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      Judge keeps block on Trump’s offer of mass buyouts for US federal workers

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      A federal judge has kept a temporary block on the Trump administration’s offer of mass buyouts for more than 2 million government workers while he considers whether the offer is lawful.After issuing a temporary retraining order extending a deadline last week for federal employees to decide whether to accept the buyout offer, US district judge George O’Toole heard arguments in Boston on Monday in the lawsuit brought by federal workers’ unions which claims the administration’s “deferred resignation” program is illegal because it has not been authorized by Congress. After the arguments, O’Toole said he would keep in place the temporary restraining order while he considers whether to block it longer term.The lawsuit argues that the buyout offer is an “arbitrary, unlawful, short-fused ultimatum” to force the resignation of government workers under the “threat of mass termination”.The judge’s decision prevents the administration from implementing the buyout plan for now. It is unclear when he will rule on the unions’ request to stop it entirely.The Trump administration said it had offered nearly all of the roughly 2 million civilian federal workers the opportunity to leave their jobs and receive eight months’ severance pay and benefits, or to stay in their positions and agree to new reforms, including a requirement to work in the office five days a week.In an email titled “Fork in the road”, the US office of personnel management (OPM) also warned that those who chose to stay would be subject to “enhanced standards of conduct” and might face potential layoffs or reassignment.Since the email was sent on 29 January, 65,000 workers have chosen to take the deferred resignation offer, according to a White House official.Democrats and union leaders have advised federal workers not to accept the offer amid concerns about its legality and the administration’s ability to fulfill its side of the deal. “It’s a scam and not a buyout,” said Everett Kelley, president of the American Federation of Government Employees.A coalition of Democratic attorneys general, led by the New York attorney general, Letitia James, warned federal employees that the buyout offer was “misleading”.“President Trump’s so-called buyout offers are nothing more than the latest attack on federal workers and the services they provide,” James wrote in a statement. “These supposed offers are not guaranteed.”Employees at the education department have been warned that those who accept the buyout could see their paychecks stop at any time and workers would not have any recourse.In response to the judge’s order, the OPM announced on Thursday that the deadline to accept the deferred resignation program would be extended to Monday.“The program is NOT being blocked or canceled,” it said. “The government will honor the deferred resignation offer.”

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      Revelations of Israeli spyware abuse raise fears over possible use by Trump

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      Even as WhatsApp celebrated a major legal victory in December against NSO Group, the Israeli maker of one of the world’s most powerful cyberweapons, a new threat was detected, this time involving another Israel-based company that has previously agreed contracts with democratic governments around the world – including the US.Late in January, WhatsApp claimed that 90 of its users, including some journalists and members of civil society, were targeted last year by spyware made by a company called Paragon Solutions. The allegation is raising urgent questions about how Paragon’s government clients are using the powerful hacking tool.Three people – an Italian journalist named Francesco Cancellato; the high-profile Italian founder of an NGO that aids immigrants named Luca Casarini; and a Libyan activist based in Sweden named Husam El Gomati – announced they were among the 90 people whose mobile phones had probably been compromised last year.More is likely to be known soon, when researchers at the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto, which investigates digital threats against civil society and has worked closely with WhatsApp, is expected to release a new technical report on the breach.Like NSO Group, Paragon licenses its spyware, which is called Graphite, to government agencies. If it is deployed successfully, it can hack any phone without a mobile phone user’s knowledge, giving the operator of the spyware the ability to intercept phone calls, access photographs, and read encrypted messages. Its purpose, Paragon said, was in line with US policy, which calls for such spyware to only be used to assist governments in “national security missions, including counterterrorism, counter-narcotics, and counter-intelligence”.In a statement to the Guardian, a Paragon representative said the company had “a zero-tolerance policy for violations of our terms of service”. “We require all users of our technology to adhere to terms and conditions that preclude the illicit targeting of journalists and other civil society leaders,” the representative said.The company does appear to have acted swiftly in response to the cases that have emerged so far. The Guardian reported last week that Paragon had terminated its contract with Italy for violating the terms of its contract with the group. Italy had – hours before the Guardian’s story broke – denied any knowledge of or involvement in the targeting of the journalist and activists, and said it would investigate the matter.David Kaye, who previously served from 2014 to 2020 as a special rapporteur on freedom of expression and opinion said the marketing of military-grade surveillance products, such as the kind made by Paragon, comes with “extraordinary risks of abuse”.“Like the NSO Group’s Pegasus spyware, it is easy for governments easily to avoid basic principles of rule of law. Though not all the details are known, we are seeing the likelihood of scandalous abuse in the case of Italy, just as we have seen that in other contexts across Europe, Mexico and elsewhere,” Kaye said.The issue seems particularly relevant in the US. In 2019, during the first Donald Trump administration, the FBI acquired a limited license to test NSO Group’s Pegasus. The FBI said the spyware was never used in a domestic investigation and there is no evidence that either the Trump or Joe Biden administrations used spyware domestically.In the face of increasing reports of abuse, including use of NSO’s spyware against American diplomats abroad, the Biden administration put NSO on a blacklist in 2021, saying the company’s tools had enabled foreign governments to conduct transnational repression and represented a threat to national security.Biden also signed an executive order in 2023 that discouraged the use of spyware by the federal government and allowed it to be used in limited circumstances.It was therefore a surprise when it was reported by Wired last year that the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) agency had – under the Biden administration – signed a $2m one-year contract with Paragon. The contract was reportedly paused after the news became public and its current status is unclear. Ice did not respond to a request for comment.A Paragon representative said the company was “deeply committed to following all US laws and regulations” and that it was fully compliant with the 2023 executive order signed by Biden. The person also pointed out that Paragon was now a US-owned company, following its takeover by AE Industrial Partners. It also has a US subsidiary based in Virginia, which is headed by John Fleming, a longtime veteran of the CIA who serves as executive chair.Unlike its predecessor, however, the new US administration has publicly stated that it will seek to use the levers of government against Trump’s perceived political enemies. Trump has repeatedly said he would try to use the military to take on “the enemy from within”. He has also singled out career prosecutors who have investigated him, members of the military, members of Congress, intelligence agents and former officials who have been critical of him, for potential prosecution. He has never explicitly stated that he would use spyware against these perceived rivals.Researchers like those at Citizen Lab and Amnesty Tech are considered the leading experts in detecting illegitimate surveillance against members of civil society, which have occurred in a number of democracies, including India, Mexico and Hungary. More

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      Trump is driving political debate to ever new lows. The left must hold on to its values | Zoe Williams

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      The problem with Trump’s America is that everything happens so fast, and across too many categories. There are moves so stupid and trivial that you can lose hours wondering whether there is a long game or if it’s all just trolling: renaming the Gulf of Mexico, bringing back plastic straws. There are moves so inhumane, causing so much deliberate suffering, that they are hard to fathom. The cancellation of USAid is so consequential that reaction has almost frozen in place, as the world figures out which immediate humanitarian crisis to prioritise, and waits for some grownup, such as the constitution, to step in. Into that baited silence steps Elon Musk, with a hoax about the agency having been a leftwing money-laundering organisation. Then everyone hares off to react to that, first debunking, then considering, what it might mean, for a man of such wealth and power to have come so completely unstuck from demonstrable reality. This is not an accident – and yet it has no meaning. So why is he doing it? To galvanise a base, or make a public service announcement that observable reality can’t help you now, so get used to having it overwritten by fantasy? It’s an understandable thing to worry about.Then there are the chilling direct legislative moves against sections of US society: banning the use of any pronouns that are not male or female in government agencies, defunding gender-affirming medical care, signalling a ban on transgender people in the military with an executive order that says being trans “conflicts with a soldier’s commitment to an honourable, truthful, and disciplined lifestyle, even in one’s personal life”. There’s the assault on immigrant rights, which is vivid and wide-ranging from the resurrection of Guantánamo Bay as a for ever holding-house, to the shackled people deported to Punjab, to the reversal of a convention that schools, churches and hospitals would not be raided by Immigration and Customs Enforcement.The sabre-rattling on tariffs throws up its own unstable side-show. Bit-part Republicans such as Bill Cassidy, the Louisiana senator, try to carve out some space in the drama with remarks so bracingly racist – the maternal death rate isn’t as bad if you don’t count black women, apparently – that you’re forced to give him the attention he craves. Ignoring him will not make him go away.There will never be any shortage of things to react to; nothing will ever be inconsequential. Even things that misfire comically or are immediately ruled illegal will have an effect, drive the debate to new lows and foster fear and division. And there will rarely, from outside the US, be any meaningful way to react; whatever ideas about democracy we’ve had to let go of in 2025, it remains bordered.There’s an agenda to that too, of course. If the watching world is constantly responding to things it can’t change or even protest about, that sends spores of impotence far and wide. Events in the US are already debasing our own discourse: Trump cheerleaders springing up with bizarre arguments and the leader of the opposition Kemi Badenoch strategically claiming that liberalism has been “hacked” by groups focused on “radical green absolutism”. The effect? Everything is pushed rightwards.It might be impossible to blot out the drama, but we have to simultaneously focus on our own debates and our own terms – the threats to trans rights in our own country, the language on immigration in our own parliament, our own burgeoning politics of nastiness and tough-talking. We don’t have to surrender to the momentum of the right by becoming more like them. We don’t have to catch this virus because America sneezed. Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist More

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      For many Palestinian Americans, Trump’s Gaza plan evokes legacy of displacement

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      For Palestinian Americans in Dearborn, Michigan, like Zaynah Jadallah and her family, displacement and loss have become central elements of her family heritage.Her family members were teachers in Al-Bireh in what is now the occupied West Bank during the 1948 Nakba, when hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were forced from their homes and land by Zionist paramilitaries, and then the Israeli army, in the war surrounding Israel’s creation.“They fled the attacks in two cars for Jordan. One of the cars made it, the other was bombed and they were burned alive,” she says.“None of them survived.”So when Donald Trump, standing alongside Benjamin Netanyahu, suggested last week that Palestinians in the devastated Gaza Strip leave their homes and that it be turned into a “riviera” for “the people of the world”, comments he has since doubled down on, Jadallah was livid.“The president of the United States calling for ethnic cleansing and the continued genocide of Palestinians,” she says.“It’s outrageous.”For many Palestinian American residents of Dearborn such as Jadallah, the responses to the US president’s proposals follow a similar line: defiance, anger, but not much in the way of surprise.“He has a history of being loyal to the Zionist movement of genocide and colonizing [of the] the Palestinian people,” she says.“It wasn’t surprising, but it was outrageous.”A photo on the front cover of the Dearborn-published Arab American News’s 1 February edition portrays thousands of Palestinians walking along a sea front to their destroyed homes in northern Gaza. The caption reads: “The Great March of Return”.“Gaza’s history is one of both pain and pride,” reads the newspaper’s lead article on the topic.It continues: “It stretches back to ancient civilizations and includes great resistance against invasion, such as the three-month siege by Alexander the Great and his Macedonian army in 332 BCE.”Trump’s announcement upended decades of international consensus and threatened fragile talks to extend a delicate ceasefire in Gaza. It was met with glee by much of the Israeli prime minister’s ruling coalition and other far-right elements in Israel.More than half of Dearborn’s 110,000 residents are of Arab heritage, making it home to one of the largest Arab communities outside the Middle East. Many Palestinian American residents have lost family members during Israel’s onslaught on the Gaza Strip, which killed more than 46,000 people.“Nobody is really shocked. Everybody is disgusted,” says Amer Zahr, a Palestinian American comedian and activist whose family was displaced from Nazareth, Jaffa and Akka (Acre) during the Nakba.“I’m really angry at the notion that we’re talking about the thing that Trump said on Tuesday like it’s new or novel or unique. It is not,” he says.“It is the policy of Israel to ethnically cleanse Palestinians, and that policy has been fully supported and funded by the United States.”He also finds that it’s only when Trump makes such comments that liberals and the Democratic party “finally reject the notion of the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians”.“I guess it has a different ring to it when Trump says it.”Trump won more votes in November’s presidential election in Dearborn than the Democratic party’s Kamala Harris or Green party candidate Jill Stein, the first time a Republican party candidate won the city in 24 years.While Harris declined to campaign in Dearborn, Trump had lunch at the Great Commoner, a café owned by an Arab American businessperson, just days before the election.“A lot of people [in Dearborn] voted for him secretly,” Zahr says. “They are the ones who have gone silent now.” Zahr voted for Stein.But some are doubling down on their support, not inclined to take Trump’s words at face value. Bishara Bahbah, a Palestinian American born and raised in Jerusalem, campaigned extensively in Michigan and other swing states through the group formerly called Arab Americans for Trump. (The group changed its name last week to Arab Americans for Peace.) He says Trump’s comments were just a “testing of the waters”.“I think the president threw out this idea as a trial balloon. There can never be a displacement of Palestinians from their homeland. It’s counterproductive,” he says.While members of his family were forced to flee Jerusalem during the Nakba in 1948, and he himself has since been banned from living in the city of his birth, Bahbah continues to believe peace in the Middle East is Trump’s main goal.“I know the president wants a legacy of peace and wants to be known as a peacemaker. For him to do that, the only path is a two-state solution which he told me he would support.”He says he has faced a backlash for supporting Trump that has included “messages on X that could be interpreted as death threats”, but that he’s been told by Trump’s advisers that Trump did not mean to suggest that Palestinians in Gaza be forcibly removed from their homes and land.“I believe that the president will come to the conclusion that what he said publicly is just not workable,” he says. He says the rebrand of his group to Arab Americans for Peace, announced hours after Trump’s comments, had been in the works for months.For Jadallah, Trump’s alleged plans for Israel to turn over the Gaza Strip to the US are an obvious contradiction to what he campaigned for president on.“It really shows his intention to serve a foreign government before the American people, right?” she says.“Because if he wants an America first agenda, he would talk about how we can spend our hard-earned tax dollars to improve our healthcare systems and our schools.”She says the resilience Palestinians in Gaza have shown following 15 months of bombardments and continued displacement lead her to believe that it’s highly unlikely that Trump’s plan to remove people from Gaza would succeed.“They’ve endured genocide, hunger, been displaced multiple times from the north to the south,” she says.“There’s still 2 million people residing in Gaza and they’ve told us that they don’t want to leave because they are the rightful owners of the land.” More

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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      US equality chief fired by Trump condemns ‘demonization of the term DEI’

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      View image in fullscreenSeven days after Donald Trump was inaugurated, Jocelyn Samuels received a message from the White House saying that the president – who had first appointed her as a commissioner to the US government agency tasked with fighting workplace discrimination – now wanted her gone.Like so many other officials Trump has axed since retaking office, Samuels was informed she was being terminated from the US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) because of her “support for radical Biden administration guidance, DEI initiatives and a refusal to defend women against extreme gender ideology”.The order appeared to fly in the face of the legal precedent governing her appointment to the commission, but Samuels also sees her firing as part of a greater strategy to create a Republican majority on the five-member commission that will roll back protections for transgender employees in particular, and retaliate more generally against businesses that attempt to address inequity in their workforce.“What I observed from the outside is that there is a real desire to decimate the federal government’s ability to provide the level of services that it has to the American people,” Samuels told the Guardian as she sat in a cafe earlier this week across the street from the White House, where her firing was orchestrated.“With regard to the EEOC, I think that these terminations were in service of the administration’s agenda to eliminate whatever they mean by DEI programs, and to erase the existence of trans people, because those are issues that fall directly under the EEOC jurisdiction, to the extent that they result in discrimination in the workplace.”A longtime civil rights lawyer who has been a senior official in the departments of justice and health and human services, Samuels was appointed to the commission during Trump’s first term, and then reappointed by Joe Biden.On 27 January, she, along with fellow commissioner Charlotte Burrows and the EEOC’s general counsel, both Democratic appointees, received an email from the White House presidential personnel office, saying they “unsuitable to be members of this administration”, Samuels recalled.View image in fullscreenThe termination “makes a mockery of the whole structure of these independent agencies,” she said. “I do think that this was an unlawful action on his part, and it is a real disservice to workers across the country for me not to have been able to serve out my term.”A Trump administration official described Samuels and Burrows as “far-left appointees with radical records of upending longstanding labor law, and they have no place as senior appointees in the Trump administration, which was given a mandate by the American people to undo the radical policies they created”.Samuels is one of many targeted in the firing spree Trump embarked on after returning to power last month, which the president has justified as necessary to root out supporters of policies he opposes, such as diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives supported by Biden.The president has ordered the axing of the leaders of the US Coast Guard, the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) and 18 independent federal agency watchdogs, allowed Elon Musk’s “department of government efficiency” to attempt to entice millions of federal employees into quitting their jobs and tried to pause all government loans and grants. Democrats say the campaign is an attempt to remove dissenters and ensure a compliant federal bureaucracy, while his spending freeze and mass buyouts have faced setbacks in court.The president has also gone after Democrats appointed to independent agency positions that are meant to be insulated from political interference. In addition to his dismissals from the EEOC, Trump fired three Democratic members of the Private Civil Liberties Oversight Board, a presidential advisory body, as well as a Democrat on the National Labor Relations Board, who this week filed a lawsuit alleging an “unprecedented and illegal” dismissal by the president. He is also attempting to fire the chair of the Federal Election Commission, who has thus far refused to leave her post.Created by the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964 and tasked with enforcing protections against the discrimination of job applicants and employees, the five-member EEOC is intended to be bipartisan, with no more than three commissioners belonging to a sitting president’s party.Among its tools is litigation against companies that it claims allow discrimination, including against transgender workers. Under Biden, the commission brought suits against a New York bar and restaurant where a transgender employee was told he “wasn’t a real man”, and a Michigan restaurant chain that allowed a transgender employee to be misgendered by a co-worker, then fired him and his colleagues when they complained.Samuels’s term was not to expire until July of next year, and she expected to have “another 18 months on the commission, along with my fellow Democratic commissioners, to continue to advance our interpretations of the law”.Instead, she was sent an email full of conservative buzzwords as justification for her dismissal. But Samuels says Trump and his acolytes have never spelled out what they mean by DEI, and instead believe they are using their dislike of it as cover for a regulatory offensive intended to stop all efforts to address inequity.“I think that this demonization of the term DEI is really misrepresenting the nature of the important work that needs to be done to really create a level playing field,” Samuels said. “And my concern is that once there is a Republican majority on the EEOC, the commission will work to undermine employers’ ability to do this important work.”View image in fullscreenWith its commission in Republican hands, Samuels said the EEOC could roll back guidance that protects transgender workers from harassment, and rescind its interpretation of a federal law that female employees who seek abortions must be given accommodation by their employer. It may also actively take part in the Trump administration’s fight against DEI, by pursuing claims of discrimination against employers who embrace policies that favor workforce diversity, flipping the traditional mission of pursuing claims against employers who eschew diversity and discriminate against employees from underrepresented demographics.The firing of Samuels and Burrows has left just a single Republican and Democratic commissioner each on the EEOC, robbing it of a quorum and limiting its functionality. Trump appointed the remaining Republican, Andrea Lucas, as acting chair, who, portending what Samuels fears, named as among her priorities “rooting out unlawful DEI-motivated race and sex discrimination” and “defending the biological and binary reality of sex”.“There are plenty of race-neutral ways that employers can advance their commitment to diversity, but I think that a commission that thinks that even committing to that proactive work means that you are taking race into account in a way that will hurt white people, can do a lot of damage,” Samuels said.And contrary to the White House’s accusation that she supports “extreme gender ideology” and failed to “defend women”, Samuels argues there is no conflict between women’s rights and transgender rights.“Cisgender women are not harmed by combating failures to hire trans people or egregious misgendering or harassment of trans people,” Samuels said. “An assault on the rights of one is an assault on the rights of all.”Samuels has considered suing over her dismissal, but is mindful of the greater legal peril that could bring. Such a case could wind up before the supreme court, where its conservative supermajority has recently shown a willingness to expand executive powers, including with last year’s ruling granting presidents immunity for their official acts. If the justices uphold Samuels’s dismissal, they could do so in a way that grants Trump and future presidents the explicit authority to fire members of independent bodies.Such a decision “would be regrettable and a disservice to the functions served by these bipartisan agencies”, Samuels said More