US President Donald Trump has authorized economic and travel sanctions targeting people who work on International Criminal Court investigations of US citizens or US allies such as Israel, drawing condemnation - but also some praise - abroad, reports Reuters.

The ICC is a permanent court that can prosecute individuals for war crimes, crimes against humanity, genocide and the crime of aggression against the territory of member states or by their nationals.

Trump's move, on Thursday, coincided with a visit to Washington by Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who is wanted by the ICC over the war in Gaza.

German Chancellor Olaf Scholz and other EU leaders said on Friday that Trump was wrong to impose sanctions on the ICC.

"Sanctions are the wrong tool," said Scholz. "They jeopardize an institution that is supposed to ensure that the dictators of this world cannot simply persecute people and start wars, and that is very important."

Antonio Costa, the president of the European Council of EU leaders, wrote on social media platform Bluesky that sanctioning the ICC "undermines the international criminal justice system as a whole".

The Netherlands, the host nation of the court based in The Hague, also said it regretted the sanctions.

The ICC itself condemned the sanctions and said it "stands firmly by its personnel and pledges to continue providing justice and hope to millions of innocent victims of atrocities across the world, in all situations before it."

But Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, a staunch ally of Trump, said the sanctions showed it might be time to leave the ICC.

"It's time for Hungary to review what we're doing in an international organization that is under US sanctions! New winds are blowing in international politics. We call it the Trump-tornado," he said on X.

ASSET FREEZES, TRAVEL BANS

Court officials convened meetings in The Hague on Friday to discuss the implications of the sanctions, a source told Reuters on condition of anonymity.

The US sanctions include freezing any US assets of those designated and barring them and their families from visiting the United States.

It was unclear how quickly the US would announce names of people sanctioned. During the first Trump administration in 2020, Washington imposed sanctions on then-prosecutor Fatou Bensouda and one of her top aides over the ICC's investigation into alleged war crimes by American troops in Afghanistan.

The United States, China, Russia and Israel are not members of the ICC.

Trump signed the executive order after US Senate Democrats last week blocked a Republican-led effort to pass legislation setting up a sanctions regime targeting the war crimes court.

The court has taken measures to shield staff from possible US sanctions, paying salaries three months in advance, as it braced for financial restrictions that could cripple the war crimes tribunal, sources told Reuters last month.

In December, the court's president, Judge Tomoko Akane, warned that sanctions would "rapidly undermine the court's operations in all situations and cases, and jeopardize its very existence".

Russia has also taken aim at the court. In 2023, the ICC issued an arrest warrant for President Vladimir Putin, accusing him of the war crime of illegally deporting hundreds of children from Ukraine. 

Russia has banned entry to ICC chief prosecutor Karim Khan and placed him and two ICC judges on its wanted list.

MSH

At least 34 people, including two babies were killed when a contraband fuel depot exploded into flames in southern Benin near the border with Nigeria on Saturday.

According to Beninese Interior Minister Alassane Seidou, “a serious fire occurred in the town of Seme Podji. Another 20 people were seriously wounded in the incident.”

"I can't really give you the cause of the fire, but there is a large gasoline warehouse here and cars, tricycles and motorcycles come from morning to evening,” he added.

Nigeria is a main oil and gas producer where fuel smuggling is very common along its borders, particularly when the government maintains a subsidy to keep fuel prices low.

The majority of the victims were burnt and they could not be not be identified.

It is a long established fact that a reader will be distracted by the readable content of a page when looking at its layout. The point of using Lorem Ipsum is that it has a more-or-less normal distribution of letters, as opposed to using 'Content here, content here', making it look like readable English. Many desktop publishing packages and web page editors now use Lorem Ipsum as their default model text, and a search for 'lorem ipsum' will uncover many web sites still in their infancy. Various versions have evolved over the years, sometimes by accident, sometimes on purpose (injected humour and the like).