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The freed Israeli hostage Eli Sharabi has been invited to meet Donald Trump on Tuesday in Washington, his brother Sharon has said.
When Sharabi and two other hostages, Or Levy and Ohad Ben Ami, were released on 8 February after nearly 500 days in captivity, their physical condition outraged Israelis, which Trump echoed. Sharabi has since told Israeli media of the severe hunger and violence he endured in captivity.
Excerpts from Sharabi’s interview on Israel’s Channel 12 “were shown to Trump, with English subtitles, and he was shocked once again, but also expressed great sympathy for those who survived captivity”, Sharon said, according to a translation from the Israeli newspaper Haaretz.
Israeli hostage recalls pain and hunger during captivity
In the Israeli television interview, Sharabi recalled being tied up, losing consciousness and experiencing extreme hunger. “I remember not being able to fall asleep because of the pain,” he said. “The ropes are already digging into your flesh, and every movement makes you want to scream.”
Sharabi’s brother said the freed hostage was flying to the US aboard a plane provided by Miriam Adelson, the Israeli-American widow of casino magnate Sheldon Adelson and a major Trump donor.
“Tomorrow morning, we’re boarding the plane with Mrs Adelson’s kind help. We’ll arrive to see Trump and explain to him up close the urgency of continuing the first stage or beginning the second stage – it doesn’t really matter,” said Sharon Sharabi, referring to the tenuous ceasefire between Israel and Hamas.
Europe scrambles in wake of Trump row
At the weekend, there was a very real sense of Europe reshaping its defence and diplomatic priorities on the hoof after Donald Trump and JD Vance’s public dressing-down of the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy. At a UK summit, the British prime minister, Keir Starmer, sought to walk the fine line of mending ties with Trump while assembling a “coalition of the willing” to devise their own peace plan for Ukraine.
And yet it was telling that Zelenskyy was offered a chat with King Charles not at a royal palace, but at Sandringham, a family residence. Trump is delighted with his own royal invitation, but will also be aware that Zelenskyy was on the receiving end of a more personal, intimate and revealing gesture.
Kremlin praises US foreign policy vision
The pivot in US foreign policy “largely” coincides with Russia’s own vision, a Kremlin spokesperson has said, with Donald Trump described as showing “common sense”.
Dmitry Peskov told state media: “There is a long way to go, because there is huge damage to the whole complex of bilateral relations. But if the political will of the two leaders, President Putin and President Trump, is maintained, this path can be quite quick and successful.”
He made the comments on Wednesday but they were only made public on Sunday, two days after Trump defended Putin during a fiery clash with the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, at the Oval Office on Friday.
Tesla pays price for Elon Musk’s hard right turn
Filipos described himself as a “true Tesla fanboy”, saying a Cybertruck would be the third vehicle he’d buy from the company. But he has opted instead for a Ford F-150 Lightning and traded in his Model 3 Performance Tesla. The turning point came when Musk did back-to-back Nazi-style salutes during an inauguration day celebration for Donald Trump in January.
Filipos is part of a growing movement of Tesla enthusiasts who are turning their backs on the company – selling their cars, dropping their leases and getting rid of Tesla stock. Many say that while they still love the cars, they can’t square the CEO’s politics and behaviour with their own. Musk is synonymous with Tesla; his vehicles, the Cybertruck in particular, are his calling cards.
US Postal Service faces a murky future
Defenders of the US Postal Service (USPS) are concerned that the 249-year-old institution could soon experience the slice and slash of Elon Musk’s “department of government efficiency”.
Donald Trump is reportedly preparing to dissolve USPS’s bipartisan board of governors and place the agency under the control of the commerce department secretary, Howard Lutnick, the Washington Post has reported.
Trump has made no secret of his desire to reform the federal agency, once calling it Amazon’s “delivery boy”. But it employs 637,000 people and 91% of Americans view it favourably, according to a Pew Research survey taken when USPS was perhaps the most visible federal agency during the Covid pandemic and came close to running out of cash entirely.
US immigration policy turns Central America into dumping ground
Little more than a month since his inauguration day, Donald Trump is strong-arming Central American leaders into collaborating with his hardline immigration agenda, forcing their countries to act as a dumping ground for immigrants whom the US can’t simply deport back to their home countries.
“In Trump’s first term, it was said that it was a transactional logic,” said Ana María Méndez-Dardón, Central America director for the Washington Office on Latin America. “In this case, I would say that it’s one of imposition, a logic of threats.”
The threats, such as to take back the Panama canal or impose tariffs, have forced a flurry of deals between Washington and Central American countries that have little to gain from cooperation, but potentially much to lose.
Tariff Tuesday looms
The commerce secretary, Howard Lutnick, said US tariffs on Canada and Mexico would go into effect on Tuesday, but whether they would be set at 25% remained unclear.
“That is a fluid situation,” Lutnick said. “There are going to be tariffs on Tuesday on Mexico and Canada. Exactly what they are, we’re going to leave that for the president and his team to negotiate.”
Lutnick said the two countries had “done a reasonable job” securing their borders with the US, though he maintained the deadly drug fentanyl continued to flow in.
What else happened today:
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Tim Walz says he regrets how much time he spent during the election campaign addressing the false, racist rumours of pets being abducted and eaten in Springfield, Ohio. “They sucked me in,” said Walz said in an episode of the New Yorker Radio Hour podcast.
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Donald Trump’s “border tsar”, Tom Homan, and far-right media personality Tucker Carlson talked about a bizarre range of extremist and racist conspiracy theories in an interview a few weeks before Homan took office. While the interview has been fleetingly reported previously, the details of Homan’s far-fetched conversation with Carlson have not.
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Aside from his work laying waste to US federal agencies, Elon Musk is also getting involved in a relatively obscure election in a state of six million people. He is spending millions to tip the scales in favour of a Republican candidate running for a seat on the highest court in Wisconsin. Critics regard it as a statement of intent by Musk to expand his political power.
