wrecking ball to threaten leading universities – institutions that played a vital role in making the US a world leader in medicine and many other fields of research.The supreme court has been strangely, worrisomely silent while Trump rules by shakedown, even as many district court judges have shown plenty of spine, ruling, for instance, that Trump’s across-the-board tariffs and assaults on law firms are illegal. When the supreme court wants to move quickly, it often finds a way. It would be great if the court moved to protect the rule of law, universities and academic freedom from Trump’s shakedowns. The court could and should issue a ruling as soon as possible that Trump violated Title VI of the Civil Rights Act by egregiously failing to follow its requirements before freezing universities’ funding. Similarly, the court could greatly reduce the economic mayhem that Trump’s tariffs are causing by quickly upholding the US court of trade’s ruling that Trump has far overstepped his authority to impose tariffs. But the high court been shamefully passive, even submissive.Congress and the supreme court need to wake up, step up and lay down the law. They must stop Trump’s rule by shakedown, which far too often involves capricious, vindictive dealmaking and ignores our legal rules and standards. Americans need to realize that Trump’s style of governance is dangerously eroding our rule of law and democracy.

      Steven Greenhouse is a journalist and author, focusing on labor and the workplace, as well as economic and legal issues More

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      US imposes sanctions on international court officials in ‘flagrant attack’

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      The Trump administration has ramped up its efforts to hobble the international criminal court in what the ICC has denounced as a “flagrant attack against the independence of an impartial judicial institution”.The US state department on Wednesday announced new sanctions on four ICC officials, including two judges and two prosecutors, saying they had been instrumental in efforts to prosecute Americans and Israelis. As a result of the sanctions, any assets that the targets hold in US jurisdictions are frozen.The sanctions were immediately denounced by both the ICC and the United Nations, while Israel welcomed the move announced by the secretary of state, Marco Rubio.It is just the latest in a series of steps the Trump administration has taken against the Hague-based court, the world’s first international war crimes tribunal. The US, which is not a member of the court, has already imposed penalties on the ICC’s former chief prosecutor, Karim Khan, who stepped aside in May pending an investigation into allegations of sexual misconduct, and four other tribunal judges.The new penalties target the ICC judges Kimberly Prost of Canada and Nicolas Guillou of France and prosecutors Nazhat Shameem Khan of Fiji and Mame Mandiaye Niang of Senegal.“These individuals are foreign persons who directly engaged in efforts by the international criminal court to investigate, arrest, detain or prosecute nationals of the United States or Israel, without the consent of either nation,” Rubio said.He added that the administration would continue “to take whatever actions we deem necessary to protect our troops, our sovereignty and our allies from the ICC’s illegitimate and baseless actions”.In a separate statement, the state department said Prost was sanctioned for a ruling to authorize an ICC investigation into personnel in Afghanistan, which was later dropped. Guillou was sanctioned for ruling to authorize the ICC’s issuance of arrest warrants for Benjamin Netanyahu and Israel’s former minister of defense Yoav Gallant related to Israel’s war in Gaza.France – whose president, Emmanuel Macron, was in Washington two days earlier – expressed “dismay” over the action.The sanctions are “in contradiction to the principle of an independent judiciary”, a foreign ministry spokesperson said in Paris.Khan and Niang were penalized for continuing Karim Khan’s investigation into Israel’s actions in Gaza, including upholding the ICC’s arrest warrants for Netanyahu and Gallant, according to the statement.In response, the ICC issued a statement calling the sanctions “a flagrant attack against the independence of an impartial judicial institution” and “an affront against the Court’s states parties, the rules-based international order and, above all, millions of innocent victims across the world”.A UN spokesperson, Stéphane Dujarric, said the ICC had the full support of the world body to carry out its work. The UN was “very concerned” about the US continuing to target the international court, he said.“We firmly believe that the ICC is a key pillar of international criminal justice, and we respect their work,” Dujarric said. “The decision imposes severe impediments on the functioning of the office of the prosecutor in respect for all the situations that are currently before the court.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionNetanyahu welcomed the US move.“This is a firm measure against the mendacious smear campaign against the State of Israel and the IDF, and for truth and justice,” he said in a statement, using an acronym for the Israeli military.Wednesday’s move carries on a history of Trump administration actions against the ICC dating back to his first term in office. During Trump’s first term, the US hit the ICC with sanctions, but those were rescinded by Joe Biden’s administration in early 2021.Danya Chaikel, the International Federation for Human Rights’s representative to the ICC, said the escalation in US sanctions amounted to “a continued attack on the rule of law and a blatant attempt to intimidate those pursuing accountability for atrocity crimes”.She said the new sanctions were a “defining test” for the ICC’s 125 member states. “Will they defend the court’s independence and the rights of victims of international crimes, or allow intimidation by powerful states to dictate who deserves justice?” she added. More

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      Trump’s tariffs replace diplomacy as other US tools of statecraft are discarded

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      On the campaign trail, Donald Trump pledged to use tariffs to revitalise American industry, bringing jobs home and helping to make America great again. But more than six months into his administration, experts say the president’s trade war is increasingly being wielded as a political cudgel, in lieu of more traditional forms of diplomacy.The president’s current target, India, has been unable to reach a trade agreement, and Trump appears ready to follow through with his threat to impose a further 25% tariff on Delhi – bringing the total to 50% – the joint highest levy on any country, along with Brazil.It is a whiplash-inducing turnaround from a few months ago, when the newly minted Trump administration seemed intent on continuing a years-long bipartisan effort to deepen ties with India as a geopolitical counterweight to China. It’s part of a trend that highlights how tariffs are used as threats against countries perceived to be recalcitrant. Rather than a tool of economic coercion, Trump instead wields tariffs as a political weapon.Five rounds of trade talks between the two sides have brought India no closer to conceding to US demands that it open up its vast agriculture and dairy sectors. Negotiations planned for early next week have been abruptly called off, as India’s prime minister, Narendra Modi, grapples with Trump’s demand that India cease to buy oil from Russia; sales that the US says are helping to fuel Vladimir Putin’s war against Ukraine.The demand – that India wean itself off the Russian oil, which accounts for about 35% of its total supply – sits at odds with the original stated purpose of Trump’s tariff regime: to bring manufacturing back to the US and rebalance trade deficits.“Tariffs have a very specific purpose of protecting domestic industry from competition,” says Dr Stuart Rollo from the Centre for International Security Studies at the University of Sydney. “That’s not really what this is about … It’s kind of pivoted to a tool of geopolitical compulsion.”Trump himself has come to admit this. Along with the threatened additional 25% tariff on India in retaliation for continuing to purchase Russian oil, the president has tied Canada’s 35% tariff to its recognition of Palestinian statehood.In the case of Brazil, which has a rare trade surplus with the US, meaning it buys more than it sells, Trump has said that the huge 50% tariff is due to the trial of his political ally, Jair Bolsonaro, who is charged with plotting a military coup after he lost the 2022 presidential election.The president’s top trade adviser, Peter Navarro, even has a new term for these explicitly political trade threats: “national security tariffs”.The Democratic senator Chris Murphy put it more bluntly, writing in the Financial Times in April that the tariffs are not designed as economic policy but as a “means to compel loyalty to the president”.Rollo says: “It’s a way of the United States to compel as much of the world as possible into realignment with its global leadership at a time when its actual weight and gravity is diminishing.”In some ways, this is not new; the Biden administration used trade restrictions to limit China’s access to state-of-the-art semiconductors at a time of heated geopolitical tensions.But Devashish Mitra, a professor of economics at Syracuse University, says that for many in India, the threat faced over Russian oil purchases seems incoherent, ill thought out, and could push India closer to China.“India did consider the US an ally,” says Mitra. “It was a country that the US was relying on as a counter to China in that region. So it had a huge geopolitical importance, but it doesn’t seem like Trump values any of that.”This week, China’s foreign minister has been in Delhi for talks, and Modi is expected in Shanghai at the end of the month, his first visit in seven years. It’s a part of a recent pattern of tightening relations between the Brics countries – Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa, which make up 40% of global GDP – that experts say is a response to Trump’s aggressive trade policies.For future US administrations, winning back the trust of some of these countries could be difficult, as Trump’s escalating trade war comes at the same time as his administration dismantles its instruments of global statecraft. From mass firings at the state department to the slashing of foreign assistance programmes at USAID, America’s diplomatic toolbox is vastly diminished.Tariffs have “come to replace diplomacy”, says Rollo.And so with his attention divided between crises at home and abroad, the president has left himself armed with only a hammer, with every global flashpoint looking to him like a nail. More