A South Korean court on Friday ordered impeached President Yoon Suk Yeol to be released from jail, a move that could allow Yoon to stand trial for his rebellion charge without being physically detained.

Yoon was arrested and indicted in January over the Dec. 3 martial law decree that plunged the country into political turmoil. The opposition-controlled parliament separately voted to impeach him, leading to his suspension from office.

The hearings in his impeachment trial at the Constitutional Court concluded in late February, and that court is expected to rule soon on whether to formally remove him from office or reinstate him.

The Seoul Central District Court said it accepted Yoon’s request to be released from jail because the legal period of his formal arrest expired before he was indicted.

The court also cited the need to resolve questions over the legality of the investigations on Yoon. Yoon’s lawyers have accused the investigative agency that detained him before his formal arrest of lacking legal authority to probe rebellion charges.

Investigators have alleged that the martial-law decree amounted to rebellion. If he’s convicted of that offense, he would face the death penalty or life imprisonment.

Yoon’s defense team welcomed the court’s decision and urged prosecutors to release him immediately. The presidential office also welcomed the court’s decision, saying it hopes Yoon will swiftly return to work.

However, South Korea law allows prosecutors to continue to hold a suspect whose arrest has been suspended by a court temporarily while pursuing an appeal.

The main liberal opposition Democratic Party, which led Yoon’s Dec. 14 impeachment, called on prosecutors to immediately appeal the court’s ruling.

Yoon’s martial law decree, which involved the dispatch of troops and police forces to the National Assembly, evoked traumatic memories of past military rules among many South Koreans. The decree lasted only six hours, as enough lawmakers managed to get into an assembly hall and voted to overturn it unanimously.

Yoon later argued his decree was only meant to inform the people of the danger of the opposition Democratic Party, which undermined his agenda and impeached top officials, and said he dispatched troops to the assembly only in order to maintain order. But some top military and police officers sent to the assembly have told Constitutional Court hearings or investigators that Yoon ordered them to drag out lawmakers to obstruct a vote on his decree or detain politicians.

If the Constitutional Court upholds Yoon’s impeachment, he will be officially thrown out of office and a national election will be held to choose his successor within two months. If the court rejects his impeachment but he is still in jail, it’s unclear whether and how soon he will be able to exercise his presidential powers.

Massive rallies by opponents and supporters of Yoon have filled the streets of Seoul and other major South Korean cities. Whatever the Constitutional Court decides, experts say it will likely further polarize the country and intensify its conservative-liberal divide.

Yoon is the first South Korean president to be arrested while in office. South Korean law gives a president immunity from most criminal prosecution, but not for grave charges like rebellion or treason.

By law, a president in South Korea has the power to put the country under martial law in wartime and similar emergency situations, but many experts say South Korea wasn’t in such a state when Yoon declared martial law.

The Washington Times

Saudi Arabia has deported 8,733 illegal residents in the past week as part of a nationwide crackdown on residency, labour, and border violations, the Ministry of Interior announced on Saturday.

Between January 30 and February 5, security forces carried out joint field operations in collaboration with multiple government agencies, leading to the arrest of 21,477 individuals across various regions of the Kingdom. Those detained included 13,638 violators of the Residency Law, 4,663 violators of the Border Security Law, and 3,176 violators of the Labor Law, the ministry said.

The operation also apprehended 1,316 people attempting to cross the border into Saudi Arabia illegally, with 40 per cent identified as Yemeni nationals, 58 percent as Ethiopian nationals, and 2 per cent from other nationalities. An additional 77 individuals were arrested while trying to leave the country unlawfully.

Authorities also referred 28,661 violators to their diplomatic missions to obtain travel documents, while 2,919 individuals were in the process of completing travel reservations.

The crackdown extended beyond undocumented individuals, with 13 people arrested for facilitating illegal entry, providing shelter, or employing violators.

The Ministry of Interior confirmed that 37,120 individuals—33,547 men and 3,573 women — are currently undergoing legal procedures ahead of further punitive measures.

Saudi law imposes severe penalties on those assisting illegal migration, including prison sentences of up to 15 years and fines of up to SR1 million ($266,000). The ministry warned that vehicles and properties used to transport or harbor violators will be confiscated.

Gulf News

The US State Department has issued a halt to nearly all existing foreign assistance and paused new aid, according to an internal memo sent to officials and US embassies abroad.

The leaked notice follows President Trump’s executive order issued on Monday for a 90-day pause in foreign development assistance pending a review of efficiencies and consistency with his foreign policy.

The United States is the world’s biggest international aid donor spending $68bn in 2023 according to government figures. The State Department notice appears to affect everything from development assistance to military aid.

It makes exceptions only for emergency food aid and for military funding for Israel and Egypt. The leaked memo’s contents have been confirmed by the BBC.

“No new funds shall be obligated for new awards or extensions of existing awards until each proposed new award or extension has been reviewed and approved,” says the memo to staff.

It adds that US officials “shall immediately issue stop-work orders, consistent with the terms of the relevant award, until such time as the secretary shall determine, following a review.”

It also orders a wide scale review of all foreign assistance to be completed within 85 days to ensure the aid adheres to President Trump’s foreign policy goals.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio – the US’s top diplomat – has previously stated that all US spending abroad should take place only if it makes America “stronger”, “safer” or “more prosperous”.

One former senior State Department official told the BBC the notice meant a “potentially huge” impact on foreign aid programmes funded by the US.

“One can imagine, for example, the humanitarian de-mining programmes around the world suddenly being told stop work. That’s a pretty big deal,” said Josh Paul, who oversaw Congressional relations on weapons transfers at the State Department until late 2023.

Dave Harden, a former US Agency of International Aid (USAID) mission director in the Middle East, told the BBC the move was “very significant”, saying it could see humanitarian and development programmes funded by the US around the world being immediately suspended, while the review is carried out.

He said it could affect a wide range of critical development projects including water, sanitation and shelter.

“The employees of the implementing partner or the [non-governmental organisation] would be able to be paid, but actual assistance, I think, needs to be halted,” said Mr Harden.

“I have gone through [assistance suspensions] many times when I was the West Bank and Gaza mission director, but that was specific to that account. This is global,” he said.

“Not only does it pause assistance, but it puts a ‘stop work’ order in existing contracts that are already funded and underway. It’s extremely broad,” he added.

The AFP news agency reported the funding freeze could also potentially affect Ukraine, which received billions of dollars in weapons under Trump’s predecessor Joe Biden.

Rubio’s memo, justifying the freeze, said it was impossible for the new administration to assess whether existing foreign aid commitments “are not duplicated, are effective and are consistent with President Trump’s foreign policy”.

Rubio has issued a waiver for emergency food assistance, according to the memo.

This comes amid a surge of humanitarian aid into the Gaza Strip after a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas began, and several other hunger crises around the world, including Sudan.

The memo also said waivers have so far been approved by Rubio for “foreign military financing for Israel and Egypt and administrative expenses, including salaries, necessary to administer foreign military financing”.

The State Department has been approached for comment.

Credit: BBC

The Kremlin said on Thursday it saw nothing particularly new in a threat by U.S. President Donald Trump to hit Russia with new sanctions and tariffs if it did not agree to end the war in Ukraine.

Referring to Russia and the war, Trump said on Wednesday: “If we don’t make a ‘deal,’ and soon, I have no other choice but to put high levels of Taxes, Tariffs, and Sanctions on anything being sold by Russia to the United States, and various other participating countries.”

Trump said he would be doing a very big favour to Russia and Putin by getting them to bring an end to what he called “this ridiculous war”.

Asked about Trump’s comments, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Trump had often applied sanctions against Russia in his first term as president.

“We do not see any particularly new elements here,” Peskov told reporters. “He likes these methods, at least he liked them during his first presidency.”

Moscow was closely monitoring all Trump’s statements, said Peskov.

“We carefully record all the nuances. We remain ready for dialogue, President Putin has repeatedly spoken about this – for equal dialogue, for mutually respectful dialogue.”

Trump, who earlier this week said the Ukraine conflict was “destroying” Russia, has said he plans to speak to Putin soon. Peskov said Moscow was still waiting for “signals” from the U.S. side.

Among the first executive orders signed by President Donald Trump was an order to rename the Gulf of Mexico to the newly named “Gulf of America.”

“President Trump is bringing common sense to government and renewing the pillars of American civilization,” the newly inaugurated president’s executive order said.

Trump also called for Alaska’s 20,000-foot mountain, Denali, to be reverted back to Mount McKinley, which was its name before former President Barack Obama had it changed in 2015.

Trump’s executive order calls for the U.S. secretary of the interior to change the names on federal maps.

He has appointed former North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum for the position.

During his January press conference at Mar-a-Lago, Trump declared he would change the name, saying the gulf is currently run by cartels and that “it’s ours.”

“We’re going to be changing the name of the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America, which has a beautiful ring that covers a lot of territory, the Gulf of America,” Trump said at the time. “What a beautiful name. And it’s appropriate. It’s appropriate. And Mexico has to stop allowing millions of people to pour into our country.”

Presidents do have the authority to rename geographic regions and features, but it needs to be done via executive order.

The U.S. Board of Geographic Names typically has the jurisdiction for geographic names.

The Gulf of Mexico is one of the largest and most important bodies of water in North America. It’s the ninth-largest body of water in the world and covers some 600,000 square miles.

Half of the U.S. petroleum refining and natural gas processing capacity is located along the Gulf of Mexico, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and it supplies about 40% of the nation’s seafood, according to the Environmental Defense Fund.

Following Trump’s inauguration on Monday, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis issued an executive order on winter weather in the state that already refers to the gulf as the “Gulf of America.”

While referring to a weather system that could impact the state beginning Tuesday, DeSantis’ executive order said, “An area of low pressure moving across the Gulf of America, interacting with Arctic air, will bring widespread impactful winter weather to North Florida.”

“For us and the whole world, it is still the Gulf of Mexico,” Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum said Tuesday in a response to Trump’s various decrees.

ABC News

Leaving Israel is easier, Shira Z. Carmel thinks, by saying it’s just for now. But she knows better.

For the Israeli-born singer and an increasing number of relatively well-off Israelis, the Oct. 7, 2023 Hamas attack shattered any sense of safety and along with it, Israel’s founding promise: to be the world’s safe haven for Jews. That day, thousands of Hamas militants blew past the country’s border defenses, killed 1,200 people and dragged 250 more into Gaza in a siege that caught the Israeli army by surprise and stunned a nation that prides itself on military prowess. This time, during what became known as Israel’s 9/11, the army didn’t come for hours.

Ten days later, a pregnant Carmel, her husband and their toddler boarded a flight to Australia, which was looking for people in her husband’s profession. And they spun the explanation to friends and family as something other than permanent — “relocation” is the easier-to-swallow term — acutely aware of the familial strain and the shame that have shadowed Israelis who leave for good.

“We told them we’re going to get out of the line of fire for awhile,” Carmel said more than a year later from her family’s new home in Melbourne. “It wasn’t a hard decision. But it was very hard to talk to them about it. It was even hard to admit it to ourselves.”

Thousands of Israelis have left the country since Oct. 7, 2023, according to government statistics and immigration tallies released by destination countries such as Canada and Germany. There’s concern about whether it will drive a “brain drain” in sectors like medicine and tech. Migration experts say it’s possible people leaving Israel will surpass the number of immigrants to Israel in 2024, according to Sergio DellaPergola, a statistician and professor emeritus of Hebrew University in Jerusalem.

“In my view, this year people entering will be smaller than the total of the exit,” he said. “And this is quite unique in the existence of the State of Israel.”

The Oct. 7 effect on Israeli emigration is enough for prominent Israelis to acknowledge the phenomenon publicly — and warn of rising antisemitism elsewhere.

“There is one thing that worries me in particular: talks about leaving the country. This must not happen,” former premier Naftali Bennett, a staunch critic of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, tweeted in June after a conversation with friends who were leaving. Israel, he wrote, needs to retain the talent. “Who wants to return to the days of the wandering Jew, without real freedom, without a state, subject to every anti-Semitic whim?”

Thousands of Israelis have opted to pay the financial, emotional and social costs of moving out since the Oct. 7 attack, according to government statistics and families who spoke to The Associated Press in recent months after emigrating to Canada, Spain and Australia. Israel’s overall population continues to grow toward 10 million people.

But it’s possible that 2024 ends with more Israelis leaving the country than coming in. That’s even as Israel and Hezbollah reached a fragile ceasefire along the border with Lebanon and Israel and Hamas inch toward a pause in Gaza.

Israel’s Central Bureau of Statistics estimated in September that 40,600 Israelis departed long-term over the first seven months of 2024, a 59% increase over the same period a year earlier, when 25,500 people left. Monthly, 2,200 more people departed this year than in 2023, CBS reported.

The Israeli Ministry of Immigration and Absorption, which does not deal with people leaving, said more than 33,000 people have moved to Israel since the start of the war, about on par with previous years. The interior minister refused to comment for this story.

The numbers are equally dramatic in destination countries. More than 18,000 Israelis applied for German citizenship in 2024, more than double the same period in 2023 and three times that of the year before, the Interior Ministry reported in September.

Canada, which has a three-year work visa program for Israelis and Palestinians fleeing the war, received 5,759 applications for work permits from Israeli citizens between January and October this year, the government told The Associated Press. In 2023, that number was 1,616 applications, and a year earlier the tally was 1,176 applications, according to Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada.

Other clues, too, point to a notable departure of Israelis since the Oct. 7 attacks. Gil Fire, deputy director of Tel Aviv Sourasky Medical Center, said that some of its star specialists with fellowship postings of a few years in other countries began to waver about returning.

“Before the war, they always came back and it was not really considered an option to stay. And during the war we started to see a change,” he said. “They said to us, ‘We will stay another year, maybe two years, maybe more.’”

Fire says it’s “an issue of concern” enough for him to plan in-person visits with these doctors in the coming months to try to draw them back to Israel.

Michal Harel, who moved with her husband to Toronto in 2019, said that almost immediately after the attacks the phone began ringing — with other Israelis seeking advice about moving to Canada. On Nov. 23, 2023, the couple set up a website to help Israelis navigate moving, which can cost at least 100,000 Israeli shekels, or about $28,000, Harel and other Israeli relocation experts said.

Not everyone in Israel can just pack up and move overseas. Many of those who have made the move have foreign passports, jobs at multinational corporations or can work remotely. People in Gaza have even less choice. The vast majority of Gaza’s 2.3 million people have been displaced by relentless Israeli bombing since Oct. 7, 2023, yet no one has been able to leave the enclave since May. Before then, at least 100,000 Palestinians are believed to have left Gaza.

Health officials in Gaza say Israeli bombing has killed more than 45,000 people.

Speaking by phone last month, Harel reported that the site has received views from 100,000 unique visitors and 5,000 direct contacts in 2024 alone.

“It’s people who want to move quickly with families, to wake up in the morning and enjoy life,” she said. “Right now (in Israel), it’s trauma, trauma, trauma.”

“Some of them,” Harel added, “they want to keep everything a secret.”

Aliya — the Hebrew term for used for immigration, literally the “ascent” of Jews into Israel — has always been part of the country’s plan. But “yerida” — the term used for leaving the country, literally the “descent” of Jews from Israel to the diaspora, emphatically has not.

For Israel’s first decades of independence, the government strongly discouraged departing Israelis, who were seen in some cases as cowardly and even treasonous. A sacred trust and a social contract took root in Israeli society. The terms go — or went — like this: Israeli citizens would serve in the military and pay high taxes. In exchange, the army would keep them safe. Meanwhile, it’s every Jew’s obligation to stay, work and fight for Israel’s survival.

“Emigration was a threat, especially in the early years (when) there were problems of nation-building. In later decades, Israel became more established and more self-confident,” said Ori Yehudai, a professor of Israel studies at Ohio State University and the author of “Leaving Zion,” a history of Israeli emigration. The sense of shame is more of a social dynamic now, he said, but “people still feel they have to justify their decision to move.”

Shira Carmel says she has no doubt about her decision. She’d long objected to Netanyahu’s government’s efforts to overhaul the legal system, and was one of the first women to don the blood-red “Handmaid’s Tale” robes that became a fixture of the anti-government protests of 2023. She was terrified as a new mom, and a pregnant one, during the Hamas attack, and appalled at having to tell her toddler that they were gathering in the bomb shelter for “hugging parties” with the neighbors. This was not the life she wanted.

Meanwhile, Australia beckoned. Carmel’s brother had lived there for two decades. The couple had the equivalent of a green card due to Carmel’s husband’s profession. In the days after the attack, Carmel’s brother alerted her to the possibility of a flight out of Israel for free, if on very short notice, which she confirmed with the Australian embassy in Israel. Basic logic, she says, pointed toward moving.

And yet.

Carmel recalls the frenzied hours before the flight out in which she said to her husband in the privacy of their bedroom: “My God, are we really doing this?”

They decided not to decide, opting instead for: “We’re just getting on a plane for now, being grateful.” They packed lightly.

On the ground half a world away, weeks became months. And they decided: “I’m not going to go back to try to give birth in the war.” In December, they told their families back in Israel that they were staying “for now.”

“We don’t define it as ‘forever,’” Carmel said Tuesday. “But we are for sure staying for the foreseeable future.”

ABCNews