Last month’s Los Angeles fires were one of the costliest disasters in US history
Last month was the world’s warmest January on record raising further questions about the pace of climate change, scientists say.
January 2025 had been expected to be slightly cooler than January 2024 because of a shift away from a natural weather pattern in the Pacific known as El Niño.
But instead, last month broke the January 2024 record by nearly 0.1C, according to the European Copernicus climate service.
The world’s warming is due to emissions of planet-heating gases from human activities – mainly the burning of fossil fuels – but scientists say they cannot fully explain why last month was particularly hot.
It continues a series of surprisingly large temperature records since mid-2023, with temperatures around 0.2C above what had been expected.
“The basic reason we’re having records being broken, and we’ve had this decades-long warming trend, is because we’re increasing the amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere,” Gavin Schmidt, director of Nasa’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, told BBC News.
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Displaced Palestinians make their way through the Nuseirat Refugee Camp on February 5, 2025. (Photo: Ashraf Amra/Anadolu via Getty Images)
“The expulsion of the Palestinian civilian population from Gaza would not only be unacceptable and contrary to international law,” said Germany’s foreign minister. “It would also lead to new suffering and new hatred.”
U.S. President Donald Trump’s call on Tuesday for the ethnic cleansing of Gaza with American military force drew near-universal condemnation from the international community, with political leaders, United Nations officials, and human rights groups denouncing the outrageous proposal as inhumane and blatantly unlawful.
“Any forcible transfer in or deportation of people from occupied territory is strictly prohibited,” Volker Türk, the U.N. high commissioner for human rights, said in a statement following Trump’s remarks alongside Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who is facing an International Criminal Court arrest warrant after presiding over a 15-month-long, U.S.-backed decimation of the Gaza Strip.
U.S. allies and adversaries, including in the Middle East, swiftly rejected Trump’s call for American ownership of Gaza and the total removal of the Palestinian population. Hamas, the Palestinian Authority, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, Palestine’s envoy to the U.N., Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and ordinary Palestinians in Gaza were among those who dismissed the U.S. president’s proposal as unconscionable.
“These calls represent a serious violation of international law,” said Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas. “Peace and stability will not be achieved in the region without establishing a Palestinian state with Jerusalem as its capital on the borders of 1967, based on the two-state solution.”
European nations also sharply criticized Trump’s proposal, with France’s foreign ministry expressing “opposition to any forced displacement of Gaza’s Palestinian population, which would constitute a serious violation of international law, an attack on the legitimate aspirations of Palestinians, and also a major obstacle to the two-state solution and a factor of major destabilization for our close partners, Egypt and Jordan, and the whole region.”
German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock said that “the expulsion of the Palestinian civilian population from Gaza would not only be unacceptable and contrary to international law.”
“It would also lead to new suffering and new hatred,” she warned.
“Once again, the man who claimed to be the peace candidate is showing himself to be nothing more than the War Profiteer President.”
Trump’s call for a U.S. takeover of the Gaza Strip came days after the president said he wants to “just clean out” the Palestinian enclave by forcibly displacing the territory’s population, which is living under a fragile cease-fire agreement and in the process of returning to homes left in utter ruins by Israeli and American bombs.
Francesca Albanese, the U.N. special rapporteur for the occupied Palestinian territories, said at a press conference on Tuesday that Trump’s proposal is “completely irresponsible.” Even the act of floating ethnic cleansing in Gaza amounts to “incitement to commit forced displacement, which is an international crime,” said Albanese.
“The international community is made up of 193 states,” she added, “and this is the time to give the U.S. what it has been looking for: isolation.”
U.S. human rights and anti-war organizations joined the chorus slamming Trump’s proposal, with Amnesty International USA executive director Paul O’Brien writing on social media that “removing all Palestinians from Gaza is tantamount to destroying them as a people.”
Sara Haghdoosti, executive director of Win Without War, said in a statement late Tuesday that “forcibly removing Palestinians from Gaza is ethnic cleansing.”
“It is obviously illegal, deeply morally wrong, and incredibly dangerous,” said Haghdoosti. “People in Palestine, Israel, Lebanon, and beyond need a real end to the war, not permanent forced displacement. Instead, tonight President Trump proposed to send U.S. armed forces to Gaza to kick Palestinians out and act as security guards for [Jared] Kushner and friends as they cash in on what Trump called ‘the Riviera of the Middle East.'”
“Once again,” Haghdoosti added, “the man who claimed to be the peace candidate is showing himself to be nothing more than the War Profiteer President.”
Elon Musk urges you to be a Fascist like him, says that you can ignore facts
and reality then.Climate Science Denier Donald Trump says Burn, Baby, Burn.
A baby born in the U.S. to a Guatemalan asylum seeker is seen on April 20, 2020 in Stamford, Connecticut.(Photo by John Moore/Getty Images)
“Today, virtually every baby born on U.S. soil is a citizen upon birth,” said Judge Deborah Boardman. “That law and tradition will remain the status quo pending the resolution of this case.”
Ruling on one of at least nine legal challenges that have been filed against U.S. President Donald Trump’s executive order attempting to end birthright citizenship, a federal judge on Wednesday said she would not allow the district court she presides over to “be the first” in the country to endorse Trump’s erroneous interpretation of the 14th Amendment.
U.S. District Judge Deborah Boardman in Maryland found that Trump’s executive order, signed the day he took office last month, “runs counter to our nation’s 250-year history of citizenship by birth.”
In the 1898 U.S. Supreme Court case United States v. Wong Kim Ark, the judge noted, the high court “resoundingly rejected the president’s interpretation of the Citizenship Clause of the 14th Amendment.”
In his executive order, Trump claimed the amendment “has never been interpreted to extend citizenship universally to everyone born within the United States” and has excluded people born on U.S. soil to parents who don’t have permanent legal status.
The directive was set to take effect on February 19, with all babies born after that date to undocumented immigrants or those with temporary status rendered ineligible for citizenship documents.
The lawsuit was filed by two immigrant rights groups, CASA and the Asylum Seeker Advocacy Project, on behalf of five pregnant women who do not have permanent legal status.
The groups argued that the order would “throw into doubt” the status of thousands of children across the country.
“Today, virtually every baby born on U.S. soil is a citizen upon birth,” said Boardman. “That is the law and tradition of our country. That law and tradition will remain the status quo pending the resolution of this case.”
“I should be worried about the health of my child. I should be thinking about that primarily, and instead my husband and I are stressed, we’re anxious and we’re depressed about the reality that my child may not be able to become a U.S. citizen.”
One plaintiff, a physician from Venezuela who was identified as Monica in the lawsuit, said she feared her child would be born stateless.
“I’m 12 weeks pregnant,” said Monica. “I should be worried about the health of my child. I should be thinking about that primarily, and instead my husband and I are stressed, we’re anxious and we’re depressed about the reality that my child may not be able to become a U.S. citizen.”
The judge added that the executive order was “likely to be found unconstitutional” and said the Trump administration hadn’t proved it would be harmed by a preliminary injunction.
Boardman is the second federal judge to block Trump’s executive order. Nearly two dozen Democratic state attorneys general, the American Civil Liberties Union, and at least one county have also filed legal challenges.
Days after the executive order was issued, a federal judge in Seattle who was appointed by Republican President Ronald Reagan issued a temporary restraining order blocking the directive, saying he “had difficulty understanding” how the administration’s lawyers could argue the executive action was constitutional.
Under Boardman’s ruling, the order will remain blocked unless a higher court overturns her decision or until she issues a final ruling.
Elon Musk urges you to be a Fascist like him, says that you can ignore facts
and reality then.Climate Science Denier Donald Trump says Burn, Baby, Burn.
Elon Musk at Trump’s inauguration. The president established a ‘department of government efficiency’ on the same day. Photograph: Kevin Lamarque/AP
Elon Musk has achieved astonishing power in Trump’s administration – and spent the weekend wielding it
Since declaring his support for Donald Trump in July of last year and subsequently spending more than $250m on his re-election effort, Elon Musk has rapidly accumulated political influence and positioned himself at the heart of the new administration. Now as prominent as the president himself, Musk has begun to make use of that power, making decisions that could affect the health of millions of people, gaining access to highly sensitive personal data, and attacking anyone who opposes him. Musk, the world’s richest man and an unelected official, has achieved an astonishing level of power over the federal government.
Over the weekend, workers with Musk’s “department of government efficiency” (Doge) clashed with civil servants over demands for unfettered access to the computer systems of major US government agencies in a breakneck series of confrontations. When the dust settled, several top officials who opposed the takeover had been pushed out, and Musk’s allies had gained control.
Musk, with the backing of Trump, is now working to shut down the US Agency for International Development (USAid) – the world’s largest single supplier of humanitarian aid. He bragged on Sunday about “feeding USAid into the wood chipper”. He has also targeted several other agencies in an aggressive attempt to purge and remake the federal government along ideological lines, while avoiding congressional or judicial oversight.
Many of Musk’s actions have taken place without forewarning or transparency, sowing chaos and confusion among the thousands of people employed at the agencies like USAid that he has gone after. Humanitarian organizations that rely on US funding have halted operations and laid off staff, while government workers have been locked out of their offices. He is operating Doge as an unofficial government department with no congressionally approved mandate while he technically holds the position of “special government employee”, which allows him to sidestep financial disclosures and a public vetting process.
Elon Musk urges you to be a Fascist like him, says that you can ignore facts
and reality then.Climate Science Denier Donald Trump says Burn, Baby, Burn.
A view of Gaza City after Israel’s destruction of it, February 4, 2025
WE CAN’T say the mask has slipped. US President Donald Trump has never masked his contempt for human rights or international law.
But the US president saying the United States will “take over” the Gaza Strip and expel all its inhabitants is a watershed moment. It is an unambiguous demand for ethnic cleansing on a huge scale.
Trump doesn’t mince words about what he sees happening to Palestinians who refuse to be driven out, saying they have to go to “some place they can live and not die.” Nor is the erasure of the Palestinians to be confined to Gaza; he moots Israel’s annexation of the West Bank too.
It hardly needs saying that if Trump wanted Palestinians to “live and not die,” he would not continue to arm the Israeli war machine that has killed them in their tens of thousands over the past year, or connive, by extending the suspension of funds to the Palestinian refugee agency UNRWA, at starving them of food and medicine.
The same point applies to the British government.
The mood music from Labour’s Trump apologists is that there’s nothing to see here — it’s just Trump, he says a lot of wild things. Scottish Blairite Jim Murphy says we shouldn’t take him “literally in what he says because he often has no intention of doing it.” Cabinet Minister Steve Reed says there’s no need for a “running commentary” on US presidential statements and we should give Trump credit for securing the current ceasefire.
Foreign Secretary David Lammy likewise refuses to acknowledge the US government’s extremism, saying “Trump is right” to want to rebuild Gaza — a ludicrous evasion of the central part of Trump’s proposal, which is to rebuild it without Palestinians — before reiterating support for the two-state solution.
To say Trump’s plan for the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians is too outlandish to take seriously ignores the brutal fact that the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians is already happening.
Climate Science Denier Donald Trump says Burn, Baby, Burn.UK Foreign Minister David Lammy confirms that UK government and military are active participants in Israel’s genocides and that the F-35 parts that they suspended from supplying to Israel are instead simply diverted via the United States. He says see https://youtu.be/QILgUHrdWREGenocide denier and Current UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer is quoted that he supports Zionism without qualification. He also confirms that UK air force support has been essential in Israel’s mass-murdering genocide. Includes URLs https://www.declassifieduk.org/keir-starmers-100-spy-flights-over-gaza-in-support-of-israel/ and https://youtu.be/O74hZCKKdpA
