Monument Valley in Utah, seen from Muley Point in the Bears Ears national monument, before Donald Trump’s drastic reduction of its boundaries. Photograph: George Frey/Getty Images
President’s order strips nearly 3m acres of Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante, sacred tribal sites, of safeguards
Patagonia, the outdoor clothing and gear company, has joined a lawsuit challenging Donald Trump’s decision to significantly reduce the Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante national monuments in Utah, removing protections from nearly 3m acres.
In July, the president approved the reduction of the sites by 90%, clearing the way to open the land to oil and gas companies. He argued in his proclamations that doing so would allow lands to be “put to a higher-priority use” and that they contained critical minerals important to “resource independence …[and] national security”.
Trump previously targeted the monuments, which are sacred to tribes, in his first term. Joe Biden ultimately overturned it.
Patagonia sued Trump in 2017 when he first sought to downsize the public lands in Utah. His proclamations earlier this year represented an even more dramatic reduction of the monuments than he sought in his first term.
The retailer announced on Wednesday it was joining a lawsuit to put a stop to what it described as illegal orders that “betray Tribal sovereignty”.
“We will not stand idly by while anti-public lands crusaders attempt to exploit these lands for their extractive-industry friends or disrespect tribal nations,” Ryan Gellert, the company’s CEO, said in a statement.
Orcas discuss Donald Trump and the killer apes’ concept of democracy. Front Orca warns that Trump is crashing his country’s economy and that everything he does he does for the fantastically wealthy.
Prime Minister Andy Burnham departs 10 Downing Street, London, to attend his first Prime Minister’s Questions at the Houses of Parliament, September 2, 2026
PM tells MPs he want welfare cuts and backs Nato demands for soaring military spending
BOND markets piled pressure on Prime Minister Andy Burnham today as government borrowing costs rose ahead of his first Budget.
The City and big business are now mobilising to discipline the new government and keep it in line with Treasury economic orthodoxy.
Mr Burnham bent before the storm at his first Prime Minister’s Questions (PMQs) today and again committed himself to abiding by the Treasury rules so beloved of his predecessor.
He also told MPs that he wanted to see cuts in the welfare budget, while backing Nato demands for soaring military spending.
Business leaders queued up to demand action to curb spending, in particular urging an end to the triple lock with protects pensioners’ living standards.
One of Mr Burnham’s own close advisers, former Goldman Sachs economist Jim O’Neill, led the charge, warning that the Prime Minister’s lengthy statement to MPs on Tuesday had raised concerns about his commitment to controlling spending.
Mr O’Neill told LBC radio that it had it had implied “a lot more government spending” which was “the last thing investors want to hear.”
Saying that the rise in interest rates on government debt invoked “Liz Truss days” he called for an end to the pensions triple lock and a “credible” plan to cut welfare spending.
Four victims of the Trump administration’s boat bombings, Eduard Hidalgo, Dushak Milovcic, Ricky Joseph, and Chad Joseph, are seen in a composite image. (Photo courtesy of CLIP)
“This is a make-believe armed conflict, but these are very real killings,” said one legal expert.
Wednesday marked one year since President Donald Trump began bombing boats allegedly smuggling drugs in the Caribbean Sea and Pacific Ocean—a grim anniversary that sparked a fresh wave of condemnation from rights advocates across the United States and beyond.
“For a year now, the Trump administration has engaged in a terrifying, lawless killing campaign at sea and has yet to provide the public with anything beyond the most threadbare justifications,” said Jeff Stein, staff attorney with ACLU’s National Security Project, in a statement late Tuesday.
The ACLU and the Center for Constitutional Rights are suing over the administration’s refusal to comply with a Freedom of Information Act request for a legal opinion authored by the US Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) attempting to justify the strikes.
“These strikes have devastated countless families, terrified communities, and, by the administration’s own admission, failed to achieve their purported goal of stopping drugs from entering into the United States,” Stein said. “We urge leaders in both Congress and the executive branch to put an immediate end to these strikes before anyone else is killed.”
Despite mounting outrage over the bombings, which have killed at least 227 people and, as Amnesty International USA’s national director for government relations, Amanda Klasing, highlighted Monday, “are illegal under both international and US law,” the Republican-controlled Congress has failed to pass any war powers resolutions intended to stop the campaign.
“The Trump administration has summarily killed more than 200 people over the course of the past year, bragging about these killings online and facing no accountability,” Ida Sawyer, crisis, conflict, and arms director at Human Rights Watch, said Wednesday. “The victims and their loved ones deserve a full accounting of these operations, and justice for the grave harm they have suffered.”
After a two-month pause in the bombings, the administration revived them last week, launching a pair of attacks that killed at least six people, according to social media posts and aerial footage from US Southern Command. The strikes followed SOUTHCOM’s early August announcement of an expanded operation across Latin America called Joint Task Force Western Hemisphere.
In September and October 2025, when the strikes began, US Southern Command, known as SOUTHCOM, linked three of the strikes to the Tren de Aragua and Ejército de Liberación Nacional criminal organizations. Most later strikes were described as targeting “a vessel operated by designated terrorist organizations.”
But the military’s most recent two announcements of strikes simply stated that “confirmed intelligence revealed the vessel’s active involvement in narco-trafficking.”
Brian Finucane, a former State Department legal adviser who now advises the US Program at the International Crisis Group, told the outlet that “they are engaging in conduct that is widely regarded to be flagrantly illegal, criminal even, and have not offered anything approaching plausible legal rationale.”
The OLC memo may be the administration’s “permission slip,” Finucane said, but it hasn’t actually substantiated claims that the United States is engaged in an armed conflict with cartels that traffic drugs.
“This war framing on the part of the administration is really bogus,” he added. “This is a make-believe armed conflict, but these are very real killings.”
I don’t think there’s really even a colorable argument that this isn’t mass murder.theintercept.com/2026/09/02/m…
Several Democrats in Congress, from House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (NY) to Senate Minority Whip and Judiciary Committee Ranking Member Dick Durbin (Ill.), renewed their criticism of the boat bombings on Wednesday.
Sen. Ruben Gallego (D-Ariz.) said that “the most recent strike was four days ago. A year of killing, and this administration has never once come to Congress to justify any of it. This cannot become the way our country goes to war.”
“The American people are already paying for one war they didn’t want in the first place,” he continued, nodding to the illegal six-month assault on Iran. “I fought in Iraq. I know what these wars cost, and I know who pays them. I will use every tool I have as a United States senator to stop this and to defend the Constitution.”
House Armed Services Committee Ranking Member Adam Smith (D-Wash.) noted that “it remains unclear whether these operations have made any real difference in stopping illegal drugs from reaching the United States.”
“This is especially true for fentanyl,” he noted, which Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth “have repeatedly claimed is the reason for these extrajudicial killings even though we know that it is cocaine—not fentanyl—that is typically shipped via small boats from South America.”
Smith also called out the Department of Defense for failing “to publicly provide the costs of these operations, both in terms of dollars and readiness,” and declared that “never before in my over 20 years on this committee have I seen such a staggering lack of transparency on behalf of an administration and DOD to meaningfully inform Congress of the use of lethal military force.”
Today marks one year of the Trump administration’s illegal boat strikes campaign that has killed over 225 people.
This is a stain on our country and has done nothing to make America safer. Taxpayer dollars should not be spent on these extrajudicial killings. pic.twitter.com/U5RU6FkyA8
However, with Republicans holding narrow majorities in Congress and mostly still refusing to truly challenge the administration on the boat strikes—and various other violent actions around the world—some campaigners are also stepping up pressure on other governments.
“The Trump administration has had complete impunity for this campaign of unlawful killings for a year, and has stated openly that it has no intention of stopping,” said Sawyer. “Other countries should refrain from any cooperation on these strikes, and Congress should urgently work to rein in the deadly actions of an administration bent on violating international law.”
Jamil Dakwar, director of ACLU’s Human Rights Program, said that “the international community must do everything in its power to hold the Trump administration responsible for these extrajudicial killings that are blatant violations of international law.”
“No other country should provide any assistance that could contribute to these unlawful US government killings,” Dakwar added, calling for an “independent international investigation into this lawless campaign.”
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UK Prime Minister Andy Burnham leaves 10 Downing Street to address lawmakers in the House of Commons for the first time as prime minister in London, United Kingdom, on September 1, 2026. [Raşid Necati Aslım – Anadolu Agency]
Pro-Palestine groups on Wednesday delivered a petition signed by more than 55,000 people calling on new British Prime Minister Andy Burnham to hold Israel accountable over the genocide in Gaza, Anadolu reports.
Video footage shared on US social media company X showed Ryvka Barnard, deputy director of the Palestine Solidarity Campaign (PSC), Sara Husseini, director of the British Palestinian Committee, and prominent British actor Juliet Stevenson, a vocal critic of Israeli actions, handing the petition to Burnham’s office in Downing Street.
Speaking in the video, Barnard said they were calling on Burnham to uphold international law and the rights of the Palestinian people and to hold Israel to account over the genocide “that it’s been committing, that’s an ongoing genocide that it continues to commit.”
Husseini said there could be no “piecemeal approach” to occupation, apartheid and genocide.
“So, this petition today, really is a reminder that the wider British public … will be watching really closely to see if this new government can commit to meaningful policy change that can actually deliver accountability and the painfully long overdue justice that Palestinians deserve,” she said.
For her part, Stevenson said: “We’re urging Andy Burnham and his government to shift the UK government’s position on this, because we’ve watched Keir Starmer (former prime minister) collude with it.”
Israel’s genocide in Gaza has killed at least 73,470 Palestinians and injured 174,540 others since October 2023, according to the enclave’s Health Ministry. Most of the victims have been women and children, while around 90% of Gaza’s civilian infrastructure has been destroyed.
Genocide 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/O74hZCKKdpAKeir Starmer objects to criticism of the IDF. He asks how could anyone object to them starving people to death, forced marches like the Nazis did, bombing Gaza’s hospitals and universities, mass-murdering journalists, healthworkers and starving people queuing for food, killing and raping prisoners and murdering children. He calls for people to stop obstructing his genocide for Israel. New Labour UK Prime Minister Andy Burnham continues Labour party policy of active support and complicity in Israel’s genocide.
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An excavator demolishes a Palestinian-owned building as Israeli forces carry out a raid in the Taawun Alawi area of Nablus, West Bank, Palestine on August 31, 2026. [Nedal Eshtayah – Anadolu Agency]
Israel has forcibly displaced residents of Khirbet al-Taban in the southern occupied West Bank, making it the 66th Palestinian village to be completely emptied of its residents since October 2023, Israeli rights group B’Tselem said Wednesday.
The group said in a statement that Israeli forces raided the village, south of Hebron, Wednesday morning and demolished the homes of all its residents within hours.
Khirbet al-Taban is home to 12 families totaling about 70 people, including 28 children, it said.
“The forces did not leave a single home standing,” B’Tselem said.
Israeli forces also demolished sheep pens, water tanks and storage facilities and destroyed caves in the area, according to the group.
B’Tselem said Khirbet al-Taban was the “66th Palestinian village that Israel has forcibly displaced since October 2023,” while residents of 18 other villages have been partially displaced.
The group said the displacement operations have forcibly removed about 4,931 Palestinians from their homes, including approximately 2,339 children and teenagers.
B’Tselem Executive Director Yuli Novak said Israel was “continuing to erase Palestinian communities at an accelerating pace as part of the ethnic cleansing it is carrying out in the West Bank.”
Novak said the international community was standing “idly by while Palestinian lives are left exposed to Israeli violence.”
The demolition of Khirbet al-Taban comes amid an escalation in the seizure of Palestinian land across the West Bank, including occupied East Jerusalem, alongside occupiers’ attacks and the establishment of illegal settlement outposts and projects.
In July, Israeli authorities issued 31 orders to seize about 831,000 square meters of Palestinian land in the West Bank, according to The Palestinian Colonization and Wall Resistance Commission.
The Israeli army and occupiers also carried out 2,256 attacks against Palestinians, their land and property during the month, including 1,458 by the army and 798 by occupiers, according to the commission.
Since Israel began its genocide on the Gaza Strip on Oct. 8, 2023, Israeli forces and occupiers have intensified attacks in the West Bank, including occupied East Jerusalem, through killings, arrests, forced displacement, home demolitions and illegal settlement expansion.
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Orcas discuss Donald Trump and the killer apes’ concept of democracy. Front Orca warns that Trump is crashing his country’s economy and that everything he does he does for the fantastically wealthy.
Donald Trump says that he obviously deserves a Peace prize because Obama got one and explains why he established his Bored of PeaceOrcas discuss rotting brain, front Orca says he wishes someone would lock him up, small Orca speaks bluntly.
Prime Minister Andy Burnham departs 10 Downing Street, London, to attend his first Prime Minister’s Questions at the Houses of Parliament, September 2, 2026
