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      Donald Trump could stop Gaza’s famine. Instead he’s following Biden’s lead | Mohamad Bazzi

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      A global hunger-monitoring group declared last week that Gaza’s largest city and its surrounding area were suffering from an “entirely man-made” famine, mostly caused by Israel’s deliberate starvation strategy and continued siege of the territory. This news won’t surprise anyone who has paid even scant attention to the images and videos of emaciated children and desperate parents that have been coming out of Gaza for months.But the first confirmation of famine by the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC), which includes the World Food Programme, the World Health Organization and other aid agencies, is an important institutional marker. Years from now, it will serve as a reminder of how Israel used starvation as a weapon of war while western powers did nothing. And it will be a source of shame for all those who will inevitably claim that they didn’t realize the extent of Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza, despite dozens of Palestinian journalists being killed for conveying that reality to the world.Donald Trump can stop this famine – the US is Israel’s largest weapons supplier and most important political supporter. But he has chosen not to. Instead, Trump is backing the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, in his latest plan to sow more death and destruction by invading Gaza City and displacing 1 million Palestinians. Last month, the US president said children in Gaza “look very hungry”, adding that scenes of suffering showed “real starvation”. Trump contradicted the Israeli government’s spurious claim that warnings about impending famine were fake news.Yet the Trump administration stayed silent after the IPC issued its latest report last week, confirming that Gaza City and its environs are in the midst of a full-blown famine. In order to declare a famine, the IPC requires that an area must cross three critical thresholds: at least 20% of households face an extreme shortage of food; at least 30% of children suffer from acute malnutrition; and at least two adults or four children out of every 10,000 people die each day due to starvation, or disease and malnutrition. Since the IPC was founded in 2004 to warn of global food shortages, it had confirmed only three previous famines: in Somalia in 2011, South Sudan in 2017 and Sudan last year.By the time a famine is declared, it’s often too late to stop an exponential rise in deaths due to starvation and malnutrition. When a drought-driven famine hit Somalia between 2010 and 2012, about half of the 250,000 people killed had already died by the time the IPC found that the country had crossed famine thresholds.During past famines, the IPC’s declaration helped drive global attention and prompted international donors to rush aid to affected regions. But the world’s attention is already focused on Gaza, and the UN and other aid groups say they have enough food near Gaza’s borders to feed its entire population of 2.1 million for nearly three months. Israel simply refuses to allow much of that aid into the besieged territory – a deliberate starvation campaign supported by the Trump administration.As Tom Fletcher, the UN’s humanitarian aid chief, put it last week: “Food stacks up at borders because of systematic obstruction by Israel.” He added that the Gaza famine was “caused by cruelty, justified by revenge, enabled by indifference and sustained by complicity”. Fletcher then appealed to world leaders to pressure Netanyahu to lift the siege.That plea was ultimately intended for Trump, the only leader who can force Netanyahu to end Gaza’s suffering. But the Israeli prime minister and his government continue to defy global outrage, largely because they have Trump’s unwavering support.Since early 2024, the UN and international relief groups have been sounding alarms about the potential for widespread starvation in Gaza because of the Israeli military blockade that started within days of the October 2023 Hamas attack on Israel. As I wrote recently, Joe Biden ignored these warnings while his administration tried to undermine criticism of its unconditional weapons shipments to Israel. Throughout 2024, when parts of Gaza reached the brink of starvation, Israel would ease its siege allowing some food and supplies to reach desperate Palestinians – and averting a descent into full-blow famine.But Netanyahu abandoned that strategy in early March, when he imposed a new siege on Gaza, with Trump’s tacit approval, depriving Palestinians of food, medicine and other basic needs. Netanyahu, who worried that his extremist government coalition would collapse if he agreed to a permanent truce with Hamas, quickly resumed Israel’s war, breaking a ceasefire that was in place for two months. Since then, Israel has inflicted a more severe siege and starvation campaign on Gaza.On 18 August, Hamas announced that it had accepted a ceasefire deal that is virtually identical to one that Israel and the US had proposed a few weeks earlier. But as he has done for nearly two years, Netanyahu is dragging his feet and making new demands to obstruct negotiations and torpedo any potential deal. Ultimately, Netanyahu wants to prolong the war and stay in power.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionIt seems Trump has been seduced by Netanyahu’s promise of a decisive victory with his latest plan to conquer Gaza City and other parts of the territory that are not yet occupied by the Israeli military. Speaking to reporters at the White House on Monday, Trump said the Gaza war would reach “a conclusive ending” in the next two or three weeks.Netanyahu has been promising – and failing to deliver – a “total victory” over Hamas for more than a year. “Total victory over Hamas will not take years,” he said confidently in a speech in February 2024. “It will take months.” Since then, Netanyahu expressed lofty ambitions to reshape the entire Middle East, but he continued to defy international and domestic pressure to specify Israel’s postwar plans for Gaza or how the war could end short of his amorphous goal of “total victory”. And that was a deliberate tactic: from the beginning, Netanyahu’s allies wanted a protracted war that would end with Israel occupying Gaza and ethnically cleansing its Palestinian inhabitants.Last week, a top Biden administration official confirmed in an interview aired by an Israeli TV channel that, soon after the October 2023 Hamas attack, Netanyahu was preparing for a grinding guerrilla war in Gaza which could last “for decades”. Matthew Miller, the former state department spokesperson who often defended the administration’s unconditional support for Israel, also said that Netanyahu had repeatedly sabotaged US-brokered ceasefire negotiations. (An Israeli TV report found the prime minister nixed deals or near-agreements seven times.) But the Biden administration consistently blamed Hamas for refusing to accept a ceasefire, and rarely called out Netanyahu for his obstinacy, thinking it would harden Hamas’s position.For 15 months, Biden provided the Israeli premier with political cover and billions of dollars in US arms, becoming more deeply complicit in Israel’s use of starvation as a weapon and other war crimes. Today, Trump is repeating the same ineffective and immoral strategy, enticed by Netanyahu’s empty promise of victory while famine spreads in Gaza.

      Mohamad Bazzi is director of the Hagop Kevorkian Center for Near Eastern Studies, and a journalism professor, at New York University More

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      Can the Democrats win by trolling Trump? – podcast

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      Archive: ABC 7, ABC 10, ABC News, CBS News, CNN, DRM News, Fox 11 Los Angeles, Fox Business, KARE 11, KPRC 2 Click2Houston, MSNBC, WHAS11, WKYC Channel 3 Texas, WSYX ABC6, WTKR News 3
      Read Lauren Gambino’s reporting on California politics
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      Who is Jim O’Neill? CDC chief set to bolster RFK Jr plan to remake vaccine policy

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      The White House has chosen a top aide to health secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr to temporarily lead the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention – an appointment that is expected to bolster Kennedy’s goals of remaking federal vaccine policy.Jim O’Neill, a biotech investor and speechwriter for the health department during the George W Bush administration, was tapped as acting director of the agency that oversees vaccine recommendations, a White House official confirmed to the Guardian.O’Neill’s appointment follows the firing of infectious disease expert Susan Monarez as the CDC director, after she refused to resign under pressure from Kennedy and his allies in what her lawyers have called a “targeted” retaliation for refusing to support unscientific directives. Her firing has prompted turmoil within the US’s top public health agency, and at least three top officials have also quit in protest.The agency has been paralyzed in recent weeks, with staff still reeling from mass layoffs and a shooting this month at the agency headquarters that killed a police officer. Meanwhile, Kennedy – a prominent anti-vaccine advocate for two decades – had fired top agency leaders and recently reconstituted an expert panel on immunizations.Monarez, who was confirmed by the Senate as CDC director less than a month ago, was viewed by agency staff and outside experts as someone who could potentially help moderate Kennedy’s anti-vaccine agenda.O’Neill, unlike Monarez, has no training in medicine or infectious disease science. He is a former speechwriter for the health department, during the Bush years, who went on to work for the tech investor and conservative megadonor Peter Thiel.During the Covid pandemic, O’Neill voiced public support for unproven treatments that were not supported by scientific evidence, including ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine, as well as vitamin D as a supposed “prophylaxis”.He also posted a number of conspiratorial theories on social media, including the baseless claim that “the name #COVID was chosen to conceal the origin of the virus. This name made it harder to study and probably slowed the response.”In the coming weeks, the CDC is scheduled to hold a meeting of its vaccine advisers and O’Neill is expected to play a key role. The process could lead to new, restrictive guidelines on which Americans will be allowed to receive updated Covid vaccines.Senator Bill Cassidy, a physician who chairs the Senate’s health, education, labor and pensions committee, called for the vaccine advisory panel to “indefinitely postpone” its scheduled September meeting, amid the chaos at the CDC.“If the meeting proceeds, any recommendations made should be rejected as lacking legitimacy given the seriousness of the allegations and the current turmoil in CDC leadership,” Cassidy said in a statement.O’Neill can only serve as an interim leader of the agency until a permanent director is confirmed by the Senate.During confirmation hearings for his current post as deputy secretary at the Department of Health and Human Services, O’Neill insisted he was “pro-vaccine”, but Democrats in the hearings voiced skepticism, given O’Neill’s close allyship with Kennedy.News of O’Neill’s appointment has sparked criticism among healthcare professionals. Atul Gawande, a surgeon, author and public health expert asked: “Has America run out of actual health practitioners with demonstrated experience improving public health outcomes?”“Or maybe,” he added, “it is just ones willing to betray the tenets and beneficiaries of public health that Trump and RFK Jr want them to do.”Lauren Gambino contributed reporting More

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      RFK Jr ally reportedly chosen to lead CDC as departing officials hit out at vaccine messaging – live

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      The White House has picked an aide to health secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr as acting director of the Centers for Disease Control and PreventionNews of the temporary appointment was first reported by the Washington Post.The aide is Jim O’Neill, currently the deputy health secretary. A former speechwriter for the health department in the George W. Bush administration, O’Neill then worked for Silicon Valley investor, and JD Vance backer, Peter Thiel for a decade.In 2020, O’Neill’s frequent tweets on the Covid pandemic included this comment about China’s wildlife trade: “It’s almost like the communists want to spread disease.”He also called Facebook Orwellian for announcing that it would direct users who spread misinformation about the virus to the World Health Organisation.As Donald Trump threatens to expand federal control over cities and states run by elected Democratic officials, by deploying the National Guard, 19 of the 23 Democratic governors issued a joint statement on Thursday condemning his actions.“The President’s threats and efforts to deploy a state’s National Guard without the request and consent of that state’s governor is an alarming abuse of power, ineffective, and undermines the mission of our service members”, the governors said.The statement comes as Trump hints that his next targets for federal intervention may include two heavily Democratic cities: Chicago and Baltimore.“This chaotic federal interference in our states’ National Guard must come to an end”, the governors added.The signatories included several potential candidates for the 2028 presidential nomination, including: Wes Moore of Maryland, Gavin Newsom of California, JB Pritzker of Illinois, Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania and Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan. The four Democratic governors who did not join the statement include the party’s 2024 nominee for vice-president, Tim Walz of Minnesota, as well as Katie Hobbs of Arizona, Ned Lamont of Connecticut and Josh Green of Hawaii.The White House has picked an aide to health secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr as acting director of the Centers for Disease Control and PreventionNews of the temporary appointment was first reported by the Washington Post.The aide is Jim O’Neill, currently the deputy health secretary. A former speechwriter for the health department in the George W. Bush administration, O’Neill then worked for Silicon Valley investor, and JD Vance backer, Peter Thiel for a decade.In 2020, O’Neill’s frequent tweets on the Covid pandemic included this comment about China’s wildlife trade: “It’s almost like the communists want to spread disease.”He also called Facebook Orwellian for announcing that it would direct users who spread misinformation about the virus to the World Health Organisation.Senator Bill Cassidy, a physician who chairs the Senate’s Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, just called for a vaccine advisory panel to indefinitely postpone its scheduled September meeting.The Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, which was reshaped by the health secretary, Robert F Kennedy Jr, in June, when he fired all 17 of its members and replaced them with a smaller number of experts, including several Covid vaccine critics, was expected to meet 18 September to decide on whether or not to approve updated Covid vaccines.In a statement on Thursday, attributed by his office to “Dr Cassidy”, the Republican senator and longtime vaccine advocate who reluctantly voted to confirm Kennedy as health secretary, said:“Serious allegations have been made about the meeting agenda, membership, and lack of scientific process being followed for the now announced September ACIP meeting. These decisions directly impact children’s health and the meeting should not occur until significant oversight has been conducted. If the meeting proceeds, any recommendations made should be rejected as lacking legitimacy given the seriousness of the allegations and the current turmoil in CDC leadership”.The new vaccine advisory panel members chosen by Kennedy, an anti-vaccination advocate, include Retsef Levi, a professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management, who has baselessly claimed that Covid vaccines are killing young people and should be stopped and Robert Malone, who did early on mRNA technology but beame a hero to anti-vaxxers during the pandemic by claiming, without evidence, that mRNA Covid vaccines might cause cancer.Senator Bernie Sanders, ranking member of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP) committee, has called for a bipartisan congressional investigation into Susan Monarez’s firing as director of the CDC.In a letter to his Republican counterpart, senator Bill Cassidy, Sanders called the termination “reckless” and “dangerous”. He urged Cassidy to open a bipartisan investigation, and require secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr to testify at a hearing in front of the HELP committee.“It is absolutely imperative that trust in vaccine science not be undermined. The well being of millions of people are at stake,” Sanders wrote.Yesterday, Cassidy posted on X that the CDC “departures” would require “oversight”.Debra Houry, who served as chief medical officer and deputy director for program and science at the CDC, said that she, Daskalakis and Jernigan agreed to leave together because of their work on vaccine science and outbreaks.“We have reached the tipping point and we knew it was a powerful statement for the three of us to do this together,” Houry said.She encouraged reporters to “report on the harms that are being done by losing our staff,” and called out secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr’s vaccine messaging. “Look at measles, we have the highest number of cases in the US in 30 years because we had unvaccinated populations, and a secretary that’s promoted vitamins over vaccines,” she said.Some of the senior CDC officials who recently resigned just spoke at the demonstration opposite the agency’s Atlanta headquarters.“Let’s get the politics out of public health,” said Daniel Jernigan, who worked at the CDC for 30 years and played a key role in influenza and pandemic preparedness. “Let the science lead us, because that’s how we get to the best decisions for public health.”Demetre Daskalakis, known for his leadership in HIV prevention and vaccination programs, as well as the Biden administration’s response to the Mpox outbreak, addressed the staffers who walked-out today. “You are the people that protect America, and America needs to see that you are the people that protect America, and we are going to be your loudest advocates,” he said.Hundreds of staffers have gathered across the street from the CDC headquarters to support vaccine research, and public health leaders who resigned or fired by the Trump Administration in recent days.Demonstrators held up signs that read “you are heroes” and “CDC saves lives”.The senior leaders that resigned yesterday, Debra Houry, Demetre Daskalakis, Daniel Jernigan and Jennifer Layden, were escorted off campus this morning, denied a dignified exit by agency leaders.The agency is reeling from the firing of CDC chief Susan Monarez by the White House, and is still recovering from the attack of a gunman – who fired more than 500 rounds into the Atlanta offices before killing DeKalb police officer David Rose.

      The dispute over the firing of Susan Monarez, director of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), continued today. Earlier, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters that a new nominee for CDC director would be announced “very soon”, but Monarez’s lawyers have said that she won’t leave her post unless the president himself terminates her. A Trump spokesperson said today that secretary Kennedy’s firing stands, and Monarez wasn’t “aligned” with the administration’s Maha agenda.

      Following Monarez’s firing, four senior CDC leaders abruptly resigned, expressing frustration with Kennedy’s approach to vaccines and his management style. Read more from my colleague, Marina Dunbar here.

      In response to the tumult at Health and Human Services, there have been several calls from public health experts for secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr to resign, and Senator Bernie Sanders, ranking member of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP) committee, has also called for a bipartisan investigation into Monarez’s firing.

      Meanwhile, Federal Reserve governor Lisa Cook has filed a lawsuit claiming Donald Trump has no authority to fire her. A notable feature of Cook’s lawsuit against the president is that Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell, and the rest of the board, are also listed as defendants. Cook’s lawyers argue that she only “found out about the attempt to remove her through President Trump’s Truth Social post,” which they say afforded her “neither a notice nor a hearing” guaranteed by the Federal Reserve Act. A judge has set a hearing in the case for Friday 29 August at 10am ET.

      The president extolled the “great success” of the GOP on Truth Social today, and said he’s floating the idea of a national convention for the Republican Party, “just prior to the Midterms.” An event which traditionally takes place every four years to select the party’s presidential nominee.

      At the White House earlier, Border czar Tom Homan said that there will be a “ramp up” of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) operations in Chicago, and other Democratic-led cities, after Labor Day. He added that these cities “refuse to work with ICE” and release “public safety threats” into the country.
      Attorney general Pam Bondi and FBI director Kash Patel are set to testify in front of the House judiciary committee, and face questions about the justice department’s handling of the Jeffrey Epstein case, according to a report from Politico.Per the two sources granted anonymity to speak with Politico, Patel is set to give testimony 17 September, and Bondi will face the committee on 9 October.A federal judge in DC has scheduled a hearing in the lawsuit filed by Lisa Cook, the Federal Reserve governor that Donald Trump has moved to fire.Judge Jia Cobb – a Biden appointee – has been assigned the case. The hearing is set for 29 August at 10am ET.The press secretary was also misleading when asked whether the president believes Covid vaccinations should be covered by health insurance, regardless of age and pre-existing conditions.“The FDA decision does not affect the availability of Covid vaccines for Americans who want them,” Leavitt said. But the agency has authorized the updated vaccines for people 65 and older, who are known to be more at risk from serious illnesses from Covid infections.As my colleague, Oliver Milman, reported yesterday, younger people will only be eligible if they have an underlying medical condition that makes them particularly vulnerable.This means that the upcoming fall and winter seasons will be the first where the US government hasn’t recommended widespread Covid vaccinations.Karoline Leavitt avoids a reporter’s question asking why Donald Trump has yet to acknowledge the shooting at the CDC headquarters in Atlanta earlier this month. Instead, she recounts the response from health secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr.
      We absolutely were very much aware of that shooting, the secretary of health and human services put out a statement immediately. He was in touch with the CDC, and he actually traveled to Georgia to assess the situation, and to mourn with the people who work in that building there.
      Leavitt also said that she wasn’t aware of any kind of taskforce going through high level appointees who aren’t “aligned” with the administration’s agenda.When asked if agency officials should be afraid of repercussions for speaking out publicly or privately, Leavitt’s answer was opaque:
      If you’re doing your job well, and if you are executing on the vision and the promises that the president made to the public who elected him back to this office, then you should have no fear about your job. Just do your job. That’s what this president wants to see.
      When asked about the firing dispute of Susan Monarez, Karoline Leavitt confirmed that the director was “not aligned with the president’s mission to make America healthy again.”Leavitt said when Monarez refused to resign, at secretary Kennedy’s behest, the president fired her. “Which he has every right to do,” she added.“This woman [Monarez] has never received a vote in her life, and the president has the authority to fire those who are not aligned with his mission. A new replacement will be announced by either the president or the secretary very soon,” Leavitt said.Karoline Leavitt said today that Chicago has seen the “most murders of any US city” for 13 consecutive years.While Chicago saw 573 homicides last year, according to FBI data, the city didn’t experience the highest murder rate in the US. St Louis, Missouri, actually saw the highest rate of homicides in both 2023 and 2024. More

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      CDC officials who quit in protest lead call to ‘get politics out of public health’

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      Senior CDC vaccine research and public health leaders who resigned in protest told hundreds of supporters across the street from campus on Thursday that the Trump administration needs to “get politics out of public health”.The agency is reeling from the firing of the CDC chief, Susan Monarez, but Monarez, who was confirmed as CDC chief just a month ago, has refused to be removed. Four senior leaders – Debra Houry, Demetre Daskalakis, Daniel Jernigan and Jennifer Layden – then resigned in protest, citing the alleged spread of misinformation under the Trump administration and political interference in their work. The staffers cheered and applauded them at the event on Thursday.“You are the people that protect America, and America needs to see that you are the people that protect America, and we are going to be your loudest advocates,” said Daskalakis to the throng. Daskalakis, who was accompanied at the rally by Houry and Jernigan, is now the former director of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases and is known for his leadership in HIV prevention and vaccination programs and the Biden administration’s response to the mpox outbreak.The three, plus Jennifer Leyden, who led the office of public health data, resigned together on Thursday to make a statement about the damage the administration had done to public vaccine research, and in protest of the administration’s response to vaccine disinformation, they said.“We agreed to do this together. We’ve been talking about it for months, and then past few days, it was just escalating,” said Houry, the CDC’s former chief medical officer. “If one of us retired, it would have been a blip. When the three of us do it together, it’s more powerful and just shows the state of our agency.” She and the others are asking for Congress to intervene, to put a stop to political interference in the organization’s work.The agency is overseen by the US health secretary, Robert F Kennedy Jr, who in recent days restricted the use of Covid vaccines for Americans and has removed scientific advisers and cut funding for medical research. Kennedy has reportedly tapped the deputy health secretary, Jim O’Neill, an investor in libertarian billionaire Peter Thiel’s orbit, as the CDC’s interim leader. Monarez was the first CDC director in 50 years to not hold a medical degree. O’Neill would be the second.The staff and supporters of the CDC gathered across the street from the campus in Atlanta, and Houry, Daskalakis and Jernigan were met with applause and handshakes, a marked difference from this morning when they were escorted off campus.View image in fullscreen“They are essentially trying to undo a lot of the science that has been settled for vaccine policies,” Jernigan said. The dismissal “was a tipping point for us that we had to say we’ve got to do something. We need to get the politics out of public health. We need to make sure that we’re using objective science in the making of vaccine and other treatment decisions. Until we can do that and get back to that, ideology will be just driving the policies rather than the science driving the policies.”The turmoil at the CDC comes as the agency is still recovering from the attack of a gunman who fired more than 500 rounds into the Atlanta offices before killing the DeKalb police officer David Rose. More than two weeks later, the White House had said nothing about the shooting, Houry said. Staffers were “concerned about speaking about vaccines in our science because they’re worried they’ll be targeted”, she said. “That’s unacceptable … This was an act of domestic terrorism. They need to address this.”The shooting has done more than shaken up the staff. The community is questioning whether their lives are valued by the federal government, said Dr Jasmine Clark, an Emory University professor of microbiology and state representative in the suburbs north of Atlanta, who is running for Congress. The speed with which the event was organized – not a walkout, more like a long lunch – spoke to the sentiment in the building, she said.“So many people in my community said they feel like no one values their life, and what am I doing when I go to work every day? It’s a privilege that people have no idea what happens in that building, and the fact that they don’t know means they’re doing a good job. But unfortunately we have an administration that does not value that work and in fact actively devalues the work and spreads misinformation that cost the life of Officer David Rose.” More

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      Democrats seek ‘immediate answers’ after reported arrests of firefighters by US border agents

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      Patty Murray, the Washington senator, has called for the Trump administration to provide “immediate answers” about reports that two firefighters were detained by border agents as they were responding to a wildfire in the state.Federal immigration authorities on Wednesday staged an operation on the scene of the Bear Gulch fire, a nearly 9,000-acre (3,600-hectare) blaze in the Olympic national forest, where they arrested two people who were part of a contract firefighting crew, the Seattle Times first reported. The fire is the largest currently burning in the state.Authorities made the firefighters line up to show ID, the Seattle Times reported. One firefighter told the newspaper that they were not permitted to say goodbye to their detained colleagues.“I asked them if his [co-workers] can say goodbye to him because they’re family, and they’re just ripping them away,” the firefighter said to the Seattle Times, adding that the federal agent swore and told the firefighter to leave.The operation sparked widespread condemnation in the state. Murray in her statement released on Thursday morning demanded information about the whereabouts of the firefighters and the administration’s policy around immigration enforcement during wildfires.The Trump administration’s immigration policy is “fundamentally sick”, Murray said. She continued: “Trump has wrongfully detained everyone from lawful green-card holders to American citizens – no one should assume this was necessary or appropriate.”The US border patrol later on Thursday released some information on the operation, saying that it had assisted the Bureau of Land Management after that agency requested help after terminating contracts with two companies following a criminal investigation.While verifying the identities of contract personnel, federal agents identified two people “present in the United States illegally”, border patrol said in a statement, including one person who had a previous order of removal.The agency did not provide more details about the nature of the criminal investigation and the identities of the firefighters have not been made public.Authorities arrested the men on charges of illegal entry, and escorted 42 others off federal lands, according to the border patrol statement.The US Forest Service said in a statement that it was aware of the border patrol operation and that the activities did not interfere with firefighting efforts.Murray in her statement said the president had been undercutting firefighting abilities in other ways, including by “decimating” the US Forest Service. The administration significantly cut budgets and staffing at the agencies that manage much of the country’s federal lands, leaving the US unprepared for this year’s fire season, the Guardian previously reported.“Here in the Pacific north-west, wildfires can [burn] and have burned entire towns to the ground. We count on our brave firefighters, who put their lives on the line, to keep our communities safe – this new Republican policy to detain firefighters on the job is as immoral as it is dangerous,” said Murray, who has represented Washington in the US Senate since 1993.“What’s next? Will Trump start detaining immigrant service members? Or will he just maintain his current policy of deporting Purple Heart veterans?”Nearly 430 personnel are responding to the Bear Gulch fire on the state’s Olympic peninsula. Firefighters told the Seattle Times that two contract crews had been sent to cut wood and were waiting for a supervisor when federal law enforcement arrived in the area. More

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      Rwanda accepts seven people from US as part of deportation deal

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      Seven people have arrived in Rwanda as part of a deal to accept deportees from the US, the Rwandan government has said.“The first group of seven vetted migrants arrived in Rwanda in mid-August … Three of the individuals have expressed a desire to return to their home countries, while four wish to stay and build lives in Rwanda,” Yolande Makolo, a government spokesperson, said on Thursday.Officials offered no information on the nationalities of the seven deportees. Rwanda said on 5 August it would accept up to 250 people from the US, and that it would have “the ability to approve each individual proposed for resettlement”.The first arrivals would be “accommodated by an international organisation with visits by the International Organisation on Migration and Rwandan social services”, Makolo said.Donald Trump’s administration has been pushing a deportation drive, negotiating controversial arrangements to send people to third countries, including South Sudan and Eswatini, formerly Swaziland.Rwanda signed a lucrative deal in 2022 to accept migrants from Britain, only for the agreement to be scrapped when Labour came to power last year.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionKigali agreed to the scheme with Washington because “nearly every Rwandan family has experienced the hardships of displacement”, Makolo said earlier this month. Those who arrived in Rwanda would be provided with training, healthcare and accommodation, she added.The Trump administration has said third-country deportations are necessary because home nations sometimes refuse to accept the deportees.Rights experts have said the deportations may break international law by sending people to countries where they face the risk of torture, abduction and other abuses.Rwanda, which has a population of 14 million people, claims to be one of the most stable countries in Africa and has drawn praise for its modern infrastructure. However, the agreement with Britain drew criticism from rights groups and faced a long-running legal challenge.President Paul Kagame’s government has been accused of human rights violations and of crushing political dissent and press freedoms. More