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Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s odyssey to Greece was described as a rousing success until the Wall Street Journal broke the news that Ambassador Kimberly Guilfoyle tried to shake down a Donald Trump donor, according to The Hill.The Journal reported late Wednesday that Guilfoyle asked Eric Deters, a Kentucky businessman and Trump supporter, to wire $100,000 to pay her American Express bill days before her July 2025 Senate confirmation hearing. “It won’t show up anywhere if you wire money to American Express that’s all that will show,” she allegedly texted him, CBS News reported. Deters says he never paid. He told CBS the request was a “quid pro quo,” while Guilfoyle called his claim “completely false.” Her lawyer, Jesse Binnall, has disputed the messages’ authenticity.The Hill spoke to one person deeply involved in U.S.-Greek relations, who requested anonymity and called the chaos around Guilfoyle a “clown show” that “tainted” a successful Rubio visit. The person said her conduct is unlikely to damage long-standing ties between Washington and Athens, but that it reinforced the idea that U.S. foreign policy is for sale and that closeness to Trump’s family and allies equals access. “It says, ‘we’re the merchants,’” the person said.Rubio was forced to address the issue, which took him off message, with the Hill reporting it appeared to have blindsided members of the Trump administration.“Our job is not to respond every time someone decides to give the media something without any advance warning, without having any chance to look at it and see what’s in there,” he told reporters while complaining that the story was “not the gospel."The allegations follow a Journal report last month that Guilfoyle promoted the business interests of a Greek construction and energy company and let its lobbyist into private diplomatic meetings. She has denied wrongdoing.Democrats have seized on the new report. “Reports coming out regarding Amb. Guilfoyle’s conduct are deeply concerning and suggest potentially corrupt influences on U.S. foreign policy,” Rep. Gregory Meeks (D-NY) said in a statement to The Hill. “I have already demanded answers from Secretary Rubio regarding her conduct and will continue to press for transparency and accountability. As I have said before, if these allegations are accurate, Amb. Guilfoyle is unfit to represent the United States abroad and should be removed from her position.”

A federal judge ruled that President Donald Trump’s first administration illegally sent asylum seekers to wait in Mexico, where they faced “persecution, torture, and possibly death.”U.S. District Judge Jesus G. Bernal of the Central District of California issued the 40-page ruling Wednesday in a lawsuit over the Migrant Protection Protocols, the policy better known as “Remain in Mexico.” A redacted version of the ruling was unsealed Friday, Politico reporter Kyle Cheney reported on X.Two legal aid groups, the Immigrant Defenders Law Center and Jewish Family Service of San Diego, sued in 2020 along with several asylum seekers, according to the ruling.The Trump administration launched the policy in January 2019, requiring many asylum seekers who arrived from Mexico to wait there while their cases moved through U.S. immigration courts, the ruling said. The Department of Homeland Security placed 66,985 people in that first version.The government said it created the program to address what it called a migration crisis at the southern border and to stop what officials viewed as abuse of the asylum system. But human rights groups documented more than 1,000 instances of violence against people in the program, including murder, torture, rape and kidnapping.“DHS concluded that MPP 1.0 enrollees awaiting their court hearings in Mexico ‘were subject to extreme violence and insecurity at the hands of transnational criminal organizations,’” Bernal wrote.Bernal ruled that the program broke a federal law requiring agencies to reasonably justify their decisions, because officials did not fully consider conditions in Mexico before launching it.“Yet, there is no evidence that Defendants considered the conditions in Mexico prior to implementing MPP 1.0,” the judge said.Bernal also ruled that the policy violated the Fifth Amendment’s guarantee of a full and fair hearing for people facing deportation.“Defendants’ removal of MPP 1.0 enrollees to Mexico where they … ‘face[d] persecution, torture, and possibly death’ deprived them of this right,” Bernal wrote. “Where noncitizens face dangerous conditions, it would be ‘untenable’ to expect them to litigate their immigration case under such conditions."The policy also violated asylum seekers’ right under federal law to be represented by a lawyer, the judge ruled. Only about 7% of people in the program had attorneys, compared with 80% of asylum seekers in immigration court overall, according to immigration court records cited in the ruling.The judge further found that the program violated the First Amendment rights of the legal aid groups and asylum seekers at immigration hearing sites, where attorneys got at most one hour with clients before court and could not speak with people who had not hired them.“The Government fails to point to any evidence in the record, or even make any argument that the restrictions ‘fulfill[] a legitimate need,’” Bernal wrote.The Trump administration reinstated the policy in January 2025, according to the ruling. Bernal paused the revived version in April, but a federal appeals court later limited the pause to the Immigrant Defenders Law Center’s current and future clients.Bernal ordered the government to propose within 21 days how it will notify asylum seekers covered by the lawsuit, after formally voiding the original program’s policies and guidance.

Committee recognises work of South African who chaired UN commission that concluded Israel was guilty of genocide in GazaThe Nobel peace prize has been awarded to Navi Pillay, the South African former UN human rights chief who chaired the UN commission that concluded Israel was guilty of genocide in Gaza.The Norwegian Nobel committee said Pillay, who is serving as a judge at the international court of justice (ICJ), has “shown that legal measures can help prevent acts of war and violence”. Continue reading...

President Donald Trump made no personal mention of his failure to win the Nobel Peace Prize on Friday morning, but he did share comments made by one of his impeachment lawyers.While this year’s honoree, Navanethem “Navi” Pillay, 85, a South African jurist and former U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, poked fun at the American president in her initial comments, telling admirers, “If you clap a little bit more, I may share this prize with Trump,” the president held his tongue.Instead, on Truth Social, he posted a statement from attorney Doug Schoen, who served on Trump's defense team during his second Senate impeachment trial in February 2021.According to Schoen, the Nobel committee made a huge mistake.“Today the Nobel Committee shamed itself beyond repair and demeaned the once great Nobel Peace Prize by giving it to the UN’s Navi Pillay,” he complained. “Pillay is an unabashed hater of America and Israel. In her position she celebrated terrorists and rewarded Hamas. She conducted a phony ‘investigation’ claiming to find that Israel committed genocide and urging prosecution. She has no credibility in any normal sphere and has never done a thing to foster peace. Just the opposite.”“But what could be expected from a committee that previously gave the once coveted peace prize to Yasser Arafat?” he raged.“President Trump gave us the Abraham Accords, which the world said would be impossible and is now expanding them! He brought home the hostages when all seemed hopeless! He is making best efforts to end the Russia/Ukraine war, to stop Iran, the number one sponsor of international terrorism, and he is trying to rebuild Gaza despite the terrorists’ best efforts to control it. The list goes on and on. These are the kinds of things the Nobel Peace Prize was intended to recognize and reward!!!” he wrote.

Free-roaming Aldabra population far exceeds human population of Seychelles after decades-long recovery programmeA survey of the world’s largest free-roaming giant tortoise population has discovered that the once endangered species is thriving.A population of Aldabra giant tortoises lives on an island in Seychelles called Aldabra Atoll. Continue reading...

A senior aide to U.S. Ambassador Mike Huckabee stopped an urgent warning from reaching Washington that Israel might be violating one of President Donald Trump's clearest demands, according to a new report.The New York Times reported that Israel approved in March more West Bank settlements at once than it ever had before , and staff at the U.S. Embassy in Jerusalem saw the move as possibly crossing Trump's red line against annexing the West Bank – so they wrote an urgent memo for policymakers in Washington.According to three U.S. officials, Huckabee's top adviser David Milstein quashed it.The Times reported that this wasn't the only time. A dozen people who work with Milstein told the paper that since he arrived in April 2025, he has repeatedly blocked or rewritten embassy reporting to make Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's government look better.When settler violence in the West Bank surged this spring, embassy staff drafted reports suggesting Israel was failing to stop it, but officials said Milstein blocked them. The cable that instead went to Washington, with Milstein listed as first author, was titled "Government Cracks Down on Escalating West Bank Violence."Milstein also buried a report on investigations into the killings of nine Palestinian Americans by Israeli settlers and soldiers, according to officials. Embassy staff found that most of the cases had stalled, some had been closed and no one had been charged. Milstein argued for telling Congress that Israel was handling the cases properly."If you don't get accountability, you endanger more American citizens," said Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-MD), who led 30 lawmakers in asking for answers.Embassy cables dropped from several a week to a few a month after Milstein took control of the section that handles Palestinian affairs. Staffers told the Times they stopped writing reports because they expected him to block them, and he also reportedly asked colleagues whether they were "pro-Israel" or "pro-Hamas."The gap between what the embassy reported and what was in the news became wide enough that White House and State Department officials contacted embassy staff directly at least twice to find out what was happening, the Times reported.Some senior White House officials have complained about Milstein to colleagues.The Times said it isn't clear whether Milstein's actions changed White House policy. It also isn't clear whether the blocked memos would have reached Trump himself. But since February, Trump has said little about annexation even as Israel has expanded its control of the West Bank.Milstein, 36, is the stepson of right-wing radio host Mark Levin, a close ally of both Trump and Netanyahu, and officials told the Times those relationships affect how he is treated. He previously worked for Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TeX) and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis."The embassy ought to tell Washington everything — the good, the bad and the ugly," said Dan Kurtzer, who was ambassador to Israel under President George W. Bush. "If they're not doing so, they are damaging the policy-making process and possibly undermining the president's policies."Huckabee didn't address any of the specific incidents, and he blew off the Times' reporting as "so lacking in fact that it ranks up with other Times farcical endeavors" and said he "categorically" rejects it.

Former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie says the revelation that two of President Donald Trump’s top political advisers worked for a pro-Russian government in the Balkans while the midterms loom is a sign Republicans are looking beyond Trump, according to Politico.Christie, a Republican who Politico says is considering another White House run, said the episode is indicative of the party looking past the Trump era.“If your top political advisors are not paying attention to the midterms and instead are paying attention to taking money off the table in a foreign country, that seems to indicate to me that they’ve moved on from Donald Trump as their top priority, and I think you’re going to see a lot of that,” Christie said.His comments follow a New York Times report that Chris LaCivita and James Blair spent several days in Republika Srpska, a partly self-governing region of Bosnia, in the week before Sunday’s elections there. Each was reportedly paid hundreds of thousands of dollars through a Washington law firm to advise the government on voting issues. The midterms are Nov. 3.Trump, who according to Politico, wasn’t aware of the trip, distanced himself from the pair in a Truth Social post on Wednesday. “They do not work for me, other than as outside consultants,” he wrote, adding that they are “allowed to do work for others” and that if there is a conflict, “I will terminate them, immediately!” The post came just months after Trump hailed Blair as “one of the brightest political minds in the Country” and tasked him with helping Republicans win the midterms, Politico noted.Not everyone sees the trip as a problem for the party’s midterm push. A Republican consultant working for MAGA Inc. told Politico the group’s work wasn’t affected because most of it is done by phone. “We were summoned to a 9 a.m. Saturday conference call where we went over polling information for two hours,” the consultant said. “I didn’t know they were out of town till I read it in The New York Times.”

Responding to a Guardian report that revealed thousands of tonnes of fuel was transported to Russia, Seoul said it was investigating the casesSouth Korea will take legal action if it finds that shipments of fuel from its ports to Russia broke domestic law, the government has said, responding to a Guardian report on the trade.The government, in a statement issued by the foreign and trade ministries and the customs service, said that it is “checking additional information concerning the loading cases reported by the Guardian” and “if the verification establishes that our laws and regulations have been violated, it plans to act in accordance with the law”. Continue reading...