WAR IN UKRAINE

U.S. offers U.N. resolution far short of European statement

UNITED NATIONS>> The United States has proposed a draft U.N. resolution that stops far short of a competing European-backed statement demanding an immediate withdrawal of all of Moscow’s forces from Ukraine.

Both are timed to the third anniversary of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which falls on Monday, when the General Assembly will vote on the nonbinding resolutions.

It sets up a clash between the United States and Europe as the strength of the transatlantic alliance has been called into question over the Trump administration’s extraordinary turnaround on Russia, opening negotiations with Moscow after years of isolation as the U.S. looks to broker a rapid end to the war. European leaders were dismayed that their officials and those from Ukraine weren’t invited to preliminary U.S.-Russia talks this week in Saudi Arabia.

DOGE

Officials fired at traffic safety agency investigating Tesla

The federal agency responsible for traffic safety, which has been investigating whether self-driving technology in Tesla vehicles played a role in the death of a pedestrian, will fire a “modest” number of employees, an agency spokesperson said late Friday.

The agency did not say whether any of the fired employees were involved in investigations of Tesla, whose CEO, Elon Musk, is leading the Department of Government Efficiency established by President Donald Trump.

The efficiency department has been forcing layoffs at numerous government agencies as part of an effort to reshape the federal bureaucracy. Musk has retained control of Tesla while spending much of his time in Washington.

SUPREME COURT

Justices reject Holocaust survivors’ lawsuit against Hungary

washington>> The Supreme Court on Friday unanimously ruled against a group of Jewish survivors of the Holocaust, saying they could not sue Hungary in the United States to recover the proceeds of property stolen by the country’s state-owned railway. The company robbed hundreds of thousands of Jews before sending them to Nazi death camps in 1944.

The question for the justices was whether the lawsuit was barred by the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act, a 1976 law that generally forbids lawsuits against foreign states.

More than half a million Hungarian Jews were murdered in a matter of months near the end of World War II. The genocidal campaign was accompanied by mass theft of Jewish property spearheaded by Hungary’s national railway after a government declaration that all valuable objects owned by Jews, except for a few personal items, were part of the nation’s wealth.

CPAC

Bannon salute at right-wing event sparks outcry

OXON HILL, Md.>> A raised-arm salute by Steve Bannon that to many resembled a Nazi gesture incited an outcry Friday not just from liberal critics of President Donald Trump and his allies but also from a leader of the European right.

It came a month after Elon Musk made a similar salute, and at a combustible moment when the administration of Trump, who has long been dogged by charges of encouraging far-right extremism, appears to be leaning more aggressively into far-right alliances around the world.

Bannon, a former chief White House strategist and a longtime thought leader in Trump’s populist movement, denied that the gesture he made Thursday at the Conservative Political Action Conference outside Washington was a Nazi salute. In a text message, he explained that he had “waved to the MAGA movement as I always do in my motivational speeches.”

But Jordan Bardella, the president of France’s far-right National Rally, announced Friday morning that he had canceled his plans to speak at the conference after “one of the speakers provocatively made a gesture referring to Nazi ideology.”

The gesture echoed one that Musk, the billionaire leading Trump’s cost-cutting efforts, made on Inauguration Day.

— Denver Post wire services