Former President of the United States Joe Biden addressing to the nation in the Rose Garden at the White House in Washington DC, United States on November 7, 2024 [Celal Güneş – Anadolu Agency]
The International Criminal Court (ICC) should investigate former US officials President Joe Biden, Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Secretary of Defence Lloyd Austin for their accessorial roles in aiding and abetting, as well as intentionally contributing to, Israeli war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza, US civil society organisation Democracy for the Arab World Now (DAWN) has said.
The NGO submitted a 172-page communication to the ICC Prosecutor Karim Khan on 19 January, 2025. Prepared with the support of ICC-registered lawyers and other war crimes experts, the submission details a pattern of deliberate and purposeful decisions by these officials to provide military, political, and public support to facilitate Israeli crimes in Gaza; this support included at least $17.9 billion of weapons transfers, intelligence sharing, targeting assistance, diplomatic protection and official endorsement of Israeli crimes, despite knowledge of how such support had and would substantially enable grave abuses.
“There are solid grounds to investigate Joe Biden, Antony Blinken and Lloyd Austin for complicity in Israel’s crimes,” said Reed Brody, DAWN board member and veteran war crimes lawyer. “The bombs dropped on Palestinian hospitals, schools and homes are American bombs, the campaign of murder and persecution has been carried out with American support. US officials have been aware of exactly what Israel is doing, and yet their support never stopped.”
DAWN’s communication lays out the legal and factual basis for investigating Biden, Blinken, and Austin for violating Articles 25(3)(c) and (d) of the Rome Statute, both aiding and abetting and intentionally contributing to crimes committed by Israeli officials in Gaza. These crimes include those identified in the arrest warrants against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his former Defence Minister Yoav Gallant, including the war crimes of starvation and intentionally directing attacks against the civilian population, and crimes against humanity, including murder, inhumane acts, and persecution, under the Rome Statute. It also includes their role in the war crime of intentionally directing attacks against civilian objects under Article 8(2)(b)(ii) and the crime of genocide under Article 6.
“Not only did Biden, Blinken and Austin ignore and justify the overwhelming evidence of Israel’s grotesque and deliberate crimes, overruling their own staff recommendations to halt weapons transfers to Israel, they doubled down by providing Israel with unconditional military and political support to ensure it could carry out its atrocities,” said Sarah Leah Whitson, Executive Director of DAWN. “They provided Israel with not only essential military support but equally essential political support by vetoing multiple ceasefire resolutions at the UN Security Council to ensure Israel could continue its crimes.”
Friedrich Merz says he is eager to re-engage with international partners
Germany’s chancellor-in-waiting didn’t wait for the final results of his country’s election on Sunday to herald a new era in Europe.
Declaring the US indifferent to this continent’s fate, Friedrich Merz questioned the future of Nato and demanded Europe boost its own defences. Quickly.
This tone from the close US ally – and from Friedrich Merz who is known to be a passionate Atlanticist – would have been unimaginable even a couple of months ago.
It’s a seismic shift. That may read like hyperbole, but what we are now experiencing in terms of transatlantic relations is unprecedented in the 80 years since the end of World War Two.
Big European powers have been shocked to the core by the Trump administration, which suggests it could revoke the security guarantees to Europe in place since 1945.
“I would never have thought that I would have to say something like this in a TV show but, after Donald Trump’s remarks last week… it is clear that this government does not care much about the fate of Europe,” Friedrich Merz said during a post-election debate on Sunday.
“My absolute priority will be to strengthen Europe as quickly as possible so that, step by step, we can really achieve independence from the USA,” he added.
Democratic Maine Gov. Janet Mills had an exchange with U.S. President Donald Trump about transgender athletes during a meeting in Washington, D.C. on February 21, 2025. (Photo: Win McNamee/Getty Images)
The president threatened to cut off federal funding to the state for respecting the identities of trans student-athletes.
Democratic Maine Gov. Janet Mills stood up to U.S. President Donald Trump at a Friday event in Washington, D.C. after the Republican threatened to cut off federal funding because the state allows transgender youth to participate in sports in line with their identities.
While at the podium, Trump asked if Maine’s governor was at the event. After Mills confirmed her presence, he asked if she will comply with his executive order intended to use his administration’s interpretation of Title IX—a federal law barring discrimination on the basis of sex at educational institutions that get federal funds—to block trans girls and women from competing as female athletes.
“You better do it, because you’re not gonna get any federal funding at all if you don’t,” Trump said to Mills—who replied that she would follow state and federal laws. She also told the president, “See you in court.”
TRUMP: The NCAA has complied immediately. That's good. But I understand Maine — is the governor of Maine here?
JANET MILLS: Yeah I'm here
TRUMP: Are you not gonna comply?
JM: I'm going to comply with state and federal law
Mills also released a statement vowing that “if the president attempts to unilaterally deprive Maine school children of the benefit of federal funding, my administration and the attorney general will take all appropriate and necessary legal action to restore that funding and the academic opportunity it provides. The state of Maine will not be intimidated by the president’s threats.”
Maine Morning Star reported Friday that the state’s attorney general, Aaron Frey, said in a statement that any attempt by Trump to cut federal funding over the issue “would be illegal and in direct violation of federal court orders.”
“Fortunately,” he said, “the rule of law still applies in this country, and I will do everything in my power to defend Maine’s laws and block efforts by the president to bully and threaten us.”
“It is disturbing that President Trump would use children as pawns in advancing his political agenda,” added Frey, who earlier this month joined other Democratic attorneys general in vowing to protect access to gender-affirming healthcare, another GOP target.
Donald Trump decrees forbidden terms denying sexual diversity
While the National Collegiate Athletic Association swiftly updated its policies to align with Trump’s order, the Maine Principals’ Association—which governs athletics for all public high schools and multiple private institutions in the state—confirmed earlier this month that it will continue allowing trans athletes to compete in girls’ sports. Mike Burnham, executive director of MPA’s Interscholastic Division, cited a 2021 update to state law.
Between 2013 and 2021, the association allowed kids to compete in a manner consistent with their gender identity as long as there were no safety concerns. An MPA committee assessed cases one by one, and there were 54 such cases during that period. Only four involved transgender girls.
In 2021, the Democratic-led Legislature added education-related protections for gender identity to [the] Maine Human Rights Act. Since then, the MPA has allowed students to compete with those of their identified gender.
The Friday exchange between Mills and Trump—whose administration is engaged in a sweeping effort to erase trans people—came after the result of a recent pole vaulting state championship for high schoolers and one Republican lawmaker’s Facebook post about it garnered national media attention.
State Rep. Laurel Libby (R-90) on Monday posted a pair of photos identifying one Greely High School pole vaulter as trans and put the teenager’s preferred name in quotation marks. She later toldMaine’s Total Coverage, “I think we have a responsibility to protect girls’ sports, to protect Maine girls, and to ensure that they have a level playing field.”
The outlet noted that state House Minority Leader Katrina Smith (R-62) “shared on her Instagram the names and email addresses of the Maine Department of Education commissioner, the state attorney general, and the executive director of the Maine Principals’ Association telling constituents to call on them to follow President Trump’s executive order.”
Libby—who on Friday made several more Facebook posts highlighting Trump’s threat to Mills and thanking the president—has faced strong backlash from Democratic lawmakers and various other critics for her initial post bullying the teenage athlete.
“We have been reminded this week of the importance of respecting the privacy of Maine kids, and the value in treating people of all ages with kindness and decency,” Rep. Ryan Fecteau (D-103), the first openly gay speaker of the Maine House of Representatives, wrote in a Friday opinion piece for the Bangor Daily News.
“To young people who are members of the LGBTQ+ community, know that I see you and I stand with you,” he said. “After the events of this week, I ask all my legislative colleagues to recommit to keeping kids out of the political fray. They deserve better. There is a time and place for policy debates. That time and place will never be a social media post attacking a student. Full stop.”
Later on Friday, the Trump administration sent a letter to Maine Department of Education Commissioner Pender Makin announcing a federal investigation into the state agency and Maine School Administrative District #51, which includes Greely High School.
“Let me be clear: If Maine wants to continue to receive federal funds from the Education Department, it has to follow Title IX,” said Craig Trainor, acting assistant secretary for civil rights at the federal level. “If it wants to forgo federal funds and continue to trample the rights of its young female athletes, that, too, is its choice.”
Responding in a lengthy statement, Mills said that “no president—Republican or Democrat—can withhold federal funding authorized and appropriated by Congress and paid for by Maine taxpayers in an attempt to coerce someone into compliance with his will. It is a violation of our Constitution and of our laws, which I took an oath to uphold.”
“Maine may one of the first states to undergo an investigation by his administration, but we won’t be the last,” warned Mills, a former district attorney and state attorney general. “Today, the president of the United States has targeted one particular group on one particular issue which Maine law has addressed. But you must ask yourself: Who and what will he target next, and what will he do? Will it be you? Will it be because of your race or your religion? Will it be because you look different or think differently? Where does it end? In America, the president is neither a king nor a dictator, as much as this one tries to act like it—and it is the rule of law that prevents him from being so.”
“I imagine that the outcome of this politically directed investigation is all but predetermined,” she added, again pledging to fight Trump in court. “But do not be misled: This is not just about who can compete on the athletic field, this is about whether a president can force compliance with his will, without regard for the rule of law that governs our nation. I believe he cannot.”
This post has been updated to include the Trump administration’s letter to the Maine Department of Education and the governor’s response.
Democratic Maine Gov. Janet Mills responds to Donald Trump’s threats saying “See you in court”.Elon Musk urges you to be a Fascist like him, says that you can ignore facts and reality then.
White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt speaks during the daily briefing in the Brady Briefing Room of the White House in Washington, D.C., on February 12, 2025. (Photo: Andrew Caballero-Reynolds/AFP via Getty Images)
The news outlet has been barred from presidential events for refusing to call the Gulf of Mexico by the president’s chosen name, “the Gulf of America.”
Accusing the White House of a “targeted attack” on editorial independence that “strikes at the very core of the First Amendment,” The Associated Press on Friday filed a lawsuit against three Trump administration officials over its blocked access to all presidential events.
The administration announced earlier this month that AP reporters would not be permitted to cover press events at the White House, Mar-a-Lago, or on Air Force One due to its editorial decision to continue referring to the Gulf of Mexico by the name that has been internationally recognized for more than 400 years.
President Donald Trump issued an executive order in January stating that the Gulf of Mexico would be renamed the Gulf of America. Trump has the authority to change a body of water’s name for official government purposes, and some bodies of water are called by different names in different countries—for example, the Gulf of California is known as the Sea of Cortez in Mexico.
The AP said it would acknowledge Trump’s chosen name for the body of water, but continue officially referring to it as the Gulf of Mexico.
“The press and all people in the United States have the right to choose their own words and not be retaliated against by the government.”
As Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum said this month as she threatened to sue Google for changing the Gulf of Mexico’s names in its maps feature, the U.S. does not have sovereignty over the body of water, and Trump cannot unilaterally order other entities to call it by his chosen name.
The AP on Friday said in its lawsuit that “the press and all people in the United States have the right to choose their own words and not be retaliated against by the government.”
The suit names White House Chief of Staff Susan Wiles, Deputy Chief of Staff Taylor Budowich, and Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt, who has said in briefings that it is “a fact” that the body of water off the western coast of Florida and the southern coasts of several other states is called the Gulf of America.
The news outlet called on the U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C. to stop the White House from blocking its journalists from gathering news at presidential events.
Neo-Fascist Climate Science Denier Donald Trump says Burn, Baby, Burn.Elon Musk urges you to be a Fascist like him, says that you can ignore facts and reality then.
Reform UK leader Nigel Farage at the 2025 Alliance for Responsible Citizenship conference. Credit: ARC / YouTube
The Reform UK leader reiterated false climate claims at Jordan Peterson’s Alliance for Responsible Citizenship event in London.
Reform UK leader Nigel Farage has admitted that he doesn’t know about climate science, despite claiming that politicians shouldn’t worry about man-made carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions.
Farage was speaking at the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship (ARC) conference in London today. ARC claims that it wants to help “save civilisation”, yet several of the event’s speakers have spread climate science denial.
In an interview with Canadian psychologist and ARC co-founder Jordan Peterson, Farage said claimed that sunspots and volcanoes have more impact on the climate than human-caused CO2 emissions – an opinion longdebunked by climate experts.
He added: “I’m not a scientist. I can’t tell you whether CO2 is leading to warming or not, but there are so many other massive factors.”
Despite admitting that he is not a climate expert, Farage claimed it was “absolutely nuts” that CO2 is considered to be a pollutant.
Reform UK campaigns to entirely scrap the UK’s policies to achieve net zero emissions by 2050. It also proposes increased fossil fuel extraction, including the opening of new coal mines, and received at least £2.3 million (92 percent of its funding) from fossil fuel interests, polluters and climate deniers prior to the 2024 general election campaign.
As DeSmog revealed on Monday, a leaked guest list for the ARC event includes executives from oil and gas giants including BP, Koch Inc., Valero Energy, and Energy Transfer.
ARC received £1 million in 2023 from its director Paul Marshall, a hedge fund manager who owns GB News and recently bought The Spectator magazine. As revealed by DeSmog, Marshall’s hedge fund had £1.8 billion invested in fossil fuels – including in oil and gas giants Chevron, Shell, and Equinor – as of June 2023.
On 17 February, during the first day of the ARC conference, Donald Trump’s Energy Secretary Chris Wright called the UK’s 2050 net zero target “sinister”, and suggested climate action was a plot to “shrink human freedom”.
Nigel Farage and Climate Denial
Farage was a star speaker on the second day of the ARC conference at the ExCel centre in east London, during which he took part in a one-on-one interview with ARC frontman Peterson, who is a major promoter of climate science denial.
After declaring that “net zero is a complete disaster”, Farage called for dozens of “small modular nuclear reactors” across the UK. Peterson responded with a question about the science of climate change, suggesting: “Maybe it’s time to stop our obsession with carbon altogether.”
Peterson said: “I also think conceivably that the environmentalist climate scam was an offshoot of the Club of Rome Malthusian stupidity that is predicated on the presumption that resources are finite and that there’s far too many people on the planet, and there’s a terrible anti-human motivation lurking underneath all of that’s pessimistic and brutal and genocidal in its fundamental ethos.”
Farage replied: “The one thing I hear that drives me absolutely potty is that carbon dioxide is a pollutant! That’s what they tell us! That clearly is absolutely nuts. Now, there are times in our past when CO2 in the atmosphere has been much, much higher than it is today, and that’s before people drove 4×4 Chelsea tractors.”
In fact, 2024 was the hottest year on record, according to experts at the World Health Organization.
As climate scientist Dr Philipp Breul from Imperial College London has stated: “We are causing the climate to change significantly faster than it has, to the best of our knowledge, in the last million years.
“This incredibly fast rate of change is the real problem, as it leaves neither society nor the ecosystem time to adapt.”
Farage went on to say that Sir Patrick Moore, a TV astronomer, told him 20 years ago that “when it comes to carbon dioxide levels, and when it comes to warming and cooling, let me assure you that sunspot activity and underwater volcanic activity will always have a bigger impact on the environment than man himself ever can”.
“I’ve very much stuck to that view,” Farage added.
Climate scientists at the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the world’s leading climate science body, have stressed that “it is a statement of fact, we cannot be any more certain; it is unequivocal and indisputable that humans are warming the planet”.
Farage went on to repeat the misleading claim that only three percent of CO2 emissions are produced by humans. In fact, human activity has raised the atmosphere’s carbon dioxide content by 50 percent in less than 200 years, according to NASA.
The Reform UK described himself as an “environmentalist in the old school sense and definition of that term”, complaining that “climate hysteria has blinded us to other environmental disasters such as the rape of our oceans”.
Later in the interview, Farage agreed with Peterson that “family” is of central importance for a happy society. He also said he believed in “Judeo-Christen values”, and asserted that the Conservative Party is “not remotely right-wing”.
Nigel Farage explains the politics of Reform UK: Racism, Fake anti-establishmentism, Deregulation, Corporatism, Climate Change Denial, Mysogyny and Transphobia.Elon Musk urges you to be a Fascist like him, says that you can ignore facts and reality then.
