World News Random, Random

[ti-amie]

Steve Herman ‬ ‪@newsguy.bsky.social‬
·
2m



CELAC President Pro Tempore Iris Xiomara Castro (who is the president of Honduras) calls for an urgent meeting of the regional group as the immigration feud quickly intensifies between the presidents of Colombia and the US.

[ponchi101]

Phil Lewis
‪@phillewis.bsky.social‬

Colombian President Gustavo Petro's full post ordering an increase of import tariffs on U.S. goods, says he doesn't really like traveling to the U.S. because it's “a bit boring” and invokes the ancestors

Frankly... one idiot talking to another.
The "Columbia" misspelled is embarrasing.

[ti-amie]

'Act of brutality': Cuba rebukes Donald Trump's Guantanamo Bay migrant detention plan
The US president says he will order the Pentagon and Department of Homeland Security to prepare the facility to house as many as 30,000 migrants.

United States President Donald Trump will order the Pentagon and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to prepare a migrant facility at Guantanamo Bay for as many as 30,000 immigrants.

The US naval base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, already houses a migrant facility — separate from the high-security US prison for foreign terrorism suspects — that has been used on occasion for decades, including to house Haitians and Cubans picked up at sea.

But a move to house tens of thousands of migrants at the base would again widen the Pentagon's role in Trump's crackdown on illegal immigration.

"Today I'm ... signing an executive order to instruct the Departments of Defence and Homeland Security to begin preparing the 30,000-person migrant facility at Guantanamo Bay," Trump said at the White House on Wednesday (local time).

Trump said the facility would be used to "detain the worst criminal illegal aliens threatening the American people".

"Some of them are so bad we don't even trust the countries to hold them because we don't want them coming back, so we're going to send them out to Guantanamo."

He said the move would "double our capacity immediately" to hold illegal migrants, amid a huge crackdown that he promised at the start of his second term.

Trump made the shock announcement as he signed a bill allowing the pre-trial detention of undocumented migrants charged with theft and violent crime — named after a US student killed by a Venezuelan immigrant.

Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel has sharply rebuked Trump's plans for Guantanamo Bay.

"In an act of brutality, the new US government announces imprisonment at the Guantanamo naval base, located in illegally occupied Cuban territory," Díaz-Canel wrote on X, adding the migrants would be held near facilities he said the US had used for "torture and illegal detention".

The Pentagon did not immediately respond to a request for comment, but personnel from DHS will likely be responsible for the migrants themselves.

It is unclear how the facility would be funded.

The detention facility at Guantanamo Bay was set up in 2002 by then-president George W Bush to detain foreign militant suspects following the September 11 attacks on the US in 2001.

There are 15 detainees left in the prison.

However, the facility for migrants is separate from the detention centre on the base.

Pro-refugee groups have called for the Guantanamo migrant facility to be closed and for Congress to investigate alleged abuses there.

The International Refugee Assistance Project said in a 2024 report that detainees described unsanitary conditions, families with young children housed together with single adults, a lack of access to confidential phone calls, and the absence of educational services for children.

https://www.sbs.com.au/news/article/act ... /9ua6gunjk

[dryrunguy]

In other news, due to the freeze on foreign aid, USAID is now a shell of what it used to be. The daughter of one of our former owners owns a company that specializes in USAID. All of their USAID contracts were terminated at the government's convenience, and she laid off the bulk of her employees.

[ti-amie]

Trump says he is cutting off funding to South Africa over land confiscations
Government of South African President Cyril Ramaphosa is ‘treating certain classes of people very badly’, Trump claims as he demands ‘full investigation’ of situation

Agence France-Presse
Mon 3 Feb 2025 03.46 GMT

US President Donald Trump has asserted South Africa is “confiscating” land and “treating certain classes of people very badly” as he announced he was cutting off all future funding to the country pending an investigation.

The land issue in South Africa has long been divisive, with efforts to redress the inequality of white-rule drawing criticism from conservatives including Elon Musk, the world’s wealthiest person, who was born in South Africa and is a powerful Trump adviser.

South African President Cyril Ramaphosa last month signed a bill that stipulates the government may, in certain circumstances, offer “nil compensation” for property it decides to expropriate in the public interest.

“South Africa is confiscating land, and treating certain classes of people VERY BADLY,” Trump wrote on his Truth Social platform on Sunday.

“I will be cutting off all future funding to South Africa until a full investigation of this situation has been completed!” Trump wrote.

Pretoria argues the bill does not allow the government to expropriate property arbitrarily and must first seek to reach agreement with the owner.

However, some groups fear a situation similar to the Zimbabwe government’s seizure of white-owned commercial farms, often without compensation, after independence in 1980.

Later, in a briefing with journalists, Trump said that South Africa’s “leadership is doing some terrible things, horrible things” without giving examples.

“So that’s under investigation right now. We’ll make a determination, and until such time as we find out what South Africa is doing – they’re taking away land and confiscating land, and actually they’re doing things that are perhaps far worse than that.”

Land ownership is a contentious issue in South Africa with most farmland still owned by white people three decades after the end of apartheid.

Since then land courts have adjudicated on a handful of land disputes and, after exhaustive processes, returned land to previously displaced owners.

According to the South African government, the 1913 Natives Land Act saw thousands of Black families forcibly removed from their land by the apartheid regime.

The delicate issue has been a particular rallying point for the right, with various conservative figures including Musk and right-wing journalist Katie Hopkins championing the cause of white land-owners.

Musk was born in Pretoria on 28 June 1971, to an engineer father and a Canadian-born model mother, leaving the country in his late teens. The formal policy of apartheid lasted until 1990, and multi-racial elections were held in 1994.

Trump has surrounded himself with powerful Silicon Valley figures who came of age in apartheid southern Africa, like David Sacks, his newly appointed artificial intelligence and cryptocurrency czar, who co-founded PayPal along with Musk.

Billionaire Peter Thiel – another PayPal cofounder, who introduced Trump to his vice-president, JD Vance – also lived in southern Africa, including time in Namibia which was then controlled by Pretoria.

He has previously been accused of supporting the apartheid system, that violently subjugated the Black majority of South Africa to uphold white rule and economic control, something a spokesperson denied on his behalf.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/202 ... MP=bsky_gu

[Owendonovan]

Serbian State Media Shift Tune in Coverage of Huge Protests, Testing Leader
State TV had previously largely ignored the demonstrations against President Aleksandar Vucic, but now it is putting a spotlight on the rallies.

Thousands of protesters crowd the streets in rallies by the Danube River.
Reporting from Novi Sad and Belgrade, Serbia
Feb. 2, 2025
When tens of thousands of protesters blocked three key bridges across the Danube River, paralyzing Serbia’s second-biggest city this weekend, the Balkan country’s beleaguered governing party issued a stern warning — not to the protesters but to the state-controlled broadcasting service for reporting on them.

After mostly ignoring three months of student-led street demonstrations across the country, Radio Television Serbia, long a propaganda bullhorn for President Aleksandar Vucic, had suddenly shifted gears and put protests in Novi Sad atop its news bulletins.

Worse still, at least for the governing party, it reported factually without denouncing the protesters as traitors in the pay of foreign intelligence services or puppets of the opposition, as it has in the past.
Students and other Serbian citizens in Novi Sad on Saturday during a demonstration organized to mark fatalities three months earlier at a train station
President Vucic’s Serbian Progressive Party complained in an unusual statement late Saturday about the “scandalous reporting” by the broadcaster, saying it “grossly abused the journalistic profession by siding with politicians who would destroy the constitutional order of the Republic of Serbia.”

Control of the media has been a central pillar of Serbia’s system under Mr. Vucic, allowing him to weather multiple rounds of protests by demonizing and discrediting protesters, and to keep a firm grip on power for more than 12 years.
Many, however, are now asking whether this control is slipping, and with it perhaps the president’s increasingly authoritarian rule.

“This is a small but possibly revolutionary change,” said Jasmina Paunovic, a veteran state prosecutor in Belgrade, the capital. She added that longtime royalists were wavering throughout the system as “they shake off their fear” of losing their state jobs or facing disciplinary action.

She said that many judges and prosecutors she knows, though all ultimately dependent on the state for their careers, now support the students, at least privately. Serbia’s bar association voted on Sunday for lawyers to suspend work for a month in solidarity with students, who have barricaded campuses across the country.

A white taxi bearing a Serbian flag drives down a street lined with protesters.
Belgrade taxi drivers arriving to pick up students after the blockade of one of the bridges in Novi Sad on Sunday.
The weekend protests in Novi Sad, held three months after a structural failure at a newly renovated railway station in the city killed 15 people, drew not only students from local universities and Belgrade but also throngs of older people angry over what they see as a system riddled with corruption.

The Nov. 1 collapse of a concrete canopy suspended over the station’s entrances crushed the people below it and triggered the snowballing protest movement, which was driven by a belief that official negligence and graft were responsible for the tragedy. The station was renovated by a consortium of state-owned Chinese companies, and work on the canopy was carried out by a private Serbian contractor that had been promoted by officials.

The recent protests over several weekends represent the biggest outpouring of discontent since street demonstrations in the late 1990s against Slobodan Milosevic, Serbia’s nationalist leader during the Balkan Wars that followed the collapse of communist Yugoslavia.

Svetlana Bistrovic, 43, a nurse and mother of two, said she had decided to cheer on students blocking a major railway and road bridge in Novi Sad on Saturday after seeing the Serbian tennis star Novak Djokovic appear at a basketball game on Friday night wearing a shirt with the words “Students are champions.”

She waved a sign emblazoned with protest slogans and featuring a plastic tennis racket.

That Mr. Djokovic, whose family has in the past been outspoken in backing President Vucic, was siding with protesters, she said, showed that “change is coming in this country.”
A crowd of people outside in coats, one holding a white sign that reads, in part, “Change.”
The recent protests over several weekends are the biggest outpouring of discontent since demonstrations in the late 1990s against the Serbian nationalist leader Slobodan Milosevic.Credit...Andrej Isakovic/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
But Mr. Vucic shows no sign of giving up. Last week he jettisoned his prime minister, Milos Vucevic, a loyal ally, a former mayor of Novi Sad and chairman of the governing party, known as SNS, leaving the country without a government.

But Mr. Vucic, confident that his party can defeat fractious opposition parties in any new election, given the uneven electoral playing field, has since vowed to go on the offensive against his political opponents and to call a general election if Parliament fails to approve a new government to his liking.

“I will not give anyone this state on a platter,” he told supporters on Saturday. “I will fight, fight, fight.”

Nebojsa Vladisavljevic, a political science professor at the University of Belgrade, described Serbia as a “spin dictatorship,” which, like other post-communist governments in neighboring Hungary and elsewhere, “is less repressive but much more manipulative.”

He said the sudden shift in messaging by the state broadcaster, RTS “is just part of a game to show that there is a bit of fair media coverage.”

And even without state television and radio firmly on the president’s side, he added, Mr. Vucic still controls a battery of potent media weapons, like the private television station Pink, which remains unswervingly loyal. And an array of vitriolic tabloids show no sign of wavering in their support for the president.

The growing protests, like those in Novi Sad over the weekend, are driven by a belief that official negligence and graft were responsible for the rail station tragedy in November.
Tabloids like Informer, a particularly vicious attack dog for the government, have savaged student activists as traitors serving neighboring Croatia, Serbia’s main enemy during the wars of the early 1990s over the ruins of Yugoslavia.

Mila Pajic, a university student in Novi Sad active in organizing protests, said she had been portrayed by government-aligned media as “mentally unstable.” She was demonized as anti-Serbian, with Informer publishing a video of her arguing with her boyfriend and asserting that the couple was fighting over clandestine funding from abroad. It accused her of being in cahoots with Croatia.

The tabloid story, she said, “was completely invented” and turned “an ordinary argument between two people in their 20s into a national scandal.”

She said the state broadcaster’s shift to more sympathetic coverage of the protests “is not a huge step forward but a small step in the right direction.”

Mr. Vladisavljevic, the Belgrade political scientist, interpreted the governing party’s denunciation of RTS journalists for their neutral coverage of events in Novi Sad as a “pre-emptive move to keep them in line” and a message to the party’s heavily rural base that “nothing has really changed.”

“They worry that the media might flip. They worry about the military, about the prosecutors, everyone,” he said. “But we are not at a tipping point yet.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/02/worl ... ident.html

[ponchi101]

Novak will be president of Serbia soon. Within the decade.

[Owendonovan]

Novak will be president of Serbia soon. Within the decade.

Agreed.

[ti-amie]

Police say around 10 people killed in Sweden school campus shooting
3 hours ago

Johanna Chisholm
BBC News


The attack in Orebro has been described as the "worst mass shooting in Swedish history"
Getty Images

Police say around 10 people have been killed in a shooting at an education centre in central Sweden, including the suspected gunman.

Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson described Tuesday's attack at Risbergska school in Orebro, 200km (124 miles) west of the capital city Stockholm, as the "worst mass shooting in Swedish history".

Police said they believe the male perpetrator to be among the dead and that he was not previously known to them. There was no immediately identifiable motive and he was believed to be acting alone, they said.

"It is difficult to take in the magnitude of what has happened today," Kristersson said at an evening news conference.

Police earlier warned the death toll could continue to rise as several people had been injured.

A number of the injured have been taken to hospital, with at least four people undergoing operations.

Police initially said five people had been shot, and the incident was being investigated as an attempted murder, arson and an aggravated weapons offence.

Local media later began reporting that several people had died, before police said "around 10" people had been killed but they "could not be more specific" about the number of fatalities.

They also confirmed there did not appear to be a "terror" motive behind the attack.

Police heard reports of a shooting taking place at Risbergska school - an adult education centre - at 12:33 local time (11:44 GMT). The facility sits on a campus that is home to other schools.

These centres are attended primarily by people who have not finished primary or secondary school.

Earlier, students at several nearby schools were being kept indoors "for security purposes".

"We don't want members of the public to go there," Orebro police chief Roberto Eid Forest warned.

The justice minister, who appeared alongside the prime minister on Tuesday evening, shared his condolences for those affected by the "tragedy" and reassured citizens that schools in the country would be safe to return to on Wednesday.

"[I've] never seen a school shooting of this magnitude," Gunnar Strommer said.

Nearby hospitals had cleared their emergency rooms and intensive care units to free up space for patients, local media reported.

Orebro University Hospital said five people injured by gunshot wounds were treated at its emergency room. An additional sixth person, not injured by a gun, had "minor injuries" treated, it said.

No children were among the people being treated there, the municipality for Orebro County said in an update.


The shooting appears to have targeted a centre attended by people who have not finished primary or secondary school Getty Images

Teacher Lena Warenmark told SVT, Swedish public radio, she heard around 10 gunshots close to her study.

Ali el Mokad, a relative of a man who is believed to have been studying at the school at the time of the attack, had positioned himself outside of a local hospital waiting to hear on his relatives' condition.

"It doesn't feel very good actually," Mr Mokad told Reuters news agency. He said that his cousin also knew someone at the school, and when she called her friend earlier, "she fell to the ground because she was crying so much".

"She thought what she saw was so terrible. She only saw people lying on the floor, injured and blood everywhere," Mr Mokad said, describing the scene his cousin's friend had witnessed.

Another witness, a student at the school, who gave only her first name, Marwa, described a difficult scene in which she and several others tried to save a person's life.

"A guy next to me was shot in the shoulder. He was bleeding a lot. When I looked behind me I saw three people on the floor bleeding," she told TV4 Sweden.

Marwa and another friend tried to help the injured person by wrapping a shawl around the man's shoulder "so that he wouldn't bleed so much".

"Everyone was so shocked."

Earlier in the day, Prime Minister Kristersson remarked on how today is "a very painful day for all in Sweden" as he shared that those who had a "normal school day" replaced "with terror" are all in his thoughts.

"Being confined to a classroom with fear for your own life is a nightmare that no one should have to experience," Kristersson said in a post on X.

He later asked people to give police the freedom and the space they need to do their work and investigations, as he also stressed that there was no further risks to attending school the next day.

More information will be shared by police and the Swedish government in the coming days, Kristersson added.

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c79d52gpd02o

[ti-amie]

Trump proposes U.S. ‘take over’ Gaza
In a news conference with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, President Donald Trump suggested Gazans should leave the war-torn area and that the U.S. would step in and “develop it.”
By Matt Viser and Michael Birnbaum Updated 46 minutes ago

Donald Trump on Tuesday proposed that the United States take a “long-term ownership position” over Gaza, moving its residents to a “good, fresh, beautiful piece of land” in another country and developing the war-torn territory under U.S. control, offering a vision of mass displacement likely to inflame sentiments in the Arab world.

Trump’s proposal, which he offered as he welcomed Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to the White House, was likely to provoke a furious reaction from many Palestinians as well as their Arab allies in the region, since it suggested permanently removing Gaza’s 2.2 million residents from Palestinian territory and settling them outside of their land. It would also pull the United States even more deeply into the conflict by taking over territory that belongs to Palestinians.

The idea was a first indicator of Trump’s swaggering approach to the region, as he waded into a generations-old conflict with the assurance that he could resolve what years of efforts by U.S. diplomats have failed to accomplish. His proposal appeared to give little consideration to what Palestinians have said they want.

“I don’t think people should be going back to Gaza. I think that Gaza has been very unlucky for them,” Trump said. “They’ve lived like hell. They lived like you’re living in hell. Gaza is not a place for people to be living, and the only reason they want to go back, and I believe this strongly, is because they have no alternative.”

Gazan residents generally want to stay on their land. Trump did not specify where the new land for Gazans might be found, although he made his comments after repeating his desire for Egypt and Jordan to take in Gaza’s residents. Nor did he appear to grapple with the many Gazan residents who would not want to depart their home territory, nor with the practicalities of potentially forcing them to leave it.

“I do see a long-term ownership position, and I see it bringing great stability to that part of the Middle East, and maybe the entire Middle East,” Trump said.

Asked if U.S. troops would be deployed to take over Gaza, Trump said that “we’ll do what’s necessary. … We’ll take it over and develop it.”

Netanyahu said that he was open to the idea.

“He sees a different future for that piece of land,” Netanyahu said of Trump’s proposal for the United States to take over Gaza.

“It’s worth paying attention to this. We’re talking about it,” he added. “It’s something that could change history.”

Ahead of the meetings with Netanyahu on Tuesday, Trump said he believed Palestinians in Gaza did not have a future there.

“Look, the Gaza thing has not worked. It’s never worked,” Trump told reporters. “I think they should get a good, fresh, beautiful piece of land, and we get some people to put up the money to build it and make it nice and make it habitable and enjoyable.”

The president, who said he will visit Gaza, suggested that it could be a “piece of land, or numerous pieces of land,” raising the possibility that Palestinians could spread across multiple places, potentially diluting their identity — another idea that would spark anger among advocates for the war-battered territory, which faced relentless Israeli bombardment for nearly 16 months until a ceasefire took hold just before Trump took office last month.

Gaza “has been hell,” Trump later told reporters. “You take certain areas and you build really good-quality housing, like a beautiful town, like some place where they can live and not die, because Gaza is a guarantee that they’re going to end up dying. The same thing is going to happen again.”

Trump added that he felt that Gaza’s residents would “love to leave Gaza if they had an option. Right now, they don’t have an option.”

After the meetings, Trump said that a U.S. rebuilding effort in Gaza would create “economic development that will supply unlimited numbers of jobs and housing for the people of the area.” He didn’t specify which people he meant.

Netanyahu lavished the new U.S. leader with praise.

“You say things others refuse to say,” Netanyahu said. “And after the jaws drop, people scratch their heads and they say, ‘You know, he's right.’”

The two leaders have a complicated history. They were close allies during Trump’s first term, when he moved the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem. But in the aftermath of the 2020 election, the Israeli leader congratulated President Joe Biden on winning. Trump then began publicly and privately criticizing Netanyahu.

But Trump’s decision to welcome the Israeli leader as his first international guest suggests an effort to patch up the relationship.

Trump’s blunt approach to Gaza’s future stood in sharp contrast with the Biden administration, which spent more than a year making painstaking, repeated visits to the region to try to devise a reconstruction plan that would satisfy the kaleidoscope of competing interests over the war-battered territory.

Egypt and Jordan have hotly resisted Trump’s attempts to cajole them into taking Palestinians during the reconstruction of Gaza, a process he has said could take 10 or 15 years.

In addition to rebuilding Gaza, Trump and Netanyahu discussed the tenuous ceasefire between Israel and Hamas, how to handle Iran, and normalizing relations between Israel and Saudi Arabia. The two leaders held a series of meetings at the White House, and planned to hold a private dinner there too.

Ahead of the meeting, the foreign ministers of Egypt and Turkey — another country that has been involved in brokering an end to the conflict — released a joint statement rejecting any proposal to displace or resettle Palestinians to “countries outside the Palestinian territories, either for short-term or long-term purposes.”

Many Gazans also rejected it.

“Our Palestinian people, and the people of Gaza in particular, are rooted here and will not go anywhere. If Trump wants to pave something, he can go pave the sea,” Mustafa Ibrahim, a Gaza-based political expert, wrote on Facebook.

So did Hamas, the militant group that attacked Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, and retains control of significant parts of Gaza.

“Trump's statements are racist, and a blatant attempt to liquidate our Palestinian cause and deny our established national rights,” Izzat al-Rishq, a member of the Hamas political bureau, said in a statement.

Trump has invited Jordan’s King Abdullah II for a meeting in Washington next week. Egypt, meanwhile, is deeply dependent on the United States for military aid, giving Trump significant power in the relationship.

Trump, a former real estate developer, last month referred to Gaza as “a phenomenal location, on the sea, the best weather,” and added that “some fantastic things could be done with Gaza.” On Tuesday, he referred to the area as the “Riviera” of the Middle East and “something that could be so magnificent.”

He added: “I envision world people living there. The world’s people. I think you’ll make that into an international, unbelievable place. I think the potential in the Gaza Strip is unbelievable. And I think the entire world, representatives from all over the world, will be there, and they’ll live there. Palestinians, also, Palestinians will live there. Many people will live there.”

The visit comes at a difficult moment for Netanyahu, who has faced domestic criticism from members of his coalition for agreeing to a ceasefire, as well as international condemnation for his role in creating a humanitarian crisis in Gaza.

Netanyahu’s meeting with Trump was one part of several days of meetings as he adjusts to a Washington that has changed politically over the past few weeks, with Republicans who are more aligned with him now more ascendant. In addition to meetings with Trump administration officials Monday and Tuesday, Netanyahu is expected to visit with congressional leaders Thursday.

Despite Trump’s campaign promises to back Israel more enthusiastically than the Biden administration, he and Netanyahu do not see eye to eye about all aspects of the conflict.

Among other issues, Trump favors a swift and final end to the war. Netanyahu is facing a domestic rebellion from his right-wing coalition partners if he does not resume the fighting in Gaza once the hostages are released as part of the first phase of the ceasefire deal. The Israeli leader will need to reconcile the differences.

The agreement, which was mediated by Egypt, Qatar and the United States, began Jan. 19 and includes an initial phase of 42 days. Phase-two negotiations are expected to start this week, with some issues still unresolved. The initial ceasefire is supposed to continue even if the second phase is not agreed on in time.

“We’re going to try” to get to the second phase, Netanyahu said Tuesday ahead of the meeting.

Over the past two weeks, Hamas and allied militants have released 18 hostages who were abducted in the Oct. 7 attack, including 13 Israelis and five Thai nationals. Israel has also freed more than 580 Palestinian prisoners and detainees, allowed more aid to flow into Gaza and withdrawn its troops from key military posts in the enclave.

The Gaza Health Ministry says more than 47,000 people have been killed in the territory since the Oct. 7 attack. About 40 people are believed to still be held hostage in Gaza.

The two leaders also discussed normalizing relations between Israel and Saudi Arabia. That was a goal during Trump’s first term, and something that Biden also made a priority.

Trump has floated traveling to Saudi Arabia as his first foreign trip. Any agreement between Saudi Arabia and Israel would be a major breakthrough for the security and economy of the region, building trade ties between the Jewish state and the biggest and most important Arab nation after decades of tensions.

The two countries were close to a deal just ahead of the Oct. 7 attack. But the ferocious Israeli response has complicated the ability of Saudi Arabia’s de facto leader, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, to strike an agreement.

Trump and Netanyahu also discussed Iran, which both U.S. and Israeli officials believe is at its weakest point in years. After the collapse of its regional proxies, Tehran has been left without most of the tools it has used for decades to exert power throughout the Middle East.

That vulnerability could provide an opening to some sort of deal with the United States and the international community. But it also makes Tehran more of a target for Iran hawks in both Israel and Washington, and could spur Iranian leaders to go forward in their efforts to develop a nuclear weapon, policymakers said.

Ahead of the meeting with Netanyahu on Tuesday, Trump signed an executive order that reimposed “maximum pressure” on Iran, a first-term policy that imposed wide-ranging sanctions on Tehran’s economy in a bid to deter it from pursuing nuclear weapons.

Trump also signed an executive order pulling the United States from the United Nations Human Rights Council and the U.N. agency that provides aid to Gaza, which Israel has criticized as working in coordination with Hamas. The decision is mostly symbolic after Congress last year pulled funding for the group.

Karen DeYoung in Washington, Shira Rubin in Tel Aviv and Hazem Balousha in Toronto contributed to this report.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics ... u-meeting/

[ponchi101]

Just what is needed. ANOTHER actor claiming rights to Gaza.

[Owendonovan]

Who's paying for this?

[patrick]

Another foray and wasted dollars going overseas by Mr Delay

[ti-amie]

Who's paying for this?

You must be a lawyer because you asked a question you know the answer to.