First, Uganda is in shock after 4 children were killed in a brutal attack at a kindergarden in Kampala. Then, Sudanese military leader and head of state, Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, appoints Yasir al-Atta as the Armed forces new chief of staff. And, a week until the Beninese people head to the polls for the country’s general election, the opposition parties are in crisis.
First, Uganda is in shock after 4 children were killed in a brutal attack at a kindergarden in Kampala. Then, Sudanese military leader and head of state, Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, appoints Yasir al-Atta as the Armed forces new chief of staff. And, a week until the Beninese people head to the polls for the country’s general election, the opposition parties are in crisis.
He pointed to California, Illinois, Minnesota, Maine and New York, and alleged fraud was “so large that, if successful, we would literally be able to balance our American budget”, without providing evidence.
“Raids have already started in L.A.,” Trump said. Authorities arrested eight people for allegedly perpetrating over $50m in healthcare fraud, largely in southern California, federal officials announced on Thursday.
Most of the accused, which include healthcare professionals such as nurses and a psychologist, allegedly schemed to defraud Medicare by running “sham” hospice care facilities where they used people who were not terminally ill as beneficiaries, the US Department of Justice said in a statement.
Allies of Trump are meanwhile increasingly alleging that blue states are complicit in fraud.
Last December, Trump froze federal childcare funding to Minnesota over such accusations. He has also heavily deployed Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents in the state amid controversial immigration raids which resulted in the killings of two Americans, Renee Good and Alex Pretti, as well as widespread protests.
In February, Vance announced that the Trump administration would “temporarily halt” more than a quarter-billion dollars in Medicaid funds to Minnesota as part of efforts to ensure the state was a “good steward of the American people’s tax money”.
Minnesota’s Democratic governor, Tim Walz, pushed back at the time, saying: “This has nothing to do with fraud.” He added: “The agents Trump allegedly sent to investigate fraud are shooting protesters and arresting children. His DoJ is gutting the US attorney’s office and crippling their ability to prosecute fraud. And every week Trump pardons another fraudster.”
Trump has also previously claimed “there is more fraud in California than there is in Minnesota”.
In recent months, the Trump administration argued that southern California was rife with healthcare fraud and pledged to crack down, while frequently using the matter politically to criticize the state’s Democratic leadership. Nearly all cases cited by the justice department in the wave of arrests as part of “Operation Never Say Die” were tied to southern California.
“The southern California region is a high-risk environment for hospice-related and many other forms of healthcare fraud,” said Akil Davis, assistant director at the FBI, who claimed that the US loses “hundreds of billions of dollars annually to healthcare fraud”.
In response to the news, Gavin Newsom defended his state, saying California has taken action. The governor said that he banned new hospice licenses in 2021 and that the state revoked more than 280 licenses since 2024 and pursued more than 100 criminal cases.
“The Trump Administration – home to the biggest fraudsters on Earth – is trying to blame California for issues with THEIR federal programs,” Newsom said. “Glad to see the Feds finally taking seriously the fraud in the programs they themselves manage…only 15 months after Trump took office.”
In a news conference announcing the arrests, Dr Mehmet Oz, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services administrator, said his agency planned to review every hospice in California.
In response to Trump’s announcement, New York governor Kathy Hochul’s spokesperson, Jen Goodman, told the Guardian: “Well before the Trump administration took office, Governor Hochul was leading efforts to root out waste, fraud and abuse, including sweeping reforms that saved over $2 billion for taxpayers. As always, New York is glad to partner with the federal government to continue our work, but we won’t stand by as Donald Trump and JD Vance use ‘fraud’ as a disguise for their efforts to cut healthcare and rip critical programs away from New York’s most vulnerable.”
The Guardian has approached the governors’ offices of Illinois, Minnesota and Maine for comment.
Since retaking office last January, Trump has granted presidential pardons to dozens of people convicted of white-collar crimes, including several individuals who were convicted of fraud.
Meanwhile, earlier this week, Trump delivered a primetime address in which he said: “We’re fighting wars. We can’t take care of daycare,” adding: “It’s not possible for us to take care of daycare, Medicaid, Medicare – all these individual things, they can do it on a state basis.”
The legislation has been drafted and redrafted since it was first introduced to the National Assembly at the end of 2024. Earlier drafts would have outlawed any comparison between Israel and Nazi Germany as “trivialising” the Holocaust and banned public speech calling for the ill-defined “denial” of a state’s existence.
If passed, the law in its current form will broaden the definition of “apology for terrorism” – defending or justifying terrorist acts, considered an offence in France – to include speech that “implicitly” justifies or downplays acts deemed terrorist. The law would also make it illegal to call for the “destruction” of any country recognised by France, punishable by five years in prison.
The draft law’s preamble leaves little doubt which country the authors have in mind.
“Today, anti-Jewish hatred in our country is fuelled by an obsessive hatred of Israel, whose very existence is regularly delegitimised and criminalised,” it reads.
“This hatred of the State of Israel is now inseparable from hatred of Jews,” the law says.
UN’s Albanese slams ‘shameful and defamatory’ anti-Semitism accusations against her
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The proposed law – dubbed the “Yadan law” after lawmaker Caroline Yadan, who introduced it – has split the National Assembly. Critics say it is a misguided attempt to crack down on anti-Semitism that could backfire, possibly even fuelling further hatred against the Jewish community.
A petition on the official site of the National Assembly protesting the draft bill had garnered more than 160,000 signatures as of Friday.
But the 2024 annual report released by France’s National Consultative Commission on Human Rights on the fight against racism, anti-Semitism and xenophobia said its surveys have not found a statistically significant connection between respondents holding a negative view of the political or religious ideology of Zionism and anti-Semitic prejudices.
“It is therefore difficult to view anti-Zionism as the key driver of contemporary anti-Semitism,” the report read.
Lawmakers on the left – from Socialist Party leaders to the Greens and the hard-left France Unbowed – have slammed the law as an attempt to stifle legitimate criticism of the Israeli government by defining it as fundamentally anti-Semitic. The far-right National Rally, the right-wing Les Républicains, the centre-right bloc and a handful of Socialist Party members including former president François Hollande have backed the bill.
The French government has not been shy about its support for the law – or its assertion that opposing the creation of a Jewish state on what was previously Palestinian territory is fundamentally anti-Semitic.
Speaking at the 40th annual dinner of the Representative Council of French Jewish Institutions in February, Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu said that the government would bring the bill – first introduced by Yadan in 2024 – to a vote in the spring, arguing that the country needed new laws to deal with what he described as a new form of hatred against France’s Jewish community.
“Contemporary anti-Zionism has become the mask of an old anti-Semitism,” he said, echoing the spirit of the draft law.
Viral video falsely claims Israeli Jews are ‘stealing land’ in Morocco
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Lecornu went on to say that calls for Palestine to be free “From the River to the Sea” – a common slogan among activists – was an explicit call for Israel’s destruction since it refers to Israeli territory. Activists maintain the cry is a demand for freedom for those living on historically Palestinian land.
While Lecornu said that criticising the Israeli government and its military actions was legitimate, he accused those describing Israel’s war on Gaza as a “genocide” of “stripping Jews of their history and transforming them from victims into executioners”.
“Talking about ‘genocide’ in Gaza erases their memory of the Holocaust,” he said. “It downplays it and reverses it.”
An earlier version of the draft law proposed to make it illegal to compare Israel to Nazi Germany – an article that was removed on the advice of the Conseil d’état, France’s highest administrative court.
Nathalie Tehio, the president of France’s Human Rights League – a staunch opponent of the proposed law – warned that legally tying the protection of France’s Jewish community to protection of the State of Israel could very well fuel anti-Semitism rather than fight it.
“In reality, it equates French Jews with Israel – which is dangerous in and of itself, as this very equation fuels anti-Semitism,” she said. “But it also gives the impression that there is a double standard, because it is a law that targets the issue of anti-Semitism while also serving as a defence of Israel – so there is a double risk of reinforcing anti-Semitism.”
Other critics have slammed what they describe as overly broad or vague wording that makes it difficult to predict what statements would or wouldn’tfall afoul of the new legislation.
The French Lawyers’ Union in January warned that criminalising statements that “implicitly” justify or incite acts of terror would effectively turn judges into unwilling “thought police”.
Others have questioned the need for such a law in the first place.
François Dubuisson, a professor in international law at the Université libre de Bruxelles, said that France already had a raft of legislation targeting incitement to racial hatred and against “glorifying” terrorism.
“In my view, the current legislation in France is sufficient, because what remains in the amended version of the bill – after taking into account the opinion of the Conseil d’état – is primarily a broadening of the offense of advocating terrorism,” he said. “But it’s important to note that, even under current law, the offense of advocating terrorism is extremely broad and is, in fact, often heavily criticised by a number of international human rights organisations.”
Since the Hamas-led terror attack on Israel on October 7, 2023, France’s “apology for terrorism” law has been used to summon hundreds of activists, trade unionists, researchers and left-wing politicians for police questioning over statements they’ve made in connection to the attacks.
Dubuisson said that the need for a law banning calls for a state’s destruction seemed even less clear.
“To my knowledge, this does not exist anywhere in the world,” he said. “I’m not aware of any legislation – and particularly in Europe – that contains such an offence.”
He argued that calls for the violent destruction of a state and its people would already leave the speaker exposed to a raft of existing laws criminalising incitement to violence.
And while the text’s preamble specifically mentioned Israel, the current wording would also cover calls for the destruction of the state of Palestine, which France recognised in September last year – a decision that prompted Yadan to leave French President Emmanuel Macron’s parliamentary group.
Tehio pointed out that Israel’s existence as a Jewish state continues to be fiercely debated, including by anti-Zionist Jews campaigning for what has become known as a “one-state solution” – Israelis and Palestinians sharing a single state with full and equal rights for all.
“There are some, for example, who believe that there should be a single state comprising both Israel and the Palestinian state together,” she said.
Just what statements the law would ultimately penalise remains deeply unclear. Tehio said that the French PM’s example of a direct call for Israel’s destruction – “From the River to the Sea” – can also be heard on the lips of far-right Israeli activists, though in very different contexts.
“Those who use that phrase will indeed be penalised, because it would be interpreted as implying either the destruction of the Palestinian state or the destruction of the Israeli state,” she said. “But that actually makes no sense.”
