EU to provide emergency funds to help keep Radio Free Europe afloat
Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty started broadcasting during the Cold War. Its programs are aired in 27 languages in 23 countries across Eastern Europe, Central Asia and the Middle East. Its lawyers have been fighting the administration in court.
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Washington Post
an hour ago
- Washington Post
The government is paying 154,000 people not to work
This spring, the Trump administration and Elon Musk's U.S. DOGE Service drastically reduced the federal workforce, all in the name of cost-cutting. This included making a 'deferred resignation' offer to government workers, offering to pay them through at least the end of September if they resigned their positions. Post reporter Meryl Kornfield and colleagues have been trying for months to find out exactly how many federal employees took these buyouts. Last week, they reported for the first time that the government is now paying more than 154,000 people not to work. Colby Itkowitz speaks with Meryl about how she and her colleagues uncovered this number, how the Trump administration defends its claims of cost-cutting, and how former federal workers are feeling as they continue to earn a paycheck for work they are not doing. Today's show was produced by Peter Bresnan. It was edited by Maggie Penman and mixed by Sean Carter. Subscribe to The Washington Post here.
Yahoo
an hour ago
- Yahoo
Kaul joins multistate suit claiming Trump has sought to deter care of transgender youths
Wisconsin Attorney General Josh Kaul joined a multistate lawsuit Aug. 1 suing the Trump administration for "relentlessly, cruelly and unlawfully" targeting transgender people. The lawsuit, filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts, comes six months after Kaul vowed to pursue legal actions should the federal government attempt to impede funding for gender-affirming health care. Recent federal actions have sought to deter health care providers from treating transgender patients under the age of 19, despite states like Wisconsin having laws in place that allow for medically appropriate procedures. President Donald Trump's Jan. 28 order oversteps its authority, the lawsuit states, by intimidating providers through threats of civil and criminal prosecution. The lawsuit emphasizes the order not only "has no basis in law" but is unconstitutional. Ultimately, the lawsuit is requesting the court to block the administration's actions and cease enforcing the order. 'The Trump administration shouldn't be interfering with the provision of health care,' Kaul said in a press release last week. 'The administration should be respecting individual liberty and equal rights, not shamefully targeting transgender people.' Trump's directive, signed early in his second term, aims to strip funds from medical institutions that provide gender-affirming care, and would require federal health programs like Medicaid and TRICARE (for military families) to exclude coverage of gender-affirming surgeries and hormone treatments for young people by 2026. Gender-affirming medical care supports people whose gender identity is out of sync with the sex they were assigned at birth. Health care may include the use of hormones to delay puberty in adolescents, behavioral health counseling to support and promote the gender identity with which a person aligns, and hormone replacement therapy. In very rare cases for young people, it may involve surgery. Access to gender-affirming services has been associated with lower suicide risks for transgender people. Research has also shown that people encountering anti-transgender bias and a denial of services had more than double the prevalence of suicide attempts than those who didn't have such experiences, according to the Williams Institute. The attorneys general warn the administration's tactics have had a chilling effect on states' ability to provide gender-affirming services. Despite protective laws being on the books, health care providers have already scaled back the services they offer to transgender youth. Other gender clinics have shuttered services completely in an attempt to avoid civil or criminal investigations and actions. Joining Kaul in filing this lawsuit are the attorneys general of California, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawai'i, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Rhode Island, and the District of Columbia, as well as the Governor of Pennsylvania. Natalie Eilbert covers mental health issues for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. She welcomes story tips and feedback. You can reach her at neilbert@ or view her X (Twitter) profile at @natalie_eilbert. This article originally appeared on Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: Wisconsin AG Kaul joins suit claiming Trump deters transgender care Solve the daily Crossword
Associated Press
2 hours ago
- Associated Press
Bondi moves forward on Justice Department investigation into origins of Trump-Russia probe
WASHINGTON (AP) — Attorney General Pam Bondi has directed that the Justice Department move forward with a probe into the origins of the Trump-Russia investigation following the recent release of documents aimed at undermining the legitimacy of the inquiry that established that Moscow interfered on the Republican's behalf in the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Bondi has directed a prosecutor to present evidence to a grand jury after referrals from the Trump administration's top intelligence official, a person familiar with the matter said Monday. That person was not authorized to discuss it by name and spoke on condition of anonymity to The Associated Press. Fox News first reported the development. It was not clear which former officials might be the target of any grand jury activity, where the grand jury that might ultimately hear evidence will be located or which prosecutors — whether career employees or political appointees — might be involved in pursuing the investigation. It was also not clear what precise claims of misconduct Trump administration officials believe could form the basis of criminal charges, which a grand jury would have to sign off on for an indictment to be issued. The development is likely to heighten concerns that the Justice Department is being used to achieve political ends, given longstanding grievances over the Russia investigation voiced by President Donald Trump, who has called for the jailing of perceived political adversaries. Any criminal investigation would revisit one of the most dissected chapters of modern American political history. It is also surfacing at a time when the Trump administration is being buffeted by criticism over its handling of documents from the Jeffrey Epstein sex trafficking investigation. The investigation into Russian election interference resulted in the appointment of a special counsel, Robert Mueller, who secured multiple convictions against Trump aides and allies but did not establish proof of a criminal conspiracy between Moscow and the Trump campaign. The inquiry shadowed much of Trump's first term and he has long focused his ire on senior officials from the intelligence and law enforcement community, including former FBI Director James Comey, whom he fired in May 2017, and former CIA Director John Brennan. The Justice Department appeared to confirm an investigation into both men in an unusual statement last month but offered no details. Multiple special counsels, congressional committees and the Justice Department's own inspector general have studied and documented a multi-pronged effort by Russia to interfere in the 2016 presidential election on Trump's behalf, including through a hack-and-leak dump of Democratic emails and a covert social media operation aimed at sowing discord and swaying public opinion. But that conclusion has been aggressively challenged in recent weeks as Trump's director of national intelligence and other allies have released previously classified records that they hope will cast doubt on the extent of Russian interference and establish an Obama administration effort to falsely link Trump to Russia. In one batch of documents released last month, Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, disclosed emails showing that senior Obama administration officials were aware in 2016 that Russians had not hacked state election systems to manipulate the votes in Trump's favor. But President Barack Obama's administration never alleged that votes were tampered with and instead detailed other forms of election interference and foreign influence. A new outcry surfaced last week when Sen. Chuck Grassley, the Republican chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, released a set of documents that FBI Director Kash Patel claimed on social media proved that the 'Clinton campaign plotted to frame President Trump and fabricate the Russia collusion hoax.' The documents were part of a classified annex of a report issued in 2023 by John Durham, the special counsel who was appointed during the first Trump administration to hunt for any government misconduct during the Russia investigation. Durham did identify significant flaws in the investigation but uncovered no bombshells to disprove the existence of Russian election interference. His sprawling probe produced three criminal cases; two resulted in acquittals and the third was a guilty plea from a little-known FBI lawyer to a charge of making a false statement. Republicans seized on a July 27, 2016, email in Durham's newly declassified annex that purported to say that Hillary Clinton, then the Democratic candidate for president, had approved a plan during the heat of the campaign to link Trump with Russia. But the purported author of the email, a senior official at a philanthropic organization founded by billionaire investor George Soros, told Durham's team he had never sent the email and the alleged recipient said she never called receiving it. Durham's own report took pain to note that investigators had not corroborated the communications as authentic and said the best assessment was that the message was 'a composites of several emails' the Russians had obtained from hacking — raising the likelihood of Russian disinformation. The FBI's Russia investigation was opened on July 31, 2016, following a tip that a Trump campaign adviser, George Papadopoulos, had told a Russian diplomat that Russia was in possession of dirt on Clinton.
