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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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      ‘They will collide eventually’: how long will the Trump-Musk relationship survive?

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      A picture is worth a thousand words – or, more precisely, $288m. That was the sum tech entrepreneur Elon Musk donated to Donald Trump’s presidential election campaign. His reward was dramatically illustrated by the cover of this week’s Time magazine: an image of Musk, coffee cup in hand, sitting behind the Resolute desk used by every US president since Jimmy Carter.Some speculated that the picture of “President Musk” was designed to provoke the thin-skinned Trump, who is known to revere Time magazine and has twice been named its “person of the year”. The president reacted on Friday with a pointed joke: “Is Time magazine still in business? I didn’t even know that.”Musk, for his part, wrote on his X social media platform: “I love @realDonaldTrump as much as a straight man can love another man.”It was the consummation of an unlikely relationship that is bringing an unnerving revolution to America. Trump and Musk share an appetite for disruption, rule-breaking and goading liberals. The convergence of the world’s most powerful man and the world’s richest man spells double trouble for democracy in the eyes of critics.Can the bromance last? Recent history is littered with examples of Trump acolytes who threatened to steal some of his limelight and paid the price. Sceptics have been predicting the demise of the Trump-Musk axis almost since it began, suggesting that two giant egos will surely collide.But others perceive a symbiotic relationship that might go the distance. Joe Walsh, a former Republican representative and a Trump critic, said: “They’re the two most powerful people on the planet right now. They desperately need each other.“They’re in this for the long haul so people who think this thing’s going to bust up in a month or two are smoking something. We’re looking at four years of these two doing this. They are like two monsters and every day they’re growing stronger.”At first glance, Trump and Musk have little in common. Trump is a 78-year-old property developer and reality TV star from New York who came to politics late, spends hours on the golf course and has a cultural frame of reference rooted in the 1980s.Musk, 53, was born in South Africa during the era of racial apartheid, made his fortune in Silicon Valley and is chief executive of Tesla, an electric vehicle maker, and SpaceX, a rocket company aiming for the stars. He has publicly stated that he has Asperger syndrome, part of the autism spectrum.View image in fullscreenIn 2016, he said Trump “doesn’t seem to have the sort of character that reflects well on the United States”. In 2022, Trump described Musk as a “bullshit artist” for supporting his opponents in 2016 and 2020. By last year, both were singing a different tune.Musk threw his weight behind Trump in the election against Kamala Harris, becoming his top donor, speaking at campaign rallies and elevating pro-Trump propaganda on his X social media platform. He spent election night at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Florida, and celebrated his inauguration with an apparent Nazi salute.Musk has so far been the biggest single difference between Trump’s first term as president and his second. Dubbed “first buddy”, he was appointed as head of the “department of government efficiency” (Doge), a taskforce aimed at restructuring federal agencies, cutting budgets, rooting out waste and corruption, and dismissing employees.Musk, known for a leadership style that rules by fear and demands total loyalty from workers, has duly brought a Silicon Valley-style “move fast and break things” approach to scything through the federal government with no regard for the constitution or rule of law.His Doge team of young software engineers quickly gained access to the treasury payment system, which is responsible for a billion payments a year totaling $5tn. It includes sensitive information involving bank accounts and social security payments.Then Doge shuttered the United States Agency for International Development (USAid) without seeking the necessary authority from Congress, destroying a tool of American soft power and severing vital food and medicine programmes worldwide. Musk tweeted gleefully: “We spent the weekend feeding USAID into the wood chipper.”Doge’s tactics have included locking out employees, freezing funding, terminating leases and offering “deferred resignation” packages to workers. Musk is also using his X platform to promote Trump’s agenda, attack critics and make outrageous statements. He labelled USAid as “evil” and a “criminal organization” without providing evidence.Musk is not a full-time government employee, instead holding a “special government employee” status, allowing him to sidestep financial disclosure and public vetting processes. Chuck Schumer, the Democratic minority leader in the Senate, said: “An unelected shadow government is conducting a hostile takeover of the federal government.”But Trump appears unconcerned, claiming: “Elon can’t do and won’t do anything without our approval. And we’ll give him the approval where appropriate. Where not appropriate, we won’t.” A White House source told the Guardian that the president had recruited Musk to do “crazy shit” and he was delivering.To some commentators, the match makes sense. Bill Whalen, a research fellow at the Hoover Institution thinktank at Stanford University in California, said: “It’s safe to assume Donald Trump has always admired wealth and there are only a handful of people on the planet whom he can look northward to in terms of wealth and Musk is one of them.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“Trump obviously has the power that Musk thrives on but the one thing that might be in common here is they both enjoy being disrupters and mischief makers.”Musk has incentives both financial and ideological. His companies have extensive contracts with the federal government and, as head of Doge, he is in a position to streamline regulations to directly benefit them.He has also found common cause with Trump and his “Make America Great Again” (Maga) movement, making it clear that he is focused on eradicating the so-called “woke” agenda. He eliminated diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives at X, formerly Twitter, and appears to be bringing that mindset to his government work.View image in fullscreenHe shares Trump’s worldview on race. Musk has falsely claimed that the South African government is allowing a “genocide” against white farmers; Trump announced that he would shut down all aid to South Africa over what he alleged was a “massive human rights violation” in the form of a new land rights law.Still, no honeymoon lasts forever. Musk’s approval rating is falling fast, even among Republicans. Just 43% of Republican respondents say they want Musk to have “a little” influence, and 17% say they want him to have “none at all”, according to a recent poll from the Economist/YouGov.This week, protesters outside government buildings carried hand-painted placards complaining: “Nobody elected Elon.” Democrats in Congress have made him their prime target, accusing him of an illegal power grab. Representative Jared Golden of Maine posted on X: “My constituents, and a majority of this country, put Trump in the White House, not this unelected, weirdo billionaire.”This could make Musk a useful foil for Trump, deflecting attention from the president. But it might also eventually turn Musk into a political liability, leading voters to question which is the master and which the puppet. Pressure from allies such as Steve Bannon, a sharp critic of Musk and other tech oligarchs, and Republicans in Congress would surely grow ahead of next year’s midterm elections.Rick Wilson, a co-founder of the Lincoln Project, a pro-democracy group that this week released an attack ad titled “President Musk”, said: “They will collide eventually. When Trump sees Elon causing political damage to him, he’ll cut the cord in a hot minute.“It won’t even take five heartbeats. Once he sees that Elon is dragging him down in the polling – and Elon has become spectacularly unpopular in the last few weeks – Elon’s going to have a rough moment.”On the other hand, Musk is not like anyone that Trump has encountered before. His estimated wealth of $426bn dwarfs that of the president. He wields huge power and influence through X. He might prove harder to dispose of than previous lieutenants.Charlie Sykes, a conservative author and broadcaster, said: “I don’t know how he solves a problem like Elon. He can fire or destroy anyone else. He can brush Marco Rubio off. He could destroy JD Vance’s political future with a Truth Social post. But he’s stuck with Elon Musk.“Elon Musk now has his own power base. He’s got his own cult of personality. There’s going to come a moment where these egos are going to clash – there can be only one master of the universe at the same time – but how is this resolved? How does Trump disentangle himself from the Frankenstein’s monster that he’s gotten into bed with?” 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’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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      Air traffic control to Sir Keir: turbulence ahead | Stewart Lee

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      To Elon Musk, I say this! To perform oneNazi salute at Donald Trump’s inauguration, while simultaneously offering full support to European neo-Nazis, might be considered a misfortune. To perform two Nazi salutes at Donald Trump’s inauguration, while simultaneously offering full support to European neo-Nazis, begins to look like carelessness.I didn’t write that joke. I have cannibalised it from one by the gay Irish Victorian Oscar Wilde, a typical diversity hire who would have achieved nothing had his work not been promoted by the famously woke 19th-century British establishment. Luckily, Wilde was dead long before he had the opportunity to emigrate to the US and take an air traffic controller job from a more deserving straight white male, where his gayness would have caused planes to crash.And dead also is Wilde’s contemporary Little Tich, the resilient dancing midget, whose spectacular gravity-defying boots can still be seen on display in Bloomsbury’s bijoux Museum of Comedy, alongside Tommy Cooper’s fez and a jar of thoughts John Cleese was forbidden from articulating owing to political correctness. But I dread to think of the havoc a capering music hall midget might have wrought on today’s international flight paths. It is a relief that Trump has targeted the diversity policies that could lead, directly up the gently sloping access ramp of woke inclusivity, to millions of appalling aviation disasters.Call me a textbook member of the tofu-munching north London wokerati, but I am proud to live in a world where people of shorter stature, while still entitled to dance in funny shoes if they so desire, can also be air traffic controllers. And call me a textbook member of the cinnamon latte-guzzling liberal elite, but it does seem wrong for the new president of the US to blame dwarf diversity hires and lazy amputees and those pesky epileptics for an air crash, without any evidence, especially when he’s reportedly just laid off loads of air traffic controllers.On a recent Friday in York, I had a lovely north African tapas lunch with a longstanding comedy promoter who, though still young, was old enough to remember working for a special bowling alley in Blackpool, where small people in crash helmets mounted on little trolleys were ricochetted down the aisles at speed towards clusters of vulnerable skittles by violently drunk stag parties. In the end, this massively popular seaside attraction – dwarf bowling – closed early, not because someone in Blackpool had a belated anxiety about whether it was ethical, but because of the injuries sustained by those being bowled down the lanes by the intoxicated revellers.In the 1920s, Blackpool’s midgets lived in their own Midget Town on top of the Blackpool Tower, where tourists paid to see them go about their daily business in suitably scaled-down settings. It was a living. But when Midget Town finally closed, the pre-PC future offered only pantomime, seasonal work and bowling. It’s a world Trump would like to return to.Ah, well! Meet our potential major trading partner, whose return, according to Boris Johnson, was to be celebrated as another welcome victory over the woke. Witnessing the adjudicated sex abuser and convicted felon’s inauguration, Johnson, perhaps scenting his own second chance in the offing, related in the Daily Mail how, as the “invisible pulse of power surged” from the battered bible into the hand of Trump: “I saw the moment the world’s wokerati had worked so hard to prevent.” I can’t even be bothered to write anything funny about a man who could pen something so cynical, stupid and self-serving. I wish Johnson, the wounded wild pig of world politics, wandering around the central reservation wailing, having been winged by a passing Winnebago, would just fuck off. For ever.Too many of our politicians and pundits seem willing to take a wait-and-see approach to the wild swings of Trump’s pendulous wrecking balls. We should stand strong against Trump alongside Canada, the harmless honey bear of international politics suddenly rearing up like an animatronic grizzly in an 80s B-movie. Keir Starmer is in danger of being on the wrong side of history, his only consolation being that, at the current rate of collapse, there may not be much history left. Like the natural world Starmer wishes to destroy, it seems history may be a finite resource.“Drill, baby, drill!” cries Trump, as Los Angeles burns and Greenland’s permafrost unfreezes to the point where the previously unexploitable country may actually be worth him invading. Meanwhile, Starmer’s cry is the same but more complex and no less stupid. “Build a third runway and drill in the Rosebank oilfield, baby, build a third runway and drill in the Rosebank oilfield! And while you’re at it, lock up peaceful environmental protesters too. Especially the elderly.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionStarmer can’t really criticise Trump’s planet-pulverising withdrawal from the Paris agreement, let alone his baseless hostility to a phalanx of imaginary disabled air traffic incompetents, when he too has decided to throw all life on Earth under the bus, despite having once been an idealistic teenager who left his “village and went to the city of Leeds” and “discovered a whole new world of indie bands – like Orange Juice and the Wedding Present”. Bless!I began this supposedly funny column on Monday morning, when the US president was still saying Starmer was “very nice” and there’d be no UK tariffs. Then I travelled to Oxford to do a show, and one takeaway coffee and a homemade sausage sandwich later, the UK seemed to have drifted back into Trump’s target zone, depending on which interpretation of his last mouth-fart of vengeful gobbledy-vomit you chose to believe. There’s no point trying to make plans around the whims of Trump. Starmer may as well throw cake at a hippo or try to cajole a box jellyfish. Go to Brussels on bended knee and beg for brotherhood.

      Stewart Lee tours Stewart Lee vs the Man-Wulf this year, with a Royal Festival Hall run in July

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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