A federal court in New York has summoned US President Donald Trump to respond to a lawsuit brought by three sitting judges of the International Criminal Court (ICC), who accuse his administration of punishing them with sweeping sanctions for their work on investigations involving Israel and the United States.

The summons, issued on Thursday by the US District Court for the Southern District of New York, requires the government to respond within 60 days to a complaint filed a day earlier by judges Kimberly Prost of Canada, Solomy Balungi Bossa of Uganda and Reine Alapini-Gansou of Benin.https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/sanctioned-icc-judges-sue-trump-us-over-attack-judicial-independence

The case names Trump as the lead defendant, along with Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, and Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche.

It also names the Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control, which maintains the sanctions list, and its director, Bradley Smith.

It is the first time that ICC judges have personally gone to court to challenge their designation under Executive Order 14203, which Trump signed on 6 February 2025.

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Defense attorneys for Tyler James Robinson, the Utah man who allegedly shot Kirk, a conservative political activist, last September, argued in a March court filing that deputy Utah county attorney Christopher Ballard had violated a pre-trial media gag order.

A Utah judge held a prosecutor in contempt on Friday for speaking to the media about the murder case against the man accused of killing Charlie Kirk, but did not grant the defense attorney’s request to bar the death penalty as punishment in the case.

Robinson’s legal team had argued in a prior filing that a report from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives did not prove the bullet that killed Kirk came from a firearm believed to belong to Robinson. The claims gained traction online and were regarded by some commentators as potentially exculpatory.

Afterward, Ballard gave statements to news outlets to combat what he later described as “misinformation” regarding the interpretations of ballistics testing.

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Donald Trump has previewed a Republican strategy for the midterm elections, seizing on a progressive sweep in New York to portray Democrats as “godless communists” who pose an existential threat to the nation.

The US president, who was a child during the “red scare”, seized on wins by democratic socialists backed by the mayor of New York, Zohran Mamdani, to stoke fears that the Democratic party has embraced extremism that could lead to the violent persecution of Christians.

On Friday, Trump was addressing religious conservatives at the Faith & Freedom Coalition’s anhttps://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/jun/26/trump-news-at-a-glance-red-scarenual Road to Majority conference at the Washington Hilton hotel. He described the election winners in New York as “very troubling people” and claimed without evidence that they “want to destroy our country, and they hate our country and our people”.

Republicans have spent months trailing in the polls as voters accuse Trump of breaking his campaign promises to lower prices and keep the US out of foreign wars. But party strategists believe they have spotted an opening in the rise of Mamdani, giving them an opportunity to tag the entire Democratic party with the most extreme views of the left.

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Pete Buttigieg, the former US transportation secretary, said on Friday an anonymous and – police say – meritless accusation led Child Protective Services to investigate his family.

In a Substack post published on Friday, Buttigieg described the incident – which resulted in him being separated from his four-year-old twins – as “among the darkest hours of my life” and likened the accusation to “swatting”, the practice of calling police with a false report of an emergency to trigger a law enforcement response.

“Now imagine the same concept, but with Child Protective Services instead of a SWAT team,” Buttigieg wrote. “Hadn’t thought of that? Me neither, until a few days ago when a police officer and a CPS worker showed up at our home and politely asked to speak with me.”

“For twenty-four deeply distressing hours, we had no idea what I was accused of or what was about to happen,” Buttigieg wrote. “We could not understand someone abusing the system like this in order to hurt me and my family with an absurd and easily refuted allegation of a horrific crime.”

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