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Trump to sign executive order lifting Syria sanctions

Trump to sign executive order lifting Syria sanctions

The Nationala day ago
US President announced during his visit to Riyadh last month that he would be giving Syria near-total sanctions relief
President Donald Trump on Monday will sign an executive order to lift US sanctions on Syria.
Mr Trump announced during his visit to Riyadh last month that he would be giving Syria near-total sanctions relief. But unwinding the US laws and designations is a complex process and requires Congressional action in some cases.
State Department spokeswoman Tammy Bruce said the executive order reaffirms the President's "belief that the Syrian people deserve a future of safety and prosperity".
"This policy, reflects the President's conviction that American leadership can unlock new paths to regional stability," Ms Bruce told reporters.
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said the order will remove sanctions on Syria while maintaining sanctions on former president Bashar Al Assad.
"His associates, human rights abusers, drug traffickers, persons linked to chemical weapons activities, ISIS and their affiliates, and Iranian policies" will remain under sanctions, she said.
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Battles over public lands loom after sell-off proposal fails
Battles over public lands loom after sell-off proposal fails

Gulf Today

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Battles over public lands loom after sell-off proposal fails

Alex Brown, Tribune News Service Hunters, hikers and outdoors lovers of all stripes mounted a campaign in June against a Republican proposal to sell off millions of acres of federal public land. a. But even though the land sales proposal was defeated, experts say federal lands face a slew of other threats from President Donald Trump's administration. Agency leaders have proposed rolling back the 'Roadless Rule' that protects 58 million acres from logging and other uses. Trump's Justice Department has issued a legal opinion that the president is allowed to abolish national monuments. Regulators have moved to slash environmental rules to ramp up logging and oil and gas production. And Trump's cuts to the federal workforce have gutted the ranks of the agencies that manage federal lands. 'This is not over even if the sell-off proposal doesn't make it,' said John Leshy, who served as solicitor for the US Department of the Interior during the Clinton administration. 'The whole thing about leasing or selling timber or throwing them open to mining claims, that's a form of partial privatization. It's pretty much a giveaway.' Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum has repeatedly described public lands as America's 'balance sheet.' He has argued that some lands could be used to provide housing, while calling for an expansion of mining and oil and gas drilling to increase their economic output. 'President Trump's energy dominance vision will end those wars abroad, will make life more affordable for every family in America by driving down inflation,' Burgum said before his confirmation hearing. Public lands advocates are bracing for ongoing battles for the rest of Trump's term in office. They expect Republicans to add last-minute public lands amendments to other bills moving through Congress, and for land management agencies to attempt to strip protections from other federal lands. Given the vocal backlash to the initial sell-off plan, advocates expect future attempts to be shaped behind closed doors and advanced with little time for opponents to mount a defense. Meanwhile, they expect states to play a key role in shaping those battles. In Western states, where most federally owned lands are located, many leaders from both parties view public lands as special places open to all Americans and critical for clean water, wildlife and tourism. But some conservatives resent the fact that large portions of their states are managed by officials in Washington, DC, limiting development and private enterprise. Officials in some states, including Idaho, Utah and Wyoming, have pushed lawsuits or resolutions seeking to force the feds to hand over huge amounts of land. Public land experts say the lawmakers behind those efforts will likely press harder now that Trump is in the White House. Such state-level takeover attempts could shape the proposals that emerge from Trump's allies in Washington. The firestorm over federal lands exploded when US Sen. Mike Lee, a Utah Republican, introduced legislation that would force the US Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management to sell up to 3.3 million acres of land. The measure also would direct the agencies to make more than 250 million additional acres eligible for sale. 'We've never seen a threat on this magnitude ever,' said Devin O'Dea, Western policy and conservation manager with Backcountry Hunters & Anglers. 'There's been an overwhelming amount of opposition. We've seen record-breaking engagement on this issue.' Lee, a longtime federal lands opponent, claimed the lands were needed for housing and argued the government has been a poor manager of its land. 'Washington has proven time and again it can't manage this land,' Lee said in June when announcing the proposal. 'This bill puts it in better hands.' But a wide-ranging coalition of opponents argued that the proposal had no protections to ensure the lands would be used for affordable housing, and that many of the parcels eligible for sale had little housing potential. A furious social media campaign highlighted cherished hiking trails, fishing lakes and ski slopes that were in danger of being sold, urging people to call their lawmakers to oppose the measure. In recent days, Montana Republican US Sens. Steve Daines and Tim Sheehy, as well as Idaho Republican US Sens. Mike Crapo and Jim Risch, came out in opposition to the land sale proposal. That put into question whether Lee's legislation could earn even a simple majority. Then the Senate parliamentarian ruled the sell-off could not be included in the reconciliation bill without a 60-vote majority. That ruling came a day after Lee posted on social media that he would be making changes to the bill in response to concerns from Hunter Nation, a nonprofit whose board includes Donald Trump Jr. Lee released a scaled-back measure last week that would exempt national forest lands but would direct the Bureau of Land Management to sell up to 1.2 million acres. It would require land for sale to be within five miles of a population center and developed to provide housing. Public land advocates say Lee's changes did little to assuage their concerns. They argue that federal land sales or transfers should happen through the current, long-standing process, which requires local stakeholder input and directs the proceeds from land sales to be reinvested into conservation and public access on other parcels. 'It's the overwhelming belief of hunters and anglers that the budget reconciliation process is not the appropriate vehicle for public land sales,' said O'Dea, with the hunting and fishing group. On Saturday evening, Lee announced that he was withdrawing the proposal, saying that Senate rules did not allow him to include protections that land would not be sold to foreign interests. But he pledged to continue the battle over federal land ownership, working with Trump to 'put underutilised federal land to work for American families.' While the sell-off proposal aligned with some state officials' goal of taking over federal lands, some lands experts say private developers would have been the real winner. 'If the lands are transferred to the states without money, the states lose,' said Leshy, the former Interior Department official. 'It's a hit on their budget, which means they're gonna have to sell them off. If states got a significant amount of public lands, a lot of that would end up in private hands.' In Utah, where leaders have made the most aggressive push to take over federal lands, lawmakers argue that they could raise lease prices for oil and gas operations, bringing in enough revenue to cover the state's management costs. 'The policy of the state is to keep these lands open and available to the public,' Speaker Mike Schultz, a Republican, told Stateline. O'Dea pointed to an economic analysis of what it would cost Montana to take over federal lands. The report found it would cost the state $8 billion over 20 years to take on wildfire management, deferred maintenance and mine reclamation. He noted that many Western states have sold off a majority of the 'trust lands' they were granted at statehood, undermining claims that a state takeover would leave lands in the public domain. While Lee's land sales proposal has gotten the biggest headlines, public land advocates are fighting a multifront battle against the Trump administration's moves to roll back the protected status of certain lands, slash environmental rules, and expand logging, mining and drilling operations.

Trump's ‘Bill' just put the Senate in play for Democrats
Trump's ‘Bill' just put the Senate in play for Democrats

Gulf Today

timean hour ago

  • Gulf Today

Trump's ‘Bill' just put the Senate in play for Democrats

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Marco Rubio defends USAID closure as uncertainty surrounds future help to poorer countries
Marco Rubio defends USAID closure as uncertainty surrounds future help to poorer countries

The National

timean hour ago

  • The National

Marco Rubio defends USAID closure as uncertainty surrounds future help to poorer countries

US Secretary of State Marco Rubio has defended the closure of the US Agency for International Development, which officially shut its doors on Tuesday after more than six decades of assistance to poorer countries. Five months after Elon Musk called USAID a 'criminal organisation' and said he had fed it into a 'wood chipper', the agency started by president John F Kennedy and credited with saving millions of lives around the globe no longer exists. Its remaining functions have been absorbed into the State Department, which will oversee a new 'America First' approach to international aid. In a statement, Mr Rubio gave parts of the Middle East and North Africa as examples of places that have received US aid but held a negative view of America. Since 1991, 'more than $89 billion invested in the Middle East and North Africa left the US with lower favourability ratings than China in every nation but Morocco", Mr Rubio said. 'The agency's expenditure of $9.3 billion in Gaza and the West Bank since 1991, whose beneficiaries included allies of Hamas, has produced grievances rather than gratitude towards the United States.' Beyond creating a globe-spanning 'NGO industrial complex' at taxpayer expense, USAID has little to show since the end of the Cold War, he said. 'Development objectives have rarely been met, instability has often worsened and anti-American sentiment has only grown.' Mr Rubio said Americans should not pay taxes to fund failed governments far from the US. 'Moving forward, our assistance will be targeted and time-limited.' USAID was known globally for providing life-saving help to poorer countries, including medicine to combat HIV and Aids. Its termination comes amid several new reports projecting that cuts to US aid could lead to millions of preventable deaths. The Lancet, which analysed data from 133 low and middle-income countries from 2001 to 2023, estimates that USAID-funded programmes helped to prevent more than 91 million deaths over the past two decades, including 30 million among children. If the cuts continue, researchers project 1.8 million excess deaths in 2025 alone, with a total of 14 million by 2030 – including 4.5 million children under the age of five. 'US aid cuts, along with the probable ripple effects on other international donors, threaten to abruptly halt and reverse one of the most important periods of progress in human development,' the study said. Mr Rubio said USAID had marketed its programmes as a charity, rather than instruments of American foreign policy intended to advance US interests Former presidents Barack Obama and George W Bush, and Irish singer Bono, on Tuesday questioned the Trump administration's closure of USAID, including funding cuts to a popular Aids and HIV programme known as Pepfar (the President's Emergency Plan for Aids Relief). Mr Obama called the dismantling of USAID 'inexplicable' and 'a colossal mistake.' Washington has been the world's largest humanitarian aid donor, amounting to at least 38 per cent of all contributions recorded by the UN. It disbursed $61 billion in foreign assistance last year, just over half of that through USAID, according to government data. The State Department denied criticism, saying countries want investment opportunities, not handouts. 'We think that the best thing we can do, from a moral perspective, to lead to development and a betterment of life all around the world, is to invest in the peace and prosperity of those countries,' a senior State Department official told reporters. 'Which means trade, investment, sort of growing our bilateral connection that way so that's the administration's view at least.' The official also said reports that Pepfar funding will not continue are inaccurate. 'The Secretary said, many, many times, Pepfar will continue, will become more efficient and we believe, more impactful,' the official said.

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