THE HAGUE: Ukrainian prosecutors on Friday charged a Russian politician and two suspected Ukrainian collaborators with war crimes over the alleged deportation of dozens of orphans from the formerly-occupied southern city of Kherson, some of them as young as one.
They are the first suspects to be charged by Ukraine, which says more than 19,000 children have been illegally transferred to Russia or Russian-held territory, officials told Reuters.
The charges brought by Ukraine’s prosecutors follow a wider investigation carried out in cooperation with the Hague-based International Criminal Court, the chief prosecutor of which visited the Kherson Children’s Home.
On Friday, the charges were filed in Ukraine, a pre-trial stage when prosecutors determine there is sufficient evidence to suspect a person of committing a criminal offense.
The ICC, the world’s permanent war crimes tribunal, issued an arrest warrant in March against Russian President Vladimir Putin and Maria Lvova-Belova, Russia’s Commissioner for Children’s Rights, accusing them of the war crime of illegally deporting hundreds of children from orphanages and children’s homes in Russian-occupied Ukraine.
The Kremlin on Wednesday again dismissed allegations that Russia had violated children’s rights in Ukraine and said that, on the contrary, its armed forces were rescuing children from conflict zones.
Prosecution documents seen by Reuters allege 48 orphans were taken from the Kherson Regional Children’s Home in September and October and re-located to Moscow and Russian-occupied Crimea.
If proven, this is a violation of the laws and customs of war under the 1949 Geneva Conventions, and punishable by up 12 years in prison under Ukrainian law, the document seen by Reuters said.
The current whereabouts of the orphans, ranging from one to four years old, is uncertain, prosecutors said.
“It was not a one-day event. 48 children who were in the Kherson Region Children’s Home were forcibly displaced, deported,” Yuliia Usenko, head of the department for the protection of children’s interests in Ukraine’s Prosecutor General’s office told Reuters. “We don’t know how these children are, in what conditions they are kept, or what their fate is.”
They may have been illegally adopted by Russian citizens, or taken to Russian institutions, she said.
The public documents redact the names of the suspects, who are believed by prosecutors to be either in occupied Crimea, or Russia. Unlike at the ICC, trials in Ukraine can be held in absentia.
The bulk of the orphans were taken on Oct. 21, 2022 under the supervision of the lead, Russian suspect. They were loaded onto white Russian Ministry of Health vehicles and taken to Russian-occupied Crimea, the charges said.
Usenko said Friday’s move against the first three suspects was just the beginning. “We want to hold accountable all the war criminals, all the people that committed horrible international crimes against our Ukrainian children.”
Ukrainian prosecutors shared a video allegedly showing one of the suspects helping to load the children onto a bus marked with the pro-Russian symbol “Z.”
Ukraine brings first charges for deporting Kherson orphans
https://arab.news/mtca8
Ukraine brings first charges for deporting Kherson orphans

- The current whereabouts of the orphans, ranging from one to four years old, is uncertain, prosecutors said
- 48 orphans were taken from the Kherson Regional Children’s Home in September and October and re-located to Moscow and Russian-occupied Crimea
Seoul says no talks with US on potential troop pullout

- The allies last year signed a new five-year agreement on sharing the cost of stationing US troops in South Korea.
SEOUL: South Korea’s defense ministry said Friday there have been no talks with Washington on pulling US troops from the South, after a Wall Street Journal report claimed Washington was considering a partial withdrawal.
Citing US defense officials, the WSJ report said Washington is considering whether to move around 4,500 troops out of South Korea and deploy them to other locations, including Guam.
Washington, South Korea’s long-time key security ally, stations around 28,500 troops in the South to help protect it against the nuclear-armed North Korea.
But US President Donald Trump said last year — before winning the election — that if he returned to the White House, Seoul would pay billions more annually to host American troops.
When asked about the WSJ report, Seoul’s defense ministry said: “There has been no discussion whatsoever between South Korea and the United States regarding the withdrawal of the United States Forces Korea.”
The allies last year signed a new five-year agreement on sharing the cost of stationing US troops in South Korea, with Seoul agreeing to raise its contribution by 8.3 percent to 1.52 trillion won ($1.1 billion) for 2026.
“US Forces Korea have served as a key component of the South Korea-US alliance, maintaining a strong combined defense posture with our military to deter North Korean aggression and provocations,” Seoul’s defense ministry said, adding this contributed to “peace and stability on the Korean Peninsula and in the region.”
“We will continue close cooperation with the US to further strengthen this role going forward.”
United States Forces Korea declined to comment when contacted by AFP, saying any remarks on the matter should come from Washington.
Mahmoud Khalil permitted to hold newborn son for the 1st time despite government objections

- Khalil was the first person arrested under President Donald Trump’s promised crackdown on pro-Palestinian protesters
NEW YORK: Detained Palestinian activist Mahmoud Khalil was allowed to hold his one-month-old son for the first time Thursday after a federal judge blocked the Trump administration’s efforts to keep the father and infant separated by a plexiglass barrier.
The visit came ahead of a scheduled immigration hearing for Khalil, a legal permanent resident and Columbia University graduate who has been detained in a Louisiana jail since March 8.
Khalil was the first person arrested under President Donald Trump’s promised crackdown on pro-Palestinian protesters and is one of the few who has remained in custody as his case winds its way through both immigration and federal court.
Federal authorities have not accused Khalil of a crime, but they have sought to deport him on the basis that his prominent role in protests against Israel’s war in Gaza may have undermined US foreign policy interests.
His request to attend his son’s April 21 birth was denied last month by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
The question of whether Khalil would be permitted to hold his newborn child or forced to meet him through a barrier had sparked days of legal fighting, triggering claims by Khalil’s attorneys that he is being subject to political retaliation by the government.
On Wednesday night, a federal judge in New Jersey, Michael Farbiarz, intervened, allowing the meeting to go forward Thursday morning, according to Khalil’s attorneys.
The judge’s order came after federal officials said this week they would oppose his attorney’s effort to secure what’s known as a “contact visit” between Khalil, his wife, Noor Abdalla, and their son Deen.
Instead, they said Khalil could be allowed a “non-contact” visit, meaning he would be separated from his wife and son by a plastic divider and not allowed to touch them.
“Granting Khalil this relief of family visitation would effectively grant him a privilege that no other detainee receives,” Justice Department officials wrote in a court filing on Wednesday. “Allowing Dr. Abdalla and a newborn to attend a legal meeting would turn a legal visitation into a family one.”
Brian Acuna, acting director of the ICE field office in New Orleans, said in an accompanying affidavit that it would be “unsafe to allow Mr. Khalil’s wife and newborn child into a secured part of the facility.”
In their own legal filings, Khalil’s attorneys described the government’s refusal to grant the visit as “further evidence of the retaliatory motive behind Mr. Khalil’s arrest and faraway detention,” adding that his wife and son were “the farthest thing from a security risk.”
They noted that Abdalla had traveled nearly 1,500 miles (2,400 kilometers) to the remote detention center in hopes of introducing their son to his father.
“This is not just heartless,” Abdalla said of the government’s position. “It is deliberate violence, the calculated cruelty of a government that tears families apart without remorse. And I cannot ignore the echoes of this pain in the stories of Palestinian families, torn apart by Israeli military prisons and bombs, denied dignity, denied life.”
Farbiarz is currently considering Khalil’s petition for release as he appeals a Louisiana immigration judge’s ruling that he can be deported from the country.
On Thursday, Khalil appeared before that immigration judge, Jamee Comans, as his attorneys presented testimony about the risks he would face if he were to be deported to Syria, where he grew up in a refugee camp, or Algeria, where he maintains citizenship through a distant relative.
His attorneys submitted testimony from Columbia University faculty and students attesting to Khalil’s character.
In one declaration, Joseph Howley, a classics professor at Columbia, said he had first introduced Khalil to a university administrator to serve as a spokesperson on behalf of campus protesters, describing him as a “upstanding, principled, and well-respected member of our community.’
“I have never known Mahmoud to espouse any anti-Jewish sentiments or prejudices, and have heard him forcefully reject antisemitism on multiple occasions,” Howley wrote.
No ruling regarding the appeal was made on Thursday. Comans gave lawyers in the case until 5 p.m. June 2 to submit written closing arguments.
Columbia’s interim president, Claire Shipman, acknowledged Mahmoud’s absence from Wednesday’s commencement ceremony and said many students were “mourning” that he couldn’t be present. Her speech drew loud boos from some graduates, along with chants of “free Mahmoud.”
US Supreme Court says Fed is unique, easing worries over Trump’s ability to fire Powell

- Supreme Court opinion says decision would not necessarily apply to Fed
A US Supreme Court ruling Thursday in a legal battle over President Donald Trump’s firing of two federal labor board members contained a line that eased, for now, worries that the cases could open the door for Trump to fire Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell at will. The court’s order allows Trump to keep the two Democratic labor board members sidelined while they challenge the legality of their removal. Lawyers for Gwynne Wilcox, who was removed from the National Labor Relations Board, and for Cathy Harris, who was dismissed from the Merit Systems Protection Board, had argued that a ruling in favor of the Trump administration could undermine legal protections for Fed policymakers long seen as being insulated from presidential dismissal for reasons other than malfeasance or misconduct. “We disagree,” a majority of justices said in the court’s brief, unsigned ruling. “The Federal Reserve is a uniquely structured, quasi-private entity that follows in the distinct historical tradition of the First and Second Banks.”
The two cases have been closely watched as proxies for whether Trump has the authority to fire officials at the Fed. The Federal Reserve Act of 1913 that created the nation’s third and still existing central bank stipulates that Fed officials may be dismissed only “for cause,” not for political or policy disagreements.
“This view of the Supreme Court really does ease my worries about their inclination to extrapolate from the NLRB cases to the Fed so I breathed a sigh of relief,” said LH Meyer analyst Derek Tang, who has followed the cases closely.
Trump has repeatedly lashed out at Powell, whom he nominated to the post during his first term and who was renominated to a second term by Democratic President Joe Biden, and said he wants to see him gone from the central bank. Though Trump, who has attacked Powell over the Fed’s decision to not lower interest rates, recently said he has no intention of trying to fire Powell, the possibility has unsettled financial markets that bank on an independent Fed’s ability to do its job without political interference.
Powell has said he believes his firing would not be permitted under the law.
The Fed system’s seven governors, including the system chair, are appointed by the president and confirmed by the Senate. Powell’s term ends in May 2026, and Trump is expected to nominate a successor in the coming months.
Krishna Guha, a vice chair at Evercore ISI, said the Supreme Court’s opinion was encouraging but not definitive. “It strictly only addresses whether a ruling on Wilcox would ‘necessarily’ implicate the Fed,” he said
A Fed spokeswoman did not have a comment.
UK will roll out chemical castration for sex offenders

LONDON: The British government will roll out the use of medication to suppress the sex drive of sex offenders, as part of a package of measures to reduce the risk of reoffending and alleviate the pressures on the prison system, which is running out of space.
Justice Secretary Shabana Mahmood said Thursday that so-called chemical castration would be used in 20 prisons in two regions and that she was considering making it mandatory.
“Of course, it is vital that this approach is taken alongside psychological interventions that target other causes of offending, like asserting power and control,” she said in a statement to Parliament following the release of an independent sentencing review,
Though the review highlighted the treatment wouldn’t be relevant for some sex offenders such as rapists driven by power and control, rather than sexual preoccupation, Mahmood said that studies show that chemical castration can lead to a 60 percent reduction in reoffending.
It’s been used in Germany and Denmark on a voluntary basis, and in Poland as mandatory for some offenders.
The recommendation was part of a wide-ranging review led by former Justice Secretary David Gauke. As well as looking at ways to cut reoffending, Gauke recommended reforms to overhaul the prisons system, which is running at near capacity.
One of the first things Mahmood did as justice minister after Labour returned to power after 14 years last July was sanction an early-release program for prisoners to free up space. She says she inherited a judicial system that had been neglected for years by the previous Conservative government and set up the review as a means to stabilize it.
“If our prisons collapse, courts are forced to suspend trials,” she said. “The police must halt their arrests, crime goes unpunished, criminals run amok and chaos reigns. We face the breakdown of law and order in this country.”
The review recommended that criminals could be released from prison earlier than they are now for good behavior, while judges could be given more flexibility to impose punishments such as driving bans. It also recommended that sentences of less than 12 months would also be scrapped for tougher community sentences. It also called for the immediate deportation for foreign nationals handed a three-year sentence or less.
The review called for higher investment in the probation service to allow officers to spend more time with offenders for their rehabilitation and extra funding for the many more who are monitored with electronic tags in the community.
Mahmood responded by giving a 700 million-pound a year for probation within years.
“If the government doesn’t put the resources into probation that is necessary, then the risk here is that we won’t make progress on rehabilitation that we need, and there will be a public backlash against it,” Gauke said.
The prison population in England and Wales has doubled over the past three decades or so to nearly 90,000. That’s despite a fall in crime rates and is driven in part by the fact that longer sentences are being handed out amid pressure to be tough on crime.
Robert Jenrick, the justice spokesman for the Conservatives, warned that scrapping short sentences would be effectively “decriminalizing” offenses like burglary, theft and assault. And monitoring tags, he said, are as useful as “smoke alarms putting out bonfires” in stopping reoffending.
In response, Mahmood said that she was clearing up the mess left by the Conservatives and that the government has also embarked on the largest expansion of prisons since Victorian times in the 19th century.
Trump to sign orders to boost nuclear power as soon as Friday, sources say

WASHINGTON: US President Donald Trump will sign executive orders as soon as Friday that aim to jumpstart the nuclear energy industry by easing the regulatory process on approvals for new reactors and strengthening fuel supply chains, four sources familiar said.
Facing the first rise in power demand in two decades from the boom in artificial intelligence, Trump declared an energy emergency on his first day in office.
Chris Wright, the energy secretary, has said the race to develop power sources and data centers needed for AI is “Manhattan Project 2,” referring to the massive US program during World War II to develop atomic bombs.
A draft summary of the orders said Trump will invoke the Cold War-era Defense Production Act to declare a national emergency over US dependence on Russia and China for enriched uranium, nuclear fuel processing and advanced reactor inputs.
The summary also directs agencies to permit and site new nuclear facilities and directs the Departments of Energy and Defense to identify federal lands and facilities for nuclear deployment and to streamline processes to get them built.
It also encourages the Energy Department to use loan guarantees and direct loans to increase the build out of reactors. Trump only used the Loan Programs Office in his first administration to support a large nuclear plant in Georgia.
The LPO has now has hundreds of billions of dollars in financing thanks to legislation passed during former President Joe Biden’s administration, but has been hit hard by job cuts during Trump’s second administration.
The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The exact text and wording of draft executive orders is subject to frequent changes and there is no guarantee elements of the EOs will not be excised or modified during the final stages of the review process.
The United States was the first developer of nuclear power and has the most nuclear power capacity in the world, but the energy source is now growing the fastest in China.
One of the sources said officials from the industry including the Nuclear Energy Institute and Constellation , a utility with the biggest US reactor capacity, were invited to attend a signing ceremony Friday afternoon. Constellation and NEI did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
The Trump administration has been debating four draft executive orders to boost nuclear power that sought ways to give the administration more power to approve reactors and reform the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the body of five panelists that approves reactors.
Nuclear is popular with Democrats for being virtually free in carbon emissions and with Republicans for providing reliable electricity compared to wind and solar power which can be intermittent, a problem that can be managed with battery storage.
Nuclear power produces radioactive waste which for which there is no permanent repository in the United States.