This live page is now closed. For more information about today’s sanctions on Iran, check out our coverage here.

We also have a look at President Donald Trump’s proposed task force to ferret out “anti-Christian bias” in the federal government here.

And explore what the pause on the employee buyout programme means for civil servants weathering uncertainty in their employment with this article.

Thanks for following today’s live updates.

What happened today in the US? Let’s break it down in a few short bullet points:

• Less than three weeks into President Donald Trump’s second term, his administration has been inundated with legal challenges, including a state-led lawsuit on Thursday seeking to bar Elon Musk’s access to sensitive payment systems.
• Thursday was meant to mark a deadline for government employees to accept a buyout in exchange for their resignations.
• But a federal judge postponed the deadline while he hears a legal challenge brought by unions representing tens of thousands of federal employees.
• Still, Trump continued his push to whittle down the federal government: Media reports indicate that the staff of USAID might be chopped from 10,000 to as little as 300.
• At an annual prayer breakfast, meanwhile, Trump announced he would launch a task force to investigate “anti-Christian bias” in the government.
• Secretary of State Marco Rubio, meanwhile, continued his tour of Latin American countries with a stop in the Dominican Republic, where he sought to reassure leaders that aid to neighbouring Haiti would be exempted from a federal funding freeze.
• Rubio also sought to reframe Trump’s push to “own” Gaza, saying that the US president was “trying to stir” other countries to action.
• While Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu continued to tour Washington, DC, the US announced further sanctions on Iran and its economic partners.
• Trump also signed sanctions against anyone who assists the International Criminal Court (ICC) in investigations of the US or its allies, namely Israel.

Some 168 environmental justice staffers have been put on administrative leave as a result of President Donald Trump’s executive order against “diversity and inclusion”. Trump issued an executive order against diversity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives, the US Environmental Protection Agency has said.

The agency noted that the staffers had worked on environmental justice efforts in heavily polluted communities that are often home to many Black, Latino and low-income residents.

Improving health in these places was one of the biggest priorities of the administration of former President Joe Biden, which hired more people to focus on environmental justice, elevated the agency’s status, and poured grant money into local environmental justice groups.

On Thursday afternoon, Trump made good on his promise to sanction the International Criminal Court (ICC) and its employees, signing an executive order accusing the court of “malign conduct”.

In the order, Trump specifically called out the ICC’s decision to issue arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his former Minister of Defence Yoav Gallant.

Both men are accused of perpetrating war crimes and crimes against humanity for their country’s assault on Gaza, where an estimated 62,000 Palestinians were killed in the span of 15 months.

Trump argues that neither the US nor Israel are party to the court’s founding document, the Rome Statute. But critics point out that Palestine is – and that’s where the alleged crimes took place.

“The ICC’s recent actions against Israel and the United States set a dangerous precedent, directly endangering current and former United States personnel, including active service members of the Armed Forces, by exposing them to harassment, abuse, and possible arrest,” Trump wrote.

“This malign conduct in turn threatens to infringe upon the sovereignty of the United States and undermines the critical national security and foreign policy work of the United States Government and our allies, including Israel.”

The order freezes any US-based assets for those involved in ICC investigations, and it also bars those individuals from entry into the US.

US Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor appeared in Kentucky on Thursday to receive the University of Louisville’s Brandeis Medal for public service.

But in her first public appearance since Trump was inaugurated to a second term, she delivered some stinging remarks for her fellow justices.

Speaking before the Louisville audience, Sotomayor criticised a Supreme Court ruling last July that granted presidents broad immunity against prosecution.

While the court stopped short of affirming the “absolute immunity” Trump claimed, it expanded executive immunity beyond what a president’s constitutional authority entails.

Under the court’s decision, any “official act” — whether defined in the US Constitution or not — could be shielded from prosecution. The ruling did not explicitly define what an “official act” may be.

Sotomayor warned that such decisions could imperil the court’s legitimacy. She had issued a dissent against the decision.

“I don’t think that Americans have accepted that anyone should be above the law in America,” Sotomayor said on Thursday.

Meta’s founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg was at the White House on Thursday “to discuss how Meta can help the administration defend and advance American tech leadership abroad”, according to company spokesperson Andy Stone.

Zuckerberg has recently sought to ingratiate himself with Trump.

Last month, his company paid $25m to settle a lawsuit brought by Trump that alleged his social media accounts were unfairly suspended after the attack on the US Capitol on January 6, 2021. Zuckerberg also attended Trump’s swearing-in last month and co-hosted an inaugural reception.

Meta is making multibillion-dollar investments in the development of artificial intelligence, and Zuckerberg has said his company wants to have a productive relationship with Trump’s administration.

Anonymous sources within the US government have told news outlets like The New York Times that sweeping layoffs are coming for the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), a branch of the government in Trump’s crosshairs.

Of the nearly 10,000 people employed with USAID, fewer than 300 are expected to remain, according to the reports.

Trump has repeatedly attacked the aid organisation, which was founded in 1961 under President John F Kennedy.

It has grown to be one of the largest aid organisations in the world, responsible for everything from disaster relief to public health assistance. Trump, however, has said he plans to implement an “America First” plan for foreign policy.

“It’s been run by a bunch of radical lunatics, and we’re getting them out,” Trump told reporters earlier this month. His allies have teased he plans to shut the agency down completely.

Demonstrations against President Donald Trump continued across the US on Thursday, taking aim at everything from his immigration policy to his close relationship with Elon Musk, who has been granted sweeping access to government systems.

It has been less than three weeks since Trump took office for his second term, and already his administration has been awhirl with controversy.

The research firm Gallup has noted that he has a 47 percent approval rating, making him the only president since 1953 to have a ranking below 50 percent at the start of his term. Trump’s 2017 inauguration was likewise marked by a low approval score: 45 percent.

But what do these poll numbers say about Trump’s ability to pass his platform? Alex Isenstadt, a senior political analyst for the publication Axios, told Global News Insight that his prospects might not be as dismal as they seem.

“The reality is that, as a newly elected president, he has a fair amount of political capital. His party controls both houses of Congress,” Isenstadt explained. “Democrats are off balance trying to find their identity, trying to figure out how they want to push back on Trump’s policies.  So he has, for the moment, a fair amount of capital.”

But Isenstadt acknowledged that passing bills through the House of Representatives could still be a challenge. Republicans have a narrow majority in the chamber, with 218 seats to the Democrats’ 215. The upcoming midterm election in 2026 could be pivotal.

“Now, if the public starts to sour on his agenda, if we get closer to next year’s midterm election and it looks like his party is about to lose control of one or both houses and they’re going to lose seats and he starts to lose further in popularity, then he starts to lose capital,” Isenstadt said.

“But for right now, he has a lot of power.”

A coalition of 12 states has launched a legal challenge to the access that the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), a nongovernmental panel, has gained into payment systems run by the US government.

California Attorney General Rob Bonta and his New York counterpart, Letitia James, were among the leaders to announce the lawsuit on Thursday.

They took aim at the conflicts of interest that DOGE’s head, billionaire businessman Elon Musk, may have in viewing private payments.

“In the past week, the US Department of the Treasury has given Elon Musk access to Americans’ personal private information, state bank account data, and other information that is some of our country’s most sensitive data,” the attorneys general wrote in a joint statement.

“As the richest man in the world, Elon Musk is not used to being told ‘no,’ but in our country, no one is above the law. The President does not have the power to give away our private information to anyone he chooses, and he cannot cut federal payments approved by Congress.”

During a visit to the Dominican Republic, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio visited a hangar where a plane allegedly belonging to the government of Venezuela’s Nicolas Maduro was located.

Taping a large notice onto the door of the plane, Rubio and other US officials declared that the plane was now in the possession of the US government.

This is the second time in less than a year that a plane belonging to Maduro has been confiscated by US authorities. In September, under former President Joe Biden, the US seized a different $13m aircraft parked in the Dominican Republic. It was later brought to the US state of Florida.

Thursday’s seizure targeted a Dassault Falcon 200 that Maduro and his officials used to visit destinations like Greece, Russia and Turkiye.

In Thursday’s remarks from the Dominican capital of Santo Domingo, Secretary of State Marco Rubio – the child of Cuban immigrants – issued sharp criticism of the governments in Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela.

He called them “enemigos de la humanidad”, or “enemies of humanity”.

He accused Venezuela of cooperating with Iran, Cuba of providing safe haven to Chinese espionage and Nicaragua of having “declared war on the Catholic Church”.

In the short term, he added, “ I don’t think there will be a change in those countries.”

While in the Dominican Republic, Rubio oversaw the seizure of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro’s plane, as part of continued sanctions and penalties against the South American leader’s government.

Tom Homan has hinted at the threat of US military action against drug cartels in Mexico.

“I think the cartels would be foolish to take on the military, but we know they’ve taken on the Mexican military before, but now we have the United States military,” he said in an interview with ABC News.

“Do I expect violence to escalate? Absolutely,” he added, “because the cartels are making record amounts of money.”

He added that Trump has the ability to “wipe them off the face of the earth” if cartel members injure US personnel.

Trump has issued an executive order starting the process of designating Mexican cartels as “foreign terrorist organisations”, although so far, no individual cartels have received that label.

The National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) has changed its policy on women’s participation in sports, following an executive order from the Trump administration targeting transgender women.

On Wednesday, Trump signed a directive limiting participation in women’s and girls’ sports to those who are identified as female at birth. Non-compliance with the order could result in the withdrawal of federal funding.

The NCAA’s new policy on Thursday would adhere to Trump’s order. NCAA President Charlie Baker praised the clarity Trump brought to the issue on the day the order was signed.

“We strongly believe that clear, consistent and uniform eligibility standards would best serve today’s student-athletes instead of a patchwork of conflicting state laws and court decisions,” Baker said. “To that end, President Trump’s order provides a clear, national standard.”

The NCAA oversees athletics at nearly 1,100 schools across the US.

The top US diplomat is planning to travel to the region after the Munich Security Conference, which begins on February 14, according to the Axios news site.

The trip will include stops in Israel, the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia and possibly more countries, the outlet reported, citing Israeli officials.

The UAE and Saudi Arabia, which have both had close ties to Trump in the past, came down harshly against Trump’s plan this week to “take over” Gaza.

Trump’s near-blanket pause on foreign aid — pending a 90-day review — has caused chaos and confusion across the globe.

While US Secretary of State Marco Rubio has said exceptions allow certain programmes, like emergency food assistance, to continue, much of that aid remains temporarily halted as humanitarian organisations seek clarity about what is exempt.

The situation has been made more confusing following Trump’s move this week to shut the US government’s top relief provider, the US Agency for International Development.

Watch our report below:

In keeping with the theme of Trump’s “America First” foreign policy agenda, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio sketched a vision of Haiti’s future that dovetails into US economic success.

He proposed that Haiti could be a platform for US “nearshoring”, the process of moving foreign manufacturing to neighbouring countries, to shorten the supply chain.

“There’s a real opportunity for Haiti to grow into a hub of nearshore manufacturing — of nearshore light manufacturing,” Rubio said at a news conference in the Dominican Republic on Thursday.

“That presence already exists there now. That can be expanded. They have a young and strong, vibrant workforce.”

Haiti currently is in the midst of an ongoing security crisis, with gang violence costing thousands of lives.

However, the Trump administration has been criticised for advancing self-serving plans for conflict-torn areas, including Gaza, where the US president proposed displacing residents and constructing a “Riviera of the Middle East”.

The United Nations has reported that, like in Gaza, displacement is an urgent concern. An estimated 1,041,000 Haitians have faced internal displacement as the result of widespread gang violence.

Rubio added that, just as the US is restricting asylum seekers, it would not expect Haiti’s neighbour, the Dominican Republic, to accept displaced people.

“I think it’s also important to be clear we cannot and will not ask the Dominican Republic to accept — or be expected of them to accept — an uncontrolled migratory wave,” Rubio said.

“No country in the world should be asked to do that, and this country should not either, and we will not be asking for that.”

Trump’s incoming Attorney General Pam Bondi has disbanded a task force targeting Russian oligarchs who are accused of enabling sanctions violations following the 2022 invasion of Ukraine. 

In a memo, Bondi said that Task Force KleptoCapture would end as part of a shift in focus and funding.

She indicated the Trump administration would prefer to dedicate resources to combating drug cartels and international gangs.

The task force had brought indictments against aluminium magnate Oleg Deripaska and TV tycoon Konstantin Malofeyev for alleged sanctions violations. It also seized yachts belonging to sanctioned oligarchs Suleiman Kerimov and Viktor Vekselberg.