标签： Oceania

In a high-stakes vote that exposed deep partisan divides over congressional authority and America’s ongoing military engagement in Iran, U.S. senators on Wednesday narrowly blocked a Democratic-led bid to curtail President Donald Trump’s ability to wage unapproved war against Iran. This marked the first congressional vote on the conflict since a 60-day statutory deadline for the White House to secure formal congressional authorization expired.

The resolution, spearheaded by Oregon Democratic Senator Jeff Merkley, represented the seventh failed Democratic effort to rein in Trump’s war powers since the Iran conflict launched more than 10 weeks earlier. The final vote tally came down to a razor-thin 50-49 margin, with the resolution falling just one vote short of passage.

Democrats argue that under the 1973 War Powers Act, passed in the wake of the Vietnam War to reassert congressional control over military deployment, the Trump administration was required to win formal legislative approval for ongoing strikes against Iran by May 1. The timeline was triggered when Trump notified Congress of the initial Iranian strikes back in early March. By their reading, the president is now openly operating in violation of federal law.

The White House has pushed back against this interpretation, claiming the 60-day clock was paused when a ceasefire was announced more than a month ago. Speaking to reporters after the vote, Merkley suggested many Republican senators held misgivings about the ongoing conflict but feared political backlash from aligning against the sitting president. “I think many of our colleagues are uncomfortable with where they stand, but they’re also uncomfortable with being on the wrong side of Trump,” Merkley said.

The ongoing legal and partisan standoff has emerged as the most high-profile test of congressional war-making authority in the half-century since the War Powers Act became law. The conflict is now in its 75th day, with mounting military costs and growing bipartisan concern over the strain the deployment has placed on overall U.S. military readiness. Before the vote, even Merkley acknowledged that the administration’s decision to pause the clock had muddied the political and legal waters for swing voters.

Despite the resolution’s defeat, Democrats have drawn encouragement from the slow but steady rise in Republican lawmakers breaking ranks with the president to support the measure. Three Senate Republicans crossed the aisle to back the resolution, one more defector than appeared in the previous April vote, shrinking the president’s winning margin to the narrowest possible outcome.

Democratic Senator Tim Kaine, a longtime advocate for reining in unauthorized war powers, told reporters that Democrats would not abandon the fight. “They’ll have another chance to vote next week, and the week after that,” Kaine said, vowing to keep pressure on Republican lawmakers to defend their positions on the conflict. “We’re going to force this vote every week until the Senate says we shouldn’t be at war. And I do believe that day is coming.”

Historically, enforcing the War Powers Act has proven extraordinarily difficult, as federal courts have generally been reluctant to intervene in inter-branch disputes over military policy. Even if the resolution eventually secures passage in the Senate, it still faces substantial obstacles in the Republican-controlled House of Representatives, and would almost certainly face an immediate veto from President Trump.

A chaotic incident unfolded at the Philippine Senate complex late Wednesday, when multiple gunshots rang out as fugitive Senator Ronald Dela Rosa, a former police chief wanted by the International Criminal Court (ICC) over crimes against humanity allegations linked to his role in Rodrigo Duterte’s deadly drug war, holed up inside the building to avoid arrest.

According to AFP journalists on the scene, at least five distinct gunshots were heard, forcing senators, staff, and journalists to lock themselves in offices for safety. Television footage captured a visibly shaken crying reporter delivering a live on-air report from inside the locked-down building, while Senator Robin Padilla publicly urged all journalists present to evacuate the premises immediately.

Interior Secretary Juanito Victor Remulla told reporters that no casualties have been reported, and the operation to identify and locate the shooter remains ongoing. Remulla confirmed Dela Rosa remained secured inside the Senate complex, adding that “he is safe. He is with security personnel. He has been informed of our activities. We have assured him that there is no warrant of arrest to be served.”

President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. released an immediate public statement denying that any government forces deployed inside or around the Senate compound had fired the shots. He clarified that agents assigned to arrest Dela Rosa had already been ordered to stand down earlier that day, following a Supreme Court directive that required the administration to justify its planned arrest and extradition of the senator to the Netherlands, where the ICC is based.

“The thing to do now is to tell all our people to calm down and we will get to the bottom of this. We will determine who is behind this trouble,” Marcos said in an address broadcast on state television.

The incident is the latest escalation of a long-simmering political crisis tied to the Duterte-era drug war. Dela Rosa, widely known by his nickname “Bato”, served as chief of the Philippine National Police from 2016 to 2018, overseeing the opening phase of Duterte’s brutal anti-narcotics crackdown that human rights monitors say left thousands of mostly low-level drug users and small-scale peddlers dead. Duterte himself was arrested by ICC authorities last March and is currently detained in The Hague awaiting trial on related charges.

Dela Rosa had stayed out of public view since November before making a surprise return this week, casting a critical vote that helped Duterte loyalists seize control of the Senate leadership. Just minutes before the gunshots rang out, Senator Vicente Sotto released a statement reporting that protesters had thrown water bottles at his car as he drove alone out of the Senate complex.

Earlier that same Wednesday, Dela Rosa made a public appeal to current and former members of the Philippine military and police to oppose his extradition, urging uniformed personnel to resist any move by the Marcos administration to hand him over to the international court. “My fellow men in uniform” should “express their sentiment” that the government “should not hand me over to foreigners”, he said.

Senate President Alan Peter Cayetano, who blocked government agents from arresting Dela Rosa earlier this week, wrote on his official Facebook page that authorities had no leads on the source of the gunfire. “We heard gunshots and we don’t know what is happening. Everyone’s locked in their rooms now. We cannot go out, we cannot secure our other staff,” he added. “Why are we under attack here?”

Melvin Matibag, director of the National Bureau of Investigation (NBI), whose agents attempted to arrest Dela Rosa at the Senate on Monday, denied that any NBI personnel were involved in the shooting. “We were on a stand down,” he told ABS-CBN network in an interview, adding there were no NBI agents inside the Senate building when the gunshots occurred.

As the U.S. Senate gears up to confirm Kevin Warsh, President Donald Trump’s nominee for Federal Reserve Chair, the incoming leader confronts a trio of extraordinary challenges: unprecedented political interference from the White House, persistent inflationary pressures buffeting the American economy, and deep internal divisions among the central bank’s top policymakers.

The confirmation vote is scheduled for 2:00 pm local time (1800 GMT) Wednesday, with Trump’s Republican party holding a narrow majority that is all but guaranteed to push Warsh’s nomination through to replace departing chair Jerome Powell. Once a well-known hardliner on inflation (commonly referred to as a monetary “hawk”), Warsh has shifted his policy stance in recent months to align with Trump’s aggressive public campaign for deep interest rate cuts. He has also pledged to implement what he calls “regime change” at the central bank, criticizing the institution for what he claims is excessive politicization and overly transparent communication around its monetary policy decisions.

But Warsh’s path to immediate rate cuts faces steep barriers. Inflation currently remains well above the Fed’s long-term 2% target, climbing to 3.8% year-over-year in April amid soaring global oil prices sparked by the escalating conflict between the U.S.-backed Israeli campaign against Iran. With price growth still stubbornly elevated, the new chair faces an uphill battle convincing members of the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC), the Fed’s rate-setting body, to back an immediate rate reduction. That gridlock sets the stage for renewed public attacks from Trump, who spent years relentlessly criticizing Powell over his policy decisions and has made no secret of his demand for lower borrowing costs to boost the economy ahead of elections.

“Warsh’s biggest challenge will likely be dealing with President Trump,” noted David Wessel, senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. “The president does not respect the independence of the Fed and he wants interest rates to be lower.”

Trump’s repeated attacks on the Fed and its leadership already represent an unprecedented assault on the central bank’s long-held institutional independence. Earlier this year, Powell claimed a criminal probe launched by the Department of Justice into cost overruns for a Fed building renovation project was a deliberate attempt to pressure him into changing his monetary policy stances. That move came on the heels of a separate Trump administration effort to remove Fed Governor Lisa Cook from the central bank’s board.

The Justice Department dropped the criminal probe into Powell as the administration moved to clear procedural hurdles for Warsh’s nomination, but the Supreme Court still has a pending case on the legality of Cook’s attempted removal. Columbia Law School professor Kathryn Judge, an expert in banking regulation, called both actions “unprecedented,” warning that the pressure on Fed officials is unlikely to ease even after Warsh takes office.

“Fed officials have been put on notice that this president is willing to use all available tools to bully them into acceding to his demands,” Judge explained.

Beyond political interference, Warsh takes the helm of the world’s largest economy still reeling from years of successive economic shocks. The COVID-19 pandemic sent inflation soaring to a 40-year peak of 9.1% in mid-2022; while price growth has cooled from that high, American households have still been grappling with persistent above-target price increases that have eroded purchasing power.

The Fed’s dual mandate creates a particularly intractable policy dilemma for the new chair. While the unemployment rate has held steady at roughly 4.3% — a level near historic lows — that stable headline number hides significant underlying turbulence. Monthly job growth has been weak and volatile for months, swinging between small gains and losses, with nearly all new job creation concentrated in the health care sector. The stable unemployment rate is also propped up by a sharp drop in labor supply, driven by both Trump’s aggressive deportation policies and the ongoing aging of the American population.

The conflicting signals leave policymakers stuck between competing goals: raise rates to bring inflation fully back to target, or cut rates to stimulate sagging job growth?

Compounding these challenges is deep internal division on the FOMC over the appropriate path forward. At the committee’s most recent meeting, an unusual three members publicly dissented from the group’s position, arguing the Fed should signal that a rate hike remains a possible option to rein in persistent inflation. Wessel pointed out that these divisions, which sometimes fall along partisan lines, represent a marked shift from the Fed’s traditionally consensus-driven culture of the past.

Adding an extra layer of institutional uncertainty is the unusual situation of outgoing chair Powell, who will remain on the Fed’s board of governors after stepping down from the leadership role — a break from more than 70 years of precedent where departing chairs leave the board when their term as chair expires.

Australia’s main opposition party, the Coalition, is set to table a sharp, interventionist alternative to the Albanese government’s housing and migration policies in its formal budget reply speech on Thursday evening, led by Opposition Leader Angus Taylor. Scheduled to address parliament shortly after 7:30pm, the plan targets what the Coalition frames as Labor’s failed approach to the national housing crisis, centering on two headline pledges: a legally tied annual cap on net overseas migration linked directly to national housing completion numbers, and full abolition of the current government’s signature housing initiatives.

A landmark court ruling has upended the legal outcome of a high-profile Sydney protest against the Israeli president’s Australian visit, after judges struck down as unconstitutional the police legislation that authorities relied on to break up the gathering and make multiple arrests.

The February demonstration, which drew hundreds of participants to Sydney Town Hall to oppose the presidential visit, saw New South Wales Police move to block the group’s planned march route, disperse sections of the crowd, and take dozens of protesters into custody. Officers based their actions on the Public Assembly Restriction Declaration (PARD), a sweeping post-terror attack law that granted police broad power to restrict public gatherings for up to 90 days following a major extremist incident.

Last month, the NSW Court of Appeal delivered a decisive ruling on the law, siding with a legal challenge mounted by the Palestine Action Group and Blak Caucus. Judges found PARD unlawfully overreached executive power by expanding police authority far beyond what the state constitution allows, invalidating the entire legislative framework.

The law had been rushed into passage by state authorities after the deadly December Bondi Beach terror attack, which left 15 people dead and more than 40 injured when two attackers opened fire during a Hanukkah gathering at the coastal site.

On Wednesday morning, NSW Police Commissioner Mal Lanyon confirmed to ABC Radio that all charges laid directly under PARD for the Town Hall protest will be dropped pending a formal departmental review. Of the 29 protesters facing charges connected to the demonstration, it remains unclear how many will see their cases dismissed, as many accused face additional unrelated offences including assaulting police, offensive conduct, and throwing projectiles, which are being processed separately through the courts.

Legal advocates have raised further questions about whether all police directions issued during the protest operation, including charges for failing to comply with officer instructions, were rooted in the now-invalidated framework, casting doubt over a broader range of charges. State Premier Chris Minns had previously argued that many charges could still stand under a separate major events declaration, a regulation typically used for large-scale sporting and entertainment gatherings that was active during the Israeli president’s visit. But the Palestine Action Group has already signaled it intends to launch a new legal challenge to that framework, arguing it was also improperly used to suppress peaceful political protest.

Greens Member of Parliament and solicitor Sue Higginson welcomed the announcement of charge reviews, saying the commissioner’s confirmation that charges were laid under an unconstitutional law proves the entire police operation was legally flawed. “People were wrongfully arrested and brutally assaulted because the Minns Labor Government chose to impose unconstitutional anti-protest laws on the people of NSW,” Higginson said in a statement, calling for all charges connected to the night of protest to be dropped entirely.

The Human Rights Law Centre also added its voice to calls for sweeping change after last month’s court ruling, noting that judges found PARD unlawfully restricted protected political communication and exceeded the state government’s constitutional authority. The organization is calling for all remaining charges to be dismissed and for a full overhaul of NSW’s protest-related legislation to bring it into line with constitutional protections for peaceful assembly and free speech.