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BRUSSELS: French President Emmanuel Macron on Thursday said the leaders of a coalition of Ukraine backers would meet again in Paris next week, hoping to finalize plans to secure a potential truce in the war with Russia.
“We will hold another meeting of the coalition of the willing next Thursday in Paris in presence of President (Volodymyr) Zelensky,” Macron told reporters following an EU summit.
WASHINGTON: The Trump administration can stop approving new refugees for entry into the US but has to allow in people who were conditionally accepted before the president suspended the nation’s refugee admissions system, an appeals court ruled Tuesday.
The order narrowed a ruling from a federal judge in Seattle who found the program should be restarted.
The three-judge panel of the 9th US Circuit Court of Appeals said the president has the power to restrict people from entering the country, pointing to a 2018 Supreme Court ruling upholding President Donald Trump’s ban on travel from several mostly Muslim countries during his first term.
Refugees who were conditionally approved by the government before Trump’s order halting the refugee program should still be allowed to resettle, the judges found.
The panel ruled on an emergency appeal of a ruling from US District Judge Jamal Whitehead who found that the president’s authority to suspend refugee admissions is not limitless and that Trump cannot nullify the law passed by Congress establishing the program.
Whitehead pointed to reports of refugees stranded in dangerous places, families separated from relatives in the US and people sold all their possessions for travel to the US that was later canceled.
Melissa Keaney, an attorney with the International Refugee Assistance Project, applauded the portions of the order that the appeals court left intact.
“We welcome this continued relief for tens of thousands of refugees who will now have the opportunity to restart their lives in the United States,” she said.
Whitehead, who was nominated by Democratic President Joe Biden, also issued a second order Tuesday blocking the cancelation of refugee resettlement contracts.
Trump’s order said the refugee program — a form of legal migration to the US for people displaced by war, natural disaster or persecution — would be suspended because cities and communities had been taxed by “record levels of migration” and didn’t have the ability to “absorb large numbers of migrants, and in particular, refugees.” There are 600,000 people being processed to come to the US as refugees around the world, according to the administration.
The Justice Department argued that the order was well within Trump’s authority.
Despite long-standing support from both major political parties for accepting thoroughly vetted refugees, the program has become politicized in recent years. Trump also temporarily halted it during his first term, and then dramatically decreased the number of refugees who could enter the US each year.
The plaintiffs said the president had not shown how the entry of these refugees would be detrimental to the US
They include the International Refugee Assistance Project on behalf of Church World Service, the Jewish refugee resettlement agency HIAS, Lutheran Community Services Northwest, and individual refugees and family members. They said their ability to provide critical services to refugees, including those already in the US, has been severely inhibited by Trump’s order.
WASHINGTON: Angry over the crush of court rulings against the Trump administration, Republicans in Congress are trying to slap back at the federal judiciary with proposals to limit the reach of its rulings, cut funding and even impeach judges, tightening the GOP’s grip on government.
House GOP leaders say all options are under consideration as they rush to rein in judges who are halting President Donald Trump’s actions at a rapid pace. In many cases, the courts are questioning whether the firings of federal workers, freezing of federal funds and shuttering of long-running federal offices are unlawful actions by the executive branch and Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency.
In perhaps the most high-profile case, Judge James E. Boasberg ordered planeloads of deported immigrants to be turned around, raising the ire of Trump, who called for his impeachment, and billionaire Musk, who is funneling campaign cash to House Republicans backing impeachment efforts. The president calls the judges “lunatics.”
House Speaker Mike Johnson said Tuesday that “desperate times call for desperate measures” without mentioning impeachment.
“We do have authority over the federal courts, as you know,” the Republican speaker said. “We can eliminate an entire district court. We have power of funding over the courts, and all these other things.”
Not yet 100 days into the new administration, the unusual attack on the federal judiciary is the start of what is expected to be a protracted battle between the co-equal branches of government, unmatched in modern memory. As the White House tests the judiciary, trying to bend it to Trump’s demands, the Congress, controlled by the president’s own Republican Party, appears ready to back him up.
It all comes as the Supreme Court last summer granted the executive broad immunity from prosecution, setting the stage for the challenges to come. But Chief Justice John Roberts warned more recently that “impeachment is not an appropriate response to disagreement concerning a judicial decision.”
Democrats are warning against what they view as an assault on the judicial branch, which so far has been the only check against Trump and DOGE’s far-reaching federal actions. Threats against the federal judges, already on the rise, remain of high concern.
“It is outrageous to even think of defunding the courts,” said Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer, reacting to the House speaker’s claims. “The courts are the bulwark against Trump, and the Republicans can’t stand it.”
House GOP leaders met Tuesday with Rep. Jim Jordan, the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, which will hold a hearing on the issue next week. The House is also expected to vote on a bill from Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., that would limit the geographic reach of certain federal rulings, to prevent temporary restraining orders from being enacted nationwide.
Jordan said he also spoke Saturday with Trump during college wrestling championships in Philadelphia.
“All options are on the table,” Jordan said late Monday. “We want to get the facts. Gather the facts.”
Since Trump took office, and with Musk, on a mission to dramatically reduce the size and scope of the federal government, the administration’s tech-inspired move-fast-and-break-things ethos has run up against the constraints of federal law.
An onslaught of court cases has been filed by employee groups, democracy organizations and advocacy groups trying to keep federal programs — from the US Agency for International Development to the Education Department — from being dismantled.
Judges have issued various types of restraints on Trump’s actions. Trump’s first administration alone accounted for 66 percent of all the injunctions issued on presidential actions between 2001 and 2023, according to data from a Harvard Law Review piece circulated by Republicans.
The legislation from Issa had no support from Democrats when it was approved by the Judiciary Committee last month. A similar bill was introduced Monday by GOP Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri.
Rep. Jamie Raskin, of Maryland, the top Democrat on the Judiciary panel, said Trump is being hit with injunctions because he is “engaged in terrible, irresponsible and lawless violations of people’s rights.”
“We are winning in court,” Raskin said in a video address. “We’ve got make sure we defend the integrity of the judiciary.”
When it comes to actually impeaching the judges, however, top Republicans have stopped short of backing what would be a severe action.
Impeachments are rare in Congress, particularly of judges, but several rank-and-file House Republicans have proposed legislation to launch impeachment proceedings against various federal judges who have ruled in ways unfavorable to the Trump administration.
Musk has rewarded House Republicans who signed onto impeachment legislation with political donations, according to a person familiar with information first reported by the New York Times. The person was granted anonymity to discuss the matter.
Republicans are particularly focused on Boasberg, the chief judge of the district court in Washington, D.C., who Jordan said is in a “somewhat unique in that, you know, his decision was crazy.”
The judge is weighing whether the Trump administration defied his order after the planes of migrants landed in El Salvador, turned over to that country’s notorious mega-prison system. The Trump administration had invoked the Alien Enemies Act, a war-time authority used during World War II against Japanese Americans, for the deportations the judge said lacked due process.
Any impeachment effort would also require backing from the Senate, where GOP leaders also panned the effort.
Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., echoed the advice of Roberts in allowing normal legal procedures to play out.
“At the end of the day, there is a process, and there’s an appeals process, and you know, I suspect that’s ultimately how this will get handled,” Thune said.
MOSCOW: Russia’s Foreign Ministry said on Tuesday the Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant was a Russian facility and transferring control of it to Ukraine or any other country was impossible.
The ministry also said that jointly operating the plant was not admissible as it would be impossible to properly ensure the physical and nuclear safety of the station.
It said Zaporizhzhia region, partly controlled by Russian forces, was one of four in Ukraine that had been annexed by Russia by virtue of referendums staged seven months after Moscow’s full-scale invasion of its neighbor and a presidential decree had formally made the station Russian property.
Western nations have dismissed the referendums as shams.
“The return of the station to Russia’s nuclear sector has been a fait accompli for quite some time,” the ministry statement said. “Transferring the Zaporizhzhia plant to the control of Ukraine or another country is impossible.”
Russian forces seized the station early in the invasion and each side has since routinely accused the other of staging attacks that endanger safety at the plant, Europe’s largest with six reactors.
Although the plant now produces no electricity, the UN’s nuclear watchdog has monitors stationed there, as it does at all Ukrainian nuclear power sites.
Ukraine demands the return of the station to its jurisdiction and rejects the 2022 annexation of its territory as illegal.
US President Donald Trump, during a phone conversation this month with his Ukrainian counterpart Volodymyr Zelensky suggested the United States could help run and possibly own Ukraine’s nuclear power plants.
Zelensky said the plants belong to the Ukrainian people. He said he and Trump had discussed potential US investment in the plant.
OTTAWA: Three skiers were killed and a fourth was critically injured when they were swept away in an avalanche in Canada’s westernmost province of British Columbia, police said Tuesday.
The four men had just finished skiing in an alpine area on the east side of Kootenay Lake, 700 kilometers (435 miles) east of Vancouver, in the early afternoon Monday and were waiting in a staging area below the tree line with another group when tragedy struck.
“A transport helicopter was nearing the group when the pilot observed an avalanche and sounded the siren,” the Royal Canadian Mounted Police said in a statement.
One group managed to race out of harm’s way, but the other was swept away in a wall of snow.
Three of the men — a 45-year-old man from the US state of Idaho, a 44-year-old from Whistler, British Columbia, and their 53-year-old guide from the nearby town of Kaslo — were later found dead by emergency responders.
The fourth man, 40, from Nelson, British Columbia, was critically injured.
Authorities this week warned of a high risk of avalanches in the area caused by rising spring temperatures.
WASHINGTON: China remains the United States’ top military and cyber threat, according to a report by US intelligence agencies published on Tuesday that said Beijing was making “steady but uneven” progress on capabilities it could use to capture Taiwan.
China has the ability to hit the United States with conventional weapons, compromise US infrastructure through cyberattacks, and target its assets in space, and also seeks to displace the US as the top AI power by 2030, the Annual Threat Assessment by the intelligence community said.
Russia, along with Iran, North Korea and China, seeks to challenge the US through deliberate campaigns to gain an advantage, with Moscow’s war in Ukraine having afforded it a “wealth of lessons regarding combat against Western weapons and intelligence in a large-scale war,” the report said.
Released ahead of testimony before the Senate Intelligence Committee by President Donald Trump’s intelligence chiefs, the report said China’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA) likely planned to use large language models to create fake news, imitate personas, and enable attack networks.
“China’s military is fielding advanced capabilities, including hypersonic weapons, stealth aircraft, advanced submarines, stronger space and cyber warfare assets and a larger arsenal of nuclear weapons,” Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard told the committee. She labeled Beijing as Washington’s “most capable strategic competitor.”
“China almost certainly has a multifaceted, national-level strategy designed to displace the United States as the world’s most influential AI power by 2030,” the report said.
CIA Director John Ratcliffe told the committee that China had made only “intermittent” efforts to curtail the flow of precursor chemicals fueling the US fentanyl crisis due to its reluctance to crack down on lucrative Chinese businesses.
Trump has increased tariffs on all Chinese imports by 20 percent to punish Beijing for what he says is its failure to halt shipments of fentanyl chemicals. China denies playing a role in the crisis, which is the leading cause of US drug overdose deaths, but the issue has become a major point of friction between the Trump administration and Chinese officials.
INTELLIGENCE LEAK FUROR OVERSHADOWS HEARING
“There is nothing to prevent China ... from cracking down on fentanyl precursors,” Ratcliffe said.
China’s embassy in Washington did not respond immediately to a request for comment.
The committee hearing was overshadowed by Democratic senators grilling Ratcliffe and Gabbard over revelations that they and other top Trump officials discussed highly sensitive military plans in a Signal messaging app group that accidentally included a US journalist.
Numerous Republican senators focused their questioning on undocumented immigrants in the United States.
The intelligence report said large-scale illegal immigration had strained US infrastructure and “enabled known or suspected terrorists to cross into the United States.”
The intelligence agencies said Iran was committed to developing surrogate networks inside the US and to targeting former and current US officials.
While Iran continued to improve its domestically produced missile and UAV systems and arm a consortium of “like-minded terrorist and militant actors,” they said, the US continues to assess that Tehran “is not building a nuclear weapon.”
But US concerns about China dominated about a third of the 33-page report, which said Beijing was set to increase military and economic coercion toward Taiwan, the democratically governed island China claims as its territory.
“The PLA probably is making steady but uneven progress on capabilities it would use in an attempt to seize Taiwan and deter — and if necessary, defeat — US military intervention,” it said.
Still, it said, China faces “daunting” domestic challenges, including corruption, demographic imbalances, and fiscal and economic headwinds that could impair the ruling Communist Party’s legitimacy at home.
China’s economic growth probably will continue to slow because of low consumer and investor confidence, and Chinese officials appear to be bracing for more economic friction with the US, the report said.
