The Dictatorship
Somalia’s crumbling hospitals show the toll of aid cuts and war
MOGADISHU, Somalia (AP) — To save the life of his badly malnourished 3-year-old son, farmer Yusuf Bulle had to travel from a remote area of southern Somalia to the capital, Mogadishu, where a rare health unit presented the only hope.
After 15 days at Banadir Hospital, the child was deemed out of danger.
“Where I come from, there is no hospital,” Bulle said. “That’s why I am here.”
One of the world’s poorest countries faces a crisis of health care exacerbated by the Trump administration’s dismantling of the U.S. Agency for International Development this year. The loss of USAID funding has disheartened many Somalis who believe they can’t depend on their own government, which focuses mostly on defeating the al-Qaida-linked al-Shabab.
Somalia’s deputy health minister, Mohamed Hassan Bulaale, told The Associated Press that the U.S. cuts led to over 6,000 health workers losing their jobs while up to 2,000 health facilities were affected — a massive hit in a country that the Center for Global Development this year said was among the world’s most likely to suffer as donors draw back.
Bomb and gun attacks by the militants — including against health centers — have reduced in frequency and intensity in recent months, leading some to see success in President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud’s “total war” against al-Shabab.
But hospital administrators, civic leaders and others say the latest push to defeat al-Shabab has come at the expense of health care and other public services.
Relying on outside money
Somalia’s Ministry of Health was allocated $91 million of a national budget exceeding $1 billion this year, with those funds tied mostly to projects backed by outside groups. That’s a significant improvement from last year’s $52 million, but almost all of that increase came from donors, said Mahad Wasuge, who runs the Somali Public Agenda think tank.
And as the United States has shown, donor money comes and goes.
Even with major setbacks in overall foreign support this year, including from other key benefactors such as Britain, “security remains the first priority” for Somali authorities, Wasuge told the AP.
Many areas outside Mogadishu don’t have functioning public hospitals, he said, with people forced to trek through often insecure areas to receive care at the ones still functional.
Such facilities in the capital include Banadir Hospital, built with Chinese support in 1977, and De Martino Hospital, established in 1922 by Italian colonialists.
During an AP visit, officials at those hospitals said much of their work would stop without assistance from the United Nations and international groups.
Even at Banadir, Mogadishu’s main public referral hospital, expectations of the Somali government aren’t high. The unit looking after malnourished children depends entirely on donor funds channeled through the humanitarian group Concern Worldwide, said supervisor Dr. Mohamed Haashi.
After 37 people employed in the unit lost their jobs with this year’s U.S. aid cuts, Concern Worldwide still pays the salaries of 13 others in addition to milk and food for mothers and babies, Haashi said.
‘Donors are fatigued’
At De Martino Hospital, director Dr. Abdirahim Omar Amin said he worries what will happen when contracts with two other humanitarian groups expire at the end of 2025.
The hospital was looking after dozens of children suffering from diphtheria, an infectious disease of the throat preventable by vaccination but now spreading in rural areas. Parents are not taking their kids for routine vaccinations because they are afraid of militant attacks, Amin said.
In the medical lab, Amin pointed to the equipment and said everything was acquired with donor funds.
“Now it looks like donors are fatigued,” he said.
Most services at the hospital are provided free of charge, thanks largely to funding from the International Rescue Committee and Population Services International. Patients with conditions not deemed urgent are asked to cover some costs.
“The Ministry of Health is supposed to give support to this hospital because this hospital belongs to the Ministry of Health,” Amin said. “I hope, even if (the humanitarian groups) left, the Ministry of Health will replace their position.”
Bulaale, the deputy health minister, said the government is working with some partners in “developing a contingency plan” after the loss of USAID funding. He didn’t elaborate.
In some ways, De Martino Hospital’s history mirrors Somalia’s scars. It once sheltered displaced people after the fall in 1991 of Siad Barre, a dictator whose removal triggered fighting by warlords from different clans. Many public facilities across Somalia were destroyed in years of civil war.
Somalia’s federal government, now based in a heavily fortified area near the airport in Mogadishu, struggles to assert itself despite support from African Union peacekeepers, U.S. airstrikes targeting al-Shabab and security consultants from nations jockeying for influence in a country with strategic access to the Indian Ocean and Gulf of Aden.
The countries include Turkey, which bankrolls a hospital with intensive care capabilities in Mogadishu.
“Even the limited number of public hospitals that started functioning properly lately are heavily dependent on donor money,” said Wasuge, the civic leader. “They don’t get direct government budget that allows them to provide better health care services.”
‘No national health care plan’
The Banadir and De Martino hospitals are where the most needy people are referred for care. De Martino, Mogadishu’s main referral hospital for COVID-19 patients during the pandemic, receives the “most vulnerable” wherever they come from, director Amin said.
Amina Abdulkadir Mohamed, a jobless woman who was at De Martino recently to give birth, said she went there because she knew she would not be asked for money.
“I was told there is free medication,” she added.
Mohamed Adam Dini, who represents Somalia’s Puntland state in the national assembly, described the federal government’s priorities as “deficient” because of its overwhelming focus on ending “anarchy.”
“A lot of diseases have been spreading” unchecked, Dini said, adding: ”There is no national health care plan, as we don’t have a national political plan.”
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For more on Africa and development: https://apnews.com/hub/africa-pulse
The Associated Press receives financial support for global health and development coverage in Africa from the Gates Foundation. The AP is solely responsible for all content. Find AP’s standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at AP.org.
The Dictatorship
Trump’s border czar Tom Homan says vetting of ICE officer is under internal review after Maine shooting
WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump’s border czar said Sunday that the vetting of an immigration officer involved in the deadly shooting of a Colombian native in Maine is under internal review after relatives revealed to The Associated Press that he had a history of serious mental health struggles and violent behavior.
Tom Homan said if the allegations against the Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer are true, “I don’t think he should ever have cleared vetting.”
“There’s several things under review,” Homan said on BLN about the officer, Army veteran David Brouillette. “The training is under review. I know this specific case, as far as the vetting, is under review by the internal affairs section.”
Questions about the Department of Homeland Security’s rush to hire, train and deploy thousands of new ICE officers to carry out Trump’s immigration crackdown have come into stark focus after back-to-back fatal shootings of immigrants in Maine and Houston.
Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin ordered a pause in vehicle stops after the fatal Maine shooting, but Trump almost immediately reversed course and insisted the stops resume as a necessary tool in his campaign to round up and deport immigrants who are in the U.S. without current legal status.
Homeland Security did not immediately respond Sunday to a request for comment about the internal review.
ICE issues new requirement for body-worn cameras during vehicle stops
Homan said that “changes have been made” and that acting ICE director David Venturella has issued a new directive that body-worn cameras must be in use if officers make a vehicle stop.
“Right now, on all vehicle stops, there’s at least one body camera on site to record the entire event,” he said.
He said Venturella “sent an instruction out that he wants at least one body camera on those vehicle stops, so we have everything on video.”
It’s unclear if the steps that the department is taking will be enough to quell the concerns coming from certain lawmakers in Congress over Homeland Security’s training and tactics as tries to reach Trump’s mass deportation goals.
Lawmakers push for answers but have more questions
Lawmakers from both parties have raised concerns.
Democrats pressed ICE officials during a closed-door briefing for the House Homeland Security Committee last week, leaving some with more questions than answers.
Lawmakers were told during the briefing that there have been 56 complaints of excessive force against ICE officers — 32 were cleared, and one was referred for disciplinary action.
No discipline had yet been handed out, the lawmakers said they were told. The rest of the incidents are still under investigation.
Republican Sen. Susan Collins of Maine, chair of the powerful Senate Appropriations Committee, has pushed for the use of body-worn cameras and ensured funding for the effort. She had said it was “extremely unfortunate” that the officer involved in the shooting in her home state was not using a camera.
Homeland Security is under scrutiny but also faces pressure to increase deportations
The Trump administration has failed to meet its goal of deporting 1 million people a year, despite an intense immigration enforcement crackdown that has resulted in violent scenes in cities nationwide.
At least 10 people have died in encounters with immigration officers since the start of Trump’s mass deportation campaign.
While the Trump administration insists it is targeting the “worst of the worst” criminals, that has not always been the result and American citizens also have been among the deaths.
The ICE officer shot 25-year-old Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero, a Colombian national who was killed in his car near his home in the coastal city of Biddeford.
In Houston, Lorenzo Salgado Araujo was killed July 7 when ICE officers chased his white work van through the streets, then shot him through the window in front of his work crew, including his brother.
Earlier this year, two Americans protesting ICE actions in Minneapolis, Renee Good and Alex Pretti, a 37-year-old nursewere killed, sparking a backlash nationwide.
Democrats launched the longest agency shutdown in history earlier this year when they refused to fund Homeland Security in a largely failed attempt to force the administration to impose various restraints on the officers.
The Dictatorship
A forced-labor crackdown or an end-run around Congress? Dissecting Trump’s new tariffs
NEW YORK (AP) — The Trump administration has imposed double-digit tariffs on more than 60 countriesusing a legal justification that permits the president to levy import taxes and other sanctions against countries found to engage in “unjustifiable,” “unreasonable” or “discriminatory” trade practices.
The new tariffs announced in recent days take effect just as temporary 10% worldwide tariffs expiredand critics say they are less about cracking down on forced labor than they are a way to replace those tariffs. The expired tariffs were themselves a temporary replacement for worldwide tariffs the Supreme Court struck down in February.
The tariffs were levied on countries that the U.S. says either don’t have or don’t effectively enforce a forced-labor import ban. The affected countrieswhich account for 99% of U.S. imports, were quick to protest, calling the Trump administration’s claims unfounded and arbitrary, as nations with vastly different records on forced labor received the same tariff level. The U.S. spent four months investigating but gave few details on how it arrived at the tariff rates, which are either 10% or 12.5%.
Sidestepping Congress
The tariffs were levied under Section 301 of the Trade Act of 1974 on countries that the U.S. determined had failed “to impose and effectively enforce a prohibition on the importation of goods produced with forced labor.”
During President Donald Trump ‘s first term, he cited Section 301 to impose sweeping tariffs on Chinese imports amid a dispute over the sharp-elbowed tactics Beijing was using to challenge America’s technological dominance. The U.S. is also using 301 powers to counter what it calls unfair Chinese practices in the shipbuilding industry.
“The 301s allow a permanent tariff without going to Congress to settle the dispute,” said Barry Appleton, a law professor and co-director of New York Law School’s Center for International Law. “That’s what all of this is about. The president doesn’t want to knock on the front door of Congress, so he’s trying every side door and every unlatched window to get in.”
Little evidence that countries failed to enforce import bans
The office of the United States Trade Representative (USTR) said it consulted with all 60 economies under investigation and held two rounds of public hearings, elicited more than 2,100 public comments, and had “engagement” with its trading partners about what they were doing to combat forced labor bans.
It didn’t detail its talks with the countries, saying those were confidential. Experts say it is fairly straightforward to investigate whether a country has a ban or not, but it is difficult to determine the government’s exact rationale for each country’s failure to enforce import bans.
“There’s not a lot of hard evidence there,” said Scott Lincicome, vice president for general economics and trade policy at the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank. “It’s pretty laughable on its face to think that a country like the ones in Europe or in Norway or Switzerland aren’t doing enough to police forced labor.”
And even if countries do enact and enforce the forced-labor import bans the U.S. wants, they would still need to prove that they’re enforcing them to Washington’s satisfaction before the tariffs would be removed, said lawyer Patrick Childress, a partner at Holland & Knight and a former U.S. trade official.
“This suggests that no short-term path for countrywide relief from the new Section 301 tariffs will be available,” he said.
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Countries and industries reject the forced labor argument
Many countries have pushed back against the Trump administration’s findings.
Brazil, which faces a 12.5% forced-labor tariff, called the U.S. move “arbitrary and unjustified.” The U.S. “chose to manipulate an issue of great importance to human rights and the struggles of workers worldwide in order to accuse 59 countries and the European Union of unfair practices,” it said in a statement.
Australia also questioned the justification for its 12.5% tariff.
“We believe that amongst all of the countries in the world, Australia does take the issue of slavery, modern slavery, seriously, and will continue to do that,” Trade Minister Don Farrell told reporters in Adelaide.
Carve-outs have riled some industries. The National Council of Textile Organizations (NCTO), which describes itself as the voice of the American textile industry, protested a mechanism that exempts the Section 301 tariffs for textile and apparel imports from Bangladesh, Cambodia, Indonesia, and Malaysia based on those countries’ imports of U.S. cotton and textiles.
“No other industry has been more disadvantaged by forced labor than the U.S. textile industry, which employs 453,000 workers and has lost 41 plants over the past two plus years,” NCTO chief executive Kim Glas said in a statement. “We remain strongly concerned that USTR’s textile mechanism will harm the very domestic manufacturers the administration seeks to help.”
US forced-labor bans don’t always work
The U.S. has two major pieces of legislation related to forced-labor import bans. The Tariff Act of 1930 gave Customs and Border Protection the authority to seize shipments where forced labor was suspected and to block further imports. But it had a big carve-out: If there was “consumptive demand,” meaning there wasn’t sufficient supply to meet domestic demand, imports were allowed regardless of how they were produced. The Trade Facilitation and Trade Enforcement Act that took effect in 2016 eliminated that loophole.
In 2021, the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act was passed. It blocks imports from China’s Xinjiang region unless businesses can prove the items were made without forced labor.
But goods made with forced labor can still make it into the U.S. In 2015, an Associated Press investigation found that slave labor was used in the fishing industry in Southeast Asia. The seafood they caught made its way to supermarkets and pet food providers across the U.S.
An investigation by The Associated Press in 2020 into the $65 billion palm oil industry found labor abuses among an invisible workforce consisting of millions of men, women and children in Asia. The fruit they harvested made its way into the supply chains of major companies, including Unilever, L’Oreal, Nestle and Procter & Gamble.
Calls for a more comprehensive approach to combat forced labor
During hearings on the tariffs this month, National Retail Federation vice president Jonathan Gold, who was representing the business coalition the Joint Association Forced Labor Working Group at the hearing, said that in order for the import bans to work, they would have to be much more extensive.
He said there need to be “clear, measurable benchmarks” tied to tariffs for countries to hit, and that the U.S. should help countries build enforcement programs.
Kenya Davis, a partner at the Boies Schiller Flexner law firm, said an effective ban needs a “comprehensive approach” that provides transparency about what the investigations consisted of, along with programs that provide countries aid in enforcing bans.
ByI dig Shroff
During the make-up White House Correspondents’ Dinner last Friday, the President of the United States tried to take a swipe at an old foe. “Even Rosie O’Donnell reached out from Ireland,” he told the room. “She was desperate to come back to the United States and pay her respects to Donald J. Trump. But that didn’t work out, unfortunately, because nobody wanted her to come back.”
The joke wasn’t merely unfunny, it was also inaccurate. O’Donnell already came back to the country. Two nights before Trump’s speech, she opened her new comedy showwhich centers on her life and feud with Trump, at Manhattan’s Daryl Roth Theatre. On Thursday, she appeared on “Late Night with Seth Meyers.”And next month, she will guest host“Jimmy Kimmel Live!”
Two decades and two presidential inaugurations later, Trump still hasn’t let it go – and O’Donnell hasn’t backed down.
After the 2024 presidential election, O’Donnell actually did what many Americans threatened to do – leave the country. But now she is back, and that matters – because the story was never just about O’Donnell herself. It was also about the rest of us, the people watching Trump attack her.
While co-hosting a 2006 episode of “The View,” then one of the biggest daytime platforms in America, O’Donnell said that Trump was not self-madeand was in no position to lecture anyone about morality. At the time, the landlord-turned-game show host was furiousbut the feud was tabloid fodder rather than national news.
Two decades and two presidential inaugurations later, Trump still hasn’t let it go – and O’Donnell hasn’t backed down. There were years of insults, including the 2015 primary debate where moderator Megyn Kelly asked Trump about women he’d called pigs and slobs and he cut her off with three words: “only Rosie O’Donnell.” He brought her up again in his first debate with Hillary Clinton. And on Friday, in a ballroom filled with media elite who have yet to call him out as bluntly and forcefully as O’Donnell has, Trump called her a “a sick young woman. Sick older woman, I guess now I have to say.”
The two-time president of the United States, in other words, has spent twenty years returning to the same woman. She was among the first with a national platform to publicly refuse the premise his whole life is built on, and he has never been able to get over it.
Which is what makes his threat last summer worth remembering: “Because of the fact that Rosie O’Donnell is not in the best interests of our Great Country, I am giving serious consideration to taking away her Citizenship.” It wasn’t a serious legal proposal – the president cannot revoke a native-born American’s citizenship – as much as it was a MAGA theory of belonging. In threatening O’Donnell, Trump threatened to make citizenship a privilege he extends and can revoke (based on mere speech, no less). It was a warning to any critic whose passport is the only thing standing between them and a very different life and who doesn’t have O’Donnell’s resources or profile.
In the context of a twenty-year battle with the now-most-powerful man in the world, a regrouping abroad is not surrender.
Of course, there is an obvious objection to holding Rosie up as any kind of resistance example: she left. Staying carries real moral weight. Many people who have absorbed this past decade of Trump’s politics did not have an Irish grandmotheror the means to build a life somewhere else. There is something a little uncomfortable about resistance broadcast from another country, particularly when only some can afford it. But in the context of a twenty-year battle with the now-most-powerful man in the world, a regrouping abroad is not surrender.
And the impetus for her decision is crucial: “I knew, after reading Project 2025, that if Trump got in, it was time for me and my non-binary child to leave the country,” she told CNN last year. After years of being Trump’s favorite target, O’Donnell had better reason than almost anyone alive to know his obsession with settling scores and having things his way. Indeed, she knew better than much of institutional Washington, which was still reassuring itself about guardrails, norms, and adults in the room. Many institutions folded alarmingly quickly this time around: the museums, the law firms, the universities. O’Donnell did not wait for them to capitulate.
Yet she did not disappear. Now she is telling her story on her own terms, projecting Trump’s own words onto a theater wall for audiences that laugh at them instead of with them. While on Friday, the president described a broken woman pleading across the Atlantic, the actual Rosie was onstage a short train ride away, turning his words into part of her act. Twenty years after he decided she would be the punchline, she is still standing.
That is why Trump keeps coming back to O’Donnell. His campaign against her only worked if it ended with her gone or begging him for forgiveness. Personal intimidation is never only about the person being targeted. It is a warning to others: cross me and you will regret it. Too many institutions accepted that bargain. Rosie O’Donnell never did. In trying to make an example of her, Trump only made a point – and not the one he intended.
I dig Shroff
Kaivan Shroff is a senior advisor to the Institute for Education and a political commentator. He previously served on the advisory board for Dream for America, a progressive Gen Z-led non-profit. He is an alumnus of the Hillary for America digital team, holds a joint degree from Harvard Law School and Harvard Kennedy School, an MBA from the Yale School of Management and a BA in Political Science from Brown University.
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