The United Nations faces uncertainty as Trump returns to US presidency

WASHINGTON: The White House said Tuesday that its officials “will determine” which news outlets can regularly cover President Donald Trump up close — a sharp break from a century of tradition in which a pool of independently chosen news organizations go where the chief executive does and hold him accountable on behalf of regular Americans.
The move, coupled with the government’s arguments this week in a federal lawsuit over access filed by The Associated Press, represented an unprecedented seizing of control over coverage of the American presidency by any administration. Free speech advocates expressed alarm.
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said the changes would rotate traditional outlets from the group and include some streaming services. Leavitt cast the change as a modernization of the press pool, saying the move would be more inclusive and restore “access back to the American people” who elected Trump. But media experts said the move raised troubling First Amendment issues because the president is choosing who covers him.
“The White House press team, in this administration, will determine who gets to enjoy the very privileged and limited access in spaces such as Air Force One and the Oval Office,” Leavitt said at a daily briefing. She added at another point: “A select group of D.C.-based journalists should no longer have a monopoly of press access at the White House.”
Leavitt said the White House will “double down” on its decision to bar the AP from many presidential events, a departure from the time-tested and sometimes contentious practice for more than a century of a pool of journalists from every platform sharing the presidents’ words and activities with news outlets and congressional offices that can’t attend the close-quarter events. Traditionally, the members of the pool decide who goes in small spaces such as the Oval Office and Air Force One.
“It’s beyond time that the White House press operation reflects the media habits of the American people in 2025, not 1925,” Leavitt said.
At an event later in the Oval Office, the president linked the AP court case with the decision to take control of credentialing for the pool. “We’re going to be now calling those shots,” Trump said.
There are First Amendment implications
The change, said one expert on presidents and the press, “is a dangerous move for democracy.”
”It means the president can pick and choose who covers the executive branch, ignoring the fact that it is the American people who through their taxes pay for the running of the White House, the president’s travels and the press secretary’s salary,” Jon Marshall, a media history professor at Northwestern University and author of “Clash: Presidents and the Press in Times of Crisis,” said in a text.
Eugene Daniels, president of the White House Correspondents’ Association, said the organization consistently expands its membership and pool rotations to facilitate the inclusion of new and emerging outlets.
“This move tears at the independence of a free press in the United States. It suggests the government will choose the journalists who cover the president,” Daniels said in a statement. “In a free country, leaders must not be able to choose their own press corps.”
The Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press called it “a drastic change in how the public obtains information about its government.”
“The White House press pool exists to serve the public, not the presidency,” Bruce D. Brown, the group’s president, said in a statement.
It comes in the context of a federal lawsuit
Leavitt spoke a day after a federal judge refused to immediately order the White House to restore the AP’s access to many presidential events. The news outlet, citing the First Amendment, sued Leavitt and two other White House officials for barring the AP from some presidential events over its refusal to call the Gulf of Mexico the “Gulf of America” as Trump ordered. AP has said its style would retain the “Gulf of Mexico” name but also would note Trump’s decision.
“As you know, we won that lawsuit,” Trump said incorrectly. In fact, US District Judge Trevor N. McFadden said the AP had not demonstrated it had suffered irreparable harm — but urged the Trump administration to reconsider its two-week-old ban, saying that case law in the circuit “is uniformly unhelpful to the White House.”
McFadden’s decision was only for the moment, however. He told attorneys for the Trump administration and the AP that the issue required more exploration before ruling. Another hearing was scheduled for late March.
The AP Stylebook is used by international audiences as well as those within the United States. The AP has said that its guidance was offered to promote clarity.
Another Trump executive order to change the name of the United States’ largest mountain back to Mount McKinley from Denali is being recognized by the AP Stylebook. Trump has the authority to do so because the mountain is completely within the country he oversees, AP has said.

JOLIET, Illinois: A suburban Chicago landlord took a knife from a belt holder and attacked a Palestinian American woman before fatally stabbing her young son 26 times, prosecutors alleged Tuesday during opening statements in the trial for a 2023 murder and hate crime.
Joseph Czuba, 73, is charged in the death of six-year-old Wadee Alfayoumi and the wounding of Hanan Shaheen on Oct. 14, 2023. Authorities said the family was targeted because of their Islamic faith and as a response to the war between Israel and Hamas that erupted on Oct. 7, 2023 with a Hamas attack on southern Israel.
Prosecutor Michael Fitzgerald, a Will County assistant state’s attorney, told jurors they’d hear an emotional 911 call, detailed witness testimony, along with police footage and explicit crime scene photos as he described each of the stab wounds to the boy’s body.

“He could not escape,” Fitzgerald said facing jurors. “If it wasn’t enough that this defendant killed that little boy, he left the knife in the little boy’s body.”
Czuba has pleaded not guilty to three counts of first-degree murder, one count of attempted murder and other charges. He wore a suit and tie to court, his greying hair falling past his shoulders. He did not speak as he watched the proceedings.
Will County Public Defender Kylie Blatti urged jurors to consider each piece of evidence carefully because key parts were missing.
“Go beyond the emotions to carefully examine the evidence,” Blatti said during opening statements. “It is easy to get lost in the horror of those images.”
The family had been renting two rooms from Czuba and his wife, who also lived at the home where the murder happened in suburban Plainfield, nearly 40 miles (65 kilometers) from Chicago.
Shaheen was the first witness and recounted the events leading up to the attack. She said they had not previously had any issues in the two years they had rented from the Czubas. They shared a kitchen and living room with the Czubas in the home.
After the start of the war Czuba told her that they had to move out because Muslims were not welcome. She urged him to “Pray for peace.” Later, he confronted Shaheen and attacked her, holding her down, stabbing her and trying to break her teeth.
“He told me ‘You, as a Muslim, must die,” said Shaheen, who mainly testified in English but had an Arabic translator on standby in her primary language. She occasionally turned to the translator for clarification on questions or to translate for her.
After the attack, Shaheen said was scared and locked herself in the bathroom, noting blood all over her body and the room. She called 911 when she heard her son screaming in another room.
“The landlord is killing me and my baby!” she screamed to the dispatcher multiple times, according to a recording of the call played in court. “He’s killing my baby in other room!”
Yelling could be heard on the background. As the roughly 15-minute recording played in court, Shaheen put her head down, clutching a tissue paper in her hand.
The boy — whose name was initially spelled Wadea Al-Fayoume by authorities — was later pronounced dead at a hospital. Shaheen had more than a dozen stab wounds and it took her weeks to recover.
The attack on the family in Plainfield renewed fears of anti-Muslim discrimination in the Chicago area’s large and established Palestinian community. The proceedings also come amid rising hostility against Muslims and Palestinians in the US since Hamas attacked Israel in October 2023.
Hundreds attended the boy’s janazah, or funeral service, where the boy was remembered as kind and into sports and Legos.
Separately, the father of the boy, who is divorced from Shaheen and did not live at the home, has filed a wrongful death lawsuit. He attended the court proceedings Tuesday along with an uncle.
Shaheen has also retained prominent civil rights attorney Ben Crump, who said she would not talk to reporters during the trial, which is expected to last about a week.
“Hanan Shaheen continues the unimaginable fight for justice for Wadee,” he said in a statement. “We have confidence in the prosecution’s efforts to earn justice for Wadee and Hanan.”