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IAEA chief to hold talks with Putin about Ukraine nuclear plant

IAEA chief to hold talks with Putin about Ukraine nuclear plant
Rafael Grossi, Director General of the International Atomic Energy Agency, attends the IAEA’s Board of Governors meeting at the agency’s headquarters in Vienna on Mar. 4, 2024. (AFP)
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Updated 05 March 2024
AFP
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IAEA chief to hold talks with Putin about Ukraine nuclear plant

IAEA chief to hold talks with Putin about Ukraine nuclear plant
  • Grossi last met Putin in Saint Petersburg in October 2022 to discuss safety issues involving the Zaporizhzhia facility
  • The IAEA chief said he hoped to discuss “technical points” with Putin
Updated 05 March 2024
AFP
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VIENNA: UN atomic watchdog chief Rafael Grossi will head to Russia Tuesday for a fresh round of talks with President Vladimir Putin to discuss “the future operational status” of Ukraine’s Russian-controlled Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant.
Europe’s largest nuclear plant has been at the center of fighting since it was captured by Russian forces in March 2022, with both Moscow and Kyiv frequently accusing each other of compromising its safety.
Grossi last met Putin in Saint Petersburg in October 2022 to discuss safety issues involving the Zaporizhzhia facility.
“I think it is very important that we keep this high-level dialogue with both belligerents,” Grossi — who heads the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) — told reporters Monday.
The IAEA chief said he hoped to discuss “technical points” with Putin and get “an impression of what the plans” for the plant are.
“There are issues related to the future operational status of the plant,” Grossi said when asked about the topics he intends to raise.
Russian Foreign ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova also confirmed the talks.
Grossi has visited Ukraine several times to meet with President Volodymyr Zelensky and other senior officials.
The IAEA chief said he also hopes to address the nuclear plant’s “extremely fragile and thin” external power supply lines, after the facility suffered a complete loss of off-site power multiple times during bouts of fighting in the past two years.
Fears over the plant’s safety have persisted throughout Russia’s invasion, with the IAEA warning that powerful explosions and mine blasts near the plant indicated “possible combat action” that were of “deep concern.”
Grossi has called for “maximum military restraint” around the plant “to reduce the danger of a nuclear accident.”
The UN nuclear watchdog has also voiced concerned about a possible shortage of staff at the Zaporizhzhia plant.
Since February, workers from Ukraine’s atomic energy operator Energoatom who refused to sign contracts with the Russian operating entity have been barred from working at the plant.
IAEA officials have been on the ground monitoring the plant since September 2022.
The plant’s six reactor units, which produced around a fifth of Ukraine’s electricity before Russia’s full-scale invasion, have been shut down.

Topics: Russia-Ukraine Conflict IAEA Rafael Grossi Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant

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Russian delegation arrives for US talks in Istanbul, witness says

Updated 7 sec ago
Reuters
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Russian delegation arrives for US talks in Istanbul, witness says

Russian delegation arrives for US talks in Istanbul, witness says
  • The delegations will also include officials from the State Department and Russian Foreign Ministry
Updated 7 sec ago
Reuters
ISTANBUL: A Russian delegation has arrived at the US Consul General’s residence in Istanbul for talks aimed at addressing bilateral issues over the operations of the two countries’ embassies, a Reuters witness said on Thursday.
A US official earlier said that the US delegation will be led by Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Sonata Coulter, while the Russian delegation will be led by Aleksandr Darchiyev, the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs Director of the North Atlantic Department and also Russia’s ambassador-designate for the United States.
The delegations will also include officials from the State Department and Russian Foreign Ministry, as well as members of their respective embassies, the official said.

Pro-Palestinian protesters force their way into Barnard College building, injuring an employee

Pro-Palestinian protesters force their way into Barnard College building, injuring an employee
Updated 27 February 2025
AP
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Pro-Palestinian protesters force their way into Barnard College building, injuring an employee

Pro-Palestinian protesters force their way into Barnard College building, injuring an employee
Updated 27 February 2025
AP

NEW YORK: Pro-Palestinian protesters wearing kaffiyeh scarves and masks pushed their way into Barnard College’s Milbank Hall, which houses the offices of the dean, and assaulted a school employee Wednesday, according to the school.
The protesters later left Milbank Hall in the night “without further incident,” Barnard President Laura Rosenbury said in a statement.
“But let us be clear: their disregard for the safety of our community remains completely unacceptable,” she said.
The school had warned that if the students were not gone by 9:30 p.m. officials could be forced to take “additional, necessary measures to protect our campus.”
The student group Columbia Students for Justice in Palestine said on the social platform X that protesters dispersed after the administration agreed to meet with them Thursday afternoon.


The demonstrators demanded amnesty for all students disciplined for pro-Palestine action; a meeting with Rosenbury and Dean Leslie Grinage; and reversal of the expulsion of two students, according to the group.
“WE WILL NOT STOP UNTIL OUR DEMANDS ARE MET. FREE PALESTINE,” it posted on X earlier in the day.
An employee was sent to the hospital after being assaulted by the protesters, Robin Levine, Barnard’s vice president for strategic communications said in a statement, without offering further details.
The protesters also encouraged other people to come on campus without identification, Levine added.
“Barnard leadership offered to meet with the protesters — just as we meet with all members of our community — on one simple condition: remove their masks,” she said earlier in the evening. “They refused. We have also offered mediation.”
Videos posted by the student group showed people wearing masks and kaffiyeh scarves chanting in a hallway. Some banged on drums, while others held megaphones.
Palestinian flags were hung on the walls and slogans such as “Barnard funds genocide” and “Free Palestine” were scrawled on the walls.

Topics: War on Gaza West Bank Palestine Israel

Trump administration says to cut 90% of USAID foreign aid contracts

Trump administration says to cut 90% of USAID foreign aid contracts
Updated 27 February 2025
AP
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Trump administration says to cut 90% of USAID foreign aid contracts

Trump administration says to cut 90% of USAID foreign aid contracts
  • The disclosures give an idea of the scale of the administration’s retreat from US aid and development assistance overseas
Updated 27 February 2025
AP

WASHINGTON: The Trump administration said Wednesday it is eliminating more than 90 percent of the US Agency for International Development’s foreign aid contracts and $60 billion in overall US assistance around the world, putting numbers on its plans to eliminate the majority of US development and humanitarian help abroad.
The cuts detailed by the administration would leave few surviving USAID projects for advocates to try to save in what are ongoing court battles with the administration.
The Trump administration outlined its plans in both an internal memo obtained by The Associated Press and filings in one of those federal lawsuits Wednesday.
Wednesday’s disclosures also give an idea of the scale of the administration’s retreat from US aid and development assistance overseas, and from decades of US policy that foreign aid helps US interests by stabilizing other countries and economies and building alliances.
The memo said officials were “clearing significant waste stemming from decades of institutional drift.” More changes are planned in how USAID and the State Department deliver foreign assistance, it said.
President Donald Trump and ally Elon Musk have hit foreign aid harder and faster than almost any other target in their push to cut the size of the federal government. Both men say USAID projects advance a liberal agenda and are a waste of money.
Trump on Jan. 20 ordered what he said would be a 90-day program-by-program review of which foreign assistance programs deserved to continue, and cut off all foreign assistance funds almost overnight.
The funding freeze has stopped thousands of US-funded programs abroad, and the administration and Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency teams have pulled the majority of USAID staff off the job through forced leave and firings.
In the federal court filings Wednesday, nonprofits owed money on contracts with USAID describe both Trump political appointees and members of Musk’s teams terminating USAID’s contracts around the world at breakneck speed, without time for any meaningful review, they say.
“’There are MANY more terminations coming, so please gear up!“’ a USAID official wrote staff Monday, in an email quoted by lawyers for the nonprofits in the filings.
The nonprofits, among thousands of contractors, owed billions of dollars in payment since the freeze began, called the en masse contract terminations a maneuver to get around complying with the order to lift the funding freeze temporarily.
So did a Democratic lawmaker.
“The administration is brazenly attempting to blow through Congress and the courts by announcing the completion of their sham ‘review’ of foreign aid and the immediate termination of thousands of aid programs all over the world,” said Connecticut Sen. Chris Murphy, a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
The State Department said Secretary of State Marco Rubio had reviewed the terminations.
In all, the Trump administration said it will eliminate 5,800 of 6,200 multiyear USAID contract awards, for a cut of $54 billion. Another 4,100 of 9,100 State Department grants were being eliminated, for a cut of $4.4 billion.
The State Department memo, which was first reported by the Washington Free Beacon, described the administration as spurred by a federal court order that gave officials until the end of the day Wednesday to lift the Trump administration’s monthlong block on foreign aid funding.
“In response, State and USAID moved rapidly,” targeting USAID and State Department foreign aid programs in vast numbers for contract terminations, the memo said.
The Trump administration asked the Supreme Court to intervene Wednesday night as an appeals court refused to lift the midnight deadline.
Trump administration officials — after repeated warnings from the federal judge in the case — also said Wednesday they were finally beginning to send out their first or any payments after more than a month with no known spending. Officials were processing a few million dollars of back payments, officials said, of billions of dollars owed to US and international organizations and companies.

Topics: Trump Returns US Agency for International Development (USAID)

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Trump sees ‘a thirst’ for his ‘gold card’ visa idea with $5 million potential path to US citizenship

Trump sees ‘a thirst’ for his ‘gold card’ visa idea with $5 million potential path to US citizenship
Updated 27 February 2025
AP
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Trump sees ‘a thirst’ for his ‘gold card’ visa idea with $5 million potential path to US citizenship

Trump sees ‘a thirst’ for his ‘gold card’ visa idea with $5 million potential path to US citizenship
  • Trump said of future possible recipients of the gold visa program: “They’ll be wealthy and they’ll be successful and they’ll be spending a lot of money and paying a lot of taxes and employing a lot of people
Updated 27 February 2025
AP

WASHINGTON: President Donald Trump said Wednesday that he plans to start selling a “gold card” visa with a potential pathway to US citizenship for $5 million, seeking to have that new initiative replace a 35-year-old visa program for investors.
“I happen to think it’ll sell like crazy. It’s a market,” Trump said. “But we’ll know very soon.”
During the first meeting of his second-term Cabinet, Trump suggested that the new revenue generated from the program could be used to pay off the country’s debt.
“If we sell a million, that’s $5 trillion dollars,” he said. Of the demand from the business community to participate, he said “I think we will sell a lot because I think there’s really a thirst.”
Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick told reporters during the same meeting that Trump’s initiative would replace the EB-5 program, which offers US visas to investors who spent about $1 million on a company that employs at least 10 people.
Lutnick said that program “has been around for many years for investment in projects” but “it was poorly overseen, poorly executed.”
The new program could mark a dramatic shift in US immigration policy but isn’t unprecedented elsewhere. Countries in Europe and elsewhere offer what have become known as “golden visas” that allow participants to pay in order to secure immigration status in desirable places.
Congress, meanwhile, determines qualifications US for citizenship, but the president said “gold cards” would not require congressional approval.
Trump said of future possible recipients of the gold visa program: “They’ll be wealthy and they’ll be successful and they’ll be spending a lot of money and paying a lot of taxes and employing a lot of people, and we think it’s going to be extremely successful.”
Henley & Partners, an advisory firm, says more than 100 countries around the world offer “golden visas” to wealthy individuals and investors. That list includes the United States, United Kingdom, Spain, Greece, Malta, Australia, Canada and Italy.
“Companies can buy gold cards and, in exchange, get those visas to hire new employees,” Trump said. Despite similar programs already occurring outside the US, he insisted, “No other country can do this because people don’t want to go to other countries. They want to come here.”
“Everybody wants to come here, especially since Nov. 5,” he said of his Election Day victory last fall.
Lutnick suggested that the gold card — which would actually work, at least to start, more like a green card, or permanent legal residency — would raise the price of admission for investors and do away with fraud and “nonsense” that he said characterize the EB-5 program.
A pathway to citizenship as part of the new program also would set it apart from the EB-5 program. Trump said vetting people who might be eligible for the gold card will “go through a process” that is still being worked out.
Pressed on if there would be restrictions on people from China or Iran not being allowed to participate, Trump suggested it will likely not “be restricted to much in terms of countries, but maybe in terms of individuals.”
About 8,000 people obtained investor visas in the 12-month period ending Sept. 30, 2022, according to the Homeland Security Department’s most recent Yearbook of Immigration Statistics.
The Congressional Research Service reported in 2021 that EB-5 visas pose risks of fraud, including verification that funds were obtained legally. Then-President Joe Biden signed a 2022 law bringing big changes to the EB-5 program, including steps meant to investigate and sanction individuals or entities engaged in fraud as part of it — meant to curb some of those risks.
Trump offered few details on how the new program might work, including making no mention of existing EB-5 requirements for job creation. While the number of EB-5 visas is capped, meanwhile, the Republican president mused that the federal government could sell 10 million “gold cards” to reduce the deficit. He said it “could be great, maybe it will be fantastic.”
“It’s somewhat like a green card, but at a higher level of sophistication,” the president said. “It’s a road to citizenship for people — and essentially people of wealth or people of great talent, where people of wealth pay for those people of talent to get in, meaning companies will pay for people to get in and to have long, long term status in the country.”

Topics: Trump Returns US citizenship Gold card visa Golden visas

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Musk and his ‘humble tech support’ effort get star turn at Trump’s Cabinet meeting

Musk and his ‘humble tech support’ effort get star turn at Trump’s Cabinet meeting
Updated 27 February 2025
AP
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Musk and his ‘humble tech support’ effort get star turn at Trump’s Cabinet meeting

Musk and his ‘humble tech support’ effort get star turn at Trump’s Cabinet meeting
  • “If we don’t do this, America will go bankrupt,” Musk told department heads assembled around a large wooden table in the Cabinet Room
Updated 27 February 2025
AP

WASHINGTON: Elon Musk took a star turn at the first Cabinet meeting of President Donald Trump’s new term, holding forth in a black “Make America Great Again” campaign hat on Wednesday about his role as “humble tech support” for the federal government — and laying out dire stakes if his cost-cutting efforts fail.
“If we don’t do this, America will go bankrupt,” Musk told department heads assembled around a large wooden table in the Cabinet Room.
Trump, not one to easily share the spotlight, seemed happy to turn the top of the hour-plus meeting over to Musk for a “little summary” of what the Department of Government Efficiency has been up to, saying that Musk’s team had found evidence of “horrible things” afoot in the government.
“He’s sacrificing a lot,” Trump said of Musk, referencing the time the world’s richest man is taking away from his many business ventures. “He’s also getting hit.”
Musk, for his part, said his lightning-fast efforts to right-size the government had drawn death threats and he jokingly knocked his fist on his “wooden head” as he said he hoped to find $1 trillion to trim from the federal budget, an effort that has caused extensive disruption among federal workers and those who rely on their services.
Musk defended his weekend attempt to require government workers to justify their prior week’s work under penalty of termination — a move that drew pushback from many in the room on national security and privacy grounds — as merely a “pulse check” to ensure that those working for the government have “a pulse and two neurons,” adding that “this is not a high bar” for workers to meet.
Speculating that some workers are either dead or fictional, Musk added that the goal was to see that workers are real, alive and can “write an email.”
Asked if members of the Cabinet were happy with Musk, the DOGE guru started to answer the question. But Trump interjected and said he might want to let Cabinet members answer. Then Trump joked that if anyone disagreed, he might “throw them out.”
That drew applause from Cabinet members.
Trump then turned things back to Musk, who said the president had “put together, I think, the best Cabinet ever.”
“And I don’t give false praise,” he added.
Musk did volunteer that his efforts to slash government spending would “make mistakes.”
He cited as an example that, while hustling to dramatically shrink the US Agency for International Development, “One of the things we accidentally canceled very briefly was Ebola prevention.” Musk insisted that “there was no interruption” in services before the funding was restored.
But a USAID official said Wednesday that no funds for the agency’s Ebola response had been released under President Donald Trump’s Jan. 20 funding freeze for foreign aid, including for efforts to combat the spread of the deadly virus.
After about 15 minutes of focus on Musk and DOGE, Trump shifted the spotlight of the Cabinet meeting back to his own accomplishments in his first weeks in office.
The Cabinet sat mostly silently for more than an hour, as Trump opened the floor to questions from an invited group of reporters.
Asked if he expected his Cabinet to follow his directives without exception, Trump initially scoffed at the question before answering, “of course, no exceptions.”

Topics: Trump Returns Elon Musk

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