Connect with us

News

Trump Administration Ends Tracking of Kidnapped Ukrainian Children in Russia

Published

on

Trump Administration Ends Tracking of Kidnapped Ukrainian Children in Russia

The State Department has ended funding for the tracking of thousands of Ukrainian children abducted by Russia, and American officials or contractors might have deleted a database with information on them, according to a letter that U.S. lawmakers plan to send to Secretary of State Rubio on Wednesday.

The work on the abducted children by the Yale School of Public Health Humanitarian Research Lab was frozen when President Trump signed an executive order in late January halting almost all foreign aid spending. Since then, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and an official under him, Pete Marocco, have ended the vast majority of foreign aid contracts, including the one to the Yale lab.

The congressional letter, organized by Representative Greg Landsman, Democrat of Ohio, said “the foreign aid freeze has jeopardized, and may ultimately eliminate, our informational support of Ukraine on this front.”

The State Department and the Yale center “had been preserving evidence of abducted children from Ukraine it had identified, to be shared with Europol and the government of Ukraine to secure their return,” the letter said, according to a copy obtained by The New York Times. Europol is the main law enforcement agency of the European Union.

“We have reason to believe that the data from the repository has been permanently deleted,” it said. “If true, this would have devastating consequences. Can you please update us as to the status of the data from the evidence repository?”

Advertisement

A person familiar with the work of the Yale Center said the details in the letter were accurate.

The Yale lab was one of several recipients of $26 million in congressional funding over three years through the State Department to track war crimes committed by Russian forces in Ukraine. That work began in 2022 under a program called the Conflict Observatory.

The lab did research into abducted children and the “filtration sites” they and others were taken to in Russian-occupied Ukraine, where Ukrainians were interrogated and prepared for deportation to Russia. The researchers used open-source information and commercial satellite imagery.

Yale researchers were compiling the database, called Caesar, so the State Department could share information on abducted children with Europol and the International Criminal Court, which could eventually bring charges against Russian officials. In 2022, after Russia began its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, President Joseph R. Biden Jr. accused the Russians of committing “genocide.”

Ukrainian officials say Russia has abducted 20,000 children from Ukraine. Yale researchers said in earlier reports they have tracked 30,000 children to sites outside of Ukraine. They have put information into the database on 6,000 children taken to Russia and more than 2,400 to Belarus. The database has detailed information on 314 kidnapped children in Russia: their names and photographs, and dossiers of 20 to 30 pages on each child.

Advertisement

Some of the findings were previously disclosed in public reports from Yale. The center also gave information on the children to the Ukrainian government.

The main contractor for the State Department project is the MITRE Corporation, a nonprofit that mainly does work for the U.S. government, including for intelligence agencies. The Yale lab had a contract under it.

The State Department did not reply to a request for comment about the project and the status of the database. The MITRE Corporation also did not reply.

In July 2023, a Russian official said Russia had brought 700,000 children from conflict zones in Ukraine to Russia.

The Yale researchers have not been able to work on the project since the funding freeze began in late January. When the U.S. government halted weapons aid and intelligence sharing with Ukraine after President Trump berated Volodymyr Zelensky at the White House on Feb. 28, the president of Ukraine, the Yale researchers lost access to satellite imagery.

Advertisement

The Trump administration restarted the intelligence sharing and weapons aid after a meeting in Saudi Arabia this month between U.S. and Ukrainian officials. But the Yale researchers still do not have access to satellite images.

Mr. Trump is trying to align with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, and the two spoke on the phone on Tuesday. Mr. Trump said he wants to arrange a 30-day cease-fire in Ukraine, which the Ukrainians have agreed to, but Mr. Putin said he would only halt strikes temporarily on energy infrastructure.

Details of the State Department’s termination of its contracts for the research into potential Russian war crimes in Ukraine were earlier reported by The i Paper, a British news site and The New Republic.The Washington Post first reported details of the congressional draft letter on Tuesday.

News

Supreme Court financial disclosures reveal how their books add to their income

Published

on

Supreme Court financial disclosures reveal how their books add to their income

Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett speaks at the Reagan Library on Sept. 9, 2025, in Simi Valley, Calif. Barrett discussed and signed copies of her new book, Listening to the Law: Reflections on the Court and Constitution.

Mario Tama/Getty Images


hide caption



toggle caption

Advertisement

Mario Tama/Getty Images

Even as the Supreme Court was handing down one legal thunderbolt after another last week, the justices were quietly releasing their annual financial reports. Justice Samuel Alito was the only sitting justice to request an extension, which he has done for 15 years. The disclosures do not give a complete account of the justices’ total income and wealth, but they give insights into their concertgoing, guest professorships and even their involvement in youth sports.

In addition to their salaries, much of the justices’ reported income came from their book deals. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson led the pack earning more than $1.1 million last year for a total of roughly $4 million since her memoir, Lovely One, was published in 2024.

Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Neil Gorsuch, Amy Coney Barrett and retired Justice Anthony Kennedy also reported income from published books. Earnings from their books ranged from $849,000 for Barrett, to $300,000 for Gorsuch and $88,000 for Sotomayor, whose books include her 2013 autobiography and five children’s books. Justice Clarence Thomas, who previously earned $1.5 million for his 2007 memoir, listed no publisher payments last year, and Justice Brett Kavanaugh, one of 13 co-authors of a 2016 legal treatise, also received no payments last year. Kavanaugh is said to be working on a memoir but he listed no payments for the anticipated book. Alito does have a book coming out in the fall, but with his financial report still outstanding, there is no data on how much he was paid for the work in 2025.

Advertisement

The only two sitting justices who have not written books are Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Elena Kagan.

Many justices also earned income from teaching at law schools. Roberts reported income from New England Law, located in Boston, and Gorsuch reported teaching income from George Mason University in Virginia. Thomas taught classes at Catholic University in Washington, D.C., and Barrett and Kavanaugh taught at Notre Dame Law School. Barrett graduated from the school and began teaching there 23 years ago; Kavanaugh has family connections to Notre Dame.

Continue Reading

News

Manhattan Building’s Columns Buckled Beneath New Addition, Images Show

Published

on

Manhattan Building’s Columns Buckled Beneath New Addition, Images Show

At least two structural columns buckled and failed in a 37-story office tower in Midtown Manhattan on Tuesday, prompting evacuations of nearby streets and buildings. While city officials asserted that the tower was in no danger of collapsing completely, outside engineers said further failures in the structure could not be ruled out.

A pair of columns that failed completely were part of the tower’s existing structure. A New York Times review of images and videos from inside the building has found that several floors were added atop these columns.

Advertisement

City officials said in a news conference on Tuesday that the building was continuing to move, while they simultaneously assured the city that the building would not suffer “total collapse.” “The way this building is constructed, it’s a steel-frame building,” John Esposito, a chief in the Fire Department in New York, said at the afternoon news conference. “So, it would not be a total collapse. It would be more of a localized collapse.” Still, he said, “that remains our concern, that it’s moved.”

Advertisement

Engineers said that the movement itself was cause for concern. In a properly designed steel building, they said, loads should redistribute quickly to surviving structural supports if columns failed.

Joe DiPompeo, a former president of the Structural Engineering Institute at the American Society of Civil Engineers, said that if the structure had been overloaded, he would expect any movement “to happen very quickly,” rather than gradually.

“Generally when a column buckles, it’s a sudden failure,” Mr. DiPompeo said. He said that a full collapse remained unlikely given the redundancies built into the building codes.

Advertisement

Engineers often refer to the most dangerous possibility as a progressive collapse, a process in which structures near the initial failure become overstressed and also fail, potentially bringing down the building if the sequence continues. While unlikely, it cannot be ruled out, Mr. DiPompeo said.

Footage recorded from inside the building shows at least two structural columns appear to have failed completely, Mr. DiPompeo said. Other nonstructural, interior walls — or at least the metal “studs” that were in place to hold them up — also appear to have deformed.

Advertisement

“The only way that really happens is if the floor above them dropped. It looks like the floor above could have dropped a foot or two, which is obviously not a good situation,” Mr. DiPompeo said.

@fernando40tiktok.commarc via Storyful

Advertisement

Advertisement

Image from @fernando40tiktok.commarc via Storyful

Advertisement

Image from @Bogs4NY via X

Advertisement

The 37-story building is in the process of being converted from office space into residential units. Four new floors and a large vertical portion were added onto the existing building in recent months. The vertical portion consists of a stack of over a dozen new floors cantilevered out over the existing building below.

Engineers said that there was nothing inherently wrong with adding residential floors or the cantilevered section above the columns that failed, as long as the original structure and the modifications had properly accounted for the added weight and wind loads.

“The cantilever alone doesn’t change anything,” Mr. DiPompeo said, but it does put additional load on the columns underneath — a factor that should have been reflected in the design.

Advertisement

Nathan Berman, managing principal and founder of MetroLoft, the developer overseeing the conversion, said on Tuesday that “this incident is nothing more than a typical construction mishap.”

He said two columns near the northwest corner of the tower had bent under the weight of additions to the building above, most likely because those columns had not been properly reinforced, though he said an investigation would determine the cause. The rest of the columns, he said, “picked up the weight.” He estimated the affected floors above the failed columns had sagged by a maximum of four inches.

Advertisement

Mr. Berman said that he expected the problems to be fixed and the project to be completed with, at most, a slight delay.

On Tuesday evening, installation of temporary shoring was set to begin shortly, in order to help stabilize the 20th and 21st floors of the building.

Advertisement
Continue Reading

News

DOJ warns of criminal charges for state election officials if noncitizens vote

Published

on

DOJ warns of criminal charges for state election officials if noncitizens vote

The Justice Department sent letters warning election officials in all 50 states and the District of Columbia that they could face criminal prosecution over noncitizen voting, a spokesperson for the Justice Department confirmed Tuesday.

The letters, signed by Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon, who heads up the department’s Civil Rights Division, give states five days to explain how they will comply with federal voter eligibility laws and how they will maintain “clean voter lists.”

Advertisement

“The Department sent these letters to all 50 states and the District of Columbia, asking for voluntary compliance in a timely manner with their obligations under federal law to ensure only citizens vote in federal elections,” a Justice Department spokesperson said in a statement.

Noncitizen voting in federal elections is extremely rare, but Trump and his administration have falsely portrayed it as a widespread issue.

Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson, Nevada Secretary of State Francisco Aguilar and Utah Lt. Gov. Deidre Henderson are among those who said they received the letters from the Justice Department.

The letters say state election officers “could be criminally prosecuted for aiding and abetting” noncitizen voting. They further specify that any election officer who knowingly retains noncitizens on a statewide voting registration list or who facilitates noncitizens’ receiving and casting ballots could be subject to criminal liability.

“An intentional act that is aimed at diluting the votes of citizens could also constitute a violation” of federal law, the letters said.

Advertisement

Henderson wrote on social media that the threats constitute “truly bizarre behavior.”

“Got another love letter this morning from the DOJ sprinkled throughout with threats of criminal prosecution,” she wrote. “I’m sure I’m not the only chief election officer of a state who is being targeted for following state and federal laws by resisting DOJ’s demands for private voter data that have thus far been ruled illegal by at least a dozen courts.”

The letters are the latest move in the Justice Department’s campaign to assert more federal control over state elections.

While some states have complied with the administration’s demands that they hand over voter roll data, the Justice Department has sued 30 states and Washington, D.C., for resisting. So far, 11 different federal courts have dismissed the Justice Department’s efforts to seize voter rolls.

Advertisement
Continue Reading
Advertisement

Trending