Category World News

Why resigning from the US government wasn’t enough for one official who stepped down.

A United States judge has issued a temporary restraining order against an effort to prevent Harvard University from enrolling foreign students.

Friday’s ruling comes in response to an emergency petition filed earlier in the day in the federal district court of Boston, Massachusetts.

In that petition, Harvard sought immediate relief after the administration of President Donald Trump barred it from using a federal government system, the Student and Exchange Visitor Program, that is required for the enrolment of international students.

US District Judge Allison Burroughs agreed with Harvard that the school and its students may suffer harm if the Trump administration’s decision is allowed to take effect. Her injunction is set to last for approximately two weeks, and she set hearing dates on May 27 and 29.

Friday’s lawsuit against the Trump administration is Harvard’s second in less than two months.

The latest is a response to a decision on Thursday announced by Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem. Her department oversees the Student and Exchange Visitor Program, and she said she is revoking Harvard’s privilege to use the system based on its failure to address Trump administration concerns.

“This administration is holding Harvard accountable for fostering violence, antisemitism, and coordinating with the Chinese Communist Party on its campus,” she wrote on social media.

The revocation means that Harvard can no longer accept foreign students. Those already enrolled will need to transfer to another school.

The move represents a major escalation in Trump’s pressure campaign against Harvard and other top US universities. He has accused schools of allowing anti-Semitism to fester, promoting “discriminatory” diversity programmes, and pushing ideological slants.

But in Friday’s lawsuit, Harvard called the Trump administration’s actions a “blatant violation” of the US Constitution and other federal laws.

Barring the prestigious Ivy League school from enrolling its international students would have an “immediate and devastating effect” on the university and the more than 7,000 visa holders in its student body, it argued.

“With the stroke of a pen, the government has sought to erase a quarter of Harvard’s student body, international students who contribute significantly to the University and its mission,” the complaint said. “Without its international students, Harvard is not Harvard.”

Trump’s current battle against higher education can be largely traced back to the pro-Palestine protests that broke out on US campuses last year, in response to Israel’s war in Gaza. Trump made cracking down on the antiwar protests a centrepiece of his 2024 re-election campaign.

While there have been instances of harassment from participants on both sides of the issue, protest organisers have rejected claims of widespread anti-Jewish sentiment. Some campus protests have even been spearheaded by Jewish students and organisations, including Jewish Voice for Peace.

Earlier this year, task forces at Harvard itself issued two reports, warning about instances of anti-Arab and anti-Muslim bias, as well as anti-Semitism.

Harvard has said it is working to address these concerns. Nevertheless, in April, Harvard became the latest school to receive a list of demands from the Trump administration.

The list included reforming its hiring and admissions practices, refusing to admit students deemed “hostile to the American values and institutions”, doing away with diversity programmes, and auditing academic programmes and centres, including several related to the Middle East.

Harvard rejected the demands and immediately faced a freeze in $2.2bn in multi-year grants and $60m in multi-year contracts. Several federal agencies have since frozen tens of millions of dollars more in grants to Harvard.

The university responded to Trump’s funding freezes with a lawsuit in April, saying the administration was violating the First Amendment of the US Constitution with its “arbitrary and capricious” cuts.

Trump has also floated revoking Harvard’s tax exempt status, and in April, Noem sent a letter to Harvard first threatening to revoke its Student and Exchange Visitor Program approval if administrators did not send information on any foreign students’ “illegal and violent activities”.

At the end of April, Harvard said it had provided all legally required information, without providing further details.

‘Irreparable harm’

Friday’s lawsuit seeks immediate relief from the Trump administration’s decision to de-certify Harvard’s ability to register foreign students, citing “irreparable harm inflicted by this lawless action”.

In response to the complaint, White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson accused the school of doing too little to address the Trump administration’s concerns.

“If only Harvard cared this much about ending the scourge of anti-American, anti-Semitic, pro-terrorist agitators on their campus, they wouldn’t be in this situation to begin with,” Jackson said.

“Harvard should spend their time and resources on creating a safe campus environment instead of filing frivolous lawsuits,” she added.

In a letter to the Harvard community, school President Alan Garber framed Trump’s attack on Harvard’s foreign student body as part of “a series of government actions to retaliate against Harvard for our refusal to surrender our academic independence”.

Garber described the de-certification as evidence of the “federal government’s illegal assertion of control over our curriculum, our faculty, and our student body”.

In its complaint, Harvard said the de-certification has thrown “countless” academic programmes, clinics, courses and research laboratories into disarray.

Harvard enrolled nearly 6,800 international students in its current school year, equal to 27 percent of its total enrolment.

On Thursday, Noem also said Harvard could avoid the move if it turned over more information on foreign students, including video or audio of their protest activity over the past five years.

“The picture of the world’s richest man killing the world’s poorest children is not a pretty one,” Microsoft founder and billionaire philanthropist Bill Gates said of Elon Musk during an interview with The Financial Times earlier this month. Gates indirectly referenced Musk’s role in gutting the federal agency United States Aid for International Development (USAID), where billions of dollars had gone towards global poverty reduction and the eradication of diseases for decades. That is, until Musk led the charge for President Donald Trump’s unofficial Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) to dismantle USAID in February. “And unless we reverse pretty quickly, that’ll be over a million additional deaths” of children worldwide, Gates said in an interview on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, expanding on his Financial Times comments.

Despite what Gates and others may think, Musk’s disdain for human lives isn’t limited to his role in leading DOGE. Nor is this just Musk’s thinking. Trump has deployed in his administration and in his relationships with billionaires a group of the old and new eugenicists. Some of these leading men believe in a philosophy known as longtermism. For humanity to survive and spread itself across the galaxy in its trillions in the eons to come, men like them must steer the way. For it is they who must make the tough decisions of allowing a significant number of present-day humans to die off to protect this distant future. And with Trump, men like Musk are guiding US domestic and foreign policies in eugenicist and longtermist ways, leaving millions in actual or potential peril.

Perhaps the leading example of old-style eugenicist thinking in Trump’s orbit is Robert F Kennedy Jr, currently serving as US Secretary for Health and Human Services (HHS). There are two positions he publicly holds which truly show Kennedy to be a 20th-century eugenicist. One is his stance against vaccines over the years, especially the MMR (measles, mumps, and rubella). In the 1990s, a handful of scientists once claimed MMR was responsible for an uptick in the frequency of doctors diagnosing children as autistic. Even though numerous studies have refuted these claims, anti-vaccine advocates like Kennedy continue to undermine public confidence in vaccine programmes. “They get the shot, that night they have a fever of a hundred and three, they go to sleep, and three months later their brain is gone. This is a Holocaust, what this is doing to our country,” Kennedy said in 2015 of MMR and his belief that it can cause autism. He later apologised for his offensive use of autism in comparison with the Holocaust.

The other is his ableism, wrapped as it is in racism. In April, Kennedy decried the increasing prevalence of autism in the US as something that “destroys families,” adding that children who “regressed … into autism … will never pay taxes, they’ll never hold a job, they’ll never play baseball, they’ll never write a poem, they’ll never go out on a date. Many of them will never use a toilet unassisted.”

Kennedy has refused to believe the data, that autism is not spreading like a disease, but instead, society has the tools to more easily identify people who are on the spectrum socially and neurologically, people who otherwise lead active lives. Similarly, in 2023, Kennedy spread an anti-vaccine rumour that was ableist, racist and conspiratorial in nature. “COVID-19 is targeted to attack Caucasians and Black people. The people who are most immune are Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese,” Kennedy said on video in July 2023 at a fundraiser for his aborted 2024 presidential run. Not only is there no evidence of a conspiracy to infect certain white and Black folk with COVID. There is no evidence to suggest that any particular group is immune to the disease. Kennedy’s racism apparently is also anti-Jewish in nature.

Earlier this month, Kennedy announced that he had authorised Medicaid and Medicare to share private data with the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in building a national database of autistic recipients “to uncover the root causes of autism” – which he considers a “preventable disease” – by September. Above and beyond his other statements, this decision smacks of the work of eugenicists from the previous century. Except that state governments across the US and fascist governments like Nazis used such lists to institutionalise those with autism and other disabilities from society. In the US, sterilisation was the method used in an attempt to protect the collective gene pool from contamination, while Nazi Germany famously used euthanasia. Clearly, Kennedy is an old-style anti-vaccine, ableist and racist eugenicist.

The new eugenics of the 21st century, though, is longtermism. Longtermism is really a 21st-century version of Social Darwinism’s “survival of the fittest” and the eugenics movement it spawned. Longtermism is not specifically about preserving a master white race. Yet longtermism also plays well within the eugenics sandbox. Longtermism’s advocates are at work to save humanity from extinction by making humans better and by making better humans. But this “betterment” comes with two caveats. One is that effective altruists – white men like Elon Musk, Bill Gates, or Jeff Bezos, for example – are fittest to act on behalf of future humanity. Two, this requires that they make decisions about whole classes of people whose use of the planet’s resources might lead to humanity’s demise. Billions of present-day humans might ultimately be sacrificed to save humanity’s distant future.

Musk expressed his fundamental belief in who deserves to live and die in a three-hour interview on the Joe Rogan podcast back in February. “So that we’ve got civilizational suicidal empathy going on … The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy. The empathy exploit. They’re exploiting a bug in Western civilization, which is the empathy response.” According to Musk, if the “they” do not “have empathy for civilization as a whole, the “they” have committed themselves “to a civilizational suicide”. The “they” Musk and Rogan referred to for three hours included undocumented migrants, white liberals and progressives, Democrats, and LGBTQIA folx.

There are other like-minded longtermists in Trump’s world, including tech billionaire Peter Thiel, who believe that Social Security is an “intergenerational Ponzi scheme”. Thiel’s is a nod towards Musk’s DOGE work against providing social welfare for elderly humans, a signal that Trump’s regime is developing ageist and ableist policies in the name of cutting wasteful spending, or eugenicist policies, really. Policies that could kill many elderly and disabled Americans.

Together with Trump, Kennedy and Musk have done their level best to remake the federal government in their own eugenicist images. Kennedy has acted in connection with Musk’s DOGE in cutting off funds for HHS, NIH, and other programmes around vaccination, disease and epidemic prevention, and cancer research since assuming his post in mid-February. There is essentially a gag order in place preventing Centers for Disease Control officials from discussing the spread of strains of bird flu among animals and humans working in the poultry industry. When pressed at a May 14 congressional hearing about his work as HHS secretary to gut the agency, Kennedy admitted that he would still “probably” vaccinate his children “for measles” in 2025. Yet in that same hearing, Kennedy again cast doubt on the MMR vaccine, a hint towards his ableist stance against people with autism. This while the US, and especially the state of Texas, are amid one of the worst measles outbreaks in the past 50 years. So far there have been over 1,000 cases, predominantly of unvaccinated children, two of whom have died.

This renewed commitment to limit federal government resources dedicated towards the health and safety of all Americans has eugenics and longtermism written all over it. The work of Musk and Kennedy, in particular, have undermined the role of the federal government in the public eye. Their reluctance to help people in need and their belief that those with physical and intellectual disabilities (particularly those who are elderly or autistic) are a drain on economic resources are all part of a view that many Americans are expendable, even unto death.

The resurgence of conflict in eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo has drawn renewed international attention following M23’s swift capture of Goma and Bukavu in late January 2025. In response, global actors have called for an immediate ceasefire and direct negotiations. Notably, Qatar and the United States have stepped forward as emerging mediators. This new momentum offers a rare opportunity to revisit the shortcomings of past mediation efforts – particularly failures in disarmament, demobilisation and reintegration (DDR), wealth-sharing, and regional consensus. Any new diplomatic initiative must prioritise these elements to forge a durable settlement and lasting regional stability.

To achieve a sustainable and enduring peace in eastern DRC, it is essential to address the root causes of the conflict. The region’s vast deposits of natural resources – especially rare earth minerals – have attracted international, regional and local actors competing for control, fuelling instability. Compounding this is the Congolese central government’s limited capacity to govern the eastern provinces, enabling the proliferation of armed groups with diverse allegiances. Ethnic tensions further exacerbate the crisis, particularly since the 1994 Rwandan genocide, after which the arrival of Hutu refugees and the formation of hostile militias heightened insecurity and cross-border conflict.

While regional dynamics, including Rwandan involvement, are undeniably significant, attributing the conflict solely to Rwanda risks oversimplification. Such narratives obscure the DRC’s longstanding structural inequalities, particularly the marginalisation of Congolese Tutsi communities. A durable peace must engage with these internal dynamics by ensuring the meaningful inclusion of Congolese Tutsi in the national political framework and addressing their grievances through equitable and just mechanisms.

Despite repeated international engagement, past mediation efforts in eastern DRC – from the Pretoria Agreement to the 2009 peace accords – have consistently failed to deliver lasting peace. These initiatives were undermined by structural weaknesses that eroded both their credibility and effectiveness.

A central flaw has been the absence of credible enforcement mechanisms. Most agreements relied on voluntary compliance and lacked robust, impartial monitoring frameworks capable of verifying implementation or deterring violations. Where monitoring mechanisms existed, they were often under-resourced, poorly coordinated, or perceived as biased. The international community’s inconsistent attention and limited political will to exert sustained pressure further undermined these efforts. In the absence of meaningful accountability, armed groups and political elites repeatedly violated agreements without consequence, fuelling a cycle of impunity and renewed violence.

Equally problematic has been the exclusionary nature of the peace processes. Negotiations were often dominated by political and military elites, sidelining civil society, grassroots communities, and particularly women – actors essential for building sustainable peace. Without broad-based participation, the accords failed to reflect the realities on the ground or earn the trust of local populations.

Moreover, these efforts largely ignored the root causes of the conflict, such as land disputes, ethnic marginalisation, governance failures and competition over natural resources. By prioritising short-term ceasefires and elite power-sharing arrangements, mediators overlooked the deeper structural issues that drive instability.

DDR programs – vital to breaking the conflict cycle – have also been inadequately designed and poorly executed. Many former combatants were left without viable livelihoods, creating fertile ground for re-recruitment into armed groups and further violence.

Crucially, these flaws were compounded by a lack of political will within the Congolese government. Successive administrations have, at times, instrumentalised peace talks to consolidate power rather than to advance genuine reform, undermining implementation and eroding public confidence.

More recent efforts, such as the Luanda and Nairobi processes, aimed to revive political dialogue and de-escalate tensions. However, they too have struggled to gain legitimacy. Critics argue that both initiatives were top-down, narrowly political and failed to include the voices of those most affected by the conflict. Civil society actors and marginalised communities perceived these dialogues as superficial and disconnected from local realities.

These processes also fell short in addressing the underlying drivers of violence – displacement, land ownership disputes, poor governance and the reintegration of ex-combatants. Without credible mechanisms for local participation or structural reform, the Luanda and Nairobi processes came to be seen more as diplomatic performances than genuine pathways to peace.

Taken together, these recurring shortcomings explain why international mediation efforts in DRC have largely failed. For any new initiative – including those led by Qatar and the United States – to succeed, it must move beyond these limitations and embrace a more inclusive, accountable and locally rooted approach.

The latest round of international facilitation – led by the United States and Qatar, alongside African-led efforts by the East African Community (EAC) and the Southern African Development Community (SADC) under Togolese President Faure Gnassingbe – offers renewed potential for meaningful progress. However, success will depend on whether these efforts can overcome the systemic failures that have plagued previous mediation attempts.

To chart a more effective and durable path to peace, Qatari and American engagement should be guided by three core principles drawn from past experience:

First, prioritise inclusive participation. Previous peace processes were largely elite-driven, involving governments and armed groups while excluding civil society, women and affected communities. This lack of inclusivity weakened legitimacy and failed to address the grievances of those most impacted by violence. A credible mediation process must include these actors to build a broad-based coalition for peace and ensure that negotiated outcomes reflect the lived realities of eastern DRC communities.

Second, address the root causes of the conflict – not just its symptoms. Earlier efforts focused narrowly on ceasefires and power-sharing, without tackling the structural drivers of instability. Effective mediation must engage with unresolved land disputes, ethnic marginalization, governance failures and the socioeconomic reintegration of former combatants. Without addressing these underlying issues, any agreement will be fragile and short-lived.

Third, establish credible enforcement and accountability mechanisms. One of the most persistent weaknesses of past agreements has been the absence of strong implementation tools. Agreements often lacked independent monitoring bodies, clear benchmarks and consequences for violations. The international community, including Qatar and the United States, must commit to sustained diplomatic pressure and support mechanisms that can ensure compliance and respond decisively to breaches. Without this, the risk of relapse into violence remains high.

By adopting these principles, current mediation efforts stand a greater chance of breaking the cycle of failed peace initiatives and laying the groundwork for a more just and lasting resolution in eastern DRC.

The crisis has once again reached a critical juncture. The involvement of new actors such as Qatar and the United States, working alongside African regional mechanisms, presents a rare opportunity to reset the approach to peacebuilding. By learning from past failures and committing to an inclusive, root cause oriented, and enforceable mediation framework, these efforts can move beyond temporary fixes and lay the foundation for a durable peace – one that finally addresses the aspirations and grievances of the Congolese people.

Aid agencies have continued to criticise Israel after it announced it had sent a small convoy of trucks carrying vital supplies into Gaza.

COGAT, the Israeli military body responsible for civil affairs in the occupied Palestinian territory, confirmed on Friday that 107 trucks had entered the enclave the previous day, loaded with flour, medicine and equipment.

However, aid agencies and others have condemned Israel’s policy to allow only minimal volumes of aid into Gaza, which the Israeli military has been blockading for close to three months.

They insist that the supplies are nowhere near enough for the millions trapped in the territory, and add that even the small amounts making it in are not making it to people due to Israeli attacks and looting.

The shipments follow Israel’s announcement on Sunday that it would permit “minimal” humanitarian aid into the territory for the first time since implementing a total blockade in early March.

Amid warnings of mounting famine and humanitarian disaster, Israel said that the decision to allow aid into Gaza was driven by diplomatic concerns.

Global outrage has been rising as the 11-week siege has progressed, leaving Gaza’s 2.1 million people on the brink of starvation, with medicine and fuel supplies exhausted.

The United Nations’ Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator Tom Fletcher has branded the aid deliveries “a drop in the ocean” and warned that far greater access is required to address the escalating crisis.

The UN estimates that at least 500 trucks of aid are needed daily. Since Monday’s announcement, only 300 trucks have made it in, including Thursday’s convoy, according to COGAT.

Attacks and looting

Aid agencies also state that even the aid that is being allowed into Gaza is not reaching people.

“Significant challenges in loading and dispatching goods remain due to insecurity, the risk of looting, delays in coordination approvals and inappropriate routes being provided by Israeli forces that are not viable for the movement of cargo,” the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) said.

Hamas officials said on Friday that Israeli air strikes had killed at least six Palestinians guarding aid trucks against looters.

An umbrella network of Palestinian aid groups said that just 119 aid trucks have entered Gaza since Israel eased its blockade on Monday, and that distribution has been hampered by looting, including by armed groups of men.

“They stole food meant for children and families suffering from severe hunger,” the network said in a statement.

The UN’s World Food Programme said on Friday that 15 of its trucks were looted in southern Gaza while en route to WFP-supported bakeries.

‘Most people living off food scraps’

Inside Gaza, the situation continues to deteriorate.

Dr Ahmed al-Farrah of Nasser Hospital told Al Jazeera that the health system is overwhelmed.

“Most people now live off food scraps of what they had in stock,” he said. “I predict there will be many victims because of food insecurity.”

Palestinian Health Ministry officials said on Thursday that at least 29 children and elderly people have died in recent days from starvation-related causes, with thousands more at risk.

UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres’s  spokesperson said aid is being distributed via UN mechanisms, but stressed the amount reaching Gaza “is not enough”.

The leaders of Britain, France and Canada warned Israel on Monday their countries would take action, including possible sanctions, if Israel did not lift aid restrictions.

“The Israeli Government’s denial of essential humanitarian assistance to the civilian population is unacceptable and risks breaching International Humanitarian Law,” a joint statement released by the British government said.

“We will not hesitate to take further action, including targeted sanctions,” it added.