Top diplomats from the United States and Russia met in Saudi Arabia to discuss ways to possibly end the war in Ukraine and improve relations between Washington and Moscow. Participants included U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky was not invited to attend and has said he won’t recognize a peace deal negotiated without Ukraine. Zelensky was scheduled to be in Saudi Arabia tomorrow but has since cancelled. The meeting comes less than a week after President Trump held a 90-minute call with Russian President Vladimir Putin.

On Monday, European leaders gathered for an emergency meeting in Paris amid a growing rift between Europe and the United States over Ukraine and other issues. European nations are divided on proposals for European troops to be deployed inside Ukraine to help secure the country if a peace deal is reached with Russia. British Prime Minister Keir Starmer backed sending peacekeeping troops to Ukraine if a deal is reached.

Prime Minister Keir Starmer: “At stake is not just the future of Ukraine. It is an existential question for Europe as a whole, and therefore vital for Britain’s national interest.”

German Chancellor Olaf Scholz said it was highly inappropriate to be discussing sending European troops to Ukraine at this time.

The United Nations’ Lebanon envoy is accusing Israel of violating the November ceasefire by not fully withdrawing from southern Lebanon by today’s deadline. While some Israeli troops have left the area, Israel has decided to keep forces at five strategic locations. On Monday, Israel carried out a deadly drone strike in southern Lebanon, the target reportedly being a Hamas commander.

Palestinian officials in Gaza have accused Israel of violating the monthlong ceasefire 266 times. Since the ceasefire began on January 19, Israeli attacks have killed at least 132 Palestinians.

Meanwhile, newly freed Palestinian prisoners have revealed new details about being tortured inside Israeli prisons. Tarek Rabie Safi spoke in Khan Younis after being freed in the latest captive swap.

Tarek Rabie Safi: “I was among those detained at Hamad City in Khan Younis on March 3rd, 2024. I was held by the Israeli army in the Gaza envelope, which is in Sde Teiman military detention center, where I stayed for four months and I was subjected to torture of our bodies, physical torture, and hunger. We were also subjected to torture by stray dogs, the dogs of the Israeli army.”

The publication +972 has revealed Israeli soldiers used an 80-year-old Palestinian man as a human shield to help them scout out abandoned buildings in Gaza City last May. Soldiers put an explosive cord around the man’s neck to prevent him from escaping, even though he walked with a cane. After eight hours, Israeli troops let the elderly man and his wife evacuate on foot, but the couple were soon shot dead by another Israeli battalion.

In news from the occupied West Bank, Israel is reportedly planning to build nearly 1,000 new settler homes in the Efrat settlement near Jerusalem. The Israeli settlements are illegal under international law. The group Peace Now condemned the move, saying the Netanyahu government is trying “to establish facts on the ground that will destroy the chance for peace and compromise.” This comes as Israel’s ongoing military operations in the West Bank have displaced at least 45,000 Palestinians, the most since the 1967 War.

Here in New York, four top deputies of New York City Mayor Eric Adams have resigned over the mayor’s agreement to help support the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown in exchange for the dismissal of corruption charges against him. Seven prosecutors in the Justice Department had already resigned in protest. New York Governor Kathy Hochul, who has the power to remove Adams from office, is meeting with city leaders today.

On Monday, thousands of protesters took to the streets across the country to speak out against Donald Trump and Elon Musk’s moves to radically dismantle the federal government in what many have likened to a coup. Protests were held in all 50 state capitals and many other cities. Many of the protests were under the banner of “Not My President’s Day.” At a protest in New York, Jay W. Walker of Rise and Resist spoke to Democracy Now!

Jay W. Walker: “We’ve got Elon Musk and Donald Trump and the DOGE bros, the tech bros, ripping our government to shreds, ripping our Constitution to shreds, just ignoring the rule of law. And the American people have to stand up to it.”

In Washington, D.C., protesters gathered outside the U.S. Capitol and the White House.

Daniel Fairholm: “The ends do not justify the means. There’s a right way and a wrong way to accomplish change. And President Trump has broken every rule of appropriate democratic change in our society.”

In more news about Elon Musk, the Trump administration’s purge of federal workers has targeted staff at the Food and Drug Administration who were reviewing Elon Musk’s brain implant company Neuralink. According to Reuters, the Trump administration fired about 20 people in the FDA’s neurological and physical medicine devices division, which was overseeing clinical trial applications by Neuralink.

The Trump administration and Elon Musk are also facing criticism over the firing of hundreds of workers at the FAA, the Federal Aviation Administration. On Monday, a team from Musk’s private SpaceX company visited the FAA’s Air Traffic Control Command Center in Virginia. Musk previously forced out FAA Administrator Michael Whitaker. This comes at a time of increased anxiety over flying. There have been four major plane crashes over the past month. On Monday, a Delta flight from Minneapolis crashed while landing in Toronto. The plane flipped upside down on the runway. At least 18 people were injured.

The acting head of the Social Security Administration has resigned after refusing to give Elon Musk and the so-called Department of Government Efficiency access to sensitive personal information about hundreds of millions of Americans. The official, Michelle King, had spent decades at the agency. It is unclear what sensitive information DOGE has obtained. The new acting head of the agency is a lower-level official who has publicly praised DOGE.

In health news, a new study is projecting as many as 20 million people could lose Medicaid coverage under a Republican congressional bill to cut the Affordable Care Act’s Medicaid expansion match rate. The American Hospital Association has harshly criticized the proposal, saying, “Medicaid provides health care to many of our most vulnerable populations, including pregnant women, children, the elderly, disabled and many of our working class.”

Donald Trump has nominated Ed Martin to be the top federal prosecutor in Washington, D.C. Four years ago, Martin helped organize the “Stop the Steal” protests that aimed to overturn the 2020 presidential election. He later represented some of the January 6 insurrectionists. He is also a longtime anti-choice activist who has pushed for a national abortion ban and the jailing of women who undergo abortions.

Three Venezuelan immigrants who won a temporary restraining order against the Trump administration blocking their transfer to Guantánamo were deported Monday.

In recent weeks, dozens of Venezuelans have been flown to the U.S. naval prison in Cuba as Trump claims to be targeting the “worst of the worst.” But new reports show many of the at least 150 Venezuelan immigrants now imprisoned at Guantánamo had never been convicted of violent crimes

The Tucson-based independent outlet Arizona Luminaria is reporting an undocumented Venezuelan mother and two of her children were deported to southern Mexico just hours after a minor traffic stop. Arizona Public Safety troopers claimed the mother, identified as Yesenia, was driving under the speed limit. She described being handcuffed in front of her children, aged 6 and 9. The troopers called Border Patrol agents, who apprehended Yesenia and her two children and later turned them over to Mexican immigration officials in the border city of Nogales before they were put on a bus and driven about 2,000 miles away to the southern Mexican state of Tabasco. The mother was incommunicado for days, until she was finally able to call her family letting them know of her whereabouts. Her two other children, who are 8 and 14 years old, are still in Tucson.

Pope Francis has spent a fourth night hospitalized in Rome, where he is being treated for a respiratory tract infection.

In recent weeks, the 88-year-old pope has spoken out against the Trump administration’s anti-immigrant policies. In a letter to U.S. bishops, the pope wrote, “The act of deporting people who in many cases have left their own land for reasons of extreme poverty, insecurity, exploitation, persecution or serious deterioration of the environment, damages the dignity of many men and women, and of entire families, and places them in a state of particular vulnerability and defenselessness.”

In Sudan, reports have emerged of over 200 people killed, including women and children, after a three-day brutal assault by Rapid Support Forces on villages in the southern White Nile state. Doctors Without Borders is warning hundreds of thousands of people could die in Sudan from famine after the Trump administration froze foreign aid. The aid cutoff forced the shutdown of critical community kitchens across Sudan.

Meanwhile, U.N. officials on Monday said some $6 billion is needed to address the worsening humanitarian crisis in Sudan, which human rights experts have described as the world’s worst-ever hunger catastrophe. A fifth of Sudan’s population has been mass displaced following 22 months of war. This is Tom Fletcher, UN Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator.

Tom Fletcher: “Because this is a humanitarian crisis that is truly unprecedented in its scale and gravity, and it demands a response unprecedented in scale and intent. It’s a crisis that is increasingly crossing Sudan’s borders, threatening to destabilize neighbors in ways that risk being felt for generations to come.”

In Uganda, authorities have dropped a military trial against prominent opposition leader Kizza Besigye, who will now be charged in a civilian court instead. Besigye, a four-time presidential candidate, has been detained since November after he went missing, reappearing days later inside a cage in front of a military tribunal in Kampala. His supporters say he faces several politically motivated charges, including treachery, which carries the death penalty. Besigye was recently rushed to the hospital after going on hunger strike last week.

In Argentina, opposition lawmakers are calling for the impeachment of President Javier Milei after lawyers filed fraud charges against the Trump-loving, far-right leader for endorsing a cryptocurrency that quickly crashed, triggering millions of dollars in loss.

In the Trump administration’s latest attack on the press, Elon Musk has called for the jailing of staff at “60 Minutes” after the CBS program aired a segment criticizing his push to freeze USAID funding. A “60 Minutes” report on Sunday included this line: “The world’s richest man cut off aid for the world’s poorest people.” Musk responded on his social media platform by writing, “60 Minutes are the biggest liars in the world! They deserve a long prison sentence.” President Trump already has a pending $20 billion lawsuit against CBS over a different “60 Minutes” segment.

The Washington Post, which is owned by billionaire Jeff Bezos, has refused to run a wraparound ad from Common Cause that called for Trump to fire Elon Musk. The ad showed a picture of Musk and the White House with the words, “Who’s running this country: Donald Trump or Elon Musk?”

Longtime political prisoner and Indigenous activist Leonard Peltier has been released from a Florida prison today after spending nearly 50 years behind bars. For decades, Peltier, who is 80 years old, has maintained his innocence over the 1975 killing of two FBI agents in a shootout on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. Last month, President Biden commuted Peltier’s life sentence to serve the remainder of his time under house arrest.