Category World News

In the occupied West Bank village of Shuqba, Israeli forces have destroyed three Palestinian homes. The destruction was described as “a real carnage,” according to a Shuqba resident.

For failing to stop illegal mining and the trafficking of cocaine, Ecuador’s president, Daniel Noboa, has announced that his nation will start imposing a 30% “security tariff” on its neighbor Colombia next month.

The announcement on Wednesday echoes those taken by US President Donald Trump, who has criticized Colombia’s left-wing government for failing to take a more aggressive approach to drug trafficking.

Noboa revealed the new import tariff in a social media post. He reaffirmed that the new tax would apply as long as the nation showed “a real commitment to jointly combating drug-trafficking and illegal mining at the border.”

Even though Colombia has a trade deficit exceeding $1 billion annually, Noboa wrote, “We have made sincere efforts to cooperate with Colombia.”

“Our military continues to fight narcotics-related criminal organizations at the border without Colombia’s assistance, despite our insistence on dialogue.” Ecuador will start imposing a 30% security tariff on imports from Colombia on February 1 due to the absence of reciprocity and decisive action.

Trump’s close ties

Noboa, 38, a right-wing leader, has a strong affinity for Trump and his policies.

Noboa praised Trump’s victory in a social media post claiming that “the future looks bright for the Continent.”

Noboa has supported Trump’s efforts to expand US influence in Latin America, most notably by supporting a failed referendum in November that would have allowed the construction of US military installations in Ecuador.

The Noboa administration has argued that a close partnership with the US is required to stop violent crime there. However, the close ties have also supported Trump’s efforts to expand his control of the Western Hemisphere.

Trump’s homeland security secretary Kristi Noem has been a guest of Noboa twice in the past year, once in July and once more before the November ballot referendum.

Noem wrote at the time that Ecuador has been a valuable partner to the United States in its efforts to stop smugglers on land and in the seas, along with illegal immigration, drug trafficking, and smugglers.

Trump has characterized his second term in office by referring to tariffs as “the most beautiful word” in the dictionary. Since resuming as president in January 2025, he has implemented a comprehensive tariff campaign that includes additional individualized tariffs for some nations and a baseline tariff of 10% on nearly all trading partners.

Trump has argued that tariffs serve both the government and domestic industries. He has also used the economic penalty to compel trading partners to comply with policy demands.

For instance, Trump threatened tariff increases against Mexico and Canada as US neighbors last year if they failed to adequately combat cross-border immigration and drug smuggling.

His administration has also imposed a tariff on China to encourage the nation’s efforts to stop the flow of fentanyl.

However, some have questioned Trump’s coercive nature and its legality. Additionally, economists have warned that domestically higher consumer prices could be brought on by the import tax increases.

Disputed relationships with Petro

Noboa’s position is that he is using the threat of tariffs to retaliate against Colombia’s President Gustavo Petro as well as to impose his own policies.

Petro, a former rebel leader, became the first left-wing leader in his country in 2022. However, his efforts to combat drug trafficking have drawn criticism both domestically and internationally.

Colombia continues to be the top producer of cocaine worldwide. The United Nations stated in a report from 2024 that the nation had experienced ten more productive years in a row. Coca leaves, the raw ingredient in cocaine, are grown on nearly 253,000 hectares (645, 000 acres) throughout the nation.

A six-decade-long internal conflict in Colombia compliques efforts. Government forces, right-wing paramilitaries, left-wing rebels, and criminal networks have been fighting for years in this sluggish conflict.

Petro has resisted the heavy-handed crackdowns of his right-wing predecessors and has instead chosen a “Total Peace” strategy that involves dialogue with armed rebels and criminal organizations since taking office.

Additionally, his administration has shifted away from the largely rural farmers’ struggle to grow coca crops. Instead, it has criticized the labs and facilities that turn the leaf into drugs and has adopted a voluntary crop substitution strategy.

Nearly 18, 400 drug-making labs have been destroyed, according to Petro’s claim. Additionally, his administration claimed to have recovered 14 tonnes of cocaine from Colombia’s largest drug bust in a decade in November.

However, prominent right-wingers like Donald Trump have urged Colombia to take “more aggressive action.” Petro should “watch his a**,” the US president said, “watch his a**,” and threatened military action.

political and criminal differences

Noboa has been one of Petro’s region’s critics. His election was boosted in part by his pledge to combat Ecuador’s growing crime problem.

Ecuador has lost its reputation as an “island of peace” in Latin America as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, where criminal activity has increased.

A sharp rise in murders also occurred in line with that trend. The think tank Insight Crime discovered that Ecuador had the highest murder rate of any South American nation at 44.6 per 100,000 people as of 2024. In total, 7 062 homicides were committed in that year.

According to experts, Ecuador’s strategic alliance between Colombia and Peru, the second-largest producer of cocaine, contributes to the crime wave.

Noboa’s tariffs’ timing, however, has sparked questions about the president’s intentions and whether or not he was solely concerned with crime rather than politics.

One day before the new tariffs were implemented, Petro shared a message on social media supporting left-wing icon Jorge Glas, who was ex-Vice President of Ecuador.

Noboa had authorized a contentious raid on Mexico’s embassy in Quito in 2024 to detain Glas on bribery charges. Petro has accused the Ecuadorian government of using “psychological torture” against the former politician, and he currently spends time in a maximum security facility.

Jorge Glass should be released, Petro wrote on Tuesday, “just as I called for the release of political prisoners in Venezuela and Nicaragua.”

Some critics speculated that the tariffs were in part a response to Tuesday’s post because Petro and Noboa have been at odds with the Glas case.

The new taxes are likely to raise questions about the future of regional trade agreements because Ecuador and Colombia are one of the world’s leading trading partners.

Washington, DC – Advocates have called on US lawmakers to seize on the tanking public approval of President Donald Trump’s aggressive immigration enforcement drive as outrage continues to grow over the killing of a United States citizen by an immigration agent in Minnesota.

During a news conference on Wednesday, several immigration experts said lawmakers have a unique opportunity to enact reforms as opinion has turned on Trump’s mass deportation pledges, an issue that helped carry the president to his second term during the 2024 election.

The events in Minnesota, they said, have underscored a grim future of unchecked US immigration enforcement, particularly in light of last year’s massive infusion of cash into the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency.

“I think we are really at an inflexion point here,” said Kate Voigt, the senior policy counsel at the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).

“We’ve seen a swell of grassroots actions over the past few weeks. More and more people are seeing that ICE is dangerous, violent, operating with impunity. More and more people are angry, scared, motivated, and more and more people are looking to their members of Congress for action.”

To be sure, a change of direction remains an enormous undertaking, according to observers.

Trump’s tax bill, passed last year by the Republican-controlled Congress, which the president dubbed his “Big Beautiful Bill”, included a gargantuan windfall of $170bn for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).

About $75bn of that was allocated to ICE over the next four years – $45bn to grow detention capacity and $30bn to boost enforcement operations. That comes on top of ICE’s annual operating budget, which has hovered around $10bn in recent years and is subject to congressional approval.

The additional funding has been described by critics as a “slush fund” with little oversight.

It makes ICE the highest-funded federal law enforcement agency by miles, while feeding what the Brennan Center for Justice has called a new “deportation industrial complex”.

Shifting public opinion

As Trump begins the second year of his second term, his administration controls an ICE force that has doubled in size in recent months, now topping 22,000 agents. They are tasked with reaching a ballooning daily detention goal of 100,000, nearly three times the typical rate, as well as a target of one million deportations a year, far beyond the 605,000 the administration reported during Trump’s first year in office.

Advocates say US residents are beginning to understand what those numbers portend.

Video recording of the killing of 37-year-old Renee Nicole Good in a Minneapolis suburb on January 7 flashflooded across social media, casting doubt, if not completely contradicting, the Trump administration’s immediate claims that Good was attempting to run over an immigration officer when he opened fire.

Within minutes, Trump officials labelled Good a “domestic terrorist”, with the federal government soon dismissing local authorities from taking part in the investigation and repudiating calls for a customary civil rights probe.

The administration then sent hundreds more federal agents to the state, bringing the total to 3,000, as it portrayed protests that spread to hundreds of cities across the US as the work of “agitators” and “insurrectionists”. The Department of Justice has since opened investigations into Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey and state Governor Tim Walz, two of the most vocal critics of the administration’s actions, for alleged conspiracy to impede immigration enforcement.

The State of Minnesota, as well as the cities of Minneapolis and St Paul, have launched a lawsuit alleging ICE agents have regularly tread on the civil liberties of residents. Images and videos of sometimes violent confrontations between immigration agents and state residents have proliferated on social media, with several instances of US citizens being harassed or detained.

During a news conference on Tuesday, local police officials in the state also said they have received a deluge of reports of ICE agents trampling on residents’ rights.

Mark Bruley, the chief of police for the Minneapolis suburb Brooklyn Park, said residents are regularly being stopped “with no cause and are being forced to produce paperwork to determine if they are here legally”.

“We started hearing from our police officers the same complaints as they fell victim to this while off duty,” Bruley added. “Every person who has had this happen to them is a person of colour.”

Speaking at Wednesday’s briefing, Heidi Altman, the vice president of policy at the National Immigration Law Center, said recent events have shown “ICE and border patrol agents are not using taxpayer dollars for the purpose of immigration enforcement”.

“They’re using it for the purpose of protecting and projecting the absolute power and executive branch of the president of the United States,” Altman said.

That perception appears to bear out in public opinion polling. A recent CBS News/YouGov poll conducted from January 14 to 16 found an equal split on Trump’s immigration pledges, but growing discontent with how they are being implemented. About 52 percent felt that ICE was making communities less safe, while 61 percent said the agency’s tactics were “too tough”.

Another poll conducted by the ACLU found that 55 percent of voters support ending mass ICE raids targeting immigrants, while a whopping 84 percent said they supported people’s right to “safely observe, record, and document ICE activities”.

An Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll found that while Trump’s approval on immigration was largely split 50 to 49 percent among voters in March 2025, the proportion of those who disapproved rose to 61 percent as of mid-January.

For his part, Trump has blamed the shifting tides on unfair media coverage, urging DHS and ICE to better publicise the “violent criminals” targeted in the 3,000 arrests the administration says immigration agents have made in Minnesota.

“Show the Numbers, Names, and Faces of the violent criminals, and show them NOW,” Trump said in a recent post on Truth Social account.

“The people will start supporting the Patriots of ICE, instead of the highly paid troublemakers, anarchists, and agitators!”

‘Business as usual’

The US Congress, which controls the so-called “power of the purse” in its budgetary discretion, remains slimly controlled by Republicans, who have shown little appetite for contradicting Trump on one of his marquee policy pillars.

Democrats have introduced a slate of legislative actions to siphon funding from ICE, constrain detentions, force ICE officers to unmask, and even to impeach DHS Secretary Kristi Noem, but all have proved non-starters.

More broadly, the party has remained divided on its approach, with some political strategists warning of continued perceived weakness on immigration, which was seen as an Achilles heel in the Democrats’ rout in the 2024 election.

Advocates who spoke on Wednesday, meanwhile, said lawmakers had an immediate opportunity to send a message as they negotiate a bill to apportion annual funding to the DHS.

The current bill would increase ICE’s annual detention budget by $400m from last year, while increasing its enforcement budget by over $300m. That’s on top of the billions of dollars already allocated last year, while offering little in the way of best-practice reforms or oversight, advocates said.

“It is insane to me to think that anybody would vote to give more money to an already bloated agency,” said Beatriz Lopez, the founder and director of the Democracy Power Project, who called the bill an important opportunity to “check” ICE.

Added Amy Fischer, director for refugee and migrant rights at Amnesty International USA: “Democrats and Republicans came to the table to pull together this bill as if it’s just business as usual, as if it’s just another year”.

Recent fighting rooted in centuries-old territorial claims has damaged or destroyed ancient Khmer temples along the Thai-Cambodia border. The area is mostly prohibited and militarized. Tony Cheng from Al Jazeera was one of the journalists who the Thai military took there.

Conservative and liberal United States Supreme Court justices have signalled scepticism towards US President Donald Trump’s bid to fire US Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook in a case with the central bank’s independence at stake.

During about two hours of arguments in the case on Wednesday, the justices indicated they were unlikely to grant the Trump administration’s request to lift a judge’s decision barring ​the Republican president from immediately firing Cook while her legal challenge continues to play out.

Some of the justices pressed D John Sauer, the US solicitor general arguing for Trump’s administration, about why Cook was not given a chance to formally respond to the unproven mortgage fraud allegations – which she has denied – that the president cited as justification for ousting Cook.

They also raised concerns about the effect on the economy of such a first-ever presidential firing from the central bank and the implications for the Fed’s cherished independence from political influence.

The case represents the latest dispute to come to the top US judicial body involving Trump’s expansive view of presidential powers since he returned to office 12 months ago.

When the court, which has a 6-3 conservative majority, agreed in October to hear the case, it left Cook in her job for the time being.

“This case is about whether the Federal Reserve will set key interest rates guided by evidence and independent judgment or will succumb to political pressure,” Cook, who attended the arguments, said in a statement afterward.

“For as long as I serve at the Federal Reserve, I will uphold the principle of political independence in service to the American people,” Cook added.

Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell also sat through the nearly two hours of arguments in the packed courtroom.

‘Cause for removal’

Sauer told the justices that the allegations against Cook impugn her “conduct, fitness, ability or competence to serve as a governor of the Federal Reserve”.

“The American people should not have their interest rates determined by someone who was, at best, grossly negligent in obtaining favourable interest rates for herself,” Sauer said.

“Deceit or gross negligence by a financial regulator in financial transactions is cause for removal,” Sauer added, arguing that the allegations require immediate removal.

Cook has called the allegations against her a pretext to fire her over monetary policy differences as Trump heaps pressure on the central bank to cut interest rates and lashes out at Fed Chair Powell for not doing so more quickly.

Conservative Chief Justice John Roberts asked Sauer to explain whether his argument that Cook should be immediately removed applies if the basis of the mortgage allegations – that she cited two different properties as a principal residence – is an “inadvertent mistake contradicted by other documents in the record”.

Sauer responded that, even if Cook made a mistake on mortgage paper, “it is quite a big mistake”.

Roberts seemed sceptical, telling Sauer, “We can debate that.”

Paul Clement, the lawyer arguing for Cook, told the justices that the allegations against her arise from “at most an inadvertent mistake” on a mortgage application concerning a vacation property.

Trump’s move against Cook is seen as the most consequential challenge to the Fed’s independence since it was formed in 1913. Until now, no president had sought to oust a Fed official.

A Supreme Court ruling is expected by the end of June.

Pressure on Fed independence

Conservative Justice Samuel Alito expressed concern that the administration had handled the case “in a very cursory manner”. Though the case involves Trump’s asserted cause to fire Cook, Alito said, “No court has ever explored those facts. Are the mortgage applications even in the record in this case?”

“There’s a million hard questions in this case,” Alito said.

In creating the Fed, Congress passed a law called the Federal Reserve Act that included provisions meant to insulate the central bank from political interference, requiring governors to be removed by a president only “for cause,” though the law does not define the term nor establish procedures for removal.

Clement told the justices that Trump’s position would transform tenure protections for Fed governors into “at-will employment”.

“That makes no sense,” Clement said. “There’s no rational reason to go through all the trouble of creating this unique, quasi-private entity that is exempt from everything from the [congressional] appropriations process to the civil service laws, just to give it a removal restriction that is as toothless as the president imagines.”

Roberts expressed doubts about Sauer’s arguments that the president’s assertion of a cause is not reviewable, or that judges cannot reinstate a fired officer.

Conservative Justice Brett Kavanaugh expressed doubts about the real-world effects of the administration’s arguments.

“Your position,” Kavanaugh told Sauer, “that there’s no judicial review, no process required, no remedy available, very low bar for cause that the president alone determines – I mean, that would weaken, if not shatter, the independence of the Federal Reserve.”

Conservative Justice Amy Coney Barrett also questioned why the Trump administration has denied Cook a hearing to defend herself, saying that it “would not have been that big of a deal” for Trump to sit down with Cook and lay out the alleged evidence against her.

Barrett also asked Sauer about the practical implications of allowing Trump’s firing of a Fed governor.

“We have amicus [friend-of-the-court] briefs from economists who tell us that if Governor Cook is [fired], that would trigger a recession. How should we think about the public interest in a case like this?” Barrett asked, adding: “If there is a risk [at this preliminary stage of the case], doesn’t that counsel caution on our part?”

Sauer said that Cook was notified in August of her termination, and that has not affected the markets. Sauer urged the justices to weigh the predictions of doom for the US economy by economists in briefs submitted in the case supportive of Cook with a “jaundiced eye”.

US District Judge Jia Cobb in September ruled that Trump’s attempt to remove Cook without notice or a hearing likely violated her right to due process under the US Constitution’s Fifth Amendment. Cobb also found that the mortgage fraud allegations likely were not a legally sufficient cause to remove a Fed governor under the law, noting that the alleged conduct occurred before she served in the Fed post.

The US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit declined Trump’s request to put Cobb’s order on hold.

‘You’re fired’

Conservative and liberal justices alike posed sharp questions to Sauer on his contention that Cook was not entitled to formal notice and a hearing before removal by the president.

Conservative Justice Neil Gorsuch asked Sauer what such a hearing would look like and whether Cook would have a right to legal counsel.

Sauer responded that the court in the past has been very reluctant to “dictate procedures to the president” and that it would be up to Trump to decide.

“Calling Ms. Cook into the [White House] Roosevelt Room, sitting across a conference table, listening for, I don’t know how long, how much evidence is a lawyer required, and then making a decision? Could that suffice?” Gorsuch asked, adding: “Just a meeting across a conference table finished with, ‘You’re fired’?”

Conservative Justice Clarence Thomas asked Sauer on what basis the justices should conclude that the Fed is “an executive branch agency and hence that the president does have a removal authority”.

“There’s an academic dispute about whether or not the Federal Reserve’s Open Market operations constitute executive power or something else, essentially private conduct. However, Congress has over the years kind of packed on traditional executive powers on the Federal Reserve,” Sauer replied.

As a Fed governor, Cook helps set US monetary policy with the rest of the central bank’s seven-member board and the heads of the 12 regional Fed banks. Her term in the job runs to 2038. Cook was appointed in 2022 by Democratic former US President Joe Biden and is the first Black woman to serve in the post.

Liberal Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson pressed Sauer to reconcile two seemingly conflicting positions: his claim that the president has broad discretion to remove a Fed governor, and his recognition that Congress included tenure protections for Fed governors to shield the Fed’s independence from White House interference.

“How does that further the aims of the statute?” Jackson asked.

Alito voiced scepticism toward Clement’s argument that a Fed governor’s conduct before taking office cannot provide a basis for removal by the president, asking Cook’s attorney to address a series of increasingly egregious hypothetical scenarios.

“How about if, after the person assumes office, videos are disclosed in which the office holder is expressing deep admiration for Hitler or for the Klan?” Alito asked.

The president sought to fire Cook on August 25 by posting a termination letter on social media citing the mortgage fraud allegations disclosed by Federal Housing Finance Agency Director Bill Pulte, a Trump appointee.