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http://archive.today/2025.04.28-134416/https://www.timesofisrael.com/top-biden-aide-israel-missed-opportunity-for-saudi-deal-hopefully-it-wont-do-so-again/

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government missed an opportunity to reach a normalization agreement with Saudi Arabia last year, a top aide to former US president Joe Biden said in an interview that aired Sunday.

The deal would have required a ceasefire and hostage release deal and a willingness on the part of Israel to establish a political horizon for an eventual Palestinian state — something Netanyahu has long rejected and, since Hamas’s October 7 onslaught, has stated would amount to a prize for terrorism.

“I don’t understand the decision not to grab that opportunity as the most important strategic move Israel can make,” Amos Hochstein told Channel 13’s “Hamakor” investigative program. “I think it was missed before. I hope Israel doesn’t miss that opportunity moving forward — even if it means doing things that politically are uncomfortable.”

Hochstein was one of nine senior Biden administration officials interviewed for the Sunday program who took viewers through their frustrations in dealing with Netanyahu’s government throughout the Gaza war.

The former US officials shared their belief that Netanyahu’s refusal to plan for the postwar management of Gaza was a stalling tactic to avoid decisions that risked toppling his government.

They detailed brief deliberations in Washington about having Biden deliver a speech aimed at potentially spurring an election in Israel, given Netanyahu’s intransigence.

And they revealed that a video posted by Netanyahu accusing the US administration of withholding various weapons transfers for months scuttled a nearly final agreement to release the lone shipment of 2,000-lb bombs that had actually been frozen.

Biden officials fumed at Netanyahu, who they felt was being ungrateful for the support that the US had been providing.

Weeks earlier, the White House had pushed a $19 billion supplemental security assistance package for Israel through Congress.

“Hamakor” also interviewed a more junior administration official who resigned in protest of what she said was Biden’s decision to give Israel a pass despite a US law that bars the transfer of weapons to countries that block the transfer of humanitarian aid.

Despite the disagreements, the top Biden officials professed devotion to Israel’s security, explaining that this dedication was what made attacks by Netanyahu and his supporters, who accused them of abandoning Israel, particularly stinging.

“Having the prime minister of Israel question the support of the United States after all that we did — do I think that was a right and proper thing for a friend to do? I do not,” said former national security adviser Jake Sullivan. “[However], I will always stand firm behind the idea that Israel has a right to defend itself and that the United States has a responsibility to help Israel, and I’ll do that no matter who the prime minister is, no matter what they say about me or the US or the president that I work for.”

Facing pressure from progressives in his party, Biden signed a memo early last year requiring the State Department to draft a report certifying whether recipients of US weapons were using them according to international law and not blocking humanitarian aid from reaching civilians.

Stacy Gilberg, who served as a senior adviser in the State Department, was among those involved in compiling that report. Shortly before it was released on May 10, she and her colleagues were boxed out of the process and the final conclusions of the report were written by higher-level officials, Gilbert told “Hamakor.”

The report concluded that while Israel did not fully cooperate with efforts to ensure aid flowed into Gaza, Jerusalem’s actions did not amount to a breach of US law that would require a halt on US weapons.

“I had to read the report twice because I couldn’t believe what it said. It was just shocking in its mendacity. Everyone knows that is not true,” she said, explaining her decision to resign in protest shortly thereafter.

Herzog, too, made a point of summarizing Biden’s perilous term positively.

“God did the State of Israel a favor that Biden was the president during this period, because it could have been much worse. We fought [in Gaza] for over a year and the administration never came to us and said, ‘ceasefire now.’ It never did. And that’s not to be taken for granted,” the former Israeli ambassador said.

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http://archive.today/2025.04.26-092803/https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/26/us/politics/trump-putin-russia-ukraine.html

If President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia drafted a shopping list of what he wanted from Washington, it would be hard to beat what he was offered in the first 100 days of President Trump’s new term.

Pressure on Ukraine to surrender territory to Russia? Check.

The promise of sanctions relief? Check.

Absolution from invading Ukraine? Check.

Indeed, as Mr. Trump’s envoy Steve Witkoff visited Moscow on Friday for more negotiations, the president’s vision for peace appeared notably one-sided, letting Russia keep the regions it had taken by force in violation of international law while forbidding Ukraine from ever joining NATO.

The notion that Russia would get to keep the territory it has taken as part of a balanced peace deal is broadly acknowledged as inevitable. But Mr. Trump is taking it further by offering official U.S. recognition of Russia’s control of Crimea, the peninsula it seized from Ukraine in 2014 in violation of international law, an extra step of legitimacy that stunned many in Ukraine as well as its friends in Washington and Europe.

Such a move would reverse the policy of the first Trump administration. In 2018, Mr. Trump’s State Department issued a Crimea Declaration affirming its “refusal to recognize the Kremlin’s claims of sovereignty over territory seized by force,” likening it to the U.S. refusal to recognize Soviet control of the Baltic States for five decades.

“Crimea will stay with Russia,” he said in the interview, which was released on Friday. He again blamed Ukraine for Russia’s decision to invade it, saying that “what caused the war to start was when they started talking about joining NATO.”

But that is not all that Mr. Putin has gotten out of Mr. Trump’s return to power. Intentionally or not, many of the president’s actions on other fronts also suit Moscow’s interests, including the rifts he has opened with America’s traditional allies and the changes he has made to the U.S. government itself.

Mr. Trump has been tearing down American institutions that have long aggravated Moscow, such as Voice of America and the National Endowment for Democracy. He has been disarming the nation in its netherworld battle against Russia by halting cyber offensive operations and curbing programs to combat Russian disinformation, election interference, sanctions violations and war crimes.

“Trump has played right into Putin’s hands,” said Ivo Daalder, the chief executive of the Chicago Council on Global Affairs and a former ambassador to NATO under President Barack Obama. “It’s hard to see how Trump would have acted any differently if he were a Russian asset than how he has acted in the first 100 days of his second term.”

But what has been so striking about Mr. Trump’s return to office is how many of his other actions over the past three months have been seen as benefiting Russia, either directly or indirectly — so much so that Russian officials in Moscow have cheered the American president on and publicly celebrated some of his moves.

After he moved to dismantle Voice of America and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, two U.S.-funded news organizations that have transmitted independent reporting to the Soviet Union and later Russia, Margarita Simonyan, the head of the Russian state broadcaster RT, called it “an awesome decision by Trump.” She added, “We couldn’t shut them down, unfortunately, but America did so itself.”

Those are just a couple of the U.S. government organizations that Mr. Trump and Mr. Musk have targeted to the delight of Russia. Moscow has long resented the U.S. Agency for International Development, the National Endowment for Democracy, the International Republican Institute and the National Democratic Institute, all of which fund democracy promotion programs that the Kremlin considers part of a campaign of regime change, and all of which now face the ax.

At the same time, Mr. Charap said that the Ukraine peace plan offered by Mr. Trump, even though tilted in Moscow’s direction, did not actually address important points that Russia insisted on including in any settlement, like barring the presence of any foreign military forces in Ukraine.

The net effect of Mr. Trump’s tilt toward Russia and dismantlement of U.S. institutions that have irritated Moscow is to undercut America’s position against a major adversary, argued David Shimer, a former Russia adviser to President Joseph R. Biden Jr. Just last month, Mr. Shimer noted, the intelligence community declared that Russia remains an “enduring potential threat to U.S. power, presence and global interests.”

“The current approach,” Mr. Shimer said, “favors Russia across the board — making concession after concession on Ukraine, dismantling our key soft power tools and weakening our alliance network across Europe, which historically has helped the United States deal with Russian aggression from a position of strength.”

http://archive.today/2025.04.25-234108/https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/25/world/europe/ukraine-peace-counterproposal.html

In response to a White House proposal to end the war in Ukraine that critics say would grant the Kremlin much of what it wants, Ukraine’s leadership has drafted a counteroffer — one that in some ways contradicts what President Trump has demanded, but also leaves room for possible compromises on issues that have long seemed intractable.

Under the plan, which was obtained by The New York Times, there would be no restrictions on the size of the Ukrainian military, “a European security contingent” backed by the United States would be deployed on Ukrainian territory to guarantee security, and frozen Russian assets would be used to repair damage in Ukraine caused during the war.

Those three provisions could be nonstarters for the Kremlin, but parts of the Ukrainian plan suggest a search for compromise. There is no mention, for instance, of Ukraine fully regaining all the territory seized by Russia or an insistence on Ukraine joining NATO, two issues that President Volodymyr Zelensky has long said were not up for negotiations.

In their proposal, the Ukrainians say their country should be “fully restored,” without specifying what that would mean. Though Mr. Zelensky has long said his administration’s ultimate goal is the return of all territories that made up Ukraine when it declared its independence from the Soviet Union in 1991, including Crimea, Kyiv’s latest proposal seems to be intentionally vague on this point.

U.S. officials later explained that although the total amount of territory controlled by Russia was unlikely to change in any future negotiations, Ukrainian officials have made clear that they intended to propose territorial swaps to improve the country’s defensive positions. Trump administration officials have privately assured the Ukrainians that they would fight for the swaps, but said they could not guarantee that Russia would go along with them.

And the White House has taken Ukraine’s side, not Russia’s, when it comes to the future shape of Ukraine’s military. The Kremlin has demanded that Ukraine’s military, now the largest and most battle-hardened in Europe besides Russia’s own, be subject to strict limitations on its size and capabilities. Trump administration officials have told the Ukrainians that they would not support such limitations.

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After firing thousands of U.S. Agency for International Development employees and gutting funding to programs across dozens of countries, this week Secretary of State and USAID administrator Marco Rubio set his sights on dismantling the State Department with the same hatchet-wielding fervor. On Tuesday, The Washington Post reported on a plan to scale back U.S.-based staff by 15 percent, and eliminate programs related to human rights, war crimes, and democracy-building. “Non-statutory programs that are misaligned with America’s core national interests will cease to exist,” Rubio tweeted on Tuesday.

But a review of USAID programs shows that, while following the DOGE playbook in public, the secretary of state has quietly safeguarded Cuban regime change programs aligned with the island’s exile base that has long powered his rise.

One of these programs is the anti-communist publication CubaNet, based out of Miami, which saw its nearly $2 million grant cut, then restored. “Our goal has always been to counteract the propaganda of the Castro regime. Without this funding, the government in Havana will have greater freedom to intensify its propaganda and repression,” the news site’s director Roberto Hechavarría Pilia said before the cash was turned back on.

A grant to the Pan American Development Foundation for “independent media and free flow of information” in Cuba was also listed as reinstated on federal contracting sites. Two people familiar with the program cuts told the Prospect that exceptions were made after Cuban exile groups lobbied the State Department to reverse their grant determinations.

http://archive.today/2025.04.21-151945/https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/21/technology/google-search-remedies-hearing.html

The Justice Department said on Monday that the best way to address Google’s monopoly in internet search was to break up the $1.81 trillion company, kicking off a three-week hearing that could reshape the technology giant and alter the power players in Silicon Valley.

Judge Amit P. Mehta of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia ruled in August that Google had broken antitrust laws to maintain its dominance in online search. He is now hearing arguments from the government and the company over how to best fix Google’s monopoly and is expected to order those measures, referred to as “remedies,” by the end of the summer.

In an opening statement in the hearing on Monday, the government said Judge Mehta should force Google to sell its popular Chrome web browser, which drives users to its search engine. Government lawyers also said the company should take steps to give competitors a leg up if the court wants to restore competition to the moribund market for online search.

The outcome in the case, U.S. v. Google, could drastically change the Silicon Valley behemoth. Google faces mounting challenges, including a breakup of its ad technology business after a different federal judge ruled last week that the company held a monopoly over some of the tools that websites use to sell open ad space. In 2023, Google also lost an antitrust suit brought by the maker of the video game Fortnite, which accused the tech giant of violating competition laws with its Play app store.

The Justice Department’s actions signal that the Trump administration plans to maintain government scrutiny of the tech industry. Apple, Meta and Amazon also face antitrust lawsuits from the U.S. government, with Meta in the second week of a trial over whether it illegally stifled competition by buying Instagram and WhatsApp when they were young companies.

The case over Google search was filed in 2020, under the first Trump administration. In 2023, Judge Mehta oversaw an eight-week trial in which the government argued that Google had subverted competition by striking deals to be the preselected search engine in web browsers and on the home screens of smartphones. The company paid $26.3 billion to companies like Apple and Samsung as part of those deals in 2021.

The government said those deals locked in Google’s control, putting its search engine in front of consumers looking for information, which gave the company more data to improve its search engine. That then attracted more consumers, entrenching the company’s dominance, the government said.

http://archive.today/2025.04.03-150445/https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/03/world/europe/russia-envoy-us-visit-trump-dmitriev.html

A Kremlin envoy said on Thursday that he was meeting with the Trump administration in Washington this week, the first time in years that a senior Russian official was known to have traveled to the United States for talks with American counterparts.

The envoy, Kirill Dmitriev, is the head of Russia’s sovereign wealth fund and President Vladimir V. Putin’s special representative for investment and economic cooperation.

He said on the Telegram messaging app on Thursday that he had met with “representatives of the administration of President Donald Trump” on Wednesday and would do so again on Thursday.

There was no immediate comment from the Trump administration about Mr. Dmitriev’s post.

Mr. Dmitriev’s visit came despite sanctions imposed by the Biden administration that described him as “a known Putin ally.” It also came as President Trump excluded Russia from the roster of countries hit by the steep tariffs unveiled on Wednesday.

Mr. Dmitriev did not specify whom he was meeting with, but his main known American counterpart in recent weeks has been Steve Witkoff, the close friend of Mr. Trump who is the White House envoy for the Middle East and Russia.

Mr. Dmitriev, a 49-year-old former banker who studied at Stanford and Harvard and worked at McKinsey and Goldman Sachs, has emerged as a key emissary for Mr. Putin in the Kremlin’s efforts to build a close relationship with Mr. Trump.

Mr. Dmitriev’s message, tailored to Mr. Trump’s pecuniary mind-set, has been that the United States stands to profit from closer ties with Russia.

In February, Mr. Dmitriev worked with Mr. Witkoff to help broker a prisoner exchange that led to the release of Marc Fogel, an American teacher imprisoned in Moscow.

In talks with Mr. Witkoff and other American officials in Saudi Arabia days later, Mr. Dmitriev claimed that U.S. companies had incurred $324 billion in losses by pulling out of Russia after Mr. Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.

Mr. Dmitriev said in his social media post on Thursday that his meetings were about restoring the U.S.-Russian dialogue. The relationship had been “completely destroyed under the Biden administration,” he wrote, and the United States could benefit from cooperation “in international affairs and in the economy.”

“A real understanding of the Russian position opens up new opportunities for constructive interaction, including in the investment and economic sphere,” Mr. Dmitriev said.

He made no mention of the negotiations over the war in Ukraine between Moscow and Washington. Those talks appear to have run aground in recent days, with Mr. Putin having rebuffed the proposal by Mr. Trump and Ukraine for a 30-day cease-fire.

Mr. Trump said last weekend that he was “very angry” over some of Mr. Putin’s comments about Ukraine, raising the possibility that the American president could drop his efforts to rebuild ties with Russia.

But Mr. Dmitriev’s visit indicated that the Trump administration was continuing to reverse the Biden administration’s isolation of Russia on the diplomatic stage.

In another sign of continuing engagement between Washington and Moscow, Sergey V. Lavrov, Russia’s foreign minister, said this week that preparations were underway for a second round of talks aimed at easing the work of American and Russian diplomats operating in each other’s countries.

U.S. and Russian officials first met in Istanbul on Feb. 27 for talks on unwinding years of tit-for-tat restrictions that reduced the American mission in Russia and the Russian mission in the United States to skeleton staffs.

“We can see signs of progress and our U.S. partners’ willingness to lift these obstacles to the normal work of diplomats in our respective capitals,” Mr. Lavrov said.