Global Pulse

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  • Trump claims other presidents flouted war powers law. It’s a mixed record

    Trump claims other presidents flouted war powers law. It’s a mixed record

    A high-stakes constitutional and political debate has erupted in Washington over President Donald Trump’s refusal to seek congressional approval to continue U.S. military operations against Iran, as the 60-day deadline mandated by the 1973 War Powers Resolution expired this Friday.

    Speaking to reporters ahead of the deadline, Trump insisted that he has no legal requirement to secure congressional authorization for the ongoing conflict, claiming that no prior U.S. president has ever sought such approval for military action. “It’s never been used. It’s never been adhered to. Nobody’s ever asked for it before,” Trump said, adding that past commanders-in-chief have long viewed Congress’s claimed authority to limit presidential war powers as “totally unconstitutional.”

    The reality of presidential compliance with the 1973 law, however, is far more nuanced than Trump’s framing. Enacted in the aftermath of the Vietnam War to curb unilateral executive war-making and restrict then-President Richard Nixon’s ability to escalate conflict without legislative backing, the War Powers Resolution requires the president to terminate any U.S. military engagement within 60 days of notifying Congress of its launch, unless lawmakers explicitly vote to extend the operation. This Friday marked exactly 60 days since the Trump administration notified Congress of the start of strikes against Tehran on February 28.

    Both Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth argue that the 60-day clock was paused when the current ceasefire between U.S. and Iranian forces went into effect, triggering ongoing disagreement over whether ceasefire periods count towards the congressionally mandated deadline. Legal experts, however, reject this interpretation. “Nothing in the War Powers Act suggests a pause of hostilities changes the requirements of the law,” said David Schultz, a professor of political science and legal studies at Hamline University in Minnesota. “Just because other presidents haven’t invoked the law doesn’t mean that what Trump is doing here is correct. Here, Trump has basically committed us to combat without any support from Congress. And if we go back to the founding of this country, one of the core fears the framers had was a strong executive committing the nation to war without the support of the elected legislative branch.”

    A look at modern U.S. history reveals that multiple of Trump’s predecessors did comply with the War Powers Resolution by securing congressional approval before launching large-scale military operations. In 1983, President Ronald Reagan obtained congressional approval to deploy U.S. Marines to Lebanon within the 60-day window, bringing his campaign into full compliance with the law. President George H.W. Bush sought and received congressional authorization for the 1991 Gulf War ahead of launching Operation Desert Storm, even as he maintained that he did not legally require the approval. His son, George W. Bush, won explicit congressional backing for the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan and the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

    That said, Trump is correct that several past administrations did find ways to circumvent the 1973 law. President Bill Clinton allowed the 1999 NATO bombing campaign in Kosovo to run 18 days past the 60-day deadline without seeking congressional authorization, with the entire operation lasting 78 days. President Barack Obama argued that the 2011 U.S. military intervention in Libya did not qualify as “hostilities” under the War Powers Resolution, allowing the campaign to continue for more than seven months without congressional approval.

    Trump has pushed back against criticism by noting that the current conflict with Iran has been far shorter in duration than many past U.S. wars, pointing to the 19-year Vietnam War, nearly nine-year Iraq War, six-year World War II, and three-year Korean War as points of comparison. Still, a clear path to ending the conflict remains elusive: Washington and Tehran remain deadlocked over two core issues, control of the strategic Strait of Hormuz and Iran’s nuclear program, leaving Trump’s exit strategy from the conflict unconfirmed. Echoing a line former President Barack Obama used in 2014 about the war in Afghanistan, ending the U.S. engagement in Iran appears far harder than starting it.

  • 61% of Americans see Trump’s Iran war as ‘mistake’: new poll

    61% of Americans see Trump’s Iran war as ‘mistake’: new poll

    A new joint poll conducted by The Washington Post, ABC News and Ipsos, released Friday, has revealed that more than 60 percent of U.S. adults now view President Donald Trump’s military conflict in Iran as a fundamental mistake. What makes this shift in public opinion extraordinary is how rapidly it has occurred: in just two months since the war began, the conflict has already hit levels of public disapproval that took previous, widely discredited U.S. wars years to reach.

    CNN senior political analyst Aaron Blake notes that polling data stretching back decades puts this rapid backlash in stark context. It took more than three years of the Iraq War for a 60-percent majority of Americans to label the conflict a mistake, while the Vietnam War required six years of continuous fighting and tens of thousands of American troop deaths to cross the same threshold.

    To understand how unprecedented this speed of disapproval is, it is necessary to look back at public opinion at the start of past major conflicts. When the U.S. invaded Iraq in 2003 under President George W. Bush, even amid growing grassroots protest, 81 percent of voters backed the invasion in April 2003, with just 16 percent calling it a mistake. It was only as the occupation devolved into a years-long deadly quagmire, and it became clear the Bush administration’s justifications for the war – claims of weapons of mass destruction – were deliberate falsehoods, that public support eroded steadily, finally hitting 64 percent opposition by 2007.

    Vietnam never commanded the overwhelming early backing that Iraq saw, but even so, 60 percent of Americans supported President Lyndon Johnson’s 1965 decision to deploy direct U.S. military intervention, with just 24 percent calling the move a mistake. While widespread anti-war protests became a defining cultural moment of the conflict, public opinion did not solidify against the war until 1968, and it was not until 1971 – after more than 50,000 U.S. troops had been killed in action – that a 61 percent majority called the war a mistake.

    Unlike both Iraq and Vietnam, Trump’s Iran war has never enjoyed even a fleeting period of broad public consensus. Just days after the launch of the campaign, branded “Operation Epic Fury” by the Trump administration, a Reuters/Ipsos poll found only 27 percent of Americans approved of the opening strikes that killed 555 Iranians, including Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and multiple senior Iranian officials. Even at that early stage, 43 percent already disapproved of the action, a gap far wider than that seen at the start of any prior major U.S. conflict, with the remaining 30 percent of respondents still undecided.

    Over the following two months, that undecided bloc has swung firmly against the conflict. Multiple damaging developments have fueled the shift: public confirmation that a U.S. double-tap airstrike on an Iranian school killed at least 155 people, 120 of them children; Iranian retaliation that blocked oil shipments through the Strait of Hormuz, pushing U.S. gasoline prices soaring above $4 per gallon; and increasingly aggressive rhetoric from Trump that critics have labeled an overtly genocidal posture toward Iran, which has made any peaceful negotiated resolution increasingly remote even under the current fragile ceasefire.

    Friday’s poll confirms that while the war retains a core loyal base of 36 percent of Americans who still view it as the right decision – nearly all of whom identify as Republican – this base is heavily outnumbered by the 61 percent who now call the conflict a mistake.

    Majorities of respondents across all demographic groups also linked the war to a range of serious national risks: 61 percent said it has increased the threat of terrorist attacks targeting Americans, 60 percent said it raises the risk of the U.S. economy tipping into recession, and 56 percent said it has damaged the United States’ relationships with its key global allies.

    A deeper breakdown of polling data exposes a particularly troubling trend for the Trump administration: the war has almost no support outside the president’s most dedicated base. 91 percent of self-identified Democrats now label the conflict a mistake, and 71 percent of independent voters – a large majority of whom were undecided when the war began – have also turned against it, leaving just 24 percent of independents in support.

    Even within the Republican Party, the war has created a sharp divide. 86 percent of self-identified MAGA Republicans still back the conflict, but moderate non-MAGA Republicans are deeply split: 50 percent still call the war the right decision, while 49 percent now view it as a mistake. Many of these Republican skeptics were rattled by Trump’s threatening remark last month that “a whole civilization will die tonight” if Iran refused to accept a negotiating deal on his terms. A majority of all Republicans, 53 percent, said they viewed that incendiary threat negatively.

    It remains unclear whether even Trump’s most loyal supporters will continue backing the war if the conflict drags on, and recent public remarks from top administration officials suggest the White House remains in denial about the scale of public opposition. On Thursday, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth appeared before Congress, where Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, a New York Democrat, pressed him on the administration’s failure to build broad public support for the conflict, noting that three out of five Americans now oppose it. Hegseth rejected the premise outright, claiming “I believe we do have the support of the American people.” He pushed back on critics by noting the conflict is only two months old, arguing that calls for withdrawal are premature – a curious framing, given Trump himself initially claimed the war would last only four to five weeks.

    During his testimony, Hegseth compared the Iran conflict to past long-running U.S. wars, arguing “Iraq took how many years? Afghanistan took how many years? And they were nebulous missions that people went along with. This is different.” That claim of a clear mission, however, falls flat: the Trump administration has offered a constantly shifting set of justifications for the war, ranging from regime change in Tehran, defending Iranian anti-government protesters, destroying Iran’s nuclear program, eliminating its ballistic missile arsenal, seizing Iranian oil fields, defending Israel, and reopening the Strait of Hormuz.

  • Doctors warn nicotine pouches could spark repeat of the vaping epidemic

    Doctors warn nicotine pouches could spark repeat of the vaping epidemic

    Australia is facing the early emergence of an unregulated public health crisis linked to unapproved nicotine pouches, with top medical authorities calling on the federal government to act fast to close regulatory gaps before the problem escalates into a repeat of the nation’s devastating vaping epidemic.

    In an official submission shared with the Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA), the Australian Medical Association (AMA) is pressing the Albanese Government to immediately close existing loopholes that are allowing unapproved nicotine-containing products to flow freely into the domestic Australian market. As federal AMA vice president Associate Professor Julian Rait emphasized, regulatory inaction right now will allow these addictive products to become deeply entrenched across the country, a mistake Australia has already made with unregulated vapes in recent years.

    Currently, not a single nicotine pouch product holds formal approval on the Australian Register of Therapeutic Goods (ARTG), yet these products are widely available to consumers, including minors, Rait says. Unlike approved therapeutic nicotine products intended to help adults quit smoking, these unregulated pouches are marketed with bright, youth-appealing branding and sold through online platforms with almost no barriers to purchase. Some products have been found to carry extremely high concentrations of the addictive substance: independent, non-industry research has recorded nicotine levels as high as 150mg per pouch – equivalent to 50 cigarettes, given a 30mg pouch matches the nicotine content of a single conventional cigarette.

    Beyond addiction, these unregulated pouches carry confirmed negative health impacts for users, Rait explained. Common adverse effects include persistent mouth and gum irritation, gastrointestinal distress, nausea, and elevated blood pressure, with long-term health risks still understudied because of the product’s unapproved status.

    The submission also highlights that the combination of fast-growing social media promotion, loose online sales rules, and the rising use of unregulated synthetic nicotine has stretched Australia’s patchwork current regulatory framework to breaking point. Rait warned that without updated, technology-neutral national regulations and consistent cross-jurisdictional enforcement, unlicensed suppliers will keep exploiting grey market gaps to reach Australian consumers.

    To address the crisis, the AMA is calling for a suite of targeted public health safeguards. These include mandatory, effective online compliance protocols to remove illicit product listings, clear and standardized health warnings on all packaging, child-resistant packaging requirements to prevent accidental child poisoning, and enhanced national monitoring of adverse health events and poisoning cases to inform ongoing regulatory adjustments.

    Right now, Australia’s response to nicotine pouches is fragmented: state and territory governments have implemented inconsistent rules, with only a handful of jurisdictions such as South Australia and Queensland acting to restrict the products under existing tobacco legislation, while others have taken no formal action. The AMA’s proposed national regulatory framework would harmonize rules across the country, simplify enforcement for local authorities, eliminate inconsistencies between regions, and create a unified, robust enforcement environment to block unapproved products from the market.

    “Without urgent federal action, we risk repeating every mistake that allowed the vaping epidemic to take hold and harm a generation of young Australians,” Rait said.

  • Brouhaha over Iran war costs to US taxpayers

    Brouhaha over Iran war costs to US taxpayers

    A fierce public debate has erupted over the full financial burden of former President Donald Trump’s Iran war, with multiple independent analysts, lawmakers, and even Iran’s top diplomat challenging the Pentagon’s official $25 billion cost estimate as a deliberate undercount that misleads U.S. taxpayers.

    The controversy ignited after Jules Hurst, the Pentagon’s acting comptroller, testified under oath before U.S. lawmakers that the Trump administration had accumulated $25 billion in expenditures on the conflict, a widely unpopular war of choice launched by the former administration. The New York Times noted that Hurst offered no additional details to contextualize the figure, which is dramatically lower than the $200 billion the Pentagon initially requested for the conflict. The low number also indicates a sharp slowdown in spending, despite early war data showing the conflict cost more than $11 billion in its first six days alone.

    Independent and institutional analysts have repeatedly pushed back against the official estimate, releasing their own assessments that place the direct cost of the conflict far higher. This month, the liberal-leaning Center for American Progress calculated that direct Pentagon spending exceeded $33 billion in just the first 39 days of fighting. A ceasefire-era assessment from the conservative American Enterprise Institute, released April 10, put the total direct cost between $25 billion and $35 billion. Independent policy analyst Stephen Semler went further, estimating the U.S. spent nearly $29 billion on the war in its opening two weeks – an average of $2.1 billion per day. Semler accused Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth of lying to Congress in a social media post Thursday, arguing that the total opening two-week cost alone already exceeded the Pentagon’s full $25 billion official estimate.

    The debate went cross-border Friday when Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi joined the criticism, taking to social media to reject the Pentagon’s figure as a deliberate fourfold undercount. “The Pentagon is lying,” Araghchi wrote, claiming the conflict – which he framed as a gamble tied to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu – has already cost U.S. taxpayers $100 billion in direct spending, four times the official claim. He added that indirect costs borne by American households are far higher, putting the current monthly burden at $500 per household and rising rapidly.

    Beyond direct military spending, experts and lawmakers have drawn attention to the massive indirect costs the conflict has imposed on U.S. consumers through soaring energy and food prices. Democratic U.S. Representative Ro Khanna of California told the House of Representatives Thursday that when accounting for these price hikes, the total cost of the war to Americans surges to more than $630 billion – an average of $5,000 per household. “We need to end this war now, and help the American people reduce costs,” Khanna said.

    Long-term projections paint an even starker picture of the conflict’s financial toll. Linda Bilmes, a public policy scholar at the Harvard Kennedy School, warned in early April that when factoring in long-term obligations like veterans’ health care and other sustained outlays, the total lifetime cost of the Iran war to U.S. taxpayers could top $1 trillion. Bilmes noted that pinning down an exact exact cumulative cost is challenging in the early stages of the conflict, but current data shows the conflict runs about $2 billion per day in short-term direct costs alone – a figure that represents just the tip of a much larger financial iceberg.

  • Interest rate hikes slash first-home buyer borrowing capacity by thousands

    Interest rate hikes slash first-home buyer borrowing capacity by thousands

    Australia’s aspiring first homeowners are facing a growing barrier to entering the property market, with consecutive interest rate increases from the Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA) severely eroding how much they can borrow from lenders, according to new industry analysis.

  • There was one way we’d agreed to do Devil Wears Prada 2, says Meryl Streep

    There was one way we’d agreed to do Devil Wears Prada 2, says Meryl Streep

    Twenty years after the original *The Devil Wears Prada* cemented its place as a cultural touchstone – spawning viral quotes, a hit West End musical, and a permanent spot in popular fashion discourse – a long-awaited sequel from Walt Disney Studios has finally landed in cinemas worldwide, with the entire original A-list ensemble reprising their iconic roles. At the top of the call sheet, three-time Academy Award winner Meryl Streep returns as Miranda Priestly, the sharp-edged, intimidating editor-in-chief of fictional Runway Magazine, a character widely believed to be modeled on Vogue’s legendary editor Anna Wintour. Streep, alongside co-stars Stanley Tucci, Anne Hathaway, and Emily Blunt, opened up about the project in interviews with BBC News, revealing that the entire cast attached one non-negotiable condition to signing on: the sequel would only move forward if its story felt relevant to the current cultural moment.

    Unlike the original 2006 film, which centered wide-eyed new assistant Andy Sachs’ fish-out-of-water experience in the high-stakes world of high fashion publishing, the sequel leans heavily into the seismic shifts that have upended the media industry over the past two decades. Plotlines mirror real-world industry upheaval: steep newsroom staffing cuts, plummeting print circulation, and the total domination of digital and social media platforms that have stripped traditional journalists of much of their editorial control. Even emerging technology like generative artificial intelligence has a place in the story’s narrative. Tucci, who returns as fan-favorite creative director Nigel Kipling, explained that the team refused to make a hollow cash-grab follow-up to the original. “Everything has to have its own necessity for being – even the frothiest sort of fun movie,” Streep emphasized, echoing that sentiment.

    Hathaway, who reprises her role as Andy Sachs – now returning to Runway as the publication’s new features editor after years away – notes that the sequel avoids retreading the original’s story to instead reflect how much the world has changed. One of the film’s core messages, she says, is that audiences hold the future of independent journalism in their hands. “I hope people realise the fate of journalism really rests on them and if you believe in it, you believe it’s important – I personally do,” she shared. Despite the timely, serious themes woven through the script, the cast is quick to stress that the sequel retains all the lighthearted, fashion-forward fun that made the original a hit. Streep jokes that while the story addresses industry struggles, it is far from a gritty investigative drama like *Spotlight*: it remains a glamorous, witty comedy packed with iconic designer looks. Tucci echoes that, framing the film as a much-needed escape amid global chaos, while Blunt, who returns as the sharp-tongued Emily Charlton, promises audiences a “joy bomb” of nostalgia and laughs perfect for seeing with friends.

    For Blunt, the *The Devil Wears Prada* franchise holds extra personal meaning: she introduced her sister to Tucci at the original film’s 2006 premiere, and the pair have now been married for 14 years, making Tucci permanent family. In the sequel, Emily has left her assistant role at Runway to take a senior executive position at a luxury retail brand, putting her in a whole new professional landscape alongside her former colleagues. Blunt points out that beyond the snappy one-liners and A-list celebrity cameos (which include fashion icons Marc Jacobs and Naomi Campbell, shot on location in iconic fashion hubs New York and Milan), the sequel also explores deeply human themes of self-realization, forgiveness, reconciliation, and reclaiming one’s path.

    Early critical reception for the film has been largely positive. *Variety* praised the project as “a sequel made with intelligence and respect for both its predecessor and the legions who still love it”, while *The Guardian* called it “good-natured, buoyant entertainment”. *Empire* noted that the sequel succeeds because it gives core characters an entirely fresh story rather than relying on nostalgia for the first film, though it added that the high-fashion narrative could have benefited from higher narrative stakes. *The Hollywood Reporter* offered a more muted take, describing the film as “pretty polished and as featherweight as a fawning magazine puff piece”.

    A core throughline that made the original film a cultural hit remains central to the sequel: its unapologetic focus on ambitious, career-driven women, a trope that remains rare in Hollywood even two decades later. Streep pointed out that the harmful stereotype of ambition as an “unattractive” quality for women has not disappeared as many hoped it would. “We would hope that feeling would be obsolete but it isn’t, it’s alive and kicking,” she said. Hathaway agrees, noting that stories centered on women who love their work and prioritize their careers are still far too uncommon in the film industry – a gap that explains why the original resonated so deeply 20 years ago, and why the sequel is connecting with audiences now.

    At the same time, the sequel explores the nuance of balancing high-pressure careers with personal fulfillment, rejecting a one-size-fits-all approach to success. Hathaway explains that the film emphasizes that definition of a full, satisfying, meaningful life is deeply personal: for some, that centers a career, for others it centers personal life, and neither path is inherently better. Streep adds that this is a message that resonates for men as well, noting that the universal goal for most people is to find a sustainable balance between professional and personal priorities.

    Penned by returning screenwriter Aline Brosh McKenna and directed by original director David Frankel, the sequel aims to give audiences both the nostalgic fun they loved from the original, and new, thought-provoking ideas to take away. For Hathaway, that balance of joy and inspiration is exactly what makes the project worth making: “Seeing a story that centres around a character you can connect to that inspires you [is] a huge reason why I’m sitting here right now.” *The Devil Wears Prada 2* is in theaters globally now.

  • Watch: May Day protests take place across major US cities

    Watch: May Day protests take place across major US cities

    On the annual international celebration of workers’ rights, thousands of demonstrators took to the streets of major urban centers across the United States to stage coordinated May Day protests. The gatherings, which brought together a diverse coalition of labor organizers, immigrant advocacy groups, and grassroots activists, centered on a unified call for greater dignity, systemic justice, and expanded fundamental freedom for both working-class Americans and immigrant communities residing in the country.

    Protesters marched through busy downtown corridors, carrying hand-painted signs and chanting slogans that highlighted ongoing struggles over fair wages, workplace safety protections, immigration reform, and pathways to citizenship for undocumented residents. The coordinated actions across multiple cities underscored growing grassroots momentum around issues that impact millions of people across the United States, from low-wage workers facing stagnant incomes to immigrant families at risk of detention and deportation.

    May Day has long served as a global platform for workers and marginalized groups to amplify their demands, and this year’s mobilizations across the U.S. continued that tradition by drawing together intersecting movements to push for policy change and greater public recognition of the contributions both workers and immigrants make to American society. While the demonstrations were largely peaceful, organizers emphasized that the widespread turnout was intended to send a clear message to policymakers that demands for equity will not be silenced.

  • US court limits mail-order access to abortion pill mifepristone

    US court limits mail-order access to abortion pill mifepristone

    On a Friday ruling that has upended the ongoing national battle over abortion access in the United States, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals has issued a temporary order that sharply curtails access to mifepristone, the core medication used in most US pregnancy terminations, by banning mail distribution and telemedicine pharmacy dispensing. The decision reverses a 2023 U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) policy that permanently eliminated the longstanding requirement that patients pick up the drug in person from a clinical provider, a rule that grew out of pandemic-era access expansions first enacted in 2021.

    The legal challenge that led to this ruling was brought by the state of Louisiana, which argues that the FDA’s relaxed distribution rules directly invalidate the state’s total ban on abortion. In its official order, the appellate court wrote that every abortion enabled by the FDA’s policy overrides Louisiana’s abortion ban and contradicts the state’s official stance that “every unborn child is a human being from the moment of conception and is, therefore, a legal person.”

    Mifepristone is the first drug in the two-step medication abortion regimen endorsed by the FDA: it blocks progesterone, a hormone required to sustain a pregnancy, and is followed by misoprostol, which empties the uterus. The drug was first approved for use up to seven weeks of pregnancy in the U.S. in 2000, with approval extended to 10 weeks in 2016. It is also used off-label to treat incomplete miscarriages and Cushing syndrome, while misoprostol has long been prescribed for stomach ulcers and postpartum hemorrhage, a non-abortion use that has kept it out of most recent regulatory battles.

    Mainstream U.S. medical bodies including the FDA and the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists have repeatedly confirmed mifepristone’s safety after more than two decades of use. FDA data shows more than 3.7 million American women used the drug between 2000 and 2018, and clinical data puts the effectiveness of the full two-drug regimen at roughly 95%, with less than 1% of cases requiring additional invasive medical intervention.

    This latest ruling comes against a shifting legal backdrop for abortion access in the U.S. In 2022, the Supreme Court overturned the federal constitutional right to abortion established in Roe v. Wade, leaving regulation up to individual states. Two years later, in 2024, the Supreme Court unanimously rejected one high-profile effort to restrict mifepristone, but left open the possibility for future state-led challenges to the drug’s distribution rules. Friday’s ruling also overrides a recent lower court decision that paused the case to allow the FDA time to complete a regulatory review of the 2023 policy.

    Reaction to the ruling has split sharply along pro-choice and anti-abortion lines. American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) attorney Julia Kaye condemned the decision in an official statement, arguing it ignores established medical science and existing legal precedent to advance an anti-abortion policy that a majority of Americans oppose. Kaye added that for vulnerable groups including rural patients, survivors of intimate partner violence, and people living with disabilities, eliminating telemedicine and mail access will cut off access to the vital medication entirely.

    Louisiana Attorney General Liz Murrill, who brought the challenge, celebrated the ruling, claiming the Biden-era FDA rule enabled the deaths of thousands of unborn children in Louisiana and millions across the country. “I look forward to continuing to defend women and babies as this case continues,” she said.

    Other state officials have moved to reassure patients that abortion access will remain unchanged in jurisdictions where it remains legal. New York Attorney General Letitia James confirmed Friday that abortion care, including medication abortion, will remain legal and accessible in New York regardless of the appellate ruling. “Mifepristone is safe, effective, and essential. Restrictions on abortion care are restrictions on life-saving health care. This decision puts lives at risk,” James said.

  • Ghana becomes the latest African country to reject a US health deal, citing data sharing concerns

    Ghana becomes the latest African country to reject a US health deal, citing data sharing concerns

    On Friday, a senior Ghanaian official confirmed to the Associated Press that Accra has turned down a proposed bilateral health partnership with the United States, joining a growing list of African nations walking away from the agreement over unaddressed data privacy and national sovereignty risks. The core sticking point for Ghana was the deal’s provisions granting U.S. entities broad, unsupervised access to the country’s most sensitive health data without adequate regulatory safeguards, according to Arnold Kavaarpuo, executive director of Ghana’s Data Protection Commission, the government body directly involved in negotiation talks. Kavaarpuo emphasized that the scope of data access the U.S. demanded far exceeded the standard parameters aligned with the deal’s stated public health objectives.

    The U.S. State Department has not issued an immediate response to requests for comment on Kavaarpuo’s remarks. The framework of these health partnerships was first rolled out under the Trump administration’s “America First” global health strategy, which replaced a fragmented network of older health aid agreements overseen by the now-restructured U.S. Agency for International Development. To date, Washington has finalized similar deals with close to 24 African countries, offering hundreds of millions of dollars in funding to nations that previously faced U.S. aid cuts, with the stated goal of shoring up local public health systems and strengthening outbreak response capacity.

    Despite the financial incentives on offer, the agreements have sparked widespread criticism and pushback across the continent over long-standing concerns about data governance and national sovereignty. Zimbabwe became the first country to publicly reject the proposal back in February, citing identical worries around health data access, unfair terms, and threats to national sovereignty. Zambia has also pushed for revisions to problematic sections of the draft agreement, though it has not yet announced a final decision on whether to move forward.

    African privacy and public health activists have repeatedly flagged that most versions of the agreement lack sufficient guardrails for sensitive personal and population health data. In some cases, the deals also include restrictive provisions: for example, in Nigeria, the U.S. has committed to prioritizing funding exclusively for Christian faith-based healthcare providers, limiting access to support for broader public health infrastructure. Jean Kaseya, Director General of the Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention, previously told reporters that the organization holds “huge concerns” about the deal’s terms around both health data and pathogen sharing between African nations and U.S. entities.

    For Ghana, the proposed $300 million total agreement would have allocated roughly $109 million in U.S. funding to the country over a five-year period, with matching supplemental investment from the Ghanaian government. Kavaarpuo outlined that the most problematic provision allowed U.S. entities to de-identify patient data at their own discretion, a policy that effectively amounted to outsourcing Ghana’s entire national health data governance infrastructure to a foreign power. The agreement would have granted access not just to aggregated health datasets, but also to underlying metadata, public health dashboards, national reporting tools, standardized data models, and official data dictionaries. Up to 10 separate U.S. entities would have been permitted to access this full suite of data with no requirement for prior approval from Ghanaian authorities, regardless of the intended use case.

    “We did not get any assurance that Ghana would retain meaningful governance and oversight over how this sensitive data would be used,” Kavaarpuo explained. “The agreement only required U.S. entities to notify Ghana after they had already completed a project involving data access, rather than establishing a mandatory prior approval framework.”

    Kavaarpuo confirmed that Ghana has formally communicated its rejection of the current draft agreement to U.S. officials, and has requested revised negotiations to address the country’s core concerns around data governance and sovereignty before any new deal can be reached.

  • US appeals court temporarily halts mail delivery of abortion pill

    US appeals court temporarily halts mail delivery of abortion pill

    In a move that reignites the decades-long national debate over abortion access in the United States, a federal appeals court imposed a temporary suspension on mail and pharmacy delivery of mifepristone Friday, the medication that accounts for the majority of abortion procedures across the country. The order came in a lawsuit filed against the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) by the state of Louisiana, a southern U.S. state with some of the nation’s most restrictive anti-abortion policies.

    The ruling came from a three-judge panel of the conservative-majority 5th Circuit Court of Appeals. It reverses an earlier lower court decision that permitted mail delivery of the drug to continue while the FDA undertakes a review of its existing regulatory framework for mifepristone. Under the new order, any person seeking mifepristone anywhere in the U.S. must obtain the drug in person from a licensed health clinic, eliminating all options for delivery by post or commercial pharmacy.

    Supporters of tighter restrictions on mifepristone have centered their arguments on a non-peer-reviewed study conducted by a conservative think tank, which was released via a public website rather than a peer-reviewed scientific journal. The FDA first granted formal approval to mifepristone, which is sold under the brand name Mifeprex, back in 2000. Today, it is the most widely used method of abortion care in the U.S., and it is also a standard treatment for managing early-stage pregnancy loss.

    In clinical use, mifepristone works by halting the progression of a pregnancy, and it is paired with a second medication, misoprostol, which expels the uterine lining. Together, the two drugs are approved by the FDA for terminating pregnancies up to 10 weeks (70 days) of gestation.

    Louisiana Attorney General Liz Murrill, a leading opponent of abortion access, celebrated the court’s decision, framing it as what she called a “Victory for Life!” In a statement following the ruling, Murrill claimed the Biden administration had facilitated what she labeled an “abortion cartel” that caused “the deaths of thousands of Louisiana babies (and millions in other states) through illegal mail-order abortion pills,” adding that “today, that nightmare is over.”

    But abortion rights advocates have sharply condemned the ruling, which is already on track to be appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court. Nancy Northup, president and CEO of the Center for Reproductive Rights, called the order politically motivated rather than evidence-based. “This isn’t about science — it’s about making abortion as difficult, expensive, and unreachable as possible,” Northup said in an official statement.

    Julia Kaye, an attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), emphasized that the decision creates unnecessary barriers to a medication that has been used safely by both abortion patients and people experiencing miscarriage for more than two and a half decades. “Anti-abortion politicians have just made it much harder for people everywhere in the country to get a medication that abortion and miscarriage patients have been safely using for more than 25 years,” Kaye noted.

    The latest legal development comes amid a sweeping shift in U.S. abortion policy that followed the Supreme Court’s 2022 decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, the landmark 1973 ruling that had enshrined a constitutional right to abortion nationwide for 50 years. Since that 2022 ruling, roughly 20 states have implemented full or partial bans on abortion care. Despite aggressive pushes from conservative groups to outlaw or severely limit abortion, consistent public opinion polling shows a majority of U.S. adults support maintaining widespread access to safe, legal abortion.

    Most recently, in 2024, the U.S. Supreme Court dismissed a separate challenge to mifepristone access, ruling that anti-abortion groups and physicians who brought the suit lacked the legal standing required to challenge the FDA’s approval of the drug.