Trump’s repeal of landmark climate ruling ‘un-American’ and ‘Orwellian’, says John Kerry – US politics live | Climate crisis

Key events

Justice department moves to drop charges against men accused of hitting ICE officer in Minnesota

Federal prosecutors in Minneapolis have moved to drop felony assault charges against two Venezuelan men, including one shot in the leg by an immigration officer, after new evidence emerged undercutting the government’s version of events.

In a filing on Thursday, the US attorney’s office for the district of Minnesota said “newly discovered evidence” in the criminal case against Alfredo Alejandro Aljorna and Julio Cesar Sosa-Celis “is materially inconsistent with the allegations against them” made in a criminal complaint and a court hearing last month.

The government’s motion asked the judge for “dismissal with prejudice”, meaning the charges against the two men cannot be resubmitted.

The pending dismissal comes after a string of high-profile shootings involving federal immigration agents where eyewitness statements and video evidence called into question claims made to justify using deadly force. Dozens of felony cases against protesters accused of assaulting or impeding federal officers have also crumbled.

The case at issue in Thursday’s filing stemmed from a 14 January incident during which an FBI investigator alleged in an affidavit that US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers attempted to conduct a traffic stop on a vehicle driven by Aljorna, who crashed and fled on foot toward an apartment complex.

As an immigration officer chased and tried to arrest him, the government claimed, Aljorna began to violently resist.

As the officer and Aljorna struggled on the ground, Sosa-Celis and another man came out of a nearby apartment and attacked the officer with a snow shovel and a broom handle, the complaint alleged. The officer, who was not named in court filings, then fired his handgun, striking Sosa-Celis in the upper right thigh. The men then fled into a nearby apartment, where they were later arrested.

Thursday’s one-page motion seeking to dismiss the charges did not detail what new evidence had emerged, but cracks began to appear in the government’s case during a 21 January court hearing to determine whether the accused men could be released pending trial.

Share

Melody Schreiber

A senior US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) official says Moderna’s clinical trial on a new, potentially more effective flu vaccine was a “brazen failure” and that the FDA is now calling it into question.

The FDA unexpectedly refused to consider Moderna’s application for a flu shot based on messenger RNA (mRNA) technology in a decision that experts say is already having a chilling effect on vaccine development.

Officials say the issue is the design of the study, in which control group participants over the age of 65 should have received a high-dose flu shot instead of a standard flu shot. Outside experts say the reasons seem to go deeper.

“It’s all pretext and obfuscation when the real agenda is rejecting conventional science and serving a predetermined anti-vaccine agenda,” said Richard Hughes IV, a partner with Epstein Becker Green and law professor at George Washington University.

Dorit Reiss, professor of law at UC Law San Francisco, said “personally humiliating a company is not a legitimate reason to refuse to review a submission”, and the refusal needs to “address substantive reasons”. Angela Rasmussen, an American virologist at the Vaccine and Infectious Disease Organization at the University of Saskatchewan, says “they’re just coming up with reasons to not approve mRNA anything, and they’re going to eventually do it to all these vaccines”.

Andrew Nixon, a spokesperson for the US Department of Health and Human Services, said the concerns that mRNA and other vaccines are being targeted by officials were “baseless”.

Share

Secretary of state Marco Rubio met his Chinese counterpart Wang Yi on Friday on the sidelines of the Munich Security Conference, an AFP journalist said, at a time of heightened Washington-Beijing tensions.

The meeting came days after US president Donald Trump said he would host Chinese leader Xi Jinping at the White House late this year, as the world’s two biggest economies look to reset ties marred by a trade war.

Rubio arrived late Friday in the Germany city, and is set to deliver a speech Saturday to the annual meeting focused on international security and defence.

Share

Trump’s climate repeal ‘un-American’ and ‘Orwellian’, says Kerry

Hello and welcome to the US politics live blog. I’m Tom Ambrose and I will be bringing you the latest news lines over the next few hours.

We start with news that the Trump administration has revoked the bedrock scientific determination that gives the government the ability to regulate climate-heating pollution. The move was described as a gift to “billionaire polluters” at the expense of Americans’ health.

The endangerment finding, which states that the buildup of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere endangers public health and welfare, has since 2009 allowed the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to limit heat-trapping pollution from vehicles, power plants and other industrial sources.

Donald Trump called the move “the single largest deregulatory action in American history”. “This is a big one if you’re into environment,” he told reporters on Thursday. “This is about as big as it gets.”

The move comes as part of Trump’s bigger anti-environment push, which has seen him roll back pollution rules and boost oil and gas.

On social media, Barack Obama said the repeal will leave Americans “less safe, less healthy and less able to fight climate change – all so the fossil fuel industry can make even more money”.

The former secretary of state John Kerry called the new rule “un-American”.

“Repealing the Endangerment Finding takes Orwellian governance to new heights and invites enormous damage to people and property around the world,” said Kerry, who also served as Joe Biden’s climate envoy. “Ignoring warning signs will not stop the storm. It puts more Americans directly in its path.”

Read the full story here:

In other developments:

Daniel Rosen, the Trump-appointed US attorney in Minnesota, said in a court filing that charges should be dropped against an immigrant who was shot by a federal immigration officer last month because “newly discovered evidence” contradicts the account of the incident from federal officers.

Sensitive intelligence that a whistleblower has accused Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, of mishandling concerned a report from the National Security Agency on an intercepted phone call last year between two members of foreign intelligence who were discussing Jared Kushner and Iran, the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times report.

Asked if he has “fired or disciplined that staffer who posted the video from your account that included the Obamas,” Donald Trump said that he had not. The president then went on to excuse the racist clip, which depicted Barack and Michelle Obama as cartoon apes.

A federal judge denied a request on Thursday from the Trump administration to pause her order keeping temporary legal protections for Haitian immigrants in place, and said that she would not be intimidated by death threats she read aloud in court.

Kristi Noem, the homeland security secretary, claimed US Customs and Border Protection in the San Diego ares have saved 1.7 billion lives by seizing drugs.

Share