WASHINGTON: Officials and federal officers turned away scores of US Agency for International Development staffers who showed up for work Monday at its Washington headquarters, after a court temporarily blocked a Trump administration order that would have pulled all but a fraction of workers off the job worldwide.
The Trump administration confirmed to The Associated Press that it had taken USAID off the lease of the building, which it had occupied for decades.
USAID’s eviction from its headquarters marks the latest in the swift dismantling of the aid agency and its programs by President Donald Trump and his billionaire ally, Elon Musk. Both have targeted agency spending that they call wasteful and accuse its work around the world of being out of line with Trump’s agenda.
A steady stream of agency staffers — dressed in business clothes or USAID sweatshirts or T-shirts — were told by a front desk officer Monday that he had a list of no more than 10 names of people allowed to enter the building. Tarps covered USAID’s interior signs.
A man who earlier identified himself as a USAID official took a harsher tone, telling staffers “just go” and “why are you here?”
USAID staff were denied entry to their offices to retrieve belongings and were told the lease had been turned over to the General Services Administration, which manages federal government buildings.
A GSA spokesperson confirmed that USAID had been removed from the lease and the building would be repurposed for other government uses.
Even as Trump and Musk, who runs what is billed as a cost-cutting Department of Government Efficiency, have taken aim at other government agencies, USAID has been hit hardest so far.
The president signed an executive order freezing foreign assistance, forcing US-funded aid and development programs worldwide to shut down and lay off staff. Secretary of State Marco Rubio had sought to mitigate the damage by issuing a waiver to exempt emergency food aid and “life-saving” programs.
Despite the waiver, neither funding nor staffing has resumed to get even the most essential programs rolling again, USAID officials and aid groups say.
The Norwegian Refugee Council, one of the largest humanitarian groups, called the US cutoff the most devastating in its 79-year history and said Monday that it will have to suspend programs serving hundreds of thousands of people in 20 countries.
“The impact of this will be felt severely by the most vulnerable, from deeply neglected Burkina Faso, where we are the only organization supplying clean water to the 300,000 trapped in the blockaded city of Djibo, to war-torn Sudan, where we support nearly 500 bakeries in Darfur providing daily subsidized bread to hundreds of thousands of hunger-stricken people,” the group said in a statement.
In an interview aired Sunday with Fox News host Bret Baier ahead of the Super Bowl, Trump suggested that he might allow a handful of aid and development programs to resume under Rubio’s oversight.
“Let him take care of the few good ones,” Trump said. Aid organizations say the damage that has been done to programs would make it impossible to restart many operations without additional substantial investment.
A federal judge on Friday temporarily blocked a Trump administration order that would have put thousands of USAID staffers on administrative leave that day and given those abroad 30 days to get back to the United States at government expense.
The temporary restraining order came in a lawsuit by two groups representing federal workers, and another hearing is scheduled for Wednesday.
While the judge ordered the administration to restore agency email access for staffers, the order said nothing about reopening USAID headquarters. Some staffers and contractors reported having their agency email restored by Monday, while others said they did not.
Some staffers said they came to the USAID offices because they were confused by conflicting agency emails and notices over the weekend about whether they should go in. Others expected they would be turned away but went anyway.
A USAID email sent Sunday night, saying it was “From the office of the administrator,” told employees that what it called “the former USAID headquarters” and other USAID offices in the Washington area were closed until further notice. It told workers to telework unless they are instructed otherwise.
USAID is stripped of its lease and staffers turned away from DC headquarters
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USAID is stripped of its lease and staffers turned away from DC headquarters
- USAID’s eviction from its headquarters marks the latest in the swift dismantling of the aid agency and its programs by President Donald Trump and his billionaire ally, Elon Musk
Germany says monitoring Russia’s use of ‘disposable’ agents
Kock declined to go into detail but said German authorities were “closely observing the means Russian services are now resorting to”
BERLIN: Germany said Wednesday it was monitoring changing Russian sabotage tactics, after media reports linked a plan to plant explosive devices on cargo planes to low-level operatives hired by Moscow.
European intelligence services believed that Russia was behind the plot, which saw parcels explode at two DHL depots last July, the Sueddeutsche Zeitung daily and public broadcasters WDR and NDR reported.
Several people implicated in the operation were believed to be “disposable” agents with no official position in the Russian intelligence services, according to the report.
Such low-level agents were typically recruited via messaging apps to carry out tasks for money, the report said.
Quizzed about the incidents at a regular press conference, German interior ministry spokeswoman Sonja Kock said investigations were “continuing intensively.”
Kock declined to go into detail but said German authorities were “closely observing the means Russian services are now resorting to,” including the use of “so-called low-level agents.”
Kock also told the briefing that Russian intelligence services operating in Germany had been “recently weakened by the expulsion of numerous agents.”
Another interior ministry official later told AFP that she was referring to the April 2022 expulsion of 40 Russian diplomats who were intelligence officers, and further departures of diplomats the following year.
The explosions at DHL depots in Leipzig, Germany and Birmingham in Britain have been described by Germany’s domestic intelligence chief Thomas Haldenwang as a “lucky accident” because of the limited impact.
Testifying before a parliamentary committee in October, Haldenwang said “there would have been a crash” if the parcels had exploded mid-flight on planes.
Kock said Wednesday that the “danger of sabotage... has increased significantly in Germany since the beginning of the Russian war of aggression against Ukraine.”
German authorities were doing “everything in our power to thwart... Russian espionage, sabotage and cyber-attacks,” she said.
Following Kashmir attack, Modi cuts short Saudi trip after talks on energy, defense
- Saudi Arabia is one of the top exporters of petroleum to India
- Modi met Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman before cutting short his visit
DUBAI: Saudi Arabia and India agreed to boost cooperation in supplies of crude and liquefied petroleum gas, according to a joint statement reported by the Saudi state news agency on Wednesday following a visit by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, which was cut short by a militant attack in Indian-administered Kashmir.
Saudi Arabia is one of the top exporters of petroleum to India.
Modi met Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman before cutting short his visit and returning to New Delhi after an attack on India's Jammu and Kashmir territory which killed 26 people, the worst attack in India since the 2008 Mumbai shootings.
The two countries also agreed to deepen their defense ties and improve their cooperation in defence manufacturing, along with agreements in agriculture and food security.
"The two countries welcomed the excellent cooperation between the two sides in counter-terrorism and terror financing," the joint statement said.
Denmark’s King Frederik to visit Greenland, daily Sermitsiaq reports
- The visit to Greenland by Denmark’s head of state comes as US President Donald Trump seeks a takeover
COPENHAGEN: Denmark’s King Frederik will travel to Greenland, a semi-autonomous Danish territory, on April 28, Greenlandic daily Sermitsiaq reported on Wednesday, citing the island’s own government.
The visit to Greenland by Denmark’s head of state comes as US President Donald Trump seeks a takeover by the United States of the minerals-rich and strategically important island.
Denmark has rejected Trump’s ambition and says only Greenlanders themselves can decide the territory’s future.
Greenland’s Prime Minister Jens Frederik-Nielsen will travel to Denmark on April 26, where he will meet with Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen, according to Sermitsiaq.
The king will travel to Greenland together with Nielsen when the prime minister returns to the island, according to the report.
Chechnya leader’s son, 17, becomes head of Chechen security council
- It is the fourth time Adam Kadyrov has been appointed to an official position since 2023, when he was 15
- He already serves as his father’s top bodyguard
The teenage son of Ramzan Kadyrov, the leader of Russia’s Chechnya region and close ally of President Vladimir Putin, has been appointed secretary of the region’s security council, according to the council’s Telegram channel.
Adam Kadyrov turned 17 in November 2024. It is the fourth time he has been appointed to an official position since 2023, when he was 15.
He already serves as his father’s top bodyguard, a trustee of Chechnya’s Special Forces University, and an observer in a new army battalion.
Ramzan Kadyrov has led Chechnya, a mountainous Muslim region in southern Russia that tried to break away from Moscow in wars that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union, since 2007.
He enjoys wide leeway from Putin to run Chechnya as his personal fiefdom in return for ensuring the stability of the region, where an Islamist, anti-Russian insurgency continued for around a decade after the end of full-scale conflict there in the early 2000s.
His rise to power came after his own father, Akhmat, was killed in a 2004 bombing by insurgents who saw him as a turncoat.
In September 2023, Adam Kadyrov was shown, in a video posted by his father on social media, beating a detainee accused of burning the Qur'an. Ramzan Kadyrov said he was proud of his son for defending his Muslim religion.
The detainee, Nikita Zhuravel, has since been sentenced to three and a half years in prison.
Russian drone strike on bus kills 9 in Ukrainian city of Marhanets, Kyiv says
- Zelensky said the Russian strike hit a bus that was transporting workers of a mining and processing plant
- “An ordinary bus. Clearly a civilian object, a civilian target,” Zelensky said
KYIV: A Russian drone hit a bus carrying workers in the Ukrainian city of Marhanets on Wednesday, killing nine people and injuring close to 50, Kyiv officials said, in an attack President Volodymyr Zelensky said was a “deliberate war crime.”
Zelensky said the Russian strike hit a bus that was transporting workers of a mining and processing plant.
“An ordinary bus. Clearly a civilian object, a civilian target,” Zelensky said on X.
“It was an egregiously brutal attack – and an absolutely deliberate war crime,” he added, calling for “an immediate, full, and unconditional ceasefire.”
Russia fired a total of 134 attack drones at targets in Ukraine overnight, Kyiv’s air force said. There was no immediate comment from Russia.
Ukrainian officials arrived in London on Wednesday, even as most other big power foreign ministers pulled out, to hold talks about ways to achieve a ceasefire as a first step toward peace.
Marhanets, in south-central Ukraine, lies on the Ukrainian-controlled north bank of the Dnipro river’s dried-up reservoir that separates the warring sides.
Dnipropetrovsk regional governor Serhiy Lysak said nine people were killed in the attack and 49 were injured.
Zelensky shared photographs of the aftermath of the attack on X, showing bodies lying in and next to the bus and being carried away by emergency workers.
Zelensky added most of the injured were women.
Elsewhere, an energy plant that provides electricity to the city of Kherson near southern front lines was destroyed in an artillery and drone attack, regional governor Oleksandr Prokudin said.
Ukraine’s emergency service also reported a drone strike on the Synelnykivskyi district in the Dnipropetrovsk region that injured two people and sparked a fire at an agricultural enterprise.
Russia further fired drones into the central region of Poltava, injuring at least six people, its governor said.
A drone attack on civilian infrastructure in the suburbs of the Black Sea port city of Odesa injured two people and sparked several fires, regional governor Oleh Kiper said on Telegram.
Russian drone salvoes also set off large-scale fires in Ukraine’s second largest city, Kharkiv, in the northeast, Mayor Ihor Terekhov said on Telegram.
Seven private houses, a storage building and an outbuilding were also damaged by drones hitting the Kyiv capital region, where a fire also broke out in a restaurant complex, its regional governor said.
Both Russia and Ukraine are under pressure from the United States to demonstrate progress toward ending the war that began with Russia’s 2022 full-blown invasion amid warnings that US President Donald Trump could walk away from peacemaking.
