President Donald Trump’s administration still plans to fire all workers at the US Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, effectively neutralizing it, according to witness testimony delivered Tuesday.
The testimony runs counter to CFPB court filings, according to which the agency would continue to exist only in a “streamlined” form, as a judge has temporarily blocked it from continuing with mass dismissals.
However a witness, an agency official who testified Tuesday in a Washington courtroom under a pseudonym for fear of retaliation, said she was privy to conversations with the Office of Personnel Management this month at which officials were still discussing firing all agency workers.
“On the 4th, it was mostly about a cost estimate for the final phase” for firing any remaining workers after as many as 1,200 workers are dismissed, said the witness.
“This was last Tuesday?” asked Deepak Gupta, a lawyer representing an employee union, consumer advocates and others challenging the administration’s moves against the CFPB.
“Yes,” the witness answered, adding that she was unaware of any change in plans to wind down the CFPB entirely.
She appeared under the pseudonym “Alex Doe” and explained that she feared retaliation for providing her testimony.
Representatives for the CFPB and OPM did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Unlike the government position taken in court papers, Trump and billionaire adviser Elon Musk have said the consumer financial watchdog should be eliminated. Trump has accused the agency of politicized enforcement and the CFPB has been reviled by conservatives and the financial services industry, which have accused it of overreach and overzealous enforcement actions.
Lawyers for the plaintiffs have said scrapping the agency in this manner defies the powers of Congress, which created the agency in 2010 and would be the sole authority able to abolish it.
Justice Department lawyers argue that Trump officials have acted within their authority and are working to comply with relevant laws.
The witness also said officials with Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency had pressured CFPB officials in mid-February to proceed more quickly in processing bulk notices of employee firings as a court hearing approached at which a judge could order a halt to the firings.
Lawyers representing the National Treasury Employees Union and others are seeking a court order directing the Trump administration to undo the actions it has taken so far in dismissing about 200 workers, placing remaining staff on leave and canceling service contracts, among other measures. A judge has yet to rule on the matter after two days of testimony.
Trump administration still plans to eliminate consumer finance bureau, witness says
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Trump administration still plans to eliminate consumer finance bureau, witness says
- Trump has accused the agency of politicized enforcement and the CFPB has been reviled by conservatives and the financial services industry, which have accused it of overreach and overzealous enforcement actions
Three tourists among 4 killed after Italian cable car crashes into a ravine south of Naples
- An Arab woman with Israeli citizenship was the third foreign victim to be identified following Thursday’s accident
- The fourth victim was the Italian driver of the cable car
ROME: Three tourists, including a brother and sister from Britain, were among four people who were killed when a mountain cable car plunged into a ravine south of Naples, an Italian official said Friday.
An Arab woman with Israeli citizenship was the third foreign victim to be identified following Thursday’s accident, said Marco De Rosa, a spokesperson for the mayor of Vico Equense.
The fourth victim was the Italian driver of the cable car. A fifth tourist, said to be the brother of the Israeli victim, is in a stable but critical condition at a Naples hospital, officials said.
Initial reports suggested that a traction cable may have snapped as the cable car ascended Monte Faito, in the town of Castellammare di Stabia. The cable car plunged into a ravine after stopping very close to the station at the top of the peak, at around 1,050 meters (3,400 feet).
Sixteen passengers were helped out of another cable car that was stuck mid-air near the foot of the mountain following the incident.
The accident happened just a week after the cable car, which is popular for its views of Mount Vesuvius and the Bay of Naples, reopened for the season. It averages around 110,000 visitors each year.
The emergency services, including Italy’s alpine rescue, more than 50 firefighters, police and civil protection personnel, worked into the evening in severe weather conditions, with fog and strong winds making rescue operations difficult.
“The traction cable broke. The emergency brake downstream worked, but evidently not the one on the cabin that was entering the station,” Luigi Vicinanza, the mayor of Castellammare di Stabia, said on Thursday. He added that there had been regular safety checks on the cable car line, which runs 3 kilometers (1.8 miles) from the town to the top of the mountain.
Local prosecutors have opened an investigation into possible manslaughter, which will involve an inspection of the cable stations, the pylons, the two cabins and the cable, officials said Friday.
The company running the service, the EAV public transport firm, said the seasonal cable car had reopened with all the required safety conditions.
“The reopening had taken place a week ago after three months of tests every day, day and night,” said EAV President Umberto De Gregorio. “This is something inexplicable.”
De Gregorio said technical experts believed there was no connection between the severe weather and the cause of the crash. “There is an automatic system. When the wind exceeds a certain level, the cable car stops automatically,” he said.
The Monte Faito cable car opened in 1952. Four people died in 1960 when a pylon broke.
Italy has recorded two similar fatal accidents involving cable cars in recent years.
A cable car crash in May 2021 in northern Italy killed 14 people, including six Israelis, among them a family of four. In 1998, a low-flying US military jet cut through the cable of a ski lift in Cavalese, in the Dolomites, killing 20 people.
Half a million weapons lost or smuggled after Taliban takeover in Afghanistan
- When Taliban swept through Afghanistan, they captured about 1 million pieces of US-funded military equipment
- Many weapons were abandoned by retreating Afghan soldiers or left behind by US forces
LONDON: Around half a million weapons seized by the Taliban after their 2021 takeover of Afghanistan have been lost, sold, or smuggled to militant groups, according to sources who spoke to the BBC.
Some of the missing weapons are believed to be in the hands of Al-Qaeda affiliates, UN officials say.
When the Taliban swept through Afghanistan, they captured about 1 million pieces of US-funded military equipment, including M4 and M16 rifles, according to the report published on Thursday.
Many weapons were abandoned by retreating Afghan soldiers or left behind by US forces, it added.
At a closed-door UN meeting in Doha last year, Taliban officials reportedly admitted that half of this equipment is now “unaccounted for.”
A UN report in February said groups such as Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan and the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan were accessing Taliban-captured weapons or buying them on the black market.
The Taliban government denies the claims, insisting that all weapons are securely stored.
However, a 2023 UN report said local Taliban commanders were allowed to keep 20 percent of seized US arms, fueling a thriving black market.
Sources described an underground trade where US-made weapons are now sold via messaging apps like WhatsApp.
Oversight of US equipment in Afghanistan has long been criticized, and a US watchdog, Sigar, said tracking efforts were hampered by poor record-keeping across multiple agencies.
US President Donald Trump has vowed to reclaim the lost weaponry, though experts argue the cost of recovery would outweigh its value.
Meanwhile, the Taliban have used captured Humvees, rifles, and other simpler equipment to bolster their military strength, although they struggle to maintain more complex machinery like Black Hawk helicopters.
Concerns remain that the flow of advanced weaponry to militant groups will continue to destabilize the region.
Australian to stand trial in Russian-occupied Ukraine on mercenary charges
- Jenkins came to Ukraine in February 2024 from Melbourne
- Then fought against the Russian army between March and December 2024
MOSCOW: An Australian man will stand trial on mercenary charges in Russian-occupied Lugansk, the eastern region’s Moscow-installed authorities said on Friday, the latest foreign soldier fighting for Ukraine to appear before the court.
“The Prosecutor’s Office of the Lugansk People’s Republic approved the indictment in the criminal case against 33-year-old citizen of the Commonwealth of Australia Oscar Charles Augustus Jenkins,” the authorities said in a statement.
According to the investigators, Jenkins came to Ukraine in February 2024 from Melbourne and then fought against the Russian army between March and December 2024, for which he was paid around $7,000-9,000 a month.
Russia and its eastern Ukraine proxies typically consider foreigners traveling to fight in Ukraine as “mercenaries.”
This enables them to prosecute fighters under its criminal code, rather than treating them as captured prisoners of war with protections and rights under the Geneva Convention.
Most recently British man James Scott Rhys Anderson, 22, was charged with terrorism after he was caught in the Kursk region fighting on Ukraine’s side.
Prince Harry requested taxpayer-funded security after Al-Qaeda death threat
- The prince is in a legal battle with the Home Office over the level of protection he receives in Britain
- Terror group called for prince ‘to be murdered’ after 2020 decision to reduce his security, court told
LONDON: The UK’s Prince Harry, duke of Sussex, requested taxpayer-funded protection following a murder threat against him by Al-Qaeda, new court documents show.
The prince is in a legal battle with the UK Home Office over the level of taxpayer-funded personal security he receives when traveling back home from the US, and the documents were revealed following the duke of Sussex’s appearance at London’s Royal Courts of Justice last week, The Independent newspaper reported.
The Executive Committee for the Protection of Royalty and Public Figures (RAVEC) ordered in 2020 that Prince Harry should receive a lower grade of security when in the UK.
He fought back against the decision, but the High Court dismissed his case against the Home Office last year, which he is now appealing.
Private evidence was heard in the case, showing that Prince Harry submitted a request for protection following the Al-Qaeda threat.
A court summary said the prince “confirmed that he had requested certain protection after a threat was made against him” by the terror organization.
Prince Harry previously claimed he faces a greater risk than Princess Diana, his late mother, with “additional layers of racism and extremism.”
After the RAVEC decision in 2020, Al-Qaeda called for Prince Harry “to be murdered,” written submissions in the prince’s appeal say.
Shaheed Fatima KC, for the prince, said that his security team was told that Al-Qaeda had released a document which said his “assassination would please the Muslim community.”
The RAVEC decision was made after Prince Harry and Meghan Markle announced they would step back from public duties in early 2020.
The pair were later told that, while in the UK, they would no longer receive the full-scale police protection offered to the king and queen, the prince and princess of Wales, and their three children.
An alternative “bespoke” security detail was arranged for the duke and duchess of Sussex.
They are required to give 30 days’ notice of their arrival in Britain for officials to make threat assessments.
Prince Harry had been “singled out for different, unjustified and inferior treatment,” Fatima said, adding that he “does not accept that ‘bespoke’ means ‘better.’”
In Bihar, 19th-century library holds India’s treasure trove of Arabic manuscripts
- Collection includes ‘Kitab Al-Tasrif’ by 10th-century Arab physician Al-Zahrawi, father of operative surgery
- Khuda Bakhsh Oriental Library has more than 21,000 rare and old manuscripts — half of them in Arabic
PATNA: When Khan Bahadur Khuda Bakhsh opened his book collection to the public in the late-19th century, he was fulfilling his father’s wish. Little did he know that, over the decades, their private library would grow into one of India’s richest repositories of the intellectual heritage of South Asia and the Middle East.
The Bakhsh family was a family of jurists and scholars, who migrated from Delhi in the early-19th century and established themselves in Patna — the capital of the eastern Indian state of Bihar.
Khuda Bakhsh’s father, Mohammed Bakhsh, was a lawyer and bibliophile, who collected 1,400 Arabic and Persian manuscripts. His son increased the collection to 4,000.
“He was spending all his money, all his assets, on developing this library, acquiring the manuscripts from all over the world,” Dr. Shayesta Bedar, the library’s former director, told Arab News.
“His father desired that Khuda Baksh should make a library for the use of the public, and it should also specialize in manuscripts. He kept the word.”
The Khuda Bakhsh Oriental Library opened in Patna in 1891, in a two-story building near the banks of the Ganges, where it still stands today.
It now holds more than 2 million items, including books, calligraphy, paintings and 21,136 manuscripts — half of them in Arabic and another few thousand in Persian.
The library’s founder had an employee named Makki, whose sole duties were to search for and buy centuries-old works on science, history and Islamic studies.
“Makki used to roam all over the world ... and he was acquiring them from different places,” Bedar said.
“(Khuda Bakhsh) was a rich man. He was an advocate, he has his own lands, and he had no other passion except to develop this library.”
Among the rarest manuscripts in the library’s holdings is the “Kitab Al-Tasrif.” Known in English as “The Method of Medicine,” it is an Arabic encyclopedia of medical procedures written near the year 1000 by Abu Al-Qasim Al-Zahrawi, a famed Arab physician from Andalusia.
Al-Zahrawi is considered the father of operative surgery and is credited with performing the first thyroidectomy and introducing more than 200 surgical tools.
Another rare work is the “Kitab Al-Hashaish,” known as the “Book of Herbs,” which is the Arabic translation of the famous Greek botanical and medical text by Dioscorides, a 1st-century physician and pharmacologist.
“These are 11th-century works ... Today’s medical science has been based on this ‘Kitab Al-Tasrif.’ And ‘Kitab Al-Hashaish’ is a collection of works that deal with medicinal plants and animals. These are some of the rarest manuscripts,” Bedar said.
Among the most prominent Persian works in the collection is the original manuscript of “Tarikh-e Khandan-e Timuriyah” (“Chronicle of the Descendants of Timur”), a 16th-century work commissioned by Mughal Emperor Akbar, which describes the descendants of the 14th-century ruler Timur in Iran and India, including Babur, Humayun and Akbar himself.
Another one is the “Divan of Hafez,” a collection of works by the 14th-century Persian Sufi poet Hafez.
“This (volume) was used by Mughal emperors to take out the omens and the writing of these Mughal kings, notes, are on the margins of the manuscript,” Bedar said.
“These (manuscripts) are a few to be named — just a glimpse ... These are the rarest ones, which are not available anywhere else in the world.”
The library has been administrated by the Indian government since the 1950s. In 1969, Parliament declared it an Institution of National Importance, which is fully funded by the Ministry of Culture.
Since 2023, works have been underway to digitalize the library’s collection and many texts are already available online — expanding the reach of Khuda Bakhsh’s library far beyond the Patna community it was intended for.
But most of the research work still happens offline, in the library’s reading rooms.
“We are connected with the libraries of Saudi Arabia, like the library of the Prophet’s Mosque in Madinah ... People from the Arab world come here for research,” Shakeel Ahmad Shamsi, the library’s information officer, told Arab News.
“We have about 10,000 Arabic manuscripts in this collection, about 8,000 or 9,000 in Persian, and in other languages also like Urdu, Hindi, Sanskrit, Pashto, Turkish ... This library is famous for its manuscripts ... it is famous in the whole world.”
