Aid groups in Myanmar on Tuesday described scenes of devastation and desperation after an earthquake that killed more than 2,700 people, stressing an urgent need for food, water and shelter and warning that the window to find survivors was fast closing.
Elon Musk’s cost-cutting team was finalising the dismantlement of the US Agency for International Development (USAID), ordering the firings of thousands of local workers and American diplomats and civil servants assigned to the agency overseas, said two former top USAID officials and a source with knowledge of the situation on Tuesday.
An Israeli airstrike killed four people, including a Hezbollah official in Beirut’s southern suburbs on Tuesday, said a Lebanese security source, further testing a shaky ceasefire between Israel and Iran-backed Hezbollah.
Myanmar earthquake death toll climbs towards 3,000
Aid groups in Myanmar on Tuesday described scenes of devastation and desperation after an earthquake that killed more than 2,700 people, stressing an urgent need for food, water and shelter and warning that the window to find survivors was fast closing.
Myanmar’s military ruler, Min Aung Hlaing, said the death toll from Friday’s 7.7 magnitude quake was expected to surpass 3,000, having reached 2,719 as of Tuesday morning, with 4,521 people injured and 441 missing.
“Among the missing, most are assumed to be dead. There is a narrow chance for them to remain alive,” he said in a speech.
The quake, which struck at lunchtime on Friday, was the strongest to hit the Southeast Asian country in more than a century, toppling ancient pagodas and modern buildings alike.
It inflicted significant damage on Myanmar’s second city, Mandalay, and Naypyitaw, the capital the previous junta purpose-built to be an impregnable fortress.
The earthquake was the latest in a succession of blows for the impoverished country of 53 million people following a 2021 coup that returned the military to power and devastated the economy after a decade of development and tentative democracy.
Myanmar’s military has been accused of widespread atrocities against civilians in its attempts to maintain power and quell a multipronged rebellion that unfolded after the coup, and the civil war had displaced more than three million people long before the quake struck.
It has dismissed the accusations as misinformation and says it is protecting the country from terrorists.
The death toll rose to 21 in neighbouring Thailand on Tuesday, where the quake caused damage to hundreds of buildings. Rescuers pressed on searching for life in the rubble of a collapsed skyscraper under construction in the capital, Bangkok, but acknowledged time was against them.
In Myanmar, UN agencies said hospitals were overwhelmed and rescue efforts hindered by infrastructure damage and the civil war. Rebels have accused the military of conducting airstrikes even after the quake, and on Tuesday a major rebel alliance declared a unilateral ceasefire to help relief efforts.
Aid groups raised the alarm on Tuesday over a lack of food, water and sanitation and the region was hit by five more aftershocks.
Julia Rees, of the UN children’s agency Unicef, who just returned from one of the worst-affected areas near the epicentre in central Myanmar, said entire communities had been flattened and destruction and psychological trauma was immense.
“And yet, this crisis is still unfolding. The tremors are continuing. Search and rescue operations are ongoing. Bodies are still being pulled from the rubble,” she said.
“Let me be clear: the needs are massive, and they are rising by the hour. The window for life-saving response is closing.”
In the Mandalay area, 50 children and two teachers were killed when their preschool building collapsed, said the UN humanitarian agency.
In a rare survival story, a 63-year-old woman who was trapped for 91 hours was pulled from the rubble of a building in Naypyitaw on Tuesday in a joint rescue effort by the Myanmar fire department and teams from India, China and Russia.
All local workers, US diplomats to be fired from USAID
Elon Musk’s cost-cutting team was finalising the dismantlement of the US Agency for International Development (USAID), ordering the firings of thousands of local workers and American diplomats and civil servants assigned to the agency overseas, said two former top USAID officials and a source with knowledge of the situation on Tuesday.
On Friday, Congress was notified that almost all of USAID’s own employees would be fired by September, all of its overseas offices shut, and some functions absorbed into the State Department.
The latest move by Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency effectively will eliminate what is left of the agency’s workforce.
“This is definitely the final closing out,” said one of the former senior USAID officials.
US President Donald Trump and Musk in February began the process of shuttering USAID and merging its operations into the State Department to ensure they conformed with Trump’s “America First” policies. The State Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The former officials and source familiar with the situation said on condition of anonymity that USAID’s human resources office told regional bureaus in a conference call that layoff notices were going to all of the more than 10,000 locally-hired foreign nationals, effective in August.
Notices would also be sent to US diplomats and civil servants assigned to work abroad for what has been the leading US foreign aid provider for more than 60 years, they said.
Trump has claimed without evidence that the agency was rife with fraud and run by “radical left lunatics”, while Musk falsely accused it of being a “criminal” organisation.
Thousands of USAID’s own staff were placed on administrative leave — they received layoff notices on Friday — hundreds of contractors fired and more than 5,000 programmes terminated, disrupting global humanitarian aid efforts on which millions depend.
According to the non-partisan Congressional Research Service, USAID maintains missions in more than 60 countries, with most of its funds going to humanitarian aid and health programmes.
Israel kills Hezbollah official in deadly Beirut airstrike
An Israeli airstrike killed four people, including a Hezbollah official in Beirut’s southern suburbs on Tuesday, said a Lebanese security source, further testing a shaky ceasefire between Israel and Iran-backed Hezbollah.
The Israeli military said the official, Hassan Bdeir, was a member of a Hezbollah unit and Iran’s Quds Force, and had assisted the Palestinian group Hamas in planning a “significant and imminent terror attack against Israeli civilians”.
Hezbollah confirmed that Bdeir had been killed along with his son, who was also a member of the group. The Lebanese security source said Bdeir was a mid-ranking commander whose responsibilities included the Palestinian file.
The Lebanese health ministry said the strike killed four people, including a woman, and wounded seven others.
It marked Israel’s second airstrike in the Hezbollah-controlled suburb of Beirut in five days, adding to strains on the US-brokered ceasefire that ended last year’s devastating conflict.
The attacks on Beirut’s southern suburbs have resumed at a time of broader escalation in the region, with Israel having restarted Gaza strikes after a two-month truce and the US hitting the Iran-aligned Houthis of Yemen in a bid to get them to stop attacking Red Sea shipping.
US Supreme Court weighs law on suing Palestinian authorities over attacks
The US Supreme Court on Tuesday examined the legality of a 2019 statute passed by Congress to facilitate lawsuits against Palestinian authorities by Americans killed or injured in attacks abroad as plaintiffs pursue monetary damages for violence years ago in Israel and the West Bank.
The nine justices heard arguments in appeals by the US government and a group of American victims and their families of a lower court’s ruling that the law at issue violated the rights of the Palestinian Authority and Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) to due process under the US Constitution.
The ongoing violence involving Israel and the Palestinians served as a backdrop to the arguments.
Many of the questions posed by the justices seemed to suggest they would rule in favor of the plaintiffs. Some of the questions explored the authority of Congress and the president to empower US federal courts to hear civil suits over allegedly wrongful conduct experienced by Americans overseas, and what type of connection defendants must have to the US before they must face such legal proceedings.
US courts for years have grappled over whether they have jurisdiction in cases involving the Palestinian Authority and PLO for actions taken abroad.
Under the language at issue in the 2019 Promoting Security and Justice for Victims of Terrorism Act, the PLO and Palestinian Authority would automatically “consent” to jurisdiction if they conduct certain activities in the US or make payments to people who attack Americans.
“Congress’ judgment on these issues, as in all issues of national security and foreign policy, are entitled to great deference,” Deputy Solicitor-General Edwin Kneedler, who argued on behalf of the Trump administration, told the justices.
Conservative Justice Brett Kavanaugh agreed with Kneedler on that point.
“Congress and the president are the ones who make fairness judgments when we’re talking about the national security and foreign policy of the United States,” said Kavanaugh. “Unless it crosses some other textually or historically rooted constitutional principle, courts shouldn’t be coming in.”
Liberal Justice Elena Kagan pressed Kneedler on the possibility of giving Congress too much leeway in subjecting people around the globe to general jurisdiction in US courts, raising potential pitfalls such as retaliation against Americans on foreign soil.
“I could understand an argument which would say ... it could have foreign policy consequences, it could encourage other nations to retaliate and treat US citizens in the same way,” said Kagan.
“There could well be problems, other countries’ reactions to that, and retaliation perhaps,” responded Kneedler.
A New York-based federal judge in 2022 ruled that the law violated the due process rights of the PLO and Palestinian Authorities guaranteed under the Constitution. The New York-based 2nd US Circuit Court of Appeals upheld that ruling.
President Joe Biden’s administration initiated the government’s appeal, which subsequently was taken up by Trump’s administration.
Mitchell Berger, arguing on behalf of the Palestinian authorities, emphasised the need for US courts to enforce jurisdictional limits on what they can adjudicate, using pirates as an example.
“Nobody likes pirates, right,” said Berger. “The United States can define piracy as an offence, but the United States does not try pirates in absentia because there’s a delta between what Congress can prescribe as laws and what courts can do.”
Among the plaintiffs are families who in 2015 won a $655-million judgment in a civil case alleging that the Palestinian organisations were responsible for a series of shootings and bombings around Jerusalem from 2002 to 2004. They also include relatives of Ari Fuld, a Jewish settler in the Israel-occupied West Bank who was fatally stabbed by a Palestinian in 2018.
A ruling is expected by the end of June.
China launches military drills around Taiwan
China staged military drills off Taiwan’s north, south and east coasts on Tuesday as a “stern warning” against separatism and called Taiwanese President Lai Ching-te a “parasite”, as Taiwan sent warships to respond to China’s navy approaching its shores.
The exercises, which China has not formally named unlike war games last year, follow a rise in Chinese rhetoric against Lai and come on the heels of US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s Asia visit, during which he repeatedly criticised Beijing.
China’s military deployed ships, aircraft and artillery to practise blockading the island, striking ground and maritime targets, and air interception to “test forces’ coordination in combat”, said Beijing’s Eastern Theatre Command.
Last May, three days after Lai’s inauguration, Chinese forces staged war games to simulate seizing full control of areas west of the so-called first island chain and conducted live-fire missile exercises.
China considers democratically governed Taiwan as its territory and calls Lai a “separatist”. In a video accompanying its announcement, the Eastern Theatre Command called him a “parasite” in English and depicted him as a green bug held by chopsticks over a burning Taiwan.
Taiwan’s government condemned the drills. The presidential office said China was “widely recognised by the international community as a troublemaker” and said Taiwan’s government had the confidence and ability to defend itself.
Taiwan’s government rejects Beijing’s sovereignty claims, saying that only the island’s people can decide their future.
Trump deported 238 Venezuelans to El Salvador
On a Thursday morning last month, immigration agents knocked on the door of Leonel Echavez’ Dallas home looking for someone else. Despite an upcoming immigration hearing, the 19-year-old Venezuelan was taken into custody for questioning about his tattoos.
Two days later, he was on a plane heading to El Salvador’s most notorious prison.
The Trump administration deported Echavez and 237 countrymen labelled as Venezuelan gang members — with no chance to contest the allegations in court.
The US government has provided scant information about the deportees beyond alleging that they are members of Tren de Aragua, a transnational criminal group from Venezuela that the Trump administration has designated a foreign terrorist organisation.
Through interviews with family members of 50 of the deportees — found via advocates and family members in the US and Venezuela, and checked against a leaked list of deportees published by CBS News — Reuters has captured the most comprehensive picture to date of how the men on those flights became caught up in a rapid-fire deportation process.
Twenty-seven of the Venezuelans whose cases Reuters reviewed were never ordered deported. They have upcoming immigration court hearings to make their asylum and other claims to stay in the US, according to immigration court records, even though they are now in El Salvador.
Judges in several cases appeared shocked to find migrants who failed to attend scheduled immigration court dates because they had been deported, according to immigration lawyers who attended the hearings.
The operation, carried out after Trump invoked the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to deport alleged members of Tren de Aragua, has been challenged by civil rights groups for a failure of due process.
A US appeals court last week upheld a decision to block Trump’s use of the law, leading the administration to appeal to the Supreme Court.
In a court filing late Friday night, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) presented what it said was a government checklist to determine Tren de Aragua members. The undated “Alien Enemy Validation Guide” employs a points system to determine gang membership. The guide takes into account criminal convictions and court records as well as tattoos, hand gestures and clothing — criteria that experts cited by the ACLU said risks making a false identification.
When asked for comment, a Trump administration official said that the administration had confidence in the process of identifying gang members.
Trump won back the White House pledging mass deportations and said in his inaugural address that he could invoke the Alien Enemies Act to target foreign gangs. The Trump administration has argued that the law gives it vast authority to deport alleged members of Tren de Aragua.
Of the 50, at least two dozen entered the US using a smartphone app known as CBP One, according to family members. The app was introduced during Joe Biden’s administration to allow migrants to schedule an appointment to request entry at a legal border crossing. Trump ended the programme as one of his first moves in office.
Eight of those deported to El Salvador by Trump had been detained at the border under Biden, and remained detained until their removal.
Ten of the 50 were arrested when they appeared for routine immigration check-ins.
Others were detained going about their daily lives — filling up their cars, leaving for work, listening to music with friends, according to interviews with family members.
They were barbers, tattoo artists, construction workers, delivery drivers and factory workers.
Family members of more than two dozen of the deportees provided Venezuelan government documents attesting to clean criminal records there, and all 50 families said their loved ones were not gang members. Reuters could not independently verify the authenticity of the documents.
Reuters found criminal charges in the US for names matching six of the men in the group, including for domestic violence and shoplifting, as well as a conviction for lewd and threatening language.
The Trump administration has acknowledged in court that many of the men sent to El Salvador do not have US criminal records.
“The lack of specific information about each individual actually highlights the risk they pose,” said US Immigration and Customs Enforcement official Robert Cerna in a court filing on 17 March. “[It] demonstrates that they are terrorists with regard to whom we lack a complete profile.”
Echavez, the 19-year-old Venezuelan, had come to the US to claim asylum in 2023, his mother Maria Luisa Paz said, among hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans fleeing economic hardship and authoritarian government at home.
Immigrants who are deemed not to pose a safety or flight risk are often allowed to pursue their asylum cases while living freely in the United States, as long as they check in regularly with ICE.
Echavez, who had a work permit, worked in an aluminium plant and lived with his cousin Daniel Paz and another friend. On 13 March, immigration agents were looking for Paz, who had a deportation order, according to Paz’s sister Greilys Herrera.
Echavez and his friend were caught up in the operation but told they would be released after some questions about their tattoos, she said.
Echavez has tattoos of a rose with branches, an arrow and of his sister’s name. He has an upcoming immigration court hearing scheduled for July, 2026 in Dallas.
Three-quarters of the 50 men had tattoos.
Immigration lawyers, family members and advocates said authorities are rounding up young Venezuelan men with tattoos that honour family members, their professions, and even soccer teams rather than signify membership in the Tren de Aragua gang.
The Trump administration insists it deported dangerous gang members even as it has declined to provide evidence.
Both documents were entered as evidence by the ACLU in its lawsuit.
Known primarily for human trafficking and extortion in Latin America, Tren de Aragua does not have a significant presence in the US, according to Rebecca Hanson, an expert on Venezuelan gangs and assistant professor at the University of Florida.
Hanson, in a court declaration for the ACLU, said it was “absolutely implausible” that Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro’s regime was intertwined with Tren de Aragua, a key legal point in Trump’s argument for the use of the Alien Enemies Act out of a wartime context.
Members cannot be identified by tattoos or hand gestures, said Hanson.
French appeals court will issue ruling in National Rally case in 2026
A Paris court said on Tuesday that three appeals had been filed in the case against the far-right National Rally party that saw leader Marine Le Pen banned from running for office for five years, but did not provide details on who had filed them.
The appeals court said in a statement that it would issue a ruling on the appeals in the summer of 2026, ahead of the 2027 presidential election.
A lower court on Monday convicted Le Pen and two dozen people from her National Rally (RN) party of embezzling EU funds. It imposed an immediate five-year ban on Le Pen running for office that will bar her from standing in 2027 unless she can get the ruling overturned on appeal before then.
Le Pen’s lawyer said on Monday she would appeal the ruling, but it was not clear if she had done so yet.
Monday’s ruling was a major setback for the longtime RN leader, who had been a front-runner in opinion polls for the 2027 presidential election. The ban will not be suspended during any appeal she lodges.
Le Pen supporters at home and abroad have called the ruling biased and undemocratic. The party’s president, Jordan Bardella, called on the French to protest this weekend against the ruling.
Le Pen told RN legislators she considered the ruling a “nuclear bomb” launched by the establishment against her. A heated debate over the ruling dominated the weekly session of questions in the National Assembly, where the RN is the largest single party.
Centre-right Prime Minister Francois Bayrou told parliament he backed the ruling but also that he had questions over Le Pen’s election ban being immediate.
“As a matter of law, any criminal decision with serious consequences should be subject to appeal,” he said, adding that he was speaking as a citizen rather than the prime minister.
President Emmanuel Macron, who beat Le Pen in the elections in 2017 and 2022, has made no public comment.
The judge announcing Monday’s court ruling, Benedicte de Perthuis, said Le Pen had been “at the heart” of a scheme to misappropriate more than €4-million of EU funds.
De Perthuis said a lack of remorse shown by Le Pen and other defendants was among the reasons that prompted the court to ban them from running for office with immediate effect.
Le Pen was also given a four-year prison sentence — two years of which were suspended and two years to be served under home detention — and a €100,000 fine, but those will not apply until her appeals are exhausted. Appeals in France usually take months or even years.
The defendants were accused of using EU funds illegally to pay the party’s staff back home instead of EU parliamentary assistants. They denied wrongdoing and said the money was used legitimately.
Netanyahu withdraws nomination of candidate for intelligence agency
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has withdrawn his nomination of former navy chief Eli Sharvit to lead the domestic intelligence agency Shin Bet only a day after making it, said his office on Tuesday.
Netanyahu thanked Sharvit for accepting the nomination “but informed him that after further thought, he intends to examine other candidates”, it said, giving no further reasons for the decision and naming no other candidate.
Israeli media reports said that Sharvit had taken part in the huge street protests that shook Israel in 2023 over Netanyahu’s drive to restrict the power of the Supreme Court and overhaul the judiciary.
In a statement, Sharvit said he had agreed to take on the role of leading Shin Bet and he had full confidence in its capacity to meet the “complex challenges that have arisen in these days”.
Netanyahu’s nomination of Sharvit came in the middle of a bitter dispute over the current head of the Shin Bet intelligence service, Ronen Bar.
The move to fire Bar, who has presided over an investigation into allegations of financial ties between Qatar and a number of aides in Netanyahu’s office, has been held up by a temporary injunction from the Supreme Court, which will consider the case next week.
Netanyahu’s move to dismiss Bar, a member of the Israeli team negotiating a return of hostages from Gaza, has provoked large demonstrations by protesters who accuse the prime minister of undermining key state institutions for political ends.
Netanyahu has dismissed the so-called Qatargate inquiry by police and Shin Bet as a politically motivated witch-hunt. He has said he lost confidence in Bar and blamed Shin Bet for intelligence failures that led to the 7 October 2023 Hamas attack on Israel, which precipitated the Gaza war.
Russia says it cannot accept US proposals on Ukraine ‘in current form’
Russia could not accept US proposals to end the war in Ukraine in their current form because they did not address the problems Moscow regarded as having caused the conflict, said a senior Russian diplomat, suggesting US-Russia talks on the subject had stalled.
The comments by Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov suggest Moscow and Washington have so far been unable to bridge the differences that President Vladimir Putin raised more than two weeks ago when he said US proposals needed reworking.
They come as Trump appears to be growing increasingly impatient with what he has suggested might be foot-dragging over a wider deal by Moscow.
Trump in recent days has said he was “pissed off” with Putin and has spoken of imposing sanctions on countries that buy Russian oil if he feels Moscow is blocking a deal.
Ryabkov, a specialist in US-Russia relations, said Moscow was not yet able to move forward with a deal.
“We take the models and solutions proposed by the Americans very seriously, but we can’t accept it all in its current form,” Ryabkov was quoted by state media as telling the Russian magazine International Affairs in an interview released on Tuesday.
“As far as we can see, there is no place in them today for our main demand, namely to solve the problems related to the root causes of this conflict. It is completely absent, and that must be overcome.”
Putin has said he wants Ukraine to drop its ambitions to join Nato, Russia to control the entirety of four Ukrainian regions it has claimed as its own, and the size of the Ukrainian army to be limited. Kyiv says those demands are tantamount to demanding its capitulation.
Volcano erupts in Iceland, triggering tourist evacuation
A volcano erupted to the south of Iceland’s capital on Tuesday, spewing lava and smoke in a fiery display of orange and red that triggered the evacuation of tourists and residents, although air traffic continued as normal.
Referred to as a land of ice and fire for its many glaciers and volcanoes, the North Atlantic island nation has now seen 11 eruptions south of Reykjavik since 2021, when dormant geological systems reactivated after some 800 years.
“Warning: An eruption has begun,” said the Icelandic meteorological office.
The outbreak penetrated protective barriers close to the Grindavik fishing town, triggering an evacuation of those residents who had returned following previous eruptions, although most houses have stood empty for over a year.
“There is lava coming within the barrier at the moment, but it’s a very limited eruption so far,” said Rikke Pedersen, head of the Nordic Volcanological Center. DM