OBITUARY: Pope Francis, first Latin American pontiff who ministered with a charming, humble style, dies at 88

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Updated 21 April 2025
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OBITUARY: Pope Francis, first Latin American pontiff who ministered with a charming, humble style, dies at 88

OBITUARY: Pope Francis, first Latin American pontiff who ministered with a charming, humble style, dies at 88
  • Francis, who suffered from chronic lung disease and had part of one lung removed as a young man, was admitted to Gemelli hospital on Feb. 14, 2025

VATICAN CITY: Pope Francis, history’s first Latin American pontiff who charmed the world with his humble style and concern for the poor but alienated conservatives with critiques of capitalism and climate change, has died Monday. He was 88.

“At 7:35 this morning, the Bishop of Rome, Francis, returned to the home of the Father. His entire life was dedicated to the service of the Lord and of his Church,″ Cardinal Kevin Ferrell, the Vatican camerlengo, said in an announcement.

Francis, who suffered from chronic lung disease and had part of one lung removed as a young man, was admitted to Gemelli hospital on Feb. 14, 2025, for a respiratory crisis that developed into double pneumonia. He spent 38 days there, the longest hospitalization of his 12-year papacy.

From his first greeting as pope — a remarkably normal “Buonasera” (“Good evening”) — to his embrace of refugees and the downtrodden, Francis signaled a very different tone for the papacy, stressing humility over hubris for a Catholic Church beset by scandal and accusations of indifference.

GALLERY: Pope Francis: The world mourns

After that rainy night on March 13, 2013, the Argentine-born Jorge Mario Bergoglio brought a breath of fresh air into a 2,000-year-old institution that had seen its influence wane during the troubled tenure of Pope Benedict XVI, whose surprise resignation led to Francis’ election.

Francis, the crowd-loving, globe-trotting pope of the peripheries, navigated the unprecedented reality of leading a universal religion through the coronavirus pandemic from a locked-down Vatican City.

He implored the world to use COVID-19 as an opportunity to rethink the economic and political framework that he said had turned rich against poor.

“We have realized that we are on the same boat, all of us fragile and disoriented,” Francis told an empty St. Peter’s Square in March 2020. But he also stressed the pandemic showed the need for “all of us to row together, each of us in need of comforting the other.”

Reforming the Vatican

Stressing mercy, Francis changed the church’s position on the death penalty, calling it inadmissible in all circumstances. He also declared the possession of nuclear weapons, not just their use, was “immoral.”

In other firsts, he approved an agreement with China over bishop nominations that had vexed the Vatican for decades, met the Russian patriarch and charted new relations with the Muslim world by visiting the Arabian Peninsula and Iraq.

He reaffirmed the all-male, celibate priesthood and upheld the church’s opposition to abortion, equating it to “hiring a hitman to solve a problem.”

Roles for women

But he added women to important decision-making roles and allowed them to serve as lectors and acolytes in parishes. He let women vote alongside bishops in periodic Vatican meetings, following longstanding complaints that women do much of the church’s work but are barred from power.

Sister Nathalie Becquart, whom Francis named to one of the highest Vatican jobs, said his legacy was a vision of a church where men and women existed in a relationship of reciprocity and respect.

“It was about shifting a pattern of domination — from human being to the creation, from men to women — to a pattern of cooperation,” said Becquart, the first woman to hold a voting position in a Vatican synod.

The church as refuge

While Francis did not allow women to be ordained, the voting reform was part of a revolutionary change in emphasizing what the church should be: a refuge for everyone — “todos, todos, todos” (“everyone, everyone, everyone”) — not for the privileged few. Migrants, the poor, prisoners and outcasts were invited to his table far more than presidents or powerful CEOs.

“For Pope Francis, it was always to extend the arms of the church to embrace all people, not to exclude anyone,” said Cardinal Kevin Farrell, whom Francis named as camerlengo, taking charge after a pontiff’s death or retirement.

Francis demanded his bishops apply mercy and charity to their flocks, pressed the world to protect God’s creation from climate disaster, and challenged countries to welcome those fleeing war, poverty and oppression.

After visiting Mexico in 2016, Francis said of then-US presidential candidate Donald Trump that anyone building a wall to keep migrants out “is not Christian.”

While progressives were thrilled with Francis’ radical focus on Jesus’ message of mercy and inclusion, it troubled conservatives who feared he watered down Catholic teaching and threatened the very Christian identity of the West. Some even called him a heretic.

A few cardinals openly challenged him. Francis usually responded with his typical answer to conflict: silence.

He made it easier for married Catholics to get an annulment, allowed priests to absolve women who had had abortions and decreed that priests could bless same-sex couples. He opened debate on issues like homosexuality and divorce, giving pastors wiggle room to discern how to accompany their flocks, rather than handing them strict rules to apply.

St. Francis of Assisi as a model

Francis lived in the Vatican hotel instead of the Apostolic Palace, wore his old orthotic shoes and not the red loafers of the papacy, and rode in compact cars. It wasn’t a gimmick.

“I see clearly that the thing the church needs most today is the ability to heal wounds and to warm the hearts of the faithful,” he told a Jesuit journal in 2013. “I see the church as a field hospital after battle.”

If becoming the first Latin American and first Jesuit pope wasn’t enough, Francis was also the first to name himself after St. Francis of Assisi, the 13th century friar known for personal simplicity, a message of peace, and care for nature and society’s outcasts.

Francis sought out the unemployed, the sick, the disabled and the homeless. He formally apologized to Indigenous peoples for the crimes of the church from colonial times onward.

And he himself suffered: He had part of his colon removed in 2021, then needed more surgery in 2023 to repair a painful hernia and remove intestinal scar tissue. Starting in 2022 he regularly used a wheelchair or cane because of bad knees, and endured bouts of bronchitis.

He went to society’s fringes to minister with mercy: caressing the grossly deformed head of a man in St. Peter’s Square, kissing the tattoo of a Holocaust survivor, or inviting Argentina’s garbage scavengers to join him onstage in Rio de Janeiro.

“We have always been marginalized, but Pope Francis always helped us,” said Coqui Vargas, a transgender woman whose Roman community forged a unique relationship with Francis during the pandemic.

His first trip as pope was to the island of Lampedusa, then the epicenter of Europe’s migration crisis. He consistently chose to visit poor countries where Christians were often persecuted minorities, rather than the centers of global Catholicism.

Friend and fellow Argentine, Bishop Marcelo Sánchez Sorondo, said his concern for the poor and disenfranchised was based on the Beatitudes — the eight blessings Jesus delivered in the Sermon on the Mount for the meek, the merciful, the poor in spirit and others.

“Why are the Beatitudes the program of this pontificate? Because they were the basis of Jesus Christ’s own program,” Sánchez said.

Missteps on sexual abuse scandal

But more than a year passed before Francis met with survivors of priestly sexual abuse, and victims’ groups initially questioned whether he really understood the scope of the problem.

Francis did create a sex abuse commission to advise the church on best practices, but it lost its influence after a few years and its recommendation of a tribunal to judge bishops who covered up for predator priests went nowhere.

And then came the greatest crisis of his papacy, when he discredited Chilean abuse victims in 2018 and stood by a controversial bishop linked to their abuser. Realizing his error, Francis invited the victims to the Vatican for a personal mea culpa and summoned the leadership of the Chilean church to resign en masse.

As that crisis concluded, a new one erupted over ex-Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, the retired archbishop of Washington and a counselor to three popes.

Francis had actually moved swiftly to sideline McCarrick amid an accusation he had molested a teenage altar boy in the 1970s. But Francis nevertheless was accused by the Vatican’s one-time US ambassador of having rehabilitated McCarrick early in his papacy.

Francis eventually defrocked McCarrick after a Vatican investigation determined he sexually abused adults as well as minors. He changed church law to remove the pontifical secret surrounding abuse cases and enacted procedures to investigate bishops who abused or covered for their pedophile priests, seeking to end impunity for the hierarchy.

“He sincerely wanted to do something and he transmitted that,” said Juan Carlos Cruz, a Chilean abuse survivor Francis discredited who later developed a close friendship with the pontiff.

A change from Benedict

The road to Francis’ 2013 election was paved by Pope Benedict XVI’s decision to resign and retire — the first in 600 years — and it created the unprecedented reality of two popes living in the Vatican.

Francis didn’t shy from Benedict’s potentially uncomfortable shadow. He embraced him as an elder statesman and adviser, coaxing him out of his cloistered retirement to participate in the public life of the church.

“It’s like having your grandfather in the house, a wise grandfather,” Francis said.

Francis praised Benedict by saying he “opened the door” to others following suit, fueling speculation that Francis also might retire. But after Benedict’s death on Dec. 31, 2022, he asserted that in principle the papacy is a job for life.

Francis’ looser liturgical style and pastoral priorities made clear he and the German-born theologian came from very different religious traditions, and Francis directly overturned several decisions of his predecessor.

He made sure Salvadoran Archbishop Óscar Romero, a hero to the liberation theology movement in Latin America, was canonized after his case languished under Benedict over concerns about the credo’s Marxist bent.

Francis reimposed restrictions on celebrating the old Latin Mass that Benedict had relaxed, arguing the spread of the Tridentine Rite was divisive. The move riled Francis’ traditionalist critics and opened sustained conflict between right-wing Catholics, particularly in the US, and the Argentine pope.

Conservatives oppose Francis

By then, conservatives had already turned away from Francis, betrayed after he opened debate on allowing remarried Catholics to receive the sacraments if they didn’t get an annulment — a church ruling that their first marriage was invalid.

“We don’t like this pope,” headlined Italy’s conservative daily Il Foglio a few months into the papacy, reflecting the unease of the small but vocal traditionalist Catholic movement that was coddled under Benedict.

Those same critics amplified their complaints after Francis’ approved church blessings for same-sex couples, and a controversial accord with China over nominating bishops.

Its details were never released, but conservative critics bashed it as a sellout to communist China, while the Vatican defended it as the best deal it could get with Beijing.

US Cardinal Raymond Burke, a figurehead in the anti-Francis opposition, said the church had become “like a ship without a rudder.”

Burke waged his opposition campaign for years, starting when Francis fired him as the Vatican’s supreme court justice and culminating with his vocal opposition to Francis’ 2023 synod on the church’s future.

Twice, he joined other conservative cardinals in formally asking Francis to explain himself on doctrine issues reflecting a more progressive bent, including on the possibility of same-sex blessings and his outreach to divorced and civilly remarried Catholics.

Francis eventually sanctioned Burke financially, accusing him of sowing “disunity.” It was one of several personnel moves he made in both the Vatican and around the world to shift the balance of power from doctrinaire leaders to more pastoral ones.

Francis insisted his bishops and cardinals imbue themselves with the “odor of their flock” and minister to the faithful, voicing displeasure when they didn’t.

His 2014 Christmas address to the Vatican Curia was one of the greatest public papal reprimands ever: Standing in the marbled Apostolic Palace, Francis ticked off 15 ailments that he said can afflict his closest collaborators, including “spiritual Alzheimer’s,” lusting for power and the “terrorism of gossip.”

Trying to eliminate corruption, Francis oversaw the reform of the scandal-marred Vatican bank and sought to wrestle Vatican bureaucrats into financial line, limiting their compensation and ability to receive gifts or award public contracts.

He authorized Vatican police to raid his own secretariat of state and the Vatican’s financial watchdog agency amid suspicions about a 350 million euro investment in a London real estate venture. After a 2 1/2-year trial, the Vatican tribunal convicted a once-powerful cardinal, Angelo Becciu, of embezzlement and returned mixed verdicts to nine others, acquitting one.

The trial, though, proved to be a reputational boomerang for the Holy See, showing deficiencies in the Vatican’s legal system, unseemly turf battles among monsignors, and how the pope had intervened on behalf of prosecutors.

While earning praise for trying to turn the Vatican’s finances around, Francis angered US conservatives for his frequent excoriation of the global financial market that favors the rich over the poor.

Economic justice was an important themes of his papacy, and he didn’t hide it in his first meeting with journalists when he said he wanted a “poor church that is for the poor.”

In his first major teaching document, “The Joy of the Gospel,” Francis denounced trickle-down economic theories as unproven and naive, based on a mentality “where the powerful feed upon the powerless” with no regard for ethics, the environment or even God.

“Money must serve, not rule!” he said in urging political reforms.

He elaborated on that in his major eco-encyclical “Praised Be,” denouncing the “structurally perverse” global economic system that he said exploited the poor and risked turning Earth into “an immense pile of filth.”

Some US conservatives branded Francis a Marxist. He jabbed back by saying he had many friends who were Marxists.

Soccer, opera and prayer

Born Dec. 17, 1936, in Buenos Aires, Jorge Mario Bergoglio was the eldest of five children of Italian immigrants.

He credited his devout grandmother Rosa with teaching him how to pray. Weekends were spent listening to opera on the radio, going to Mass and attending matches of the family’s beloved San Lorenzo soccer club. As pope, his love of soccer brought him a huge collection of jerseys from visitors.

He said he received his religious calling at 17 while going to confession, recounting in a 2010 biography that, “I don’t know what it was, but it changed my life. ... I realized that they were waiting for me.”

He entered the diocesan seminary but switched to the Jesuit order in 1958, attracted to its missionary tradition and militancy.

Around this time, he suffered from pneumonia, which led to the removal of the upper part of his right lung. His frail health prevented him from becoming a missionary, and his less-than-robust lung capacity was perhaps responsible for his whisper of a voice and reluctance to sing at Mass.

On Dec. 13, 1969, he was ordained a priest, and immediately began teaching. In 1973, he was named head of the Jesuits in Argentina, an appointment he later acknowledged was “crazy” given he was only 36. “My authoritarian and quick manner of making decisions led me to have serious problems and to be accused of being ultraconservative,” he admitted in his Civilta Cattolica interview.

Life under Argentina’s dictatorship

His six-year tenure as provincial coincided with Argentina’s murderous 1976-83 dictatorship, when the military launched a campaign against left-wing guerrillas and other regime opponents.

Bergoglio didn’t publicly confront the junta and was accused of effectively allowing two slum priests to be kidnapped and tortured by not publicly endorsing their work.

He refused for decades to counter that version of events. Only in a 2010 authorized biography did he finally recount the behind-the-scenes lengths he used to save them, persuading the family priest of feared dictator Jorge Videla to call in sick so he could say Mass instead. Once in the junta leader’s home, Bergoglio privately appealed for mercy. Both priests were eventually released, among the few to have survived prison.

As pope, accounts began to emerge of the many people — priests, seminarians and political dissidents — whom Bergoglio actually saved during the “dirty war,” letting them stay incognito at the seminary or helping them escape the country.

Bergoglio went to Germany in 1986 to research a never-finished thesis. Returning to Argentina, he was stationed in Cordoba during a period he described as a time of “great interior crisis.” Out of favor with more progressive Jesuit leaders, he was eventually rescued from obscurity in 1992 by St. John Paul II, who named him an auxiliary bishop of Buenos Aires. He became archbishop six years later, and was made a cardinal in 2001.

He came close to becoming pope in 2005 when Benedict was elected, gaining the second-most votes in several rounds of balloting before bowing out.


UK govt sanctions 25 targets involved in people-smuggling

UK govt sanctions 25 targets involved in people-smuggling
Updated 23 July 2025
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UK govt sanctions 25 targets involved in people-smuggling

UK govt sanctions 25 targets involved in people-smuggling

LONDON: Britain said on Wednesday it sanctioned 25 targets involved in people-smuggling, as part of efforts to crack down on those helping to facilitate arrivals to the country on small boats.


Somalia donors losing faith as Al-Shabab surges

Somalia donors losing faith as Al-Shabab surges
Updated 23 July 2025
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Somalia donors losing faith as Al-Shabab surges

Somalia donors losing faith as Al-Shabab surges
  • Despite billions of dollars in international support, Somalia’s army has melted in the face of an offensive by the Al-Qaeda-linked Al-Shabab insurgency, and donors are running out of patience

NAIROBI: Despite billions of dollars in international support, Somalia’s army has melted in the face of a months-long offensive by the Al-Qaeda-linked Al-Shabab insurgency, and donors are running out of patience.

Using hundreds of fighters and a vehicle packed with explosives for a suicide attack, Al-Shabab retook the town of Moqokori on July 7, the latest in a wave of defeats this year for the government.

It has given them a strategic geographical position to launch attacks into the Hiiraan region, but it was also a powerful symbolic victory over a local clan militia that had been the government’s “best fighting force” against Al-Shabab, according to Omar Mahmood of the International Crisis Group.

Somalia’s government has been battling the Islamist militant group since the mid-2000s and its fortunes have waxed and waned, but now faces a perfect storm of declining international support, a demoralized army and political infighting.

The government relied on local militias, known as “Macwiisley,” for a successful campaign in 2022-23, taking some 200 towns and villages from Al-Shabab.

But the insurgents’ counter-offensive this year has seen them regain some 90 percent of their lost territory, estimates Rashid Abdi of Sahan Research, a think tank.

Towns that were supposed models of stabilization, like Masaajid Cali Gaduud and Adan Yabal, have fallen. Three bridges along the Shebelle River, crucial to military supply lines, have been destroyed.

“The whole stretch from the north-west to the south-west of Mogadishu is now controlled largely by Al-Shabab,” Abdi told AFP.

The Macwiisley campaign collapsed, he said, because the government of President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud, known as HSM, “was extremely inept at working with the clans,” empowering some and not others based on political favoritism rather than military needs.

“The mobilization went well when the president came from Mogadishu to start the first phase of the offensive (in 2022). Everybody was heavily involved in the fighting... assisting the national army,” Mohamed Hassan, a local militia member in Hiiraan, told AFP.

“It’s no longer the same because the leadership are no longer involved and there seems to be disorganization in how the community militias are mobilized,” he added.

The Somali National Army has done little to stem the insurgents, unsurprising for a force “still in development mode while trying to fight a war at the same time,” said Mahmood, the analyst.

Its most effective arm, the US-trained “Danab” commando unit, is better at killing militants than holding territory, and has suffered demoralizing losses to its officer corps, added Abdi.

“We are beginning to see an army that is not just dysfunctional, but losing the will to actually fight,” he said.

The problems stem from the wider chaos of Somali politics, in which a kaleidoscope of clan demands have never resolved into anything like a national consensus.

The government has vowed a renewed military push, but President Mohamud’s focus has been on holding the country’s first-ever one-man, one-vote election next year.

That “will not happen,” said a Western diplomat, speaking on condition of anonymity. Even in Mogadishu, where security is strongest, “any polling station would get bombed,” he said.

“It’s unfortunate that attention was shifted toward insignificant political-related matters which do not help security instead of focusing on strengthening the armed forces,” ex-president Sharif Sheikh Ahmed recently told reporters.

Al-Shabab has not launched a full assault on the capital, but has repeatedly demonstrated its presence.

Pot-shots targeting the airport are at an all-time high, said the diplomat, and Mohamud narrowly survived an attack on his convoy outside the presidential palace in March.

The group also controls much of the economy.

“It out-taxes the state. Its business tentacles spread everywhere,” said Abdi. “It is one of the wealthiest insurgencies in Africa.”

Meanwhile, the government’s foreign backers are losing patience.

The European Union and United States have poured well over $7 billion into Somali security — primarily various African Union-led missions — since 2007, according to the EU Institute for Security Studies.

The previous AU mission ended in December, but had to be immediately replaced with a new one — with the quip-generating acronym AUSSOM — because Somali forces were still not ready to take over.

“There’s a huge amount of donor fatigue. People are asking: ‘What have we bought for the last 10 years?’ Seeing the army run away and having (to create) AUSSOM was really hard for people,” said the diplomat.

Donors, especially Washington, are reluctant to keep funding the AU mission.

Mahmood estimates it will scrabble together two-thirds of its funding for 2025: “Enough to keep things going... but there’s clearly a chronic shortfall.”

Somalia has struck deals with newer partners like the United Arab Emirates, Qatar and Egypt. Turkiye has deployed about 500 troops, backed by drones, to reinforce security in Mogadishu.

But they are interested in protecting investments such as a mooted Turkish spaceport, said Mahmood, rather than leading the fight against Al-Shabab.

“We are staring at a very grim situation,” said Abdi.


Trump administration fights to keep ex-Trump lawyer Alina Habba as New Jersey federal prosecutor

Trump administration fights to keep ex-Trump lawyer Alina Habba as New Jersey federal prosecutor
Updated 23 July 2025
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Trump administration fights to keep ex-Trump lawyer Alina Habba as New Jersey federal prosecutor

Trump administration fights to keep ex-Trump lawyer Alina Habba as New Jersey federal prosecutor

TRENTON, N.J.: The Justice Department fought to keep President Donald Trump’s former lawyer, Alina Habba, in place as the top federal prosecutor in New Jersey on Tuesday after a panel of judges refused to extend her tenure and appointed someone else to the job.

Habba, who had been named the interim US attorney for the state in March, appeared to lose the position earlier Tuesday, when judges in the district declined to keep her in the post while she awaits confirmation by the US Senate.

Acting under a law that generally limits the terms of interim US attorneys to 120 days, the judges appointed one of Habba’s subordinates, Desiree Leigh Grace, as her successor.

But just hours later, Attorney General Pam Bondi announced that she had in turn removed Grace, blaming Habba’s removal on “politically minded judges.”

“This Department of Justice does not tolerate rogue judges,” Bondi said on social media. The attorney general’s second in command, Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, said in a post on social media that he didn’t believe Habba’s 120-day term expired until 11:59 p.m. Friday.

White House spokesperson Harrison Fields said in a statement that Trump has full confidence in Habba and that the administration would work to get her confirmed by the US Senate, despite opposition from New Jersey’s two senators, both Democrats, who potentially have the power to block her nomination.

The judicial order appointing Grace, signed by Chief Judge Renee Marie Bumb, didn’t list any reasons for picking her for the position over Habba. Grace’s LinkedIn page shows she’s served as a federal prosecutor in New Jersey for the last nearly nine years.

Messages seeking comment were left with Habba’s office and the Justice Department.

Alina Habba’s tenure in New Jersey as top prosecutor

During her four-month tenure, Habba’s office tangled with two prominent New Jersey Democrats — Newark Mayor Ras Baraka and US Rep. LaMonica McIver, over their actions during a chaotic visit to a privately operated immigration detention center in the state’s largest city.

Baraka was arrested on a trespass charge stemming from his attempt to join a congressional visit of the facility. Baraka denied any wrongdoing and Habba eventually dropped that charge. US Magistrate Judge Andre Espinosa rebuked Habba’s office over the arrest and short-lived prosecution, calling it a “worrisome misstep.” Baraka is now suing Habba over what he says was a “malicious prosecution.”

Habba then brought assault charges against McIver, whose district includes Newark, over physical contact she made with law enforcement officials as Baraka was being arrested.

The prosecution, which is still pending, is a rare federal criminal case against a sitting member of Congress for allegations other than fraud or corruption. McIver denies that anything she did amounted to assault.

Besides the prosecution of McIver, Habba had announced she launched an investigation into New Jersey’s Democratic governor, Phil Murphy, and attorney general, Matt Platkin, over the state’s directive barring local law enforcement from cooperating with federal agents conducting immigration enforcement.

In social media posts, Habba highlighted her office’s prosecution of drug traffickers, including against 30 members of a fentanyl and crack cocaine ring in Newark.

Habba’s nomination has stalled under senatorial courtesy

Trump, a Republican, formally nominated Habba as his pick for US attorney on July 1, but the state’s two Democratic US senators, Cory Booker and Andy Kim signaled their opposition to her appointment. Under a long-standing Senate practice known as senatorial courtesy, a nomination can stall out without backing from home state senators, a phenomenon facing a handful of other Trump picks for US attorney.

Booker and Kim accused Habba of bringing politically motivated prosecutions.

What is Habba’s background?

Once a partner in a small law firm near Trump’s New Jersey golf course, Habba served as a senior adviser for Trump’s political action committee, defended him in court in several lawsuits and acted as a spokesperson last year as he volleyed between courtrooms and the campaign trail.

US attorneys often have experience as prosecutors, including at the state or local level. Many, including the acting US attorneys in Brooklyn and Manhattan, have worked in the offices they now lead.

Habba said she wanted to pursue the president’s agenda of “putting America first.”

Habba was one of Trump’s most visible defense attorneys, appearing on cable TV news as his “legal spokesperson.” She represented Trump in 2024 in the defamation case involving E. Jean Carroll.

But Habba has had limited federal court experience, practicing mainly in state-level courts. During the Carroll trial, Judge Lewis A. Kaplan chided Habba for botching procedure, misstating the law, asking about off-limits topics and objecting after he ruled.


Trump rehashes years-old grievances on Russia investigation after new intelligence report

Trump rehashes years-old grievances on Russia investigation after new intelligence report
Updated 23 July 2025
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Trump rehashes years-old grievances on Russia investigation after new intelligence report

Trump rehashes years-old grievances on Russia investigation after new intelligence report

WASHINGTON: President Donald Trump rehashed longstanding grievances over the Russia investigation that shadowed much of his first term, lashing out Tuesday following a new report from his intelligence director aimed at casting doubt on long-established findings about Moscow’s interference in the 2016 election.

“It’s time to go after people,” Trump said from the Oval Office as he repeated a baseless claim that former President Barack Obama and other officials had engaged in treason.

Trump was not making his claims for the first time, but he delivered them when administration officials are harnessing the machinery of the federal government to investigate the targets of Trump’s derision, including key officials responsible for scrutinizing Russia’s attempts to intervene on Trump’s behalf in 2016.

The backward-looking inquiries are taking place even as the Republican administration’s national security agencies are confronting global threats. But they have served as a rallying cry for Trump, who is trying to unify a political base at odds over the Jeffrey Epstein case, with some allies pressing to disclose more information despite the president’s push to turn the page.

Trump’s attack prompted a rare response from Obama’s post-presidential office.

“Our office does not normally dignify the constant nonsense and misinformation flowing out of this White House with a response,” said Patrick Rodenbush, an Obama spokesman. “But these claims are outrageous enough to merit one. These bizarre allegations are ridiculous and a weak attempt at distraction.”

Gabbard’s new report on the Russia investigation

Trump’s tirade, a detour from his official business as he hosted the leader of the Philippines, unfolded against the backdrop of a new report from Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard that represented his administration’s latest attempt to rewrite the history of the Russia investigation, which has infuriated him for years.

The report, released Friday, downplayed the extent of Russian interference in the 2016 election by highlighting Obama administration emails showing officials had concluded before and after the presidential race that Moscow had not hacked state election systems to manipulate votes in Trump’s favor.

But Obama’s Democratic administration never suggested otherwise, even as it exposed other means by which Russia interfered in the election, including through a massive hack-and-leak operation of Democratic emails by intelligence operatives working with WikiLeaks, as well as a covert influence campaign aimed at swaying public opinion and sowing discord through fake social media posts.

Gabbard’s report appears to suggest the absence of manipulation of state election systems is a basis to call into question more general Russian interference. By issuing it, she appeared to recover her standing in Trump’s orbit, which just one month ago had seemed uncertain after Trump said she was “wrong” when she previously said she believed Iran wasn’t building a nuclear weapon.

“She’s the hottest one in the room right now,” Trump said Tuesday night. “Tulsi, great job — and I know you have a lot more coming.”

Democrats, for their part, swiftly decried the report as factually flawed and politically motivated.

“It is sadly not surprising that DNI Gabbard, who promised to depoliticize the intelligence community, is once again weaponizing her position to amplify the president’s election conspiracy theories,” Sen. Mark Warner, the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, wrote on X.

Several investigations found Russian interference in 2016

Russia’s broad interference in 2016 has been established through a series of investigations, including special counsel Robert Mueller’s report, which concluded that the Trump campaign welcomed the Kremlin’s help but also found insufficient evidence to establish a criminal conspiracy.

A House Intelligence Committee report also documented Russia’s meddling, as did the Senate Intelligence Committee, which concluded its work in 2020 at a time when the panel was led by Republican Sen. Marco Rubio, who’s now Trump’s secretary of state.

A different special counsel appointed by the Trump Justice Department to hunt for problems in the origins of the Russia investigation, John Durham, did find flaws, but not related to what Gabbard sought to highlight in her report.

“Few episodes in our nation’s history have been investigated as thoroughly as the Intelligence Community’s warning in 2016 that Russia was interfering in the election,” said Rep. Jim Himes, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee.

He added that every legitimate investigation, including the bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee probe, “found no evidence of politicization and endorsed the findings” of an intelligence committee assessment on Russian interference made public in 2017.

Gabbard’s document was released weeks after a CIA report that reexamined that earlier intelligence community assessment. That new review, ordered by CIA Director John Ratcliffe, did not dispute Russia had interfered but suggested officials were rushed in the assessment they reached.

Trump administration is seeking investigations of former officials

Ratcliffe has since referred former CIA Director John Brennan to the Justice Department for investigation, a person familiar with the matter has said. The department earlier this month appeared to acknowledge an open investigation into Brennan and former FBI Director James Comey in an unusual statement, but the status and contours of the inquiries are unclear.

Besides Obama, Trump on Tuesday rattled off a list of people he accused of acting criminally “at the highest level,” including Comey, his 2016 Democratic opponent Hillary Clinton and former national intelligence director James Clapper.

He accused Obama, without evidence, of being the “ringleader” of a conspiracy to get him. Obama has never been accused of any wrongdoing as part of the Russia investigation, and, in any event, a landmark Supreme Court opinion from last year shields former presidents from prosecution for official acts conducted in office.

Trump launched his tirade when asked about the Justice Department’s effort to speak with Ghislaine Maxwell, the former girlfriend of Epstein, who was convicted of helping the financier sexually abuse underage girls.

“I don’t really follow that too much,” he said. “It’s sort of a witch hunt, a continuation of the witch hunt.”

Trump is under pressure from conspiracy-minded segments of his political base to release more about the Epstein case. Democrats say Trump is resisting because of his past association with Epstein. Trump has denied knowledge of or involvement with Epstein’s crimes and said he ended their friendship years ago.


Trump says trade deal struck with Japan includes 15 percent tariff

Trump says trade deal struck with Japan includes 15 percent tariff
Updated 23 July 2025
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Trump says trade deal struck with Japan includes 15 percent tariff

Trump says trade deal struck with Japan includes 15 percent tariff
  • Deal includes $550 billion Japanese investments in US
  • Trump says Japan will form a joint venture with the US for LNG in Alaska

WASHINGTON/TOKYO: President Donald Trump on Tuesday said the US and Japan had struck a trade deal that includes a lower 15 percent tariff that will be levied on US imports from the country, including autos.

In a post on Truth Social, Trump said the deal would include $550 billion of Japanese investments in the United States.

He also said that Japan would increase market access to American producers of cars, trucks, rice and certain agricultural products, among other items.

Trump’s post made no mention of easing tariffs on Japanese motor vehicles, which account for more than a quarter of all the country’s exports to the United States and are subject to a 25 percent tariff. But NHK reported that the deal lowers the auto tariff to 15 percent, citing a Japanese government official.

“This is a very exciting time for the United States of America, and especially for the fact that we will continue to always have a great relationship with the Country of Japan,” Trump said on the social media platform.

Japan is the most significant of the clutch of deals Trump has struck so far, with two-way trade in goods between the two superpowers totaling nearly $230 billion in 2024, and Japan running a trade surplus of nearly $70 billion. Japan is the fifth-largest US trading partner in goods, US Census Bureau data show.

The announcement sent stocks in Japan higher, led by big gains in automakers as Honda, Toyota and Nissan all gained 6 percent or more, and US equity index futures gained ground. The yen strengthened against the dollar.

Reuters could not immediately confirm the elements of the deal announced by Trump, and details were scant. The White House did not immediately respond to a request for additional details.

Speaking early on Wednesday in Tokyo, Japanese Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba said he had received an initial report from his trade negotiator in Washington but declined to comment on the specifics of the negotiation.

Ishiba is under intense political pressure in Japan, where the ruling coalition was set back by losing control of the upper house in an election on Sunday.

Ishiba said he couldn’t say how a trade deal would affect his decision on whether to step down from office until he saw the details.

’MISSON COMPLETE’

Trump’s announcement followed a meeting with Japan’s top tariff negotiator, Ryosei Akazawa, at the White House on Tuesday, according to a person familiar with the matter.

“#Mission Complete,” Akazawa wrote on X.

Kazutaka Maeda, an economist at Meiji Yasuda Research Institute, said that “with the 15 percent tariff rate, I expect the Japanese economy to avoid recession.”

The deal was “a better outcome” for Japan than it potentially could have been, given Trump’s earlier tariff threats, said Kristina Clifton, a senior economist at the Commonwealth Bank of Australia in Sydney.

“Steel, aluminum, and also cars are important exports for Japan, so it’ll be interesting to see if there’s any specific carve-outs for those,” Clifton said.

Autos are a huge part of US-Japan trade, but is almost all one way to the US from Japan, a fact that has long irked Trump. In 2024, the US imported more than $55 billion of vehicles and automotive parts while just over $2 billion were sold into the Japanese market from the US

Speaking later at the White House, Trump also expressed fresh optimism that Japan would form a joint venture with Washington to support a gas pipeline in Alaska long sought by his administration.

Japanese officials had initially doubted the practicality of the project but warmed to it — and a range of other investments dear to Trump — as a potential incentive to resolve trade disputes with Washington.

Trump aides are feverishly working to close trade deals ahead of an August 1 deadline that Trump has repeatedly pushed back under pressure from markets and intense lobbying by industry. By that date, countries are set to face steep new tariffs beyond those Trump has already imposed since taking office in January.

While Trump has said that unilateral letters declaring what rate would be imposed are tantamount to a deal, his team has nonetheless raced to close agreements. Trump has announced framework agreements with Britain, Vietnam, Indonesia and paused a tit-for-tat tariff battle with China, though details are still to be worked out with all of those countries.

At the White House, Trump said negotiators from the European Union would be in Washington on Wednesday.

Trump’s announcement on Tuesday was of a pattern with some previous agreements. He announced the deal on social media shortly after a meeting or a phone call with a foreign official, leaving many key details a mystery, and before the other country issued its own proclamations.

Nearly three weeks after Trump announced an agreement with Vietnam — in similar fashion — no formal statement has been released by either country spelling out the particulars of the deal that was ostensibly reached.