Category World News

US judge orders release of pro-Palestinian advocate Mahmoud Khalil

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Palestinian activist Mahmoud Khalil, who has been detained by immigration authorities since March because of his involvement in Columbia University’s Palestinian rights protests, has been ordered released by a federal judge in the US.

A federal court in New Jersey, where Khalil’s attorneys are contesting his detention, made the decision to grant him bail on Friday. It is independent of the immigration court’s ongoing legal battles against his deportation.

Khalil was released on Friday, according to district court judge Michael Farbiarz, but it is not known when he will be freed. At 3:30 PM local time (19:30 GMT), the court scheduled a conference call to discuss the terms of his release.

Khalil will be moving back to New York to be with his family, according to the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), which has been lobbying for him.

According to ACLU lawyer Noor Zafar, who spoke in a statement about the US constitutional provision protecting free speech, “This day is a joyous day for Mahmoud, for his family, and for everyone’s First Amendment rights.”

The government has continued to punish Mahmoud for expressing his political views about Palestine since he was detained in the first instance in March. However, today’s ruling underscores a fundamental First Amendment tenet: “The government cannot violate immigration law to defame speech.”

He was the first activist to be detained by President Donald Trump’s administration, who oversaw his illegal immigration status.

His case attracted national attention, particularly after the authorities denied him the chance to observe the birth of his firstborn son in April.

Noor Abdalla, Khalil’s wife, said in a statement that “after more than three months, we can finally breathe a sigh of relief and know that Mahmoud is on his way home to me and Deen, who never should have been separated from his father.”

Khalil has not been charged with any crimes. Secretary of State Marco Rubio has instead chosen to rely on a flimsy immigration law provision that allows him to impose a ban on noncitizens’ removal if they are found to have “potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences” for the US.

For free speech, it’s called the “Poster child.”

The crackdown is in violation of the US Constitution’s First Amendment, according to advocates.

The Trump administration has also received criticism for holding the students hostage while allowing them to remain free while their deportation is challenged. The administration sends immigration officers, sometimes dressed up and in plainclothes, to detain the students.

Federal courts have ordered the release of a number of other students the Trump administration is looking to deport, including Mohsen Mahdawi from Columbia and Rumeysa Ozturk from Turkish Tufts University.

Ozturk was detained after co-authoring an op-ed that demanded that her school follow the student government’s recommendation to stop selling products made by Palestinians by Israelis.

Khalil’s supporters claim that his detention in rural Louisiana will prevent him from from reaching his family and lawyers and move him to a more traditional rural area. His wife, a US citizen, lived with him in New York.

Kimberly Halkett, a reporter from Washington, DC, claimed Khalil’s release is a “blow to the Trump administration,” which has argued that his detention while pursuing his immigration case must continue.

UN nuclear chief warns of disaster if Israel hits Iran’s Bushehr plant

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As the two nations continue to exchange attacks for the eighth straight day, Rafael Grossi, the head of the UN’s atomic watchdog, has warned that an Israeli attack on Iran’s Bushehr nuclear power plant could lead to a regional catastrophe.

A direct hit on Bushehr, built on the Gulf coast by the Iranian-based IAEA, would have “very high levels of radioactivity,” the director of the organization’s director said on Friday, telling the UN Security Council.

At a session of the Iran-Israel conflict emergency session, Grossi urged attendees to never launch armed attacks on nuclear facilities. “I, therefore, call for maximum restraint,” Grossi said.

In the worst case, he claimed, evacuation orders would need to be issued for areas within several hundred kilometers of the plant, including population centers in other Gulf nations.

Grossi claimed that a strike on Bushehr’s two power lines could result in the melting of the reactor core.

Authorities would have to conduct radiation monitoring over a range of hundreds of kilometers, administer iodine to populations, and possibly halt food supplies.

Grossi reiterated his desire to work with others to reach a deal and made another appeal for a diplomatic solution.

He claimed that the IAEA can guarantee that Iran will not develop nuclear weapons through a watertight inspection system.

Grossi made his remarks as Bushehr’s air defenses were activated, according to the Iranian news website Rouydad24. Initial access to no details about the alleged Israeli attack’s target was lacking.

Israel “raising the spectre of fear.”

Iran has denied the claim that Israel launched an attack on Iran last Friday, saying its nuclear program is only intended for peaceful purposes.

UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, who was also present, called on all parties to “give peace a chance” and said the Iran-Israel conflict had the potential to “ignite a fire that no one can control.”

Amir-Saeid Iravani, Iran’s UN ambassador, repeatedly emphasized the impact of Israeli bombings on the country’s citizens while displaying images of Iranian children killed in the attacks.

Iravani argued that Israel’s attacks were “gross violations of international law,” calling on the UN to intervene, and that the Security Council would “share responsibility” with the Israeli regime if it were to fall.

Danny Danon, the Israeli ambassador, later accused Iravani of “playing victim.” We make no apology for our defense. We don’t feel bad about striking Iran’s nuclear facilities. He said, “We do not make any excuses for removing the threat.”

Gabriel Elizondo, a journalist for Al Jazeera, reported from the UN’s New York headquarters that Danon had been “trying to raise the spectre of fear and trying to win more support from other nations for Israel’s actions in Iran.”

Danon, he claimed, claimed Iran had the ballistic missile capability to strike Western Europe and even the US’s east coast.

Israeli attacks on “Iranian peaceful civilian nuclear facilities” were “liable to plunge us into a hitherto unseen nuclear catastrophe,” according to Russian UN Ambassador Vasily Nebenzya.

He continued, “Israel has ignored the assessments of the specialist international agency, and it has unilaterally chosen to strike against a sovereign nation without regard for the UN Charter.”

A senior Iranian official told the Reuters news agency that, “especially now with Israel’s strikes, any proposal for zero enrichment, which would be rejected, would be rejected.”

Nuclear disaster similar to that at Chernobyl

A military spokesman disputed the claim that Iran had struck Bushehr, calling the statement “a mistake,” according to Grossi, an Israeli military official.

Grossi claimed that Bushehr, Iran’s sole nuclear power plant, had been hit, but that neither could be confirmed or refuted.

Russian nuclear energy chief Alexei Likhachev had earlier said that any attack on the plant, where hundreds of Russian specialists work, could cause a Nuclear disaster similar to that at Chernobyl.

Grossi stated via videolink that the IAEA had no knowledge of the damage being done at Fordow, Iran’s underground uranium enrichment facility.

He claimed that the Natanz and Isfahan nuclear sites, as well as the Natanz enrichment site, had not experienced nuclear fallout as a result of the attacks.

Top court revives lawsuits against Palestinian authorities from US victims

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As plaintiffs seek monetary damages for violence years ago in Israel and the occupied West Bank, the US Supreme Court has upheld a law that was passed by Congress to facilitate lawsuits brought against Palestinian authorities by Americans killed or injured in attacks abroad.

The Palestinian Authority and Palestine Liberation Organization’s right to a fair trial was violated by the US Constitution’s 9-0 ruling overturned a lower court’s ruling.

According to the ruling’s author, conservative Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts argued that the 2019 legal system adhered to the Fifth Amendment’s requirements for due process.

According to Roberts, it is permissible for the federal government to create a “clearly narrow jurisdictional provision” that ensures that Americans who have been injured or killed by terrorist acts have a legitimate forum to file a lawsuit against their rights under the Anti-Terror Act of 1990.

The lower court’s decision to downturn a law provision had been challenged by the US government and a group of American victims and their families.

Families who were named in the plaintiffs’ lawsuit in 2015 won a $655m judgment in a civil lawsuit alleging that the Palestinian organizations carried out a number of shootings and bombings in Jerusalem between 2002 and 2004. Additionally, there are relatives of Jewish settler Ari Fuld, who was fatally stabbed by a Palestinian in 2018.

Jewish settlements on Palestinian-owned land are regarded as illegal under international law, even as this decision is made.

According to Kent Yalowitz, a plaintiffs’ attorney, “the plaintiffs, US families who had loved ones killed or maimed in PLO-sponsored terror attacks, have been waiting for justice for many years.”

Yalowitz continued, “I’m very hopeful that the case will be settled without these families having to go through any more drawn-out and unnecessary litigation.”

The case was framed by Israel’s ongoing conflict with Iran and Gaza. More than 55 000 people have died and 130 000 have been wounded since the start of the Gaza war in October 2023, according to Gaza’s health ministry.

For years, US courts have been debating whether they have jurisdiction in cases involving the Palestinian Authority and PLO for legal actions taken abroad.

The PLO and the Palestinian Authority automatically “consent” to jurisdiction if they engage in certain activities in or pay Americans who attack them, according to the language at issue in the 2019 law.

In a comprehensive legal response to “halt, deter, and disrupt” acts of international terrorism that threaten the life and limb of Americans, Roberts wrote in the ruling on Friday that Congress and the president enacted the jurisdictional law based on their “considered judgment to subject the PLO and PA (Palestinian Authority) to liability in US courts.

In 2022, US District Judge Jesse Furman of New York declared that the law violated the Palestinian Authority and the PLO’s due process rights. The 2nd US Circuit Court of Appeals, which is based in New York, upheld that ruling.

The government’s appeal was initiated by President  Joe Biden’s administration, which later received support from President  Donald Trump’s administration.

Putin says Russian recession must not happen ‘under any circumstances’

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Russia’s economy must not slide into recession, President Vladimir Putin said, after economists warned for months of a slowdown in growth.

Putin told attendees, including government ministers and central bankers, at the St Petersburg International Economic Forum on Friday that some specialists and experts were “pointing to the risks of stagnation and even a recession”.

“This must not be allowed to happen under any circumstances”, he said.

“We need to pursue a competent, well-thought-out budgetary, tax and monetary policy”, he added.

Economy Minister Maxim Reshetnikov said on Thursday that the economy was on the verge of slipping into a recession, and monetary policy decisions would determine whether it falls into one or not.

In October, the Bank of Russia increased its key interest rate to the highest level since the early 2000s to curb high inflation, only to cut it by one percentage point to 20 percent earlier this month.

Moreover, economists warned for months of a slowdown in the economy, with the country posting its slowest quarterly expansion in two years during the first quarter of 2025.

However, the Kremlin said it expected the slowdown due to two years of rapid expansion as it increased military expenditure to fund its war against Ukraine.

Yet, Putin denied that the defence industry was solely driving the economy. “Yes, of course, the defence industry played its part in this regard, but so did the financial and IT industries”, he said.

He added that the economy needed “balanced growth”, calling on officials to keep a “close eye on all indicators of the health of our industries, companies and even individual enterprises”.

At the same time, Deputy Prime Minister Alexander Novak said on Friday that it was time to “cut the]interest] rate and start heating up the economy”.

German Gref, CEO of Russia’s largest lender Sberbank SBER. MM also called for faster rate cuts to incentivise companies to invest.

Growth of military industries

Putin has used the annual economic forum to highlight Russia’s economic prowess and encourage foreign investment, but Western executives shunned it since Moscow sent troops into Ukraine in 2022, leaving it to business leaders from Asia, Africa and Latin America.

The economy, hit with a slew of Western sanctions, has so far outperformed predictions. High defence spending has propelled growth and kept unemployment low despite fuelling inflation.

Large recruiting bonuses for military enlistees and death benefits for those killed in Ukraine have also put more income into the country’s poorer regions. But over the long term, inflation and a lack of foreign investments pose threats to the economy.

Economists have warned about the economy’s continuing downward pressure and the possibility that it will stagnate as a result of inadequate investment in other than the military.

Putin claimed that the expansion of military-related industries contributed to the development of modern technologies for the military.

He vowed to keep up the modernization of the military, drawing inspiration from the experiences of the conflict in Ukraine.

He declared, “We will use modern military infrastructure facilities, modernize the Russian armed forces’ combat capabilities, and equip them with the most modern technology, weapons, and equipment,” and use of new technology.