A federal judge has extended an order blocking the deportation of detained Palestinian rights activist and recent Columbia graduate Mahmoud Khalil. Khalil is a U.S. permanent resident who was arrested for leading Gaza solidarity protests at Columbia last year. His legal team spoke after a hearing in front of a Manhattan courthouse Wednesday. This is Baher Azmy of the Center for Constitutional Rights.

Baher Azmy: “Mr. Khalil’s detention has nothing to do with security. It is only about repression. The United States government has taken the position that it can arrest, detain and seek to deport a lawful permanent resident exclusively because of his peaceful, constitutionally protected activism — in this case, activism in support of Palestinian human rights and an end to the genocide in Gaza.”

Mahmoud Khalil was finally able to speak privately with his legal team Wednesday following an order by the New York court to the Department of Homeland Security.

Mahmoud Khalil’s wife, who is a U.S. citizen and eight months pregnant, issued a statement on Tuesday, “pleading with the world to continue to speak up against his unjust and horrific detention by the Trump administration.” Protests have erupted across the country following Khalil’s arrest Saturday, including in front of the ICE detention center in Jena, Louisiana, where he is being held. We’ll have the latest on this case with one of Mahmoud Khalil’s lawyers, Ramzi Kassem, after headlines.

A panel of U.N. experts has accused Israel of “genocidal acts” against Palestinians in Gaza through attacks on women’s healthcare facilities, deliberately blocking medicine for pregnancies and neonatal care, and using sexual violence as a war strategy. In a new report, the Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory writes, “Israeli authorities have destroyed in part the reproductive capacity of the Palestinians in Gaza as a group, including by imposing measures intended to prevent births, one of the categories of genocidal acts in the Rome Statute and the Genocide Convention.” The commission also documented the use of forced public stripping and nudity, sexual harassment including threats of rape, as well as sexual assault, as part of Israeli forces’ standard operating procedure.

Mediated talks between Israel and Hamas continue today in Doha, as Palestinians in Gaza endured a 12th straight day of Israel’s total blockade of the Palestinian territory.

The Environmental Protection Agency has announced it’s undertaking the largest deregulation action in U.S. history. This includes rolling back dozens of crucial water, air quality and industry measures, as well as defunding billions of dollars from green energy and local climate groups. At threat is the landmark “endangerment finding,” which classifies greenhouse gases as a public health threat and allows for climate regulations. This is EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin.

Lee Zeldin: “I’ve been told the endangerment finding is considered the holy grail of the climate change religion. For me, the U.S. Constitution and the laws of this nation will be strictly interpreted and followed. No exceptions. Today, the green new scam ends.”

The head of Sunrise Movement called the EPA’s move “a f— you to anyone who wants to breathe clean air, drink clean water, or live past 2030.”

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration is bracing for another round of mass firings after the Trump administration signaled plans to lay off more than 1,000 workers. NOAA’s workforce is already down by about 2,000 people since Trump took office, following a first round of cuts and a buyout offer by Elon Musk and his DOGE operation.

The Trump administration has begun gutting the Justice Department unit that oversees prosecutions of public officials accused of corruption. Cuts to the Public Integrity Section come after several of its officials resigned last month when acting Deputy Attorney General Emil Bove ordered them to drop federal corruption charges against New York Mayor Eric Adams.

The acting commissioner of the Social Security Administration, Leland Dudek, has privately said Social Security benefits are in a far more precarious place than has been widely understood. In a recording obtained by ProPublica, Dudek framed the administration’s planned cuts of at least 7,000 Social Security workers as “the president’s” agenda.

On Wednesday, Democratic Congressmember John Larson lashed out at Elon Musk and his Republican colleagues during a Social Security subcommittee meeting.

Rep. John Larson: “If he’s so great, if these plans and all the fraud and abuse that he’s found are so imminent, why isn’t he here explaining it? You know why: because he’s out to privatize Social Security. He’s been on television the last couple of days talking exactly about Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid and what he intends to do: privatize it. The American people, some of them may have been born at night, but not last night.”

A federal judge in Washington, D.C., has ordered the Trump administration to pay nearly $2 billion in foreign aid funds owed to grant recipients and contractors of the State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development. In Monday’s ruling, U.S. District Judge Amir H. Ali said the administration’s freeze on the foreign aid funds likely violates the separation of powers, writing, “The constitutional power over whether to spend foreign aid is not the President’s own — and it is Congress’s own.”

Meanwhile, the Trump administration has ordered the wholesale destruction of classified documents and other records at USAID, which President Trump and Elon Musk are working to dismantle. An email from USAID’s acting executive secretary, Erica Carr, reads, “Shred as many documents first, and reserve the burn bags for when the shredder becomes unavailable or needs a break.” It’s not clear whether any USAID official got permission from the National Archives to destroy the documents, a necessary step under the Federal Records Act of 1950.

The Trump administration has flown all 40 remaining immigrants from the Guantánamo Bay military prison back to the U.S., to Louisiana. The move follows a congressional delegation’s visit to Guantánamo over the weekend and amid mounting legal challenges. Nearly 300 immigrants have been locked up by the Trump administration in Guantánamo.

Russia continued attacks on multiple Ukrainian cities overnight. In Kherson, a 42-year-old woman was killed by Russian artillery fire. Meanwhile, Russia’s top general says his forces have reclaimed nearly 90% of the territory that Ukraine seized from Russia’s Kursk border region during a surprise counteroffensive in August. On Wednesday, Russian President Vladimir Putin toured a command post near the frontlines in Kursk, dressed in military fatigues. Russian forces made rapid gains in recent days after the Trump administration cut off intelligence sharing and the flow of weapons to Ukraine. The administration restored the assistance on Tuesday, after Ukraine agreed to a 30-day ceasefire proposal.

Trump’s special envoy Steve Witkoff arrived in Moscow earlier today for talks at the Kremlin over the ceasefire plan. Reuters reports Russia presented the U.S. with a list of demands similar to its previous ultimatums: no NATO membership for Ukraine, an agreement not to deploy foreign troops in Ukraine and international recognition of Putin’s claim to Crimea and four Ukrainian provinces.

Meanwhile, Poland’s President Andrzej Duda has repeated his request for the U.S. to deploy nuclear weapons on Polish soil, calling it a deterrent to Russian aggression.

As Trump’s steel and aluminum tariffs went into effect Wednesday, Canada imposed its own 25% retaliatory tariffs on steel and aluminum, as well as on computers, sports equipment and other goods totaling over $20 billion. This is on top of previously announced reciprocal tariffs on U.S. goods. This is Canadian Foreign Affairs Minister Mélanie Joly.

Mélanie Joly: “Canada is not the one driving up the cost of your groceries or of your gasoline or any of your construction. Canada is not the one putting your jobs at risk. Canada is not the one that is ultimately starting this war. President Trump’s tariffs against you are causing that. And there are no winners in a trade war.”

As the trade war between Trump and Canada escalates, the U.S. has paused talks with Ottawa on a key water-sharing treaty over the Columbia River. Trump has repeatedly called for the U.S. annexation of Canada, for Canada to become the 51st state.

In Greenland, the opposition, center-right Demokraatit Party pulled off a surprise victory in parliamentary elections. All of Greenland’s main parties have called for full independence from Denmark, though the Demokraatit Party favors a more gradual transition. The election was called last month as Greenland came under a major international spotlight amid Trump’s threats to take over the territory, which is home to rare earth minerals. Greenlanders have forcefully rejected the idea. The population of Greenland is just 56,000 and is 90% Inuit.

Uganda has deployed special forces to South Sudan amid escalating tensions between South Sudan’s President Salva Kiir and First Vice President Riek Machar over a collapsing power-sharing deal. That 2018 agreement ended a five-year civil war that killed some 400,000 people. Deadly clashes by armed groups have been mounting, many centered in Upper Nile state. The U.N. has urged South Sudan’s leaders “to resolve tensions through dialogue.”

Yale has suspended an international law scholar and outspoken defender of Palestinian rights, after an AI-powered, far-right website called Jewish Onliner accused her of ties to a group on a U.S. sanctions list, an apparent reference to the advocacy organization Samidoun. Helyeh Doutaghi wrote in a statement, “[Yale Law School] actions constitute a blatant act of retaliation against Palestinian solidarity … I am being targeted for one reason alone: for speaking the truth about the genocide of the Palestinian people that Yale University is complicit in.” Doutaghi added the move from Yale is “the last refuge of a crumbling order — an empire in decline, resorting to brute repression to stifle and crush those who expose its unraveling hegemony.”