Category World News

More than 1,350 US State Department employees have been fired in a major diplomatic shake-up ordered by President Donald Trump, in a move critics predict would curb the United States’ influence around the world.

Friday’s mass layoff, which affect 1,107 civil service and 246 foreign service officers based in the United States, come at a time when Washington is grappling with multiple crises on the world stage: Russia’s war in Ukraine, the almost two-year-long Gaza conflict, and the Middle East on edge due to high tension between Israel and Iran.

Diplomats and other staff clapped out departing colleagues in emotional scenes at the Washington headquarters of the department, which runs US foreign policy and the global network of embassies.

Some were crying as they walked out with boxes of belongings.

“It’s just heartbreaking to stand outside these doors right now and see people coming out in tears, because all they wanted to do was serve this country,” said US Senator Andy Kim, a New Jersey Democrat who worked as a civilian adviser for the State Department in Afghanistan during the administration of former President Barack Obama.

The layoffs at the department came three days after the Supreme Court cleared the way for the Trump administration to begin carrying out its plan to gut entire government positions.

The conservative-dominated top court lifted a temporary block imposed by a lower court on Trump’s plans to lay off potentially tens of thousands of employees.

The 79-year-old Republican says he wants to dismantle what he calls the “deep state”. Since taking office in January, he has worked quickly to install fierce personal loyalists and to fire swaths of veteran government workers.

Trump’s Secretary of State Marco Rubio said the foreign policy department is too cumbersome and requires thinning out of some 15 percent.

“It’s not a consequence of trying to get rid of people. But if you close the bureau, you don’t need those positions,” Rubio told reporters on the sidelines of his ASEAN meeting in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. “Understand that some of these are positions that are being eliminated, not people.”

The American Foreign Service Association (AFSA) – the union representing State Department employees – condemned the “catastrophic blow to our national interests”.

“We oppose this decision in the strongest terms.”

The State Department employed more than 80,000 people worldwide last year, according to a fact sheet, with about 17,700 in domestic roles.

The US Agency for International Development (USAID), long the primary vehicle to provide US humanitarian assistance around the world, has already been mostly dismantled.

According to The Washington Post, State Department employees were informed of their firings by email.

Foreign Service officers will lose their jobs 120 days after receiving the notice and will be immediately placed on administrative leave, while civil service employees will be separated after 60 days, the newspaper said.

Ned Price, who served as State Department spokesman under former Democratic President Joe Biden, condemned what he called haphazard firings.

Here is how things stand on Saturday, July 12:

Fighting

• Nine people were injured in Kharkiv, and an apartment building was also damaged in Russian attacks over the past day, while one person was killed and five others injured as a result of various Russian attacks in the surrounding region, governor Oleh Syniehubov said.
• Russia’s Defence Ministry said its forces had taken the village of Zelena Dolyna in Donetsk, northeast of the cities of Sloviansk and Kramatorsk, as their troops move westward.

Politics and diplomacy

• After North Korea, Lavrov is expected to travel to China to attend the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation meeting, which is set to take place on Monday and Tuesday.
• Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov has described as “unacceptable” French President Emmanuel Macron’s proposal to send a peacekeeping force to Ukraine should Moscow and Kyiv agree to an elusive ceasefire. He also accused European leaders of a “pattern of militaristic anti-Russian sentiment”.
• The United Nations trade and development agency, UNCTAD, has announced that its agreement with Moscow to facilitate exports of Russian foodstuffs and fertiliser to international markets in a bid to rein in global food prices “will not be renewed” when it expires on July 22, citing disagreements.

Weapons

• Germany has no plans to procure additional F-35 fighter jets, a Federal Ministry of Defence spokesperson said on Friday, denying a Politico report that the country planned to grow its planned fleet to 50 amid the ongoing Russia-Ukraine war.
• NATO will need more long-range missiles in its arsenal to deter Russia from attacking Europe because Moscow is expected to increase production of long-range weapons, US Army Major-General John Rafferty told the Reuters news agency.
• Kyiv will allocate 260 million hryvnias ($6.2m) for a drone interceptor programme to defend the capital’s skies from Russian drones, city authorities said.

The United States is once again delivering military supplies to Ukraine and will also be sending its special envoy, Keith Kellogg, to Kyiv next week, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has said.

In his nightly address on Friday evening, Ukraine’s leader said that US aid shipments had been restored, following the Pentagon’s decision to briefly halt the delivery of certain weapons to Kyiv.

“We have received political signals at the highest level – good signals – including from the United States, from our European friends,” he said.

Zelenskyy added that his country was working with its allies “on new supplies, increased weapons production in Ukraine and better support for our army”.

“Next week, we will continue working with the US side on a military level, including between our military and General Kellogg,” he said.

At the start of July, the Trump administration paused shipments of weapons to Ukraine, including air defence missiles, over fears that its own stockpiles were dwindling.

The halt coincided with a spike in Russia’s aerial bombardment of Ukraine, with Moscow’s military firing 728 drones and 13 missiles against it on Wednesday, the largest daily total in more than three years of war.

The US military aid pause also came as Ukraine suffered its highest number of monthly civilian casualties in the entire war. In June, 232 people were killed and 1,343 injured, according to the human rights mission in Ukraine.

After announcing earlier this week that the US would resume shipments to Kyiv, US President Donald Trump said on Thursday that his country was sending weapons to NATO, which could then be sent on to Ukraine by its member states.

US Secretary of State Marco Rubio confirmed on Friday that European nations could give some of their military supplies to Kyiv and order replacements from the US.

“It’s a lot faster to move something, for example, from Germany to Ukraine than it is to order it from a [US] factory and get it there,” Rubio said during a visit to Malaysia.

Meanwhile, on the front line, the Russian military struck Ukraine’s southern port city of Odesa on Friday morning, injuring at least eight people, according to Ukrainian local officials.

Overnight Russian attacks on eastern Ukraine also injured nine and forced the evacuation of a maternity centre in Kharkiv, President Zelenskyy said.

Drone attacks, shelling

Meanwhile, Russian officials noted that Ukrainian drone and shelling attacks had killed three people in the Russian regions of Belgorod, Lipetsk and Tula on Friday.

The Ukrainian military said on Telegram that it had targeted a Russian fighter aircraft plant in the Moscow region and a missile production facility in the Tula region on Friday.

Both drone attacks caused explosions and fires, Ukraine added.

The US’s decision to resume aid deliveries to Ukraine comes as Trump has signalled a growing impatience with Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Amid an apparent thaw in relations, Rubio met his Russian counterpart Sergey Lavrov in Malaysia on Friday. “We are talking, and that is a start,” Rubio said.

The United Nations cultural organisation has added a remote Aboriginal site featuring one million carvings that potentially date back 50,000 years to its World Heritage list.

Located on the Burrup peninsula in Western Australia, Murujuga is home to the Mardudunera people, who declared themselves “overjoyed” when UNESCO gave the ancient site a coveted place on its list on Friday.

“These carvings are what our ancestors left here for us to learn and keep their knowledge and keep our culture thriving through these sacred sites,” said Mark Clifton, a member of the Aboriginal delegation meeting with UNESCO representatives in Paris.

Environmental and Indigenous organisations argue that the presence of mining groups emitting industrial emissions has already caused damage to the ancient site.

Benjamin Smith, a rock art specialist at the University of Western Australia, said Murujuga was “possibly the most important rock art site in the world”, but that mining activity was causing the rock art to “break down”.

“We should be looking after it,” he said.

Australian company Woodside Energy, which operates an industrial complex in the area, told news agency AFP that it recognised Murujuga as “one of Australia’s most culturally significant landscapes” and that it was taking “proactive steps … to ensure we manage our impacts responsibly”.

Delegation leader Raelene Cooper said the UNESCO listing sent “a clear signal to the Australian Government and Woodside that things need to change”.

Making the UNESCO’s heritage list does not in itself trigger protection for a site, but can help pressure national governments into taking action.

African heritage boosted

Cameroon’s Mandara Mountains and Malawi’s Mount Mulanje were also added to the latest edition of the UNESCO World Heritage list.

UNESCO Director-General Audrey Azoulay has presented Africa as a priority during her two terms in office, although the continent remains underrepresented.

The Diy-Gid-Biy landscape of the Mandara Mountains, in the far north of Cameroon, consists of archaeological sites, probably created between the 12th and 17th centuries.

Malawi’s Mount Mulanje, in the south of the country, is considered a sacred place inhabited by gods, spirits and ancestors.

UNESCO is also considering applications from two other African countries, namely the Gola Tiwai forests in Sierra Leone and the biosphere reserve of the Bijagos Archipelago in Guinea-Bissau.

Fuel control switches to the engines of an Air India flight that crashed shortly after takeoff last month were moved from the “run” to the “cutoff” position moments before impact, according to a preliminary report.

The report, issued by India’s Aircraft Accident Investigation Bureau (AAIB) early on Saturday, did not offer any conclusions or apportion blame for the June 12 disaster that killed 260 people in the plane and on the ground, but said the shift occurred three seconds after takeoff.

After the switches flipped, the Boeing 787 Dreamliner immediately began to lose thrust and sink down, according to the report.

One pilot can be heard on the cockpit voice recorder asking the other why he cut off the fuel. “The other pilot responded that he did not do so,” the report said.

It did not identify which remarks were made by the flight’s captain and which by the first officer, nor which pilot transmitted “Mayday, Mayday, Mayday” just before the crash.

The preliminary report also does not say how the switch could have flipped to the cutoff position on the London-bound flight from the Indian city of Ahmedabad.

United States aviation safety expert John Cox said a pilot would not be able to accidentally move the fuel switches that feed the engines.

“You can’t bump them and they move,” he told the Reuters news agency.

Flipping to cutoff almost immediately cuts the engines. It is most often used to turn engines off once a plane has arrived at its airport gate and in certain emergency situations, such as an engine fire. The report does not indicate there was any emergency requiring an engine cutoff.

“At this stage of investigation, there are no recommended actions to Boeing 787-8 and/or GE GEnx-1B engine operators and manufacturers,” India’s AAIB said.

Air India acknowledged the report in a statement on the social media site X. The carrier said it was cooperating with Indian authorities but declined further comment.

There were 242 people on board the plane, including passengers and crew. Only one, Viswashkumar Ramesh, survived.

The plane crashed in a residential area called Meghani Nagar, and 19 people on the ground were also killed.