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Ukraine said talks with the United States in Saudi Arabia were progressing “constructively” on Tuesday, with a partial ceasefire with Russia on the table hours after Kyiv conducted its largest drone attack on Moscow in three years of war.US Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Ukraine’s Foreign Minister Andriy Sybiga attended the meeting in Jeddah — which Russia was not participating in — as President Donald Trump ramped up pressure on Ukraine to end the war that began with Russia’s 2022 invasion.The talks follow President Volodymyr Zelensky’s public dressing-down at the White House, after which the United States cut off military aid, intelligence sharing and access to satellite imagery. Ukraine is hoping the offer of a partial ceasefire in the sky and at sea will persuade Washington to restore the assistance.”We are ready to do everything to achieve peace,” Ukrainian presidency chief of staff Andriy Yermak told reporters as he entered Tuesday’s meeting at a luxury hotel.A Ukrainian official, who requested anonymity, later told AFP the talks were “going OK, a lot of questions have been discussed”.Kyiv said the “largest drone attack in history”, in which hundreds of drones slammed into Moscow and other areas overnight, was intended to push Russian President Vladimir Putin to agree to the aerial and naval ceasefire.”This is an additional signal to Putin that he should also be interested in a ceasefire in the air,” said Andriy Kovalenko, a national security council official responsible for countering disinformation.Three people were killed in the attack, which both sides said was the biggest so far on Moscow. Russia’s army said it intercepted 337 drones around the country.- Minerals deal -Zelensky, who met Saudi Arabia’s de facto ruler in Jeddah on Monday, left the White House late last month without signing an agreement pushed by Trump that would give the US control over Ukrainian mineral resources.Zelensky has said he is still willing to sign, although Rubio said it would not be the focus of Tuesday’s meeting.Rubio, who is accompanied by national security advisor Mike Waltz, said the aid suspension was “something I hope we can resolve” in the talks.”Hopefully, we’ll have a good meeting and good news to report,” Rubio said.Rubio said the United States had not cut off intelligence for defensive operations.”The meeting with the US team started very constructively, we continue our work,” Yermak said on social media Tuesday. Asked whether the overnight drone attack could derail peace talks, Kremlin spokesperson Dmitri Peskov said: “There are no (peace) negotiations yet, so there is nothing to disrupt here.” He also declined earlier to comment on Russia’s stance on the proposed partial ceasefire.”It is absolutely impossible to talk about positions yet,” he said. “The Americans will find out only today, as they themselves say, from Ukraine to what extent Ukraine is ready for peace.”For its part, Russia has escalated strikes on Ukrainian infrastructure, and said it had retaken 12 settlements in its Kursk region that Ukraine had captured in a bid for bargaining leverage.- Rubio seeks ‘concessions’ -In the infamous White House meeting last month, Zelensky refused to bite his tongue in the face of criticism from Vice President JD Vance, with the Ukrainian leader questioning why his country should trust promises from Russia.He has since written a repentant letter to Trump.Faced with Washington’s pressure, Ukraine will lay out its support for a limited ceasefire in the sky and at sea, a Ukrainian official told AFP on Monday.Rubio signalled that the Trump administration would likely be pleased by such a proposal.”I’m not saying that alone is enough, but it’s the kind of concession you would need to see in order to end the conflict,” he told reporters.”You’re not going to get a ceasefire and an end to this war unless both sides make concessions.”Rubio said he did not expect to be “drawing lines on a map” towards a final deal in the Jeddah meeting, but said he would bring ideas back to Russia.Rubio and Waltz met last month with counterparts from Russia, also in Saudi Arabia, ending a freeze in high-level contacts imposed by former president Joe Biden after Russia defied Western warnings and launched its invasion.Trump last week also threatened further sanctions against Russia to force it to the table as it carried out strikes on Ukraine.But Trump’s abrupt shift in US policy — including suggesting Ukraine was to blame for the war, and recently siding with Russia at the UN — has stunned many allies. Rubio said Monday that the United States would also object to “antagonistic” language on Russia at an upcoming gathering of Group of Seven foreign ministers.burs-sct/th/smw

Shockwaves from the Trump administration’s campaign against pro-diversity policies and its harsh anti-immigrant rhetoric were felt throughout the South By Southwest festival, the sprawling arts and tech event long known for championing progressive values.Since taking office, Donald Trump’s hard-right White House has delivered a series of executive orders demanding that agencies across the federal government remove all references to policies meant to facilitate the hiring of women, people of color, or those with disabilities.The campaign, which has seen the Pentagon’s Black joint chief of staff asked to leave office, has also been mirrored by some of the country’s biggest companies including certain tech giants, who are dismantling departments dedicated to promoting workplace diversity.These harsh anti-progressive policies cast a shadow over this year’s SXSW, the 37-year-old festival that transforms downtown Austin, Texas, with offerings of music, cinema, and technology talks.The event typically attracts hundreds of thousands of forward-thinking creative professionals from around the world.”It feels like we’re being crushed and that any good, human, normal business policies are just being thrown out the window. I find it terrifying. We’re living in a dystopia,” said Kerrie Finch, a European based communications consultant that works with US companies.”Dismantling diversity, equity, and inclusion harms everyone because diversity means all people,” US Congresswoman Ayanna Pressley told an audience. – ‘It means women’ -“It means women. It means disabled people. It means people in rural communities. It means veterans. It means people of color,” she added.Pressley has been one of Washington’s most vocal critics of rolling back diversity policies, many of which emerged from the Black Lives Matter movement that reached its peak following George Floyd’s death at the hands of a police officer in 2020.In rented bars and hotel meeting rooms surrounding the Austin convention center, countries like France, Germany, Australia, and Brazil promote their startups and industries.Given the America First mindset in the White House, exhibitors say they sensed an impact.”From Europe…we already see it happening,” said Yeni Joseph, who leads the Netherlands taskforce for diversity and inclusion. “We have talents here that come knocking on our doors, or companies who want to expand and don’t know what it’s going to look like here,” she added.Trump’s hard line on illegal migration is deterring professionals who might consider moving to the United States, according to Dallas-based immigration attorney Dobrina Ustun. Speaking from the SXSW expo center where she offered services to foreign attendees interested in opportunities in the United States, she explained: “If you’re somebody sitting in Japan or Germany contemplating moving to the US and then you turn on the TV and hear all this anti-immigrant rhetoric, you might change your mind, at least for the time being.”- ‘Building bridges’ -Europe-based Arne Mosselman of Ainigma, an AI advisory firm, said that some US multinationals are closing down diversity projects even outside the United States.This is particularly unfortunate since AI technology is proving effective at supporting foreign workers in companies, as generative AI can help improve their performance.”Whether you want to get refugees in your company, or a designer from the Middle East – somebody who speaks a language as a second language can become client-facing thanks to generative AI,” he said.Angela V Davis of the 2638 Management Group said the rollback on diversity programs should not come as a surprise.”Companies will make promises and say, ‘Okay, we will hit our target by 2020,’ but then they keep moving the finish line. There’s no accountability,” she said.These are “interesting times in the US,” said SXSW President Hugh Forrest, speaking to a keynote audience. The success of the festival “shows what we believe in: cooperation over competition, building bridges versus burning them down.”

Climate scientist Tom Di Liberto had dreamed of working at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) since college. After more than a decade as a contractor, he finally secured a full-time position nearly two years ago.Last week, he was among hundreds abruptly fired in a sweeping government purge which, critics warn, will delay hurricane forecasts, cripple climate research and disrupt vital fisheries.Still more workers have accepted deferred resignation “buyouts” offered by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, and even deeper cuts are expected imminently.”This is the dream job — everything I want to do with my life,” Di Liberto told AFP.The 40-year-old father of two, who worked on the El Nino–La Nina cycle, was just days short of his two-year anniversary — a milestone that would have protected him from the first round of probationary workers cuts.”We knew it was coming,” he said. “But it’s never good to get such a dry, cold, callous email saying you were fired because your skills weren’t needed.”A NOAA engineer, requesting anonymity for fear of losing her job, said the cuts were already taking a toll. Half of her satellite forecasting team was laid off because they were probationary, meaning malfunctioning satellites won’t be restored as quickly.”People won’t be evacuated on time from natural disasters,” she said. “They could lose property — or their lives.”- Project 2025 – Around 700 NOAA employees — out of a 12,000-strong workforce — have been fired, though the agency has not confirmed a final number. According to The New York Times, the total, including resignations, could soon reach 20 percent of staff.The Trump administration appears to be following Project 2025, a conservative policy blueprint that calls NOAA one of the “main drivers of the climate change alarm industry” and proposes breaking it up. It also seeks to privatize the National Weather Service (NWS), forcing Americans to rely on commercial services.”Significant elements of Project 2025 have already been implemented, despite Donald Trump disavowing any knowledge of it,” Democratic congressman Jamie Raskin of Maryland told AFP, vowing continued protests and legal action. “This is being carried out in a completely lawless and irresponsible manner.”Some of those fired held leadership roles, including Sarah Cooley, 47, who was director of NOAA’s Ocean Acidification Program. A longtime academic and nonprofit leader, she said climate science stagnated under Trump’s previous term, though states and nonprofits worked to fill the gap.”But at the end of the day, loss of the work at the federal level can have a very extensive effect,” she told AFP.While states and philanthropic organizations can fund research, they don’t fly planes into hurricanes or maintain oceanographic expeditions — at least not at NOAA’s level, she added.- Flagship climate agency  -NOAA scientists play a crucial role in marine conservation and fisheries management, collecting data on fish stocks and monitoring ecosystem changes to set catch limits and other policies.”If they aren’t there to do their important jobs, these fisheries may not go forward, they may not open for the year,” Gib Brogan, a fisheries expert at nonprofit Oceana, told AFP.He warned that the economic fallout for coastal communities could be severe.But it is NOAA’s role as a cornerstone of global climate monitoring that has made it a prime target. “NOAA currently plays a major role as the clearinghouse for global climate data,” Zeke Hausfather, a climate scientist at Berkeley Earth told AFP. Its datasets inform major climate groups, he said, warning that severe cuts would amount to “willfully blinding ourselves to avoid the uncomfortable truth about the rapid changes the world is experiencing.”As uncertainty looms, researchers worldwide are scrambling to preserve NOAA’s data.”I am aware of several research groups that have preemptively downloaded the current version of their NOAA datasets of interest to mitigate some of the risks,” Leonard Borchert, a climate statistician at the University of Hamburg, told AFP.

President Donald Trump said Tuesday he will buy a “brand new Tesla” in support of his top donor and close advisor, Tesla CEO Elon Musk, after share prices tanked amid recession fears and Musk’s controversial actions in Washington.”To Republicans, Conservatives, and all great Americans, Elon Musk is ‘putting it on the line’ in order to help our Nation, and he is doing a FANTASTIC JOB!,” Trump posted on his Truth Social platform just after midnight on Tuesday.Since returning to the White House in January, Trump has empowered Musk to slash federal government spending and headcounts as leader of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).But DOGE’s high-profile cost-cutting campaign has faced increasing backlash, including protests, court rulings and some pressure from lawmakers. The turmoil has also tarnished the Tesla brand, with sales plummeting in Europe, share prices tumbling and multiple reports of cars being vandalized.Unhappy Tesla owners have even slapped bumper stickers on their vehicles claiming they had purchased them “before Elon went crazy.””The Radical Left Lunatics, as they often do, are trying to illegally and collusively boycott Tesla, one of the World’s great automakers, and Elon’s ‘baby,’ in order to attack and do harm to Elon, and everything he stands for,” Trump’s post said.”I’m going to buy a brand new Tesla tomorrow morning as a show of confidence and support for Elon Musk, a truly great American.”Why should he be punished for putting his tremendous skills to work in order to help MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN???”Musk, the world’s richest person, responded on his X platform, thanking the president.While Musk enjoys Trump’s confidence, polling shows the tech billionaire is deeply unpopular among ordinary Americans, and his cuts to government budgets have sparked angry confrontations between Republicans and their constituents at town halls.- Slumping shares -Tesla share prices continued to fall following a brief rally Tuesday, after closing more than 15 percent down on Monday, as uncertainty over Trump’s import tariffs and threats have left US financial markets in turmoil.The tech-heavy Nasdaq had tanked four percent Monday owing in part to the plunge in high-flying titans including Tesla, Apple, and Amazon.Tesla has also seen its sales drop across Europe in recent weeks following Musk’s controversial support for far-right groups, including Germany’s AfD during the country’s recent election campaign.Tesla sales in Germany — Europe’s biggest auto market — plunged more than 76 percent year-on-year in February, official data showed. Overall sales in the European Union almost halved, on year, in January.In early March, a dozen Teslas were torched at a dealership in France in what authorities treated as an arson attack, and the firm’s facilities have also been vandalized in the United States.Tesla has lost more than one-third of its market value since mid-December as Musk deepens his association with Trump.Meanwhile, Musk said his X platform was hit Monday by a major cyberattack, raising questions as to whether the politically divisive billionaire is being targeted or his decision to gut staff at what was once Twitter is haunting the social network.

Colonel Bree Fram has served in the US military for 22 years, but she now faces possible dismissal from the Space Force under President Donald Trump’s ban on transgender troops.Trump repeatedly took aim at trans people during the 2024 election campaign and signed an executive order in January stating they were unfit for military service, while the Pentagon has said it will remove transgender troops from the armed forces and prevent others from joining.The ban has been challenged in court, but unless a judge issues an injunction soon, thousands of transgender military personnel may be just weeks away from the start of proceedings to force them to cut short their careers.”I’m heartbroken about the loss, not just for myself, if it comes to that, but for all of us,” said Fram, who spoke to AFP in a personal capacity and whose views do not necessarily reflect those of the Defense Department or US government.”I think all of us want to be able to take the uniform off at a time and a place of our choosing,” said the 45-year-old engineer, who served for 18 years in the Air Force before transferring to the Space Force.”When it’s your own government that says you have to take that off because you are somehow not suitable for military service, that’s painful.”- ‘Best version of ourselves’ -Transgender Americans have faced a roller coaster of changing policies on military service in recent years, with Democratic administrations seeking to permit them to serve openly, while Trump has tried to keep them out.The US military lifted a ban on transgender troops in 2016, during Democrat Barack Obama’s second term as president, after which Fram publicly came out as transgender.But Trump took office the following year, launching his first attempt to ban transgender troops with a 2017 tweet that landed “like a lightning bolt out of the blue,” Fram said. “The initial reaction was shock.”President Joe Biden lifted the restrictions in 2021, but Trump was reelected last year after making clear he would again seek to roll back transgender rights.”This time around, it’s been more like a hurricane approaching shore that you can see coming,” she said.But the latest restrictions are even harsher, targeting transgender personnel who are already openly serving in the military as well as those who want to come out or enlist.”It’s a challenge when your identity becomes political, because trans people are not broken. We’re not asking anyone to fix us. We’re merely reaching for the best version of ourselves,” said Fram.- Seeking ‘the same opportunity’ -She said being true to herself has made her better at her job.”I truly became a better commander, a better leader, by transitioning and embracing my authenticity and letting people in to hear my story, because then they wanted to share theirs,” Fram said.Chief Petty Officer Ryan Goodell, a 32-year-old US Navy cryptologic technician, came out as trans in 2018, before Trump’s first attempt to ban trans troops went into effect.The Republican’s second ban “came as no surprise. It is disappointing nonetheless, right? Because I have 13 years in and I had planned on doing 20 — at least 20 to retire,” he said.Goodell — who like Fram spoke to AFP in a personal capacity, and whose views are his own and do not reflect those of the government or Defense Department — now faces leaving the Navy before he was ready to do so, an experience he described as “nerve-wracking.”While government officials have declared trans people unfit to serve, “we’ve had 10 years of service showing that the things being said about us are just untrue and not based in fact at all,” said Goodell.”We understand that there’s no right to serve. We just ask for the same opportunity as our cisgender counterparts to show that not only are we meeting the expectations as laid out before us now, we’ve in some cases exceeded them.”

Ukrainian drones smashed into high-rise apartment blocks on the outskirts of Moscow in the early hours of Tuesday, with both sides saying it was the largest attack on the Russian capital of the three-year conflict. The Kremlin condemned the attack, which comes just hours before top US and Ukrainian officials sat down for talks in Saudi Arabia and after three years of Russian aerial barrages on Ukrainian cities. Kyiv said the attack should push Russian President Vladimir Putin to accept its call for a halt to long-range aerial strikes, a proposal Moscow has previously ruled out.Ukrainian and US diplomats were set to meet for talks on ending the conflict, with Kyiv saying it would try to get Washington — which has resumed talks with Moscow under President Donald Trump — on board with the idea.The attack killed at least two people and wounded several more, Russian officials said.Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov denounced Kyiv targeting “residential houses”, claiming its forces only hit military infrastructure, despite near daily attacks on Ukraine’s civilian areas and thousands of Ukrainian civilians killed by its offensive.Moscow’s army said it intercepted 337 Ukrainian drones across the country in what Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin called the “most massive enemy drone attack on Moscow.”At the site of one attack, AFP journalists saw holes on the upper floors of an apartment block and broken glass and debris strewn across the asphalt.- ‘All the neighbours jumped’ -“We were sleeping, there was an explosion, the children screamed,” Yevgenia Bakatuyeva, a 38-year-old who lives in one of the apartment blocks that was hit, told AFP.”I opened my door, and all the neighbours jumped out. Somebody was in blood,” she added. Artyom, a 34-year-old car sales manager also living in the building, said he had “only seen such things on TV” and that it was “scary when in real life.” Ukraine has previously targeted Moscow, but deadly strikes so far away from the front lines are rare.No air raid alert or siren was announced in the capital amid the attack.More than 90 drones were intercepted over the Moscow Region, which surrounds the heavily defended capital, and another 126 were downed over the western Kursk region, where Russia’s ground forces are pushing back a Ukrainian cross-border incursion.- Truce in the sky -Russian aviation officials temporarily closed the four main airports serving Moscow amid the attack.Two people were killed in the attacks — a 50-year-old man and a 38-year-old security guard — Moscow Region Governor Andrey Vorobyov said in a post on Telegram.The health ministry said six people were in hospital, including a child and one person in an extremely serious condition, Russian state news agencies reported.Russia’s investigative committee called it a “terrorist attack” and opened a criminal investigation.In the Vladimir region, some 200 kilometres (125 miles) east of Moscow, a village of around 800 people was evacuated after two drones there were shot down, local authorities said.Ukraine also called it the “largest drone attack in history” saying it “lasted all night and through the morning.”- ‘Signal to Putin’ -“This is an additional signal to Putin that he should also be interested in a ceasefire in the air,” said Andriy Kovalenko, head of the National Security Council’s Center for Countering Disinformation.Ukraine is set to present the United States with a plan for a partial ceasefire with Russia, hoping to restore support from its key benefactor, which under Trump has demanded concessions to end the three-year conflict.US Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who will take part in the Saudi talks, indicated the idea had promise.Russia has previously ruled out partial ceasefires.The talks will be the most senior since a disastrous White House meeting last month, when Trump berated Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky for purported ingratitude.Since Trump’s dressing down of Zelensky, Washington has suspended military aid to Ukraine as well as intelligence sharing and access to satellite imagery in a bid to force it to the negotiating table.Russia’s foreign ministry said it had taken OSCE Secretary General Feridun Sinirlioglu — in Moscow on Tuesday — to the site of one of the attacks.Russia’s military also launched a ballistic missile and 126 drones at Ukraine overnight, Kyiv’s air force said. AFP journalists in Kyiv heard explosions overnight as air defence downed a wave of drones.A bomb attack on the eastern town of Kostiantynivka wounded four people, Ukrainian officials said.

The UK coastguard ended the search for a missing crew member after a cargo ship ran into a US-military chartered tanker carrying jet fuel in the North Sea on Monday.HM Coastguard rescued 36 crew members from the Stena Immaculate tanker and Solong container vessel, with one taken to hospital.”One crew member of the Solong remains unaccounted for, after an extensive search for the missing crew member sadly they have not been found and the search has ended,” said Matthew Atkinson, Divisional Commander for HM Coastguard.Images showed a huge plume of thick, black smoke and flames rising from the scene about 10 miles (16 kilometres) off the east England coast, sparking concerns of “multiple toxic hazards”.The Stena Immaculate tanker was “anchored off the North Sea coast near Hull… (and) was struck by the container ship Solong”, the Stena’s US-based operators Crowley said in a statement.The Stena was on a short-term US military charter with Military Sealift Command, according to Jillian Morris, the spokesperson for the command that operates civilian-crewed ships providing ocean transport for the US Defense Department.Crowley said the impact of the collision “ruptured” the tanker “containing A1-jet fuel” and triggered a fire, with fuel “reported released”.It was carrying around 220,000 barrels of jet fuel while the Solong was carrying 15 containers of sodium cyanide, according to the Lloyd’s List information service, but it is not known if any of the flammable compound had leaked.The two vessels were still on fire 12 hours after the collision, said the coastguard.A spokesperson for UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer called the situation “extremely concerning”. All crew members aboard the Stena Immaculate were confirmed to be alive, a spokeswoman for the tanker’s Swedish owner, Stena Bulk, told AFP.- ‘Toxic hazards’ -A spokesman for the government’s Marine Accident Investigation Branch spokesperson said “Our team of inspectors and support staff are gathering evidence and undertaking a preliminary assessment of the accident to determine our next steps”.Ivor Vince, founder of ASK Consultants, an environmental risk advisory group, told AFP that “the good news is it’s not persistent, it’s not like a crude oil spill”. “Most of it will evaporate quite quickly and what doesn’t evaporate will be degraded by microorganisms quite quickly”, he added, though warning that “it will kill fish and other creatures”.Paul Johnston, a senior scientist at the Greenpeace Research Laboratories at Exeter University, said “we are extremely concerned about the multiple toxic hazards these chemicals could pose to marine life.”The jet fuel entered the water close to a breeding ground for harbour porpoises, sodium cyanide is “a highly toxic chemical that could cause serious harm”, he added.- Humber traffic suspended -All vessel movements were “suspended” in the Humber estuary that flows into the North Sea, according to Associated British Ports (ABP), which operates in the Ports of Hull and Immingham in the region.  The German Central Command for Maritime Emergencies said it was also dispatching a vessel capable of fire fighting and oil recovery.The alarm about the crash near the port city of Hull in East Yorkshire was raised at 0948 GMT.A coastguard helicopter, a plane, lifeboats from four towns and other nearby vessels were part of the large rescue operation, UK Coastguard said.Grimsby native Paul Lancaster, a former seaman, told AFP that “I don’t understand how two ships that big could collide”. “There must have been a massive engineering problem,” he said outside a pub in Grimsby.- Collisions rare -Collisions remain rare in the busy North Sea.In October 2023, two cargo ships, the Verity and the Polesie, collided near Germany’s Heligoland islands in the North Sea.Three people were killed and two others are still missing and considered dead.In October 2015, the Flinterstar freighter, carrying 125 tonnes of diesel and 427 tonnes of fuel oil, sank after colliding with the Al Oraiq tanker eight kilometres (five miles) off the Belgian coast.

Protesters in New York and rights groups expressed outrage Monday over the arrest of a leader of pro-Palestinian demonstrations at Columbia University, as President Donald Trump vowed further crackdowns.Mahmoud Khalil, a recent graduate and one of the most prominent faces of the university’s high-profile protests, was arrested by US immigration officials over the weekend despite holding a permanent residency green card.The Department of Homeland Security, confirming Khalil’s arrest on Sunday, claimed he had “led activities aligned to Hamas” and that the DHS action was taken “in coordination with the Department of State.””We know there are more students at Columbia and other Universities across the Country who have engaged in pro-terrorist, anti-Semitic, anti-American activity, and the Trump Administration will not tolerate it,” the president wrote Monday on his Truth Social platform.”This is the first arrest of many to come,” he pledged.The protests at Columbia, launched last year in opposition to Israel’s devastating war in Gaza, brought widespread media attention as tensions mounted on campus and spread to other universities around the country.Some protests turned violent and saw campus buildings occupied, while students protesting Israel’s conduct were frequently pitted against pro-Israel campaigners, many of whom were Jewish.Trump and other Republicans have broadly accused the protesters of supporting Hamas, the Palestinian militant group and US-designated terrorist group whose deadly attack on October 7, 2023 against Israel sparked the war.While the Trump administration moves to quickly deport Khalil, who has reportedly been moved to the southern state of Louisiana, a federal judge on Monday ordered authorities to halt proceedings.The order, seen by AFP, by Judge Jesse Furman of the Southern District of New York also called for a preliminary hearing on Wednesday.- ‘A kidnapping’ -The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) condemned Khalil’s arrest, calling it “unprecedented, illegal, and un-American.””The government’s actions are obviously intended to intimidate and chill speech on one side of a public debate,” said Ben Wizner, director of the ACLU’s Speech, Privacy and Technology Project, in a statement.On Monday afternoon, over 1,000 protesters gathered in New York to express their outrage at Khalil’s arrest.”This was essentially a kidnapping,” said 42-year-old Tobi, who declined to give her last name for fear of retaliation.”It seems like a clear targeting of activists, which is a really, really dangerous precedent,” she said.According to his supporters, Khalil was arrested late Saturday night while returning with his pregnant wife to their residence in Columbia student housing.”This is a dismal moment in American history. We must not go down this authoritarian path one step further,” said Michael Thaddeu, one of around 50 professors who expressed their concern Monday at a press conference.The Trump administration has particularly targeted Columbia over its handling of the protests, threatening to revoke billions in federal funding if more action is not taken.On Friday, four government agencies announced initial cuts of $400 million.The arrest also prompted an outcry from the United Nations, with the spokesman for Secretary-General Antonio Guterres saying Monday “it is crucial to underscore the importance of respecting the right of freedom of expression and the right to peaceful assembly everywhere.”

Insurance market Lloyd’s of London on Monday said it had taken a financial hit totalling about $2.3 billion from the Los Angeles wildfires earlier this year.”We are still assessing the full impact” of the January fires that will affect 2025 results, chief financial officer Burkhard Keese said in a statement.The fires around the United States’ second city burned for three weeks, forcing thousands of residents to evacuate their homes.They destroyed thousands of structures, devastating the affluent Pacific Palisades neighbourhood of Los Angeles, Malibu and the community of Altadena in the wider county.Private meteorological firm AccuWeather has estimated the total damage and economic loss at between $250 billion and $275 billion.Lloyd’s of London published financial results on Monday showing pre-tax profits of $11.4 billion for 2024, slightly less than the previous year.The loss from the fires compares with an estimated hit of some 1.2 billion euros ($1.3 billion) announced by German reinsurance giant Munich Re last month.At the time it called them the “the most substantial wildfire losses in the history of the insurance industry”.Munich Re said it was well-prepared to absorb the costs from such natural catastrophes and it would continue to cover wildfires as long as the compensation was appropriate.

Workers in Washington on Monday began removing a “Black Lives Matter” street mural installed during the height of 2020 racial justice protests, bowing to pressure from President Donald Trump.Large, yellow lettering reading “Black Live Matter” has been painted on a roadway near the White House since June 2020, when protests broke out across the nation following the police killing of George Floyd, an unarmed Black man.City officials in the US capital have credited the art installation with calming tensions near the White House, where violent clashes between protesters and security personnel had occurred in the days prior.Trump, who was president at the time of the unrest, returned to office in January seeking to overturn so-called diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) practices which spread widely throughout the public and private sectors following the George Floyd protests.Congressional Republicans and Trump aides had eyed the mural as part of their move to force changes in the administration of Washington, an overwhelmingly Democratic city.Mayor Muriel Bowser, a Democrat, has sought to establish a good working relationship with Trump, seeking to head off Republican calls for fully overturning the city’s right to govern itself.She has also been worried that mass layoffs of federal workers by Trump and his billionaire adviser Elon Musk could wreak havoc on the city’s finances.”We have bigger fish to fry than fights over what has been very important to us and to the history, and especially in our ability to keep our city safe during that time — that mural played a very important part,” Bowser told reporters last week.”But now our focus is on making sure our residents and our economy survives.”When asked if it was in response to White House pressure, she said: “I’m not going to talk about specifics… but I think it’s safe to say that people don’t like it, didn’t like it.”As jackhammers plowed away Monday at the pavement, numerous onlookers snapped photos of the work.Two African American women told AFP they had come to get a final look at the mural, expressing dismay at the decision to remove it.Both said they were lifelong Democrats.”It’s history… and now they’re basically saying it didn’t happen,” said one of the two, a 54-year-old caregiver from nearby Virginia who requested anonymity because of her political work.”The money you’re spending to remove it could’ve been spent on so many other things,” she said.”What’s next?” asked her friend, 57-year-old Tajuana McCallister, a healthcare worker in Maryland.”Black history clearly doesn’t matter to him,” she said, nodding toward the White House.The site, erected during the protests, showed leaders “have compassion, (were saying) ‘we hear you,'” according to the caregiver.Its removal, she said, shows “what you (leaders) said didn’t matter.”