Trump says he hopes for Gaza ceasefire 'sometime next week'
WASHINGTON (AFP) The United States is pushing for a truce in Gaza by "sometime next week," US President Donald Trump said on Tuesday.The Republican leader was asked by reporters if a ceasefire in the devastating war between Israel and the Palestinians could be in place before a visit by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to the White House, set for July 7."We hope it's going to happen, and we're looking for it to happen sometime next week," Trump responded as he departed Washington for Florida. The swift resolution of Israel's 12-day war with Iran has revived hopes for a halt to the fighting in Gaza, where more than 20 months of combat have created dire humanitarian conditions for the population of more than two million.
Trump has previously urged Israel to "make the deal in Gaza," but on the ground, Israel has continued to pursue its offensive across the Palestinian territory.
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Gulf Today
an hour ago
- Gulf Today
Battles over public lands loom after sell-off proposal fails
Alex Brown, Tribune News Service Hunters, hikers and outdoors lovers of all stripes mounted a campaign in June against a Republican proposal to sell off millions of acres of federal public land. a. But even though the land sales proposal was defeated, experts say federal lands face a slew of other threats from President Donald Trump's administration. Agency leaders have proposed rolling back the 'Roadless Rule' that protects 58 million acres from logging and other uses. Trump's Justice Department has issued a legal opinion that the president is allowed to abolish national monuments. Regulators have moved to slash environmental rules to ramp up logging and oil and gas production. And Trump's cuts to the federal workforce have gutted the ranks of the agencies that manage federal lands. 'This is not over even if the sell-off proposal doesn't make it,' said John Leshy, who served as solicitor for the US Department of the Interior during the Clinton administration. 'The whole thing about leasing or selling timber or throwing them open to mining claims, that's a form of partial privatization. It's pretty much a giveaway.' Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum has repeatedly described public lands as America's 'balance sheet.' He has argued that some lands could be used to provide housing, while calling for an expansion of mining and oil and gas drilling to increase their economic output. 'President Trump's energy dominance vision will end those wars abroad, will make life more affordable for every family in America by driving down inflation,' Burgum said before his confirmation hearing. Public lands advocates are bracing for ongoing battles for the rest of Trump's term in office. They expect Republicans to add last-minute public lands amendments to other bills moving through Congress, and for land management agencies to attempt to strip protections from other federal lands. Given the vocal backlash to the initial sell-off plan, advocates expect future attempts to be shaped behind closed doors and advanced with little time for opponents to mount a defense. Meanwhile, they expect states to play a key role in shaping those battles. In Western states, where most federally owned lands are located, many leaders from both parties view public lands as special places open to all Americans and critical for clean water, wildlife and tourism. But some conservatives resent the fact that large portions of their states are managed by officials in Washington, DC, limiting development and private enterprise. Officials in some states, including Idaho, Utah and Wyoming, have pushed lawsuits or resolutions seeking to force the feds to hand over huge amounts of land. Public land experts say the lawmakers behind those efforts will likely press harder now that Trump is in the White House. Such state-level takeover attempts could shape the proposals that emerge from Trump's allies in Washington. The firestorm over federal lands exploded when US Sen. Mike Lee, a Utah Republican, introduced legislation that would force the US Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management to sell up to 3.3 million acres of land. The measure also would direct the agencies to make more than 250 million additional acres eligible for sale. 'We've never seen a threat on this magnitude ever,' said Devin O'Dea, Western policy and conservation manager with Backcountry Hunters & Anglers. 'There's been an overwhelming amount of opposition. We've seen record-breaking engagement on this issue.' Lee, a longtime federal lands opponent, claimed the lands were needed for housing and argued the government has been a poor manager of its land. 'Washington has proven time and again it can't manage this land,' Lee said in June when announcing the proposal. 'This bill puts it in better hands.' But a wide-ranging coalition of opponents argued that the proposal had no protections to ensure the lands would be used for affordable housing, and that many of the parcels eligible for sale had little housing potential. A furious social media campaign highlighted cherished hiking trails, fishing lakes and ski slopes that were in danger of being sold, urging people to call their lawmakers to oppose the measure. In recent days, Montana Republican US Sens. Steve Daines and Tim Sheehy, as well as Idaho Republican US Sens. Mike Crapo and Jim Risch, came out in opposition to the land sale proposal. That put into question whether Lee's legislation could earn even a simple majority. Then the Senate parliamentarian ruled the sell-off could not be included in the reconciliation bill without a 60-vote majority. That ruling came a day after Lee posted on social media that he would be making changes to the bill in response to concerns from Hunter Nation, a nonprofit whose board includes Donald Trump Jr. Lee released a scaled-back measure last week that would exempt national forest lands but would direct the Bureau of Land Management to sell up to 1.2 million acres. It would require land for sale to be within five miles of a population center and developed to provide housing. Public land advocates say Lee's changes did little to assuage their concerns. They argue that federal land sales or transfers should happen through the current, long-standing process, which requires local stakeholder input and directs the proceeds from land sales to be reinvested into conservation and public access on other parcels. 'It's the overwhelming belief of hunters and anglers that the budget reconciliation process is not the appropriate vehicle for public land sales,' said O'Dea, with the hunting and fishing group. On Saturday evening, Lee announced that he was withdrawing the proposal, saying that Senate rules did not allow him to include protections that land would not be sold to foreign interests. But he pledged to continue the battle over federal land ownership, working with Trump to 'put underutilised federal land to work for American families.' While the sell-off proposal aligned with some state officials' goal of taking over federal lands, some lands experts say private developers would have been the real winner. 'If the lands are transferred to the states without money, the states lose,' said Leshy, the former Interior Department official. 'It's a hit on their budget, which means they're gonna have to sell them off. If states got a significant amount of public lands, a lot of that would end up in private hands.' In Utah, where leaders have made the most aggressive push to take over federal lands, lawmakers argue that they could raise lease prices for oil and gas operations, bringing in enough revenue to cover the state's management costs. 'The policy of the state is to keep these lands open and available to the public,' Speaker Mike Schultz, a Republican, told Stateline. O'Dea pointed to an economic analysis of what it would cost Montana to take over federal lands. The report found it would cost the state $8 billion over 20 years to take on wildfire management, deferred maintenance and mine reclamation. He noted that many Western states have sold off a majority of the 'trust lands' they were granted at statehood, undermining claims that a state takeover would leave lands in the public domain. While Lee's land sales proposal has gotten the biggest headlines, public land advocates are fighting a multifront battle against the Trump administration's moves to roll back the protected status of certain lands, slash environmental rules, and expand logging, mining and drilling operations.
Gulf Today
an hour ago
- Gulf Today
Trump's ‘Bill' just put the Senate in play for Democrats
On Sunday, Sen. Thom Tillis, a North Carolina Republican, announced that he would not seek re-election. This came after numerous threats from President Donald Trump because of Tillis' opposition to the so-called "One Big, Beautiful" bill. Trump had even floated the idea of endorsing a primary challenger against Tillis. But when The Independent caught up with Tillis, he seemed sanguine about the whole affair. "I respect President Trump, I support the majority of his agenda, but I don't bow to anybody when the people of North Carolina are at risk and this bill puts them at risk," he told The Independent. Trump's decision to bash a senator from a state he won and Republicans need to keep could be seen as reckless. But it also jeopardised Republicans' chances of holding onto a Senate seat Tillis consistently won by narrow margins. Tillis simply recognised a political truth: it's nearly impossible to take away an entitlement once it is embedded in federal law and people have benefited from it. Voters tend to punish the party they see as trying to take away a benefit, particularly something as intensely personal as health care. Trump should have learned this in 2017 after he failed to pass a repeal of the Affordable Care Act, aka Obamacare, when the late Arizona Sen. John McCain delivered his dramatic thumbs down. But Trump's bulldozing style and demand for absolute fealty from Republicans means he might be jeopardising the future of the Republican majority in the Senate. Democrats already had Tillis in their crosshairs after he had voted to confirm Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and he shepherded Kash Patel's confirmation for FBI director. With an open seat, they have an even greater opportunity. A few months ago, Inside Washington listed North Carolina as the Senate seat most likely to flip. That prospect is much more likely with Tillis' departure. But Tillis is not the only swing-state Republican who faces a bind because of the bill. Inside Washington listed Susan Collins' seat in Maine as the No. 3 Senate seat most likely to flip. Collins faces a major challenge considering the bill caps the taxes on healthcare providers that states use to raise matching funds for Medicaid. As a result, Collins has put forward an amendment to increase the amount of money to shore up rural hospitals from $25 billion to $50 billion. That will certainly anger fiscal conservatives, to say nothing of Trump, despite the fact that many of his most die-hard supporters live in areas that depend on rural hospitals. Collins seems poised to run for re-election, especially after she defied gravity and beat back a Democratic challenger in 2020. But she faces a bind: if she votes yes on the bill, she will have hurt her most vulnerable voters after wringing her hands for weeks. If she opposes it, she will have crossed Trump. At age 72, choosing not to run next year is always a viable option. Republicans have 53 seats at the moment. So two seats flipping will not lose them the majority. But they also face the prospect of a bloody primary between incumbent Sen. John Cornyn and Attorney General Ken Paxton in Texas, which could create an opening for a Democrat to win in the Lone Star State. And just like how the passage of Obamacare and its ensuing aftermath led to Republicans winning Ted Kennedy's seat in Massachusetts, as well as Democratic-held seats in Arkansas, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, the vote on this piece of legislation could easily put Republicans on the defensive in states previously considered safe like Iowa, Kansas and Nebraska. A perfect example comes from recent Democratic history. When The Independent spoke with Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, the 2024 Democratic nominee for vice president, last month, he compared it to the election that sent him to Washington. "I believe in most part, in 2006 that one of the reasons I got elected to Congress in a tough district was over Social Security," Walz told The Independent. Just the year before, George W. Bush had floated an idea to gradually replace Social Security with private retirements accounts.
Gulf Today
an hour ago
- Gulf Today
Iran decries ‘destructive' conduct of IAEA chief
Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian told his French counterpart Emmanuel Macron that Tehran halted cooperation with the UN nuclear watchdog due to what he called the agency chief's 'destructive' behaviour towards the Islamic republic, his office said on Monday. 'The action taken by parliament members... is a natural response to the unjustified, unconstructive, and destructive conduct of the Director General of the International Atomic Energy Agency,' Pezeshkian told Macron in a phone call late Sunday, according to a presidency statement. On Wednesday, Iranian lawmakers voted in favour of a bill to suspend cooperation with the IAEA, citing Israel's June 13 attack on the Islamic republic and later strikes by the United States on nuclear facilities. A ceasefire between Iran and Israel took hold on June 24. Since the start of the war with Israel, Iranian officials have sharply criticised the agency for failing to condemn the strikes. Iran has also criticised the watchdog for passing a resolution on June 12 accusing it of non-compliance with its nuclear obligations. In a Sunday post on X, Macron said he called for 'respect for the ceasefire' and a return to negotiations to address 'ballistic and nuclear issues.' He further called for 'the swift resumption of the IAEA's work in Iran to ensure full transparency.' On Monday, France, Germany, and Britain condemned what they called 'threats' against the IAEA chief Rafael Grossi after Iran rejected its request to visit nuclear facilities bombed during the war. None specified which threats they were referring to, but Iran's ultra-conservative Kayhan newspaper recently claimed documents showed Grossi was an Israeli spy and should be executed. Iran has said Grossi's request to visit bombed sites signalled 'malign intent' but insisted that no threats were posed against Grossi or the agency's inspectors. On Monday, Iranian foreign ministry spokesman Esmaeil Baqaei said the Iranian parliament's decision to halt cooperation with the IAEA reflected the 'concern and anger of the Iranian public opinion.' He further criticised the United States and European powers for maintaining what he described as a 'political approach' toward Iran's nuclear programme during his weekly press conference. Baqaei also questioned how the safety of IAEA inspectors could be ensured while the extent of the damage to Iran's nuclear facilities -- targeted by Israel and the United States during the 12-day war -- remains unknown. 'One aspect of this issue is how to ensure the safety and security of the agency's inspectors, in a situation where there is still no accurate assessment of the severity of the damage,' he said. Iran's judiciary said at least 935 people were killed in the country during its 12-day war with Israel, state media reported Monday, nearly a week since a ceasefire took hold. Among the dead were 38 children and 132 women, the spokesperson, Asghar Jahangir, said. The death toll was a sharp increase from a previous Iranian health ministry tally of 610 killed in Iran before a ceasefire went into effect on Tuesday last week. Jahangir also revised the number of people killed in an Israeli strike on Tehran's Evin Prison to 79, up from 71. Israel launched the air war on June 13, attacking Iranian nuclear facilities and killing top military commanders as well as civilians in the worst blow to Iran since the 1980s war with Iraq. Iran retaliated with barrages of missiles on Israeli military sites, infrastructure and cities. The United States entered the war on June 22 with strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities. Foreign Ministry spokesperson Esmaeil Baghaei said Israel's 'act of aggression had led to many war crimes'. He said Iran would transfer evidence to international organisations which he said should hold Israel to account. 'The Zionist regime's (Israel) action was done without any reason or justification, therefore we do not believe in separating military and civilian (victims),' Baghaei told reporters at a regular press briefing. He said any 'martyr or destroyed building is an example of war crimes.' Agencies
