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      One by one, leaders learn that grovelling to Trump leads to disaster. When will it dawn on Starmer? | Simon Tisdall

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      Sucking up to Donald Trump never works for long. Narendra Modi is the latest world leader to learn this lesson the hard way. Wooing his “true friend” in the White House, India’s authoritarian prime minister thought he’d conquered Trump’s inconstant heart. The two men hit peak pals in 2019, holding hands at a “Howdy Modi” rally in Texas. But it’s all gone pear-shaped thanks to Trump’s tariffs and dalliance with Pakistan. Like a jilted lover on the rebound, Modi shamelessly threw himself at Vladimir Putin in China last week. Don and Narendra! It’s over! Although, to be honest, it always felt a little shallow.Other suitors for Trump’s slippery hand have suffered similar heartbreak. France’s Emmanuel Macron turned on the charm, feting him at the grand reopening of Notre Dame Cathedral. But Trump cruelly dumped him after they argued over Gaza, calling him a publicity-seeker who “always gets it wrong”. The EU’s Ursula von der Leyen, desperate for a tete-a-tete, flew to Trump’s Scottish golf course to pay court. Result: perhaps the most humiliating, lopsided trade deal since imperial Britain’s 19th-century “unequal treaties” with Peking’s dragon throne.The list of broken pledges and dashed hopes is lengthy. Relationships between states normally pivot on power, policy and strategic interests. But with faithless, fickle Trump, it’s always personal – and impermanent. Disconcertingly, he told Mexico’s impressive president, Claudia Sheinbaum, that he “likes her very much” – then threatened to invade her country, ostensibly in pursuit of drug cartels. Leaders from Canada, Germany, Japan, South Korea and South Africa have all attempted to ingratiate themselves, to varying degrees. They still haven’t fared well.All this should set red lights flashing for Britain’s Keir Starmer ahead of Trump’s state visit in 10 days’ time. The prime minister’s unedifying Trump-whisperer act has produced little benefit to date, at high reputational cost. Starmer apparently believes his handling of the US relationship is a highlight of his first year in office. Yet Trump ignores his Gaza ceasefire pleas and opposes UK recognition of a Palestinian state. He hugely boosted Putin, Britain’s nemesis, with his half-baked Alaska summit. US security guarantees for postwar Ukraine are more mirage than reality. His steel tariffs and protectionist policies continue to hurt UK workers.His second state visit is an appalling prospect. The honour is utterly undeserved. It’s obvious what Trump will gain: a royal endorsement, a chance to play at being King Donald, a privileged platform from which to deliver his corrosive, divisive populist-nationalist diatribes at a moment of considerable social fragility in the US and UK. Polls suggest many Britons strongly oppose the visit; and most don’t trust the US. So what Starmer thinks he will gain is a mystery. The fleeting goodwill of a would-be dictator who is dismantling US democracy and wrecking the global laws-based order championed by the UK is a poor return.View image in fullscreenAs he demands homage from abject subjects, this spectacle will confirm the UK in the eyes of the world as a lackey state, afraid to stand up for its values. Starmer’s government is now so morally confused that it refuses to acknowledge that Israel, fully backed by Trump, is committing genocide in Gaza, while at the same time making the wearing of a pro-Palestine T-shirt a terrorist act. The Trump travesty will be an embarrassment, signalling a further descent into colonial subservience. As next year’s 250th anniversary of US independence approaches, the chronically unhealthy “special relationship” has finally come full circle.Not everyone is genuflecting to Trump – and evidence mounts that resistance, not grovelling, is by far the best way to handle this schoolyard bully. Modi’s geopolitical fling in China showed he’s learned that when dealing with Trump, firm resolve, supported by alternative options, is the better policy. Last week’s defiant speech by China’s leader, Xi Jinping, reflected a similar realisation. Both he and Putin have discovered that when they dig their heels in, whether the issue is Ukraine, trade or sanctions, Trump backs off. Xi has adopted an uncompromising stance from the start. Putin uses flattery, skilfully manipulating Trump’s frail ego. The result is the same. Like cowards the world over, Trump respects strength because he’s weak. So he caves.The bigger the wolf, the more sheepishly Trump responds. Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, like Putin, an indicted war criminal, has shown that by sticking to his guns (literally, in his case), he can face down Trump. More than that, Trump can be co-opted. After Netanyahu attacked Iran in June, against initial US advice, he induced the White House to join in – although, contemptibly, Trump only did so once he was certain who was winning. Then, typically, he claimed credit for a bogus world-changing victory. North Korea’s dictator, Kim Jong-un, similarly bamboozled Trump during his first term. Having learned nothing, and nursing his implausible Nobel peace prize ambitions, Trump is again raising the prospect of unconditional engagement with Kim.Brazil’s president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva has the right idea. The more Trump tries to bully him with 50% tariffs and a barrage of criticism, the more he resists. Trump is particularly exercised over the fate of Jair Bolsonaro, Lula’s hard-right predecessor, who, like Trump, mounted a failed electoral coup. But Lula is not having any of it. “If the United States doesn’t want to buy [from us], we will find new partners,” he said. “The world is big, and it’s eager to do business with Brazil.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThat’s the spirit! And guess what? Lula’s poll ratings are soaring. Wake up, Keir Starmer – and dump Trump.

      Simon Tisdall is a Guardian foreign affairs commentator

      Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here. More

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      Postal traffic into US plunges by more than 80% after Trump ends exemption

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      Postal traffic into the United States plunged by more than 80% after the Trump administration ended a tariff exemption for low-cost imports, the United Nations postal agency said Saturday.The Universal Postal Union says it has started rolling out new measures that can help postal operators around the world calculate and collect duties, or taxes, after the US eliminated the so-called “de minimis exemption” for lower-value parcels.Eighty-eight postal operators have told the UPU that they have suspended some or all postal service to the United States until a solution is implemented with regard to US-bound parcels valued at $800 or less, which had been the cutoff for imported goods to escape customs charges.“The global network saw postal traffic to the US come to a near-halt after the implementation of the new rules on Aug 29, 2025, which for the first time placed the burden of customs duty collection and remittance on transportation carriers or US Customs and Border Protection agency-approved qualified parties,” the UPU said in a statement.The UPU said information exchanged among postal operators through its electronic network showed traffic from its 192 member countries – nearly all the world countries – had fallen 81% on 29 August, compared with a week earlier.The agency, based in Bern, Switzerland, said the “major operational disruptions” have occurred because airlines and other carriers indicated they weren’t willing or able to collect such duties, and foreign postal operators had not established a link to CBP-qualified companies.Before the measure took effect, the postal union sent a letter to the US secretary of state Marco Rubio to express concerns about its impact.The de minimis exemption has existed in some form since 1938, and the administration says it has become a loophole that foreign businesses exploit to evade tariffs and that criminals use to get drugs into the US.Purchases that previously entered the US without needing to clear customs now require vetting and are subject to their origin country’s applicable tariff rate, which can range from 10% to 50%.While the change applies to the products of every country, US residents will not have to pay duties on incoming gifts valued at up to $100, or on up to $200 worth of personal souvenirs from trips abroad, according to the White House.The UPU said its members had not been given enough time or guidance to comply with the procedures outlined in the executive order Donald Trump signed on 30 July to eliminate the duty-free eligibility of low-value goods. More

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      Trump says US will host next year’s G20 meeting at his Doral resort in Miami – live

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      Donald Trump just announced that the US will host the 2026 meeting of the G20 at his privately owned Doral golf course and spa in Miami.The president was joined by Miami’s mayor, Francis Suarez, for the announcement in the Oval Office.Trump initially did not mention that his Doral resort was the location, but confirmed it in response to a question from a reporter. The president then quickly moved to downplay concerns that he was using his office for personal profit, claiming that “we will not make any money on it” and that the location was chosen because “everybody wants it there”.The president was asked if he intends to invite Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, to attend as an observer. He initially said that he had not yet considered that possibility, but has previously claimed that excluding Russia, over its initial invasion of Ukraine in 2014, was a mistake.Minutes later, Trump was asked again and said that both Putin and China’s leader, Xi Jinping, were welcome to attend as observers. “I’d love them to, if they want to”, the president said. “If they want to, we can certainly talk”.Eric Adams, the mayor of New York, just announced that he will not end his re-election campaign, despite reports that he was recently offered a position in the Trump administration if he would do so.Speaking to reporters in the Oval Office, Donald Trump just claimed that “a lot of illegal aliens, some not the best of people” were working at a factory in Georgia raided by immigration officers on Friday, resulting in nearly 500 arrests.However, a warrant for the raid on the HL-GA battery factory, which is being built to make car batteries for South Korean electric vehicles, identified just four “target persons”. The warrant was obtained and posted online by Politico.Donald Trump signed an executive order on Friday authorizing the US Department of Defense to refer to itself as the “Department of War”, as part of an attempt to formalize his rebranding effort without the legally required act of Congress.According to a draft White House factsheet seen by the Guardian on Thursday, the order designates “Department of War” as a “secondary title”, as a way to get around the need for congressional approval to formally rename a federal agency.The move, to have the executive branch use a name for the department Trump called “much more appropriate”, restores a name used until 1947, when Congress merged the previously independent war department and navy department with the air force into a single organization, known as the National Military Establishment. In 1949, Congress changed the name of the National Military Establishment to the Department of Defense, and made the army, navy and air force secretaries subordinate to a single, cabinet-level secretary of defense.Referring to the creation of the defense department in 1949, the president said: “We decided to go woke and we changed the name to Department of Defense, so we’re going Department of War”.Trump also introduced the defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, as “our secretary of war” and claimed that the name change “really it has to do with winning”, suggesting that the US military had somehow been hampered by the choice “to be politically correct, or wokey” and, as a result, failed to win “wars that we would’ve won easily”.The draft White House factsheet on Trump’s rebranding initiative implicitly acknowledged that only Congress can formally change the department’s name, saying that the order would authorize the defense secretary to propose legislation that would make the change permanent.Eric Adams, the sitting mayor of New York, has just announced a hastily scheduled event to begin 30 minutes from now in which he will “make an important announcement regarding the future of his campaign”. The event is scheduled for 4.30pm ET.Adams, who is running as an independent and trails in the polls, has previously denied reports that he is in talks with the White House over taking a role in the Trump administration in exchange for ending his apparently doomed re-election campaign.At a dinner with tech industry leaders last night, Donald Trump denied that he is encouraging Adams to drop out of the race to help New York’s former governor, Andrew Cuomo, defeat Zohran Mamdani, the 33-year-old democratic socialist who is the frontrunner to be elected mayor in November. Trump then immediately said that he would like Adams to drop out for that reason.The New York Times reported on Friday that Adams met in person with Trump’s friend and diplomatic envoy Steve Witkoff to discuss the possibility of being nominated as US ambassador to Saudi Arabia.Last year, federal prosecutors accused members of the Turkish government of a years-long influence campaign to cultivate and secure favors from Adams.In the federal indictment, the US attorney for New York’s southern district alleged that government officials and business leaders with ties to Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, the Turkish president, showered Adams with thousands in illegal foreign campaign donations and free or heavily discounted luxury hotel stays and flights around the world.Charges against Adams were dropped by the Trump justice department this year, over the strong objections of prosecutors who claimed that there was an explicit quid pro quo arrangement in which the mayor would cooperate with federal immigration enforcement in the city in return for corruption charges being dropped.Should Adams become the US ambassador to Saudi Arabia, he would oversee diplomacy with the kingdom whose de-facto leader, crown prince Mohammed bin Salman, US intelligence believes approved the 2018 murder of the Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi in Turkey.Donald Trump plans to announce executive orders shortly in the Oval Office, with the theme we know most about so far being an instruction to rename the Department of Defense the “Department of War”.Until then, here’s a quick recap of some of the day’s key developments:

      Trump criticized the European Union’s decision to fine Google $3.46bn over antitrust concerns and threatened a wider trade probe against the EU in response to the move.

      Health secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr plans to announce that use of Kenvue’s popular over-the-counter pain medication Tylenol in pregnant women is potentially linked to autism, without including evidence for the claims, the Wall Street Journal reported, citing people familiar with the matter.

      Georgia is about to become the eighth state to send national guard troops to Washington DC to support Trump’s federal law enforcement big foot operation there, as the US capital sues the administration over its actions.

      Most of the 475 people arrested in a massive Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) raid at a Hyundai factory construction site in southern Georgia are Korean nationals.

      The federal Ice raid is being described as the biggest single Department of Homeland Security (DHS, the parent agency of Ice) enforcement operation at one side in the department’s history. The DHS was created after 9/11.

      Treasury secretary Scott Bessent called for renewed scrutiny of the Federal Reserve, including its power to set interest rates, as the Trump administration continues its efforts to exert control over the US central bank.

      Vladimir Putin has said any western troops placed in Ukraine would be “legitimate targets” for Russian strikes, upping the stakes for Kyiv as Donald Trump’s efforts to forge a peace deal show little sign that are any closer to success.

      Trump is sending 10 F-35 stealth fighter jets to Puerto Rico to bolster US military operations against drug cartels in the Caribbean region. The action to send jets to be based in the US territory follows a deadly US missile strike on Tuesday on a boat that the administration insisted was carrying 11 Venezuelan drug traffickers.

      And the big economics news of the day was that the US added just 22,000 jobs in August, continuing the slowdown amid Trump’s tariff policy.
      Donald Trump has criticized the European Union’s decision to fine Google $3.46bn over antitrust concerns and threatened a wider trade probe against the EU in response to the move.“We cannot let this happen to brilliant and unprecedented American Ingenuity and, if it does, I will be forced to start a Section 301 proceeding to nullify the unfair penalties being charged to these Taxpaying American Companies,” the president wrote on his Truth Social platform.Google’s fine for breaching the EU’s competition rules by favoring its own digital advertising services marks the fourth such antitrust penalty for the company as well as a retreat from previous threats to break up the tech giant.The European Commission, the 27-nation bloc’s executive branch and top antitrust enforcer, also ordered the US company to end its “self-preferencing practices” and take steps to stop “conflicts of interest” along the advertising technology supply chain.The commission’s investigation found that Google had “abused” its dominant positions in the ad-technology ecosystem.Google said the decision was “wrong” and that it would appeal.Health secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr plans to announce that use of Kenvue’s popular over-the-counter pain medication Tylenol in pregnant women is potentially linked to autism, without including evidence for the claims, the Wall Street Journal reported, citing people familiar with the matter.Kennedy, in a report, will also suggest a medicine derived from folate called folinic acid can be used to treat symptoms of autism in some people, the WSJ reported.Tylenol, whose active ingredient is acetaminophen, is a widely used pain reliever, including by pregnant women.The report, expected this month from the US Department of Health and Human Services, is likely to highlight low levels of folate, an important vitamin, and Tylenol taken during pregnancy, as well as other potential causes of autism, the report said.The health department and Kenvue did not immediately respond to a Reuters request for comment.It is not the first time Kenvue or J&J have faced questions about the link between Tylenol and the condition. In 2023, a judge rejected claims the drug causes autism if mothers take it during pregnancy.The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists says Tylenol is safe to use in pregnancy, though it recommends pregnant women consult their doctors before using it, as with all medicines.Children’s Health Defense, the anti-vaccine group formerly headed by Kennedy, has posted several times in recent weeks on social media site X about the potential link between Tylenol and autism.Georgia is about to become the eighth state to send national guard troops to Washington DC to support Donald Trump’s federal law enforcement big foot operation there, as the US capital sues the administration over its actions.Georgia governor Brian Kemp announced he would be sending 316 members of the state national guard to Washington later this month, in the latest indication that Trump’s law enforcement action there will drag on, the Associated Press reports.Kemp, a Republican, said he will mobilize the roughly 300 troops in mid-September to take part in Trump’s DC operation to relieve soldiers from elsewhere who deployed earlier.
      Georgia is proud to stand with the Trump administration in its mission to ensure the security and beauty of our nation’s capital,” Kemp said in a statement.
      Trump initially called up 800 members of the District of Columbia national guard to assist federal law enforcement in his unilateral action to impose federal resources on DC with the stated goal of cracking down on crime, homelessness and illegal immigration. Since then, seven other Republican-led states have sent troops – Louisiana, Mississippi, Ohio, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee and West Virginia.The nationwide debate over gerrymandered redistricting has come to Kansas, as the Topeka Capital-Journal wrote on Thursday.Republicans initiated efforts, on Donald Trump’s urging, to engineer mid-decade redistricting in Texas, to gerrymander district maps and gain an edge in next year’s midterm elections.In Kansas, Democratic congresswomen Sharice Davids, who sits in the house with three Republicans to represent the state’s four seats in the lower chamber, could be in difficulty if the district map is gerrymandered by the GOP.Davids spoke out on Friday, saying: “Under pressure from Donald Trump, Kansas state politicians are pushing an unprecedented mid-decade redraw to make the already gerrymandered maps even more extreme – breaking their promises and putting their own political power ahead of Kansans.”She added: “Their goal is clear: stack the deck in their favor because they know their policies aren’t popular, including their disastrous budget that rips 79,000 Kansans off their health care just to give billionaires massive tax breaks. Voters, not politicians, should choose their representatives. This potential gerrymander is clearly political, threatens our democracy, and deepens division in our country.”Donald Trump plans to announce executive orders today in the Oval Office, with the theme we know most about so far being an instruction to rename the Department of Defense the “Department of War”.Trump was initially expected to issue first orders at 2pm ET then more at 4pm ET, but the media has since been informed that a single event at the White House is now due to take place at 4pm ET.Some context from my colleague Hugo Lowell: The US president is expected to sign an executive order authorizing the rebrand of the Defense Department, the White House said, as part of an attempt to formalize a name change without an act of Congress.The order will designate “Department of War” as a “secondary title”, an administration official said, as a way to get around the need for congressional approval to formally rename a federal agency.But the order will instruct the rest of the executive branch to use the “Department of War” name in internal and external communications, and allows the defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, to use “secretary of war” as his official title.Hello, US politics live blog readers, it’s another busy Friday and there is much more to come, so stay with the Guardian for all the relevant news as it happens. Here’s where things stand:

      Most of the 475 people arrested in a massive Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) raid at a Hyundai factory construction site in southern Georgia are Korean nationals.

      The federal Ice raid is being described as the biggest single Department of Homeland Security (DHS, the parent agency of Ice) enforcement operation at one side in the department’s history. The DHS was created after 9/11.

      Treasury secretary Scott Bessent called for renewed scrutiny of the Federal Reserve, including its power to set interest rates, as the Trump administration continues its efforts to exert control over the US central bank.

      Vladimir Putin has said any western troops placed in Ukraine would be “legitimate targets” for Russian strikes, upping the stakes for Kyiv as Donald Trump’s efforts to forge a peace deal show little sign that are any closer to success.

      Donald Trump is sending 10 F-35 stealth fighter jets to Puerto Rico to bolster US military operations against drug cartels in the Caribbean region. The action to send jets to be based in the US territory follows a deadly US missile strike on Tuesday on a boat that the administration insisted was carrying 11 Venezuelan drug traffickers.

      US jobs report. Our sister live blog run by the business team in London has closed now, so here’s our story on the big economics news of the day, that the US added just 22,000 jobs in August, continuing the slowdown amid Trump tariffs.
      Reuters notes that the arrests could exacerbate tensions between Washington and Seoul, a key ally and investor in the US, as the countries remain at odds over the details of a trade deal that includes $350bn of investments.Just last month, South Korea pledged $150bn in US investments – including $26bn from Hyundai Motor – at a summit for the nations’ leaders.The arrested workers were being held at Ice’s Folkston detention facility in Georgia, Schrank said. Most of the 475 people are Korean nationals, he said.Local Korean media said roughly 300 people detained were South Korean nationals.“It is our understanding that none of those detained is directly employed by Hyundai Motor Co. We prioritize the safety and well-being of everyone working at the site and comply with all laws and regulations wherever we operate,” a Hyundai spokesperson said in a statement provided to Reuters.Homeland security officials said the workers it arrested at the Hyundai facility in Georgia were barred from working in the US after crossing the border illegally or overstaying visas.The investigation took place over several months, Steven Schrank, special agent in charge of investigations for Georgia, said during a press briefing.“This was not an immigration operation where agents went into the premises, rounded up folks and put them on buses,” he said in comments reported by Reuters.Schrank said there was a network of subcontractors on the site.A spokesperson at Hyundai’s battery joint venture partner, South Korean battery maker LG Energy Solutions, said in a statement it was cooperating and had paused construction work.The facility, a joint venture between LGES and Hyundai Motor, was due to start operations at the end of this year, according to LGES.With some 475 workers arrested, according to US immigration officials, the Ice raid at the Georgia Hyundai facility is the largest single-site enforcement operation in the Department of Homeland Security’s history, Reuters notes.Treasury secretary Scott Bessent earlier called for renewed scrutiny of the Federal Reserve, including its power to set interest rates, as the Trump administration continues its efforts to exert control over the US central bank, whose insulation from short-term political pressures is widely seen as key to its effectiveness.“There must also be an honest, independent, nonpartisan review of the entire institution, including monetary policy, regulation, communications, staffing and research,” Bessent wrote in the Wall Street Journal.He called for the Fed to leave bank supervision to other governmental authorities and to “scale back the distortions it causes in the economy”, including by bond purchases made outside of true crisis conditions.A US homeland security department spokesperson had earlier said that US immigration authorities executed a judicial search warrant at the Hyundai facility in Georgia on Thursday over unlawful employment practices and other alleged federal crimes.The spokesperson said in a statement provided to Reuters that Ice’s investigative arm executed the warrant as part of acriminal investigation.“This operation underscores our commitment to protecting jobs for Georgians, ensuring a level playing field for businesses that comply with the law, safeguarding the integrity of our economy, and protecting workers from exploitation,” the spokesperson said.Following on from my last post, the White House said today that the Trump administration will enforce laws that require foreign workers have proper authorization to be in the United States, after immigration authorities raided a Hyundai facility in Georgia.“Any foreign workers brought in for specific projects must enter the United States legally and with proper work authorizations,” said White House spokeswoman Abigail Jackson, quoted by Reuters.“President Trump will continue delivering on his promise to make the United States the best place in the world to do business, while also enforcing federal immigration laws.” More

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      Judge blocks ending of legal protections for 1m Venezuelans and Haitians in US

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      A federal judge on Friday ruled against the Trump administration from ending temporary legal protections that have granted more than 1 million people from Haiti and Venezuela the right to live and work in the United States.The ruling by US district judge Edward Chen of San Francisco for the plaintiffs means that 600,000 Venezuelans whose temporary protections expired in April or whose protections were about to expire on 10 September have status to stay and work in the United States.Chen said the actions of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) secretary, Kristi Noem, in terminating and vacating three extensions granted by the previous administration exceeded her statutory authority and were arbitrary and capricious.The DHS did not immediately respond to an email seeking comment.Friday’s ruling came after an appeals court blocked Donald Trump’s plans to end protections for 600,000 people from Venezuela who have permission to live and work in the US, saying that plaintiffs were likely to win their claim that the Trump administration’s actions were unlawful.That appellate court ruling on 29 August came after Chen in March ruled that the plaintiffs were likely to prevail on their claim that the administration had overstepped its authority in terminating the protections.Temporary protected status (TPS) is a designation that can be granted by the homeland security secretary to people in the US if conditions in their homelands are deemed unsafe for return due to a natural disaster, political instability or other dangerous conditions.Designations are granted for terms of six, 12 or 18 months, and extensions can be granted as long as conditions remain dire. The status prevents holders from being deported and allows them to work.Soon after taking office, Noem reversed three extensions granted by the previous administration to immigrants from Venezuela and Haiti, prompting the lawsuit. Noem said that conditions in both Haiti and Venezuela had improved and that it was not in the national interest to allow migrants from the countries to stay on for what is a temporary program.Millions of Venezuelans have fled political unrest, mass unemployment and hunger. Venezuela is mired in a prolonged crisis brought on by years of hyperinflation, political corruption, economic mismanagement and an ineffectual government.Haiti was first designated for TPS in 2010 after a catastrophic magnitude 7.0 earthquake killed and wounded hundreds of thousands of people, and left more than 1 million homeless. Haitians face widespread hunger and gang violence. More

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      Why is much of the media ignoring questions about Trump’s health? | Margaret Sullivan

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      Prestigious news organizations gave scant attention when, for several days recently, Donald Trump faded from public view. Other than some social media posts and some blurry golf-course images, the normally ubiquitous president seemed almost to disappear.But most of Big Journalism gave that subject a pass.Given Trump’s obvious health problems – swollen ankles, an uneven gait, bruised hands and instances of verbal confusion – the media silence struck a lot of people as hypocrisy.“Why are the biggest newsrooms silent?” demanded John Passantino, who writes for the media newsletter Status. “No front-page write ups. No broadcast packages.” Trump’s health problems and near disappearance “barely registered in mainstream coverage”.By contrast, the media went overboard with unrelenting coverage of Joe Biden’s old age, but it came late. Almost all of it followed the then president’s shockingly weak debate appearance during his 2024 re-election campaign.There was plenty of finger-pointing – even a bestselling book by two media bigwigs – about the failures to report Biden’s decline earlier and about the White House’s efforts to obscure it.This time, over the Labor Day weekend, wild rumors swirled on social media that Trump had died, or had suffered a debilitating stroke or a series of them. The much-read Drudge Report published a story with this headline: PRESIDENT HEALTH CRISIS DEEPENS.Nevertheless, JD Vance seemed to target big media.“If the media you consumed told you that Donald Trump was on his deathbed because he didn’t do a press conference for three days, imagine what else they’re lying to you about,” Vance posted on X.That translated, for the gullible, into the usual trashing of the mainstream press, a regular talking point from Magaworld.In fact, big journalism was guilty of nothing of the sort; if anything, they took Trump’s disappearance too lightly.As is often the case with Trump and his allies, there’s a lot of projection going on.“Imagine what else they’re lying to you about” is something that might, much more accurately, be said about Trump and his minions on any number of subjects.Trump joined in, too. “It’s fake news – it’s so fake. That’s why the media has so little credibility,” he responded to a Fox News question that conveniently set up this round of media-bashing. (“How did you find out over the weekend that you were dead?” asked Peter Doocy at a briefing after Trump re-emerged.)Nonsense, of course. Most of the mainstream media was overly cautious, if anything, in approaching the topic.When the New York Times did get around to covering the issue, the paper took up the topic obliquely – focusing primarily on the false rumors of Trump’s death and then, much lower in a long story, addressing the paucity of information about his actual health. The headline: President Trump Is Alive. The Internet was Convinced Otherwise.The story puts in historical context the tendency of White House staffs to obscure the physical problems of American presidents – from Woodrow Wilson’s stroke to John F Kennedy’s chronic back pain. Eventually, it makes the point that “justifiable concerns and questions about Mr Trump’s health have often been met with obfuscation or minimal explanation from the people around him”.(The White House in July explained Trump’s bruising and swelling as chronic venous insufficiency, but downplayed the condition as benign and common for older people; his doctor pronounced him in excellent health.)Even after an assassination attempt on Trump last year, no medical briefings were held. And, to my recollection, there was precious little investigative follow-up on that.Yet, amid all of this, the White House press secretary claimed that Trump has been “completely transparent about his health with the public, unlike his predecessor”.As usual, in Trumpworld, a lie outpaces the truth, and everything is Biden’s fault.So what does responsible media coverage of this topic look like? The question evokes the Goldilocks fairy tale: what’s too hot? What’s too cold? And what’s just right?“Evidence-based assessments of a president’s health are absolutely fair game” for journalists, Bill Grueskin of Columbia Journalism School told Associated Press media reporter David Bauder.And when someone as omnipresent in the media as Trump drops out of view for days? That’s fair game, too.With Trump now in his 80th year – he turned 79 in June – these questions are not going away. Rampant speculation certainly isn’t the answer, but it tends to flood in when there is a vacuum of real information.The unquestioning acceptance of White House reassurance isn’t the answer either.In good journalism, “just right” is founded on skepticism and addressed by persistence – by doggedly digging out the facts and presenting them forthrightly.

      Margaret Sullivan is a Guardian US columnist writing on media, politics and culture More

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      Macron says 26 nations ready to provide postwar military backing to Ukraine

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      Twenty-six nations have pledged to provide postwar security guarantees to Ukraine, including an international force on land and sea and in the air, Emmanuel Macron said after a summit at which European leaders sought to pin down Donald Trump on the level of support he is willing to give Kyiv.“The day the conflict stops, the security guarantees will be deployed,” the French president told a press conference at the Élysée Palace in Paris, standing alongside Volodymyr Zelenskyy.After the summit, Macron told reporters: “We have today 26 countries who have formally committed – some others have not yet taken a position – to deploy a ‘reassurance force’ troops in Ukraine, or be present on the ground, in the sea or in the air.”The troops would not be deployed “on the frontline” but aim to “prevent any new major aggression”, Macron said.Macron initially said the 26 nations – which he did not name – would deploy to Ukraine. But he later said some countries would provide guarantees while remaining outside Ukraine, for example by helping to train and equip Kyiv’s forces. He did not say how many troops would be involved in the guarantees.The Ukrainian president hailed the move. “I think that today, for the first time in a long time, this is the first such serious concrete step,” he said.US contributions to the guarantees would be finalised in the coming days, Macron said.On Friday, a spokesperson for the Kremlin said that western countries “cannot” provide security guarantees for Ukraine, according to remarks reported by Russian state media.“This cannot be a guarantee of security for Ukraine that would suit our country,” Dmitry Peskov told state news agency RIA Novosti.Thursday’s meeting of 35 leaders from the “coalition of the willing” – of mainly European countries – was intended to finalise security guarantees and ask the US president for the backing that Europeans say is vital to make such guarantees viable.Many European countries including Germany, Spain and Italy have refused so far to provide troop commitments. A German spokesperson said: “The focus should be on financing, arming and training the Ukrainian armed forces,” a formula that is not vastly different from what Europe is now providing.Alarmed European leaders travelled to the White House in the wake of the August Alaska summit between Trump and Vladimir Putin fearing that the US president may be about to force Volodymyr Zelenskyy into a humiliating surrender, including loss of territory.View image in fullscreenTrump responded to the European lobbying by claiming he had won the Russian leader’s agreement to hold direct talks with the Ukrainian president, but Russia rejected any such commitment and largely maintained its demand for the surrender of Ukrainian territory and a commitment that Ukraine will never join Nato.Trump had set a deadline of 1 September for a meeting between Putin and Zelenskyy, but Trump is known to set deadlines that he then ignores.“We had a great relationship,” Trump said of Putin in an interview with the rightwing news website The Daily Caller. He said he was now very disappointed in the Russian president: “Thousands of people are dying; it’s a senseless war.”Europe has been desperate to ensure Trump does not wash his hands of the war, but it has been unable to convert Trump’s stated frustration with Putin into a plan to try to strangle the Russian economy.Macron in Paris sought to give the impression that Europe, unlike Russia, stuck to its commitments. He said: “The contributions that were prepared, documented and confirmed at the level of defence ministers under the strictest secrecy allow us to say: this work is complete and will now be politically approved.”Europe has been hoping for months that Trump would activate long-promised sweeping economic sanctions on countries that import Russian oil. The 50% tariffs that the US imposed on India, partly for importing Russian oil, appear to have driven the traditionally non-aligned Narendra Modi, the Indian prime minister, closer into the arms of China and Russia.Stung by his diplomatic failure so far, Trump has given the impression of wanting to focus on domestic policy, including crime and the economy.The US was represented at the Paris talks by Trump’s special envoy, Steve Witkoff, who also met Zelenskyy separately.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionView image in fullscreenAfter the summit, Starmer’s office said it was necessary “to go even further to apply pressure on Putin to secure a cessation of hostilities.”“The prime minister said Putin could not be trusted as he continued to delay peace talks and simultaneously carry out egregious attacks on Ukraine,” No 10 added.Russia has said it will not tolerate European troops in postwar Ukraine.The coalition of the willing includes about 30 nations backing Ukraine, mainly European but also Canada, Australia and Japan. It has met repeatedly at military and political level but not published any detailed plan of action, reflecting internal divisions and uncertainty about the nature of the US contribution.In a breakthrough of sorts, the plan for Europeans to buy US arms for use in Ukraine has started to bear fruit. On 28 August, the US state department announced the delivery of 3,350 ERAM long-range cruise missiles to Ukraine, worth $825m (£615m, €705m).The funding came from Denmark, the Netherlands, Norway and the US, but the financial contribution of each country was not disclosed. The ERAM missiles have a range similar to that of the Franco-British Scalp-EG missiles, which Ukraine fired at occupied Crimea and the Russian region of Kursk.Zelenskyy said he had not seen “any signs from Russia that they want to end the war”.The Nato secretary general, Mark Rutte, said it was not for Putin to decide if European troops would be stationed inside Ukraine. He said: “I think we really have to stop making Putin too powerful.”The German chancellor, Friedrich Merz, described Putin as the most severe war criminal of our time.On Wednesday in Beijing, Putin attended a military parade alongside Xi Jinping and hailed Russian forces’ progress in Ukraine, saying troops were advancing on “all fronts”.But there are signs that sanctions are finally taking a toll on the Russian economy after two years of high growth fuelled by defence spending.The Sberbank chief, German Gref, one of Russia’s most powerful bankers, warned on Thursday that the economy was stagnating and that unless the central bank cut interest rates then the country would fall into recession.Russia’s war economy grew at 4.1% in 2023 and 4.3% in 2024 but it is slowing sharply under the weight of high interest rates required to dampen inflation. More

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      Trump plans to sign executive order to rename Pentagon to ‘Department of War’ – as it happened

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      Donald Trump plans to sign an executive order on Friday authorizing the US department of defense to refer to itself as to the “Department of War”, two people familiar with the matter told the Guardian on Thursday.The move, to use a name Trump called “much more appropriate” in remarks last week, would restore a name used until 1947, when Congress merged the previously independent war department and navy department with the air force into a single organization, known as the National Military Establishment. In 1949, Congress changed the name of the National Military Establishment to the Department of Defense, and made the army, navy and air force secretaries subordinate to a single, cabinet-level secretary of defense.A draft White House fact sheet on Trump’s rebranding initiative implicitly acknowledges that only Congress can formally change the department’s name, saying that the order would authorize the defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, to propose legislation that would make the change permanent. In the meantime, the order instructs Hegseth and the department to start using “Department of War” as a secondary title in official correspondence, public communications and executive branch documents. The order also authorizes Hegseth to refer to himself as the “secretary of war”.When Trump was asked by a reporter last week how he plans to rename the department, since that would require an act of Congress, Trump said: “We’re just going to do it. I’m sure Congress will go along, if we need that, I don’t think we even need that.”“It just to me, seems like a just a much more appropriate,” he added. “The other is, ‘defense’ is too defensive. And we want to be defensive, but we want to be offensive, too if we have to be. So, it just sounded to me better.”Trump’s embrace of the old name, which seems to put to rest longstanding claims that he was ever the “antiwar candidate” for the presidency, comes days after he ordered the military to carry out the extrajudicial killing of 11 suspected drug smugglers.During his 2015 campaign for the Republican presidential nomination, Trump himself rejected the perception that he was anti-war by proclaiming that he was, in fact, “much more militaristic” than even George W Bush.Four years earlier, when he was flirting with a run for the presidency against Barack Obama, Trump had demanded US military intervention in Libya.“I can’t believe what our country is doing,” Trump told viewers of his YouTube video blog on 28 February 2011, two weeks before the Obama administration got US security council authorization “to protect civilians” in Libya. “Gaddafi in Libya is killing thousands of people, nobody knows how bad it is, and we’re sitting around we have soldiers all have the Middle East, and we’re not bringing them in to stop this horrible carnage and that’s what it is: it’s a carnage.”Five months later, after the US-led air campaign had forced Gaddafi from power in Libya – and Trump had decided not to challenge Obama for the presidency – the star of The Apprentice posted another YouTube clip, complaining that the administration should have waited longer to aid the Libyan rebels, to force them to agree to surrender half of the country’s oil reserves.“What we should’ve done is we should’ve asked the rebels when they came to us – and they came to us, they were being routed by Qaddafi, they were being decimated – we should’ve said, ‘We’ll help you, but we want 50% of your oil,’” Trump had said. “They would’ve said, ‘How about 75%?’”This brings our live coverage of the second Trump administration to a close for the day, but we will return on Friday. Among the day’s developments:

      The health secretary, Robert F Kennedy Jr, fended off calls for his resignation and spread vaccine misinformation during a contentious Senate hearing.

      Susan Monarez, the ousted CDC director, rejected Kennedy’s claim that she had lied about having been pressured to rubber-stamp vaccine recommendations from a panel of his anti-vaccine allies, and offered to repeat her claim under oath.

      Donald Trump plans to sign an executive order on Friday authorizing the US Department of Defense to refer to itself as the “department of war”, two people familiar with the matter told the Guardian.

      Trump hosted an array of tech industry leaders for dinner in the White House state dinning room on Thursday night, including Mark Zuckerberg, Tim Cook, Bill Gates, Sam Altman and Sergey Brin, but his former first buddy, Elon Musk, was a notable absence.

      As Trump accuses Federal Reserve governor Lisa Cook of criminal mortgage fraud, for allegedly obtaining more than one mortgage on a home designated as her primary residence, at least three members of his cabinet have multiple primary-residence mortgages, ProPublica reports.

      The justice department has launched a criminal mortgage fraud inquiry into Federal Reserve governor Lisa Cook and issued grand jury subpoenas out of both Georgia and Michigan.

      New York’s attorney general moved to have the state’s highest court reinstate Trump’s staggering civil fraud penalty, appealing a lower court decision that slashed the potential half-billion dollar penalty to zero.
      As we reported earlier, during a contentious Senate hearing on Thursday, the health secretary, Robert F Kennedy Jr, was asked twice whether he agreed with Retsef Levi, an MIT professor the secretary appointed to the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP), who has said that mRNA Covid vaccines “cause serious harm including death, especially among young people”.Kennedy said that he did agree with that statement, which Levi made in a video he posted on his X account in 2023, and has pinned at the top to this day.“I am filming this video to share my strong conviction that at this point in time all Covid mRNA vaccination program[s] should stop immediately,” Levi said in the video, “because of the mounting and indisputable evidence that they cause unprecedented level[s] of harm, including the death of young people and children.”Levi, who is Israeli, cited what he called evidence for this conclusion based on his reading of statistics from Israel’s EMS during its vaccination program in 2021. But he offered no scientific or medical evidence to support his claim, which is a fringe view not shared by the overwhelming majority or vaccine experts and medical doctors.It is worth stressing that both of the senators who asked Kennedy about that expert’s claim – Michael Bennet, a Democratic senator, and Thom Tillis, a Republican senator – referred to the new vaccine advisory board member as “Dr Levi”. That might have led some viewers to assume that Levi is a medical doctor, but he is not. He is a professor at MIT’s school of management, with a doctorate in operations research and no expertise in the science of infectious diseases or vaccines.It is unclear how Levi’s background qualifies him for a position on a vaccine panel responsible for making vaccine recommendations and whose members are supposed to be “medical and public health experts”.Donald Trump hosted an array of tech industry leaders for dinner in the White House state dinning room on Thursday night, including Mark Zuckerberg, Tim Cook, Bill Gates, Sam Altman and Sergey Brin, but his former first buddy, Elon Musk, was a notable absence.The event, which was to have been held on the newly paved-over Rose Garden, until a forecast of thunderstorms forced the event indoors, began with televised words of praise for the president from several of the assembled tech leaders, and a brief series of questions from reporters.On his social network X, formerly known as Twitter, Musk responded to a question about why he was not at the White House by writing: “I was invited, but unfortunately could not attend. A representative of mine will be there.”Musk did not say who his representative was, but one of the guests was Jared Isaacman, a billionaire private astronaut who had been Musk’s pick to lead Nasa, until his nomination was withdrawn as Musk’s relations with Trump frayed.Donald Trump plans to sign an executive order on Friday authorizing the US department of defense to refer to itself as to the “Department of War”, two people familiar with the matter told the Guardian on Thursday.The move, to use a name Trump called “much more appropriate” in remarks last week, would restore a name used until 1947, when Congress merged the previously independent war department and navy department with the air force into a single organization, known as the National Military Establishment. In 1949, Congress changed the name of the National Military Establishment to the Department of Defense, and made the army, navy and air force secretaries subordinate to a single, cabinet-level secretary of defense.A draft White House fact sheet on Trump’s rebranding initiative implicitly acknowledges that only Congress can formally change the department’s name, saying that the order would authorize the defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, to propose legislation that would make the change permanent. In the meantime, the order instructs Hegseth and the department to start using “Department of War” as a secondary title in official correspondence, public communications and executive branch documents. The order also authorizes Hegseth to refer to himself as the “secretary of war”.When Trump was asked by a reporter last week how he plans to rename the department, since that would require an act of Congress, Trump said: “We’re just going to do it. I’m sure Congress will go along, if we need that, I don’t think we even need that.”“It just to me, seems like a just a much more appropriate,” he added. “The other is, ‘defense’ is too defensive. And we want to be defensive, but we want to be offensive, too if we have to be. So, it just sounded to me better.”Trump’s embrace of the old name, which seems to put to rest longstanding claims that he was ever the “antiwar candidate” for the presidency, comes days after he ordered the military to carry out the extrajudicial killing of 11 suspected drug smugglers.During his 2015 campaign for the Republican presidential nomination, Trump himself rejected the perception that he was anti-war by proclaiming that he was, in fact, “much more militaristic” than even George W Bush.Four years earlier, when he was flirting with a run for the presidency against Barack Obama, Trump had demanded US military intervention in Libya.“I can’t believe what our country is doing,” Trump told viewers of his YouTube video blog on 28 February 2011, two weeks before the Obama administration got US security council authorization “to protect civilians” in Libya. “Gaddafi in Libya is killing thousands of people, nobody knows how bad it is, and we’re sitting around we have soldiers all have the Middle East, and we’re not bringing them in to stop this horrible carnage and that’s what it is: it’s a carnage.”Five months later, after the US-led air campaign had forced Gaddafi from power in Libya – and Trump had decided not to challenge Obama for the presidency – the star of The Apprentice posted another YouTube clip, complaining that the administration should have waited longer to aid the Libyan rebels, to force them to agree to surrender half of the country’s oil reserves.“What we should’ve done is we should’ve asked the rebels when they came to us – and they came to us, they were being routed by Qaddafi, they were being decimated – we should’ve said, ‘We’ll help you, but we want 50% of your oil,’” Trump had said. “They would’ve said, ‘How about 75%?’”As Donald Trump accuses Federal Reserve governor Lisa Cook of criminal mortgage fraud, for allegedly obtaining more than one mortgage on a home designated her primary residence, at least three members of his cabinet have multiple primary-residence mortgages, ProPublica reports.Trump’s transportation secretary, Sean Duffy, his labor secretary, Lori Chavez-DeRemer, and his Environmental Protection Agency administrator, Lee Zeldin, all have primary-residence mortgages on at least two properties, according to financial disclosure forms, real estate records and publicly available mortgage data provided by Hunterbrook Media to ProPublica.Real estate experts told the non-profit investigative outlet that claiming primary residences on different mortgages at the same time is often legal and rarely prosecuted.But Trump has called for the prosecution of Cook, the Biden-nominated central banker, for allegedly having multiple primary-residence mortgages, and leveled the same charge against Adam Schiff, the Democratic senator who led his first impeachment, and Letitia James, the New York attorney general who brought a successful civil fraud case against Trump.Two days after an appeals court reinstated a Democratic member of Federal Trade Commission, ruling that her attempted firing by Donald Trump was unlikely to survive her legal challenge, the justice department asked the supreme court to let Trump remove her again as the legal battle continues.The commissioner, Rebecca Slaughter, posted an image of herself back at work on Thursday, with the caption: “Back at my desk, back online, and have already moved to reinstitute the Click to Cancel Rule. Hope a majority of the Commission will join me – all Americans deserve to be protected from abusive subscription traps.”The FTC’s “click-to-cancel” rule, which would have required businesses to make it easy for consumers to cancel unwanted subscriptions and memberships, was adopted in October after the agency received more than 16,000 comments from consumers enraged about having to jump through hoops to cancel their enrollments.Implementation of the rule was delayed by the FTC in May, two months after Trump removed Slaughter and another Democratic commissioner.A federal appeals court vacated the rule on procedural grounds in July, just days before it was set to go into effect. Seven Democratic senators wrote to the new FTC chair that month, urging him to have the commission fix the procedural flaws identified by the court and reissue the rule.Susan Monarez, the ousted CDC director, just rejected Robert F Kennedy Jr’s claim, during a contentious senate hearing on Thursday, that she had lied about having been pressured to rubber-stamp vaccine recommendations from a panel of his anti-vaccine allies.In an account of her firing published on the Wall Street Journal opinion page, Monarez wrote that, at a meeting with Kennedy on 25 August:
      I was told to preapprove the recommendations of a vaccine advisory panel newly filled with people who have publicly expressed antivaccine rhetoric. That panel’s next meeting is scheduled for Sept. 18-19. It is imperative that the panel’s recommendations aren’t rubber-stamped but instead are rigorously and scientifically reviewed before being accepted or rejected.
      When Kennedy was confronted with that accusation by Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat, at the Senate hearing, he denied that he gave Monarez that order.“No, I did not say that to her, Kennedy said. “And I never had a private meeting with her”, he added. “So there are witnesses to every meeting that we had, and all of those witnesses will say I never said that.”Kennedy was not asked if anyone else at the meeting did issue such an order to Monarez, which would be consistent with her account.Instead, Wyden asked Kennedy if Monarez was “lying today to the Wall Street Journal and the American people”.“Yes sir”, Kennedy replied.In a statement responding to Kennedy’s testimony, Monarez’s lawyers, Mark Zaid and Abbe Lowell, wrote: “Secretary Kennedy’s claims are false, and at times, patently ridiculous. Dr. Monarez stands by what she wrote in her op-ed in The Wall Street Journal, would repeat it all under oath and continues to support the vision she outlined at her confirmation hearing that science will control her decisions.”Senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren have already called for Monarez to be called to testify before the senate, which would be under oath.Hawaii announced today that it would join a new public health alliance formed by a trio of west coast states in response to the turmoil at the CDC.On Wednesday, the California governor Gavin Newsom announced that his state had partnered with Washington and Oregon to form the West Coast Health Alliance, which they said would provide residents with science-based immunization guidance as the nation’s top public health agency – and a slew of red states – roll back long-standing recommendations medical experts and researchers have credited with limiting the spread of infectious diseases.“By joining the West Coast Health Alliance, we’re giving Hawaii’s people the same consistent, evidence-based guidance they can trust to keep their families and neighbors safe,”Josh Green, theDemocratic governor of Hawaii, said in a statement.Green, an emergency room physician, said a science-driven approach was “critical as we all go forward into an era with severe threats from infectious diseases”.The Democratic governors of California, Oregon and Washington unveiled the new alliance on the same day that Florida’s Republican surgeon general said the state would end all vaccine mandates for schoolchildren.The justice department has launched a criminal mortgage fraud inquiry into Federal Reserve governor Lisa Cook and issued grand jury subpoenas out of both Georgia and Michigan, according to documents seen by Reuters and a source familiar with the matter.The investigation, which followed a criminal referral from Federal Housing Finance Agency director Bill Pulte, is being conducted by Ed Martin, who was tapped by attorney general Pam Bondi as a special assistant US attorney to assist with mortgage fraud investigations involving public officials, along with the US attorneys’ offices in the northern district of Georgia and the eastern district of Michigan, according to the person, who spoke anonymously since the matter is not public.Pulte, who was appointed by Trump, has accused Cook of committing fraud by listing more than one property as a primary residence when she applied for mortgages, potentially to secure lower interest rates. Cook owns properties in Michigan, Georgia and Massachusetts.Trump terminated Cook over Pulte’s allegations, prompting her to file a lawsuit challenging his effort to oust her. Cook’s lawyer, prominent Washington attorney Abbe Lowell, said the DoJ was scrambling to invent new justifications for Trump’s overreach in firing the Fed governor.“He wants cover, and they are providing it. The questions over how Governor Cook described her properties from time to time, which we have started to address in the pending case and will continue to do so, are not fraud, but it takes nothing for this DOJ to undertake a new politicized investigation, and they appear to have just done it again,” Lowell said.The case, which will likely end up before the supreme court, has ramifications for the Fed’s ability to set interest rate policy without regard to politicians’ wishes, widely seen as critical to any central bank’s ability to keep inflation under control.Trump has demanded that the US central bank cut rates immediately and aggressively, berating Fed chair Jerome Powell for his stewardship of monetary policy. The central bank is expected to deliver a rate cut at its 16-17 September meeting.In one of her recent legal filings challenging Trump’s actions, Cook said she listed mortgages on three properties on forms submitted to the White House and Senate in the vetting process for her appointment to the Fed in 2022. Any inconsistencies were known when she was confirmed and cannot give Trump grounds to fire her now.Cook is the third public official to be targeted in a criminal investigation over mortgage fraud allegations. Martin, who also presides over the “Weaponization Working Group” and serves as pardon attorney, is also pursuing criminal investigations into Democratic senator Adam Schiff as well as New York attorney general Letitia James.There are also grand juries convened in those two cases, which started prior to Martin’s new appointment as a special assistant US attorney, according to the source and documents seen by Reuters.The United States will phase out some security assistance for European countries near the border with Russia, two sources familiar with the matter have told Reuters.The plan comes in the broader context of Donald Trump’s so-called “America First” foreign policy, in which his administration has slashed foreign aid and is pushing European countries to cover more of the cost of their own security.The move, first reported by the Financial Times (paywall), comes as Russia’s war with Ukraine has heightened concerns in Europe about regional instability and the possibility of further aggression from Moscow. Key recipients of the funding include Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania.Congress has approved funding for the assistance plan, which comes under the Department of Defense, but only through the end of September 2026. Trump’s administration has not asked that the program be extended, according to the FT report and confirmed to Reuters by one of its sources.Asked for comment, a White House official referred to an order Trump signed shortly after beginning his second term in January.“On day one of his second term, President Trump signed an executive order to reevaluate and realign United States foreign aid,” the official said.“This action has been coordinated with European countries in line with the executive order and the president’s longstanding emphasis on ensuring Europe takes more responsibility for its own defense,” the official said.Senator Jeanne Shaheen, the top Democrat on the Senate foreign relations committee, called the decision misguided.“It makes no sense at all to undercut our allies’ defense readiness at the same time that we’re asking them to step up their own capabilities, and it puts American troops at risk when we slash the training of the allied soldiers they would fight alongside,” she said in a statement. More

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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