‘Rewarding Hamas': Trump slams allies' push for Palestinian statehood
Recent announcements by some of Washington's closest allies have only hardened the US president's stance against the move.
While Trump slammed Canada for announcing its intention to recognise Palestinian statehood at a United Nations meeting in September, he has been milder in his criticism of French President Emmanuel Macron and British Prime Minister Keir Starmer.
He dismissed Macron's decision, which got the ball rolling last week for other countries to consider similar steps, saying the statement did not 'matter' and 'doesn't carry much weight.'
Starmer this week said the UK will formally recognise a Palestinian state in September unless Israel takes 'substantive' steps, including agreeing to a ceasefire in Gaza.
Asked about Britain's decision after a trip to Scotland and talks with Starmer, Trump said he was 'not in that camp, to be honest.'
According to Leavitt, Trump is now more critical of the push for recognition and believes it amounts to 'rewarding Hamas at a time where Hamas is the true impediment to a cease fire and to the release of all of the hostages.' — AFP
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The Star
3 hours ago
- The Star
The US said it had no choice but to deport them to a third country. Then it sent them home
WASHINGTON (Reuters) -The Trump administration says that some serious criminals need to be deported to third countries because even their home countries won't accept them. But a review of recent cases shows that at leastfive men threatened with such a fate were sent to their native countries within weeks. President Donald Trump aims to deport millions of immigrants in the U.S. illegally and his administration has sought to ramp up removals to third countries, including sending convicted criminals to South Sudan and Eswatini, formerly known as Swaziland, two sub-Saharan African nations. Immigrants convicted of crimes typically first serve their U.S. sentences before being deported. This appeared to be the case with the eight men deported toSouth Sudan and five to Eswatini, although some had been released years earlier. The U.S. Department of Homeland Security said in June that third-country deportations allow them to deport people 'so uniquely barbaric that their own countries won't take them back.' Critics have countered that it's not clear the U.S. tried to return the men deported to South Sudan and Eswatini to their home countries and that the deportations were unnecessarily cruel. Reuters found that at least five men threatened with deportation to Libya in May were sent to their home countries weeks later, according to interviews with two of the men, a family member and attorneys. After a U.S. judge blocked the Trump administration from sending them to Libya, two men from Vietnam, two men from Laos and a man from Mexico were all deported to their home nations. The deportations have not previously been reported. DHS did not comment on the removals. Reuters could not determine if their home countries initially refused to take them or why the U.S. tried to send them to Libya. DHS spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin contested that the home countries of criminals deported to third countries were willing to take them back, but did not provide details on any attempts to return the five men home before they were threatened with deportation to Libya. 'If you come to our country illegally and break our laws, you could end up in CECOT, Alligator Alcatraz, Guantanamo Bay, or South Sudan or another third country,' McLaughlin said in a statement, referencing El Salvador's maximum-security prison and a detention center in the subtropical Florida Everglades. FAR FROM HOME DHS did not respond to a request for the number of third-country deportations since Trump took office on January 20, although there have been thousands to Mexico and hundreds to other countries. The eight men sent to South Sudan were from Cuba, Laos, Mexico, Myanmar, South Sudan and Vietnam, according to DHS. The man DHS said was from South Sudan had a deportation order to Sudan, according to a court filing. The five men sent to Eswatini were from Cuba, Jamaica, Laos, Vietnam and Yemen, according to DHS. White House spokeswoman Abigail Jackson said the men deported to South Sudan and Eswatini were 'the worst of the worst' and included people convicted in the United States of child sex abuse and murder. 'American communities are safer with these heinous illegal criminals gone,' Jackson said in a statement. The Laos government did not respond to requests for comment regarding the men threatened with deportation to Libya and those deported to South Sudan and Eswatini. Vietnam's foreign ministry spokesperson said on July 17 that the government was verifying information regarding the South Sudan deportation but did not provide additional comment to Reuters. The government of Mexico did not comment. The Trump administration acknowledged in a May 22 court filing that the man from Myanmar had valid travel documents to return to his home country but he was deported to South Sudan said the man had been convicted of sexual assault involving a victim mentally and physically incapable of resisting. Eswatini's government said on Tuesday that it was still holding the five migrants sent there in isolated prison units under the deal with the Trump administration. 'A VERY RANDOM OUTCOME' The Supreme Court in June allowed the Trump administration to deport migrants to third countrieswithout giving them a chance to show they could be harmed. But the legality of the removals is still being contested in a federal lawsuit in Boston, a case that could potentially wind its way back to the conservative-leaning high court. Critics say the removals aim to stoke fear among migrants and encourage them to 'self deport' to their home countries rather than be sent to distant countries they have no connection with. 'This is a message that you may end up with a very random outcome that you're going to like a lot less than if you elect to leave under your own steam,' said Michelle Mittelstadt, communications director for the non-partisan Migration Policy Institute. Internal U.S. immigration enforcement guidance issued in July said migrants could be deported to countries that had not provided diplomatic assurances of their safety in as little as six hours. While the administration has highlighted the deportations of convicted criminals to African countries, it has also sent asylum-seeking Afghans, Russians and others to Panama and Costa Rica. The Trump administration deported more than 200 Venezuelans accused of being gang members to El Salvador in March, where they were held in the country's CECOT prison without access to attorneys until they were released in a prisoner swap last month. More than 5,700 non-Mexican migrants have been deported to Mexico since Trump took office, according to Mexican government data, continuing a policy that beganunder former President Joe Biden. The fact that one Mexican man was deported to South Sudan and another threatened with deportation to Libya suggests that the Trump administration did not try to send them to their home countries, according to Trina Realmuto, executive director at the pro-immigrant National Immigration Litigation Alliance. 'Mexico historically accepts back its own citizens,' said Realmuto, one of the attorneys representing migrants in the lawsuit contesting third-country deportations. The eight men deported to South Sudan included Mexican national Jesus Munoz Gutierrez, who had served a sentence in the U.S. for second-degree murder and was directly taken into federal immigration custody afterward, according to Realmuto. Court records show Munoz stabbed and killed a roommateduring a fight in 2004. When the Trump administration first initiated the deportation in late May, Mexico's President Claudia Sheinbaum said her government had not been informed. 'If he does want to be repatriated, then the United States would have to bring him to Mexico,' Sheinbaum said at the time. His sister, Guadalupe Gutierrez, said in an interview that she didn't understand why he was sent to South Sudan, where he is currently in custody. Shesaid Mexico is trying to get her brother home. 'Mexico never rejected my brother,' Gutierrez said. 'USING US AS A PAWN' Immigration hardliners see the third-country removals as a way to deal with immigration offenders who can't easily be deported and could pose a threat to the U.S. public. "The Trump administration is prioritizing the safety of American communities over the comfort of these deportees,' said Jessica Vaughan, policy director at the Center for Immigration Studies, which supports lower levels of immigration. The Trump administrationin Julypressed other African nations to take migrants and has askedthe Pacific Islands nation of Palau, among others. Under U.S. law, federal immigration officials can deport someone to a country other than their place of citizenship when all other efforts are 'impracticable, inadvisable or impossible.' Immigration officials must first try to send an immigrant back to their home country, and if they fail, then to a country with which they have a connection, such as where they lived or were born. For a Lao man who was almost deported to Libya in early May, hearing about the renewed third-country deportations took him back to his own close call. In an interview from Laos granted on condition of anonymity because of fears for his safety, he asked why the U.S. was 'using us as a pawn?' His attorney said the man had served a prison sentence for a felony. Reuters could not establish what he was convicted of. He recalled officials telling him to sign his deportation order to Libya, which he refused, telling them he wanted to be sent to Laos instead. They told him he would be deported to Libya regardless of whether he signed or not, he said. DHS did not comment on the allegations. The man, who came to the United States in the early 1980s as a refugee when he was four years old, said he was now trying to learn the Lao language and adapt to his new life, 'taking it day by day.' (Reporting by Kristina Cooke in San Francisco and Ted Hesson in Washington; Additional reporting by Nate Raymond in Boston, Brendan O'Boyle and Lizbeth Diaz in Mexico City, Marc Frank in Havana, Phuong Nguyen and Khanh Vu in Hanoi, Panu Wongcha-um in Bangkok, Kirsty Neeham in Sydney; Editing by Mary Milliken and Claudia Parsons)
The Star
4 hours ago
- The Star
Asean's parallel diplomacy on Myanmar: Creativity sans coordination
AT the 58th Asean Foreign Ministers' Meeting on July 9, the regional bloc reiterated its commitment to the Five-Point Consensus (5PC) as the central political reference for addressing the deepening crisis in Myanmar, which was also stated in the 2025 Asean Leaders' Statement on a Ceasefire in Myanmar Extended and Expanded. Yet more than four years since the military coup, with escalating violence, deepening displacement and widespread human rights violations, one must ask: How effective has this approach truly been? What has become increasingly clear is the growing disconnect between Asean's rhetoric and its actions. Far from being a roadmap to peace, the 5PC has become a diplomatic placeholder, invoked ritually in communiqués yet divorced from realities on the ground. What has emerged in its place is a fragmented and contradictory set of responses has emerged, exposing Asean to what is described as the trap of "parallel diplomacy". This trap reveals both institutional stagnation and growing division among Asean member states. Rather than forging a cohesive and principled regional strategy, Asean has allowed individual member states to pursue uncoordinated and improvised national initiatives. These fragmented actions, often detached from Asean's formal mechanisms, have bred confusion, diluted collective pressure on the junta and eroded public confidence in the bloc's credibility. Parallel diplomacy, by nature, is not inherently flawed. Informal channels, Track 1.5 dialogues and backchannel negotiations can play crucial roles in complex conflict contexts. However, when these efforts unfold without coordination or a shared strategic vision, they risk undermining peace building efforts. Fragmented diplomacy, in such a case, becomes a symptom of disunity, not a strategy for flexibility. Thailand's approach to the Myanmar crisis exemplifies the consequences of this incoherence. Often operating outside Asean frameworks, Thailand has spearheaded what has come to be known as the 'Bangkok Process', a series of direct engagements with Myanmar's military regime. This began with then-foreign minister Don Pramudwinai's visit to Naypyidaw in 2021 and continued with the appointment of a Thai special envoy to Myanmar. Several informal consultations followed, including meetings involving the junta and its closest allies. In December 2022, Thailand hosted a closed-door meeting that included junta representatives and the foreign ministers of Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam. Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines and Singapore boycotted the meeting, citing their commitment to the 5PC and objected to the junta's inclusion. Similar meetings followed in June 2023 and December 2024, often framed around humanitarian engagement. The latter was attended by ministers from Laos, Malaysia, the Philippines, Thailand and Singapore, with the rest sending lower-level delegates. These moves signalled improvisation over unity, diplomacy over strategy. Indonesia as Asean chair in 2023, meanwhile, held consultations with over 145 stakeholders, including resistance groups, by September that year. These engagements evolved into an informal Joint Coordination Body known as the "Jakarta Club", which remains active today. The January 2025 Asean Foreign Ministers' Retreat further highlighted the region's growing fragmentation over Myanmar. The Philippines proposed a new political framework, while Vietnam called for the inclusion of ethnic armed organisations in future dialogue. These diverging positions do not signal healthy pluralism, they reflect deepening strategic incoherence within Asean. In April, Malaysia initiated direct engagement with the National Unity Government Myanmar's civilian-led opposition. However, diplomatic courtesies and technical cooperation with the junta continue in parallel, lending de facto legitimacy to the military regime while reducing pro-democracy actors to symbolic participants. The emergence of multiple informal mechanisms, such as Indonesia's Jakarta Club, Thailand's Bangkok Process and Malaysia's dual-track diplomacy, reflects both innovation and disarray in Asean's approach. These ad-hoc efforts, in the absence of a unified strategy, illustrate Asean's drift: engaging both the junta and the opposition without a coherent political roadmap risks perpetuating stalemate rather than resolving the crisis. Part of this incoherence stems from Asean's institutional structure. The rotating nature of the Special Envoy, changing with each Asean Chair, undermines continuity and long-term strategy. Compounding this, minister-level envoy is no longer on the table. While some of these adjustments are framed as strategic, they also reflect the bloc's limited political will and uneven commitment to addressing the crisis. Another structural flaw lies in Asean's lack of a clear, enforceable mechanism to address unconstitutional changes of government. This institutional gap not only enables impunity but makes the bloc complicit in democratic backsliding. Without the courage to confront member states that violate core democratic norms, the bloc merely adds strain to its already fragile regionalism project. Another disunity has been revealed in member states' responses to Myanmar's planned 2025 elections, to be held later this year. Malaysia and Singapore have rightly questioned the vote's legitimacy, while Thailand remains neutral and Cambodia has even offered to send observers. These divergent positions highlight Asean's chronic inability to speak with one voice on fundamental democratic principles, undermining its credibility and emboldening authoritarian actors within and beyond Myanmar. Asean stands at a critical juncture shaped by crisis, centrality and conscience. This photo taken on December 10, 2023 shows members of the Mandalay People's Defense Forces (MDY-PDF) heading to the frontline amid clashes with the Myanmar military in northern Shan State. Myanmar's junta ended the country's state of emergency on July 31, 2025, ramping up preparations for a December election being boycotted by opposition groups and criticised by international monitors. — AFP The humanitarian catastrophe in Myanmar, marked by mass killings, displacement and aid blockades, has spilled across borders, fuelling instability and transnational crime. Some advocate for using all diplomatic tools, including parallel tracks, but innovation without principled leadership and a unified strategy risks becoming a smokescreen for inaction rather than a path to peace. The true test of Asean's centrality is no longer its ability to speak in uniformity, but to harmonise many voices without losing the plot. Centrality must mean more than procedural prominence, it must signal strategic coherence and moral leadership. The Myanmar crisis has revealed troubling signs of institutional drift, and unless corrected, Asean's foundational claims to unity and purpose will ring increasingly empty. Above all, Asean must summon moral clarity. Leading with conscience means naming the perpetrators, supporting the victims and rejecting impunity masquerading as diplomacy. — The Jakarta Post/ANN Yuyun Wahyuningrum is executive director of Asean Parliamentarians for Human Rights (APHR).
The Star
5 hours ago
- The Star
From Laos to Brazil, Trump's tariffs leave a lot of losers. But even the winners like Vietnam will pay a price
WASHINGTON (AP): President Donald Trump's tariff onslaught this week left a lot of losers - from small, poor countries like Laos and Algeria to wealthy US trading partners like Canada and Switzerland. They're now facing especially hefty taxes - tariffs - on the products they export to the United States starting Aug. 7. The closest thing to winners may be the countries that caved to Trump's demands - and avoided even more pain. But it's unclear whether anyone will be able to claim victory in the long run - even the United States, the intended beneficiary of Trump's protectionist policies. "In many respects, everybody's a loser here,'' said Barry Appleton, co-director of the Center for International Law at the New York Law School. Barely six months after he returned to the White House, Trump has demolished the old global economic order. Gone is one built on agreed-upon rules. In its place is a system in which Trump himself sets the rules, using America's enormous economic power to punish countries that won't agree to one-sided trade deals and extracting huge concessions from the ones that do. "The biggest winner is Trump,' said Alan Wolff, a former U.S. trade official and deputy director-general at the World Trade Organization. "He bet that he could get other countries to the table on the basis of threats, and he succeeded - dramatically.'' Everything goes back to what Trump calls "Liberation Day'' - April 2 - when the president announced "reciprocal'' taxes of up to 50% on imports from countries with which the United States ran trade deficits and 10% "baseline'' taxes on almost everyone else. He invoked a 1977 law to declare the trade deficit a national emergency that justified his sweeping import taxes. That allowed him to bypass Congress, which traditionally has had authority over taxes, including tariffs - all of which is now being challenged in court. Trump retreated temporarily after his Liberation Day announcement triggered a rout in financial markets and suspended the reciprocal tariffs for 90 days to give countries a chance to negotiate. Eventually, some of them did, caving to Trump's demands to pay what four months ago would have seemed unthinkably high tariffs for the privilege of continuing to sell into the vast American market. The United Kingdom agreed to 10% tariffs on its exports to the United States - up from 1.3% before Trump amped up his trade war with the world. The US demanded concessions even though it had run a trade surplus, not a deficit, with the UK for 19 straight years. The European Union and Japan accepted U.S. tariffs of 15%. Those are much higher than the low single-digit rates they paid last year - but lower than the tariffs he was threatening (30% on the EU and 25% on Japan). Also cutting deals with Trump and agreeing to hefty tariffs were Pakistan, South Korea, Vietnam, Indonesia and the Philippines. Even countries that saw their tariffs lowered from April without reaching a deal are still paying much higher tariffs than before Trump took office. Angola's tariff, for instance, dropped to 15% from 32% in April, but in 2022 it was less than 1.5%. And while Trump administration cut Taiwan's tariff to 20% from 32% in April, the pain will still be felt. "20% from the beginning has not been our goal, we hope that in further negotiations we will get a more beneficial and more reasonable tax rate,' Taiwan's president Lai Ching-te told reporters in Taipei Friday. Trump also agreed to reduce the tariff on the tiny southern African kingdom of Lesotho to 15% from the 50% he'd announced in April, but the damage may already have been done there. Countries that didn't knuckle under - and those that found other ways to incur Trump's wrath - got hit harder. Even some of the poor were not spared. Laos' annual economic output comes to $2,100 per person and Algeria's $5,600 - versus America's $75,000. Nonetheless, Laos got rocked with a 40% tariff and Algeria with a 30% levy. Trump slammed Brazil with a 50% import tax largely because he didn't like the way it was treating former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, who is facing trial for trying to lose his electoral defeat in 2022. Never mind that the U.S. has exported more to Brazil than it's imported every year since 2007. Trump's decision to plaster a 35% tariff on longstanding U.S. ally Canada was partly designed to threaten Ottawa for saying it would recognize a Palestinian state. Trump is a staunch supporter of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Switzerland was clobbered with a 39% import tax - even higher than the 31% Trump originally announced on April 2. "The Swiss probably wish that they had camped in Washington'' to make a deal, said Wolff, now senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics. "They're clearly not at all happy.'' Fortunes may change if Trump's tariffs are upended in court. Five American businesses and 12 states are suing the president, arguing that his Liberation Day tariffs exceeded his authority under the 1977 law. In May, the U.S. Court of International Trade , a specialized court in New York, agreed and blocked the tariffs, although the government was allowed to continue collecting them while its appeal wend its way through the legal system, and may likely end up at the U.S. Supreme Court. In a hearing Thursday, the judges on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit sounded skeptical about Trump's justifications for the tariffs. "If (the tariffs) get struck down, then maybe Brazil's a winner and not a loser,'' Appleton said. Trump portrays his tariffs as a tax on foreign countries. But they are actually paid by import companies in the U.S. who try to pass along the cost to their customers via higher prices. True, tariffs can hurt other countries by forcing their exporters to cut prices and sacrifice profits - or risk losing market share in the United States. But economists at Goldman Sachs estimate that overseas exporters have absorbed just one-fifth of the rising costs from tariffs, while Americans and U.S. businesses have picked up the most of the tab. Walmart, Procter & Gamble, Ford, Best Buy, Adidas, Nike, Mattel and Stanley Black & Decker, have all hiked prices due to U.S. tariffs. "This is a consumption tax, so it disproportionately affects those who have lower incomes,'' Appleton said. "Sneakers, knapsacks ... your appliances are going to go up. Your TV and electronics are going to go up. Your video game devices, consoles are going to up because none of those are made in America.'' Trump's trade war has pushed the average U.S. tariff from 2.5% at the start of 2025 to 18.3% now, the highest since 1934, according to the Budget Lab at Yale University. And that will impose a $2,400 cost on the average household, the lab estimates. "The US consumer's a big loser,″ Wolff said. -- AP Economics Writer Christopher Rugaber contributed to this story.
