Hungary will start the process to withdraw from the International Criminal Court, an official said Thursday, just as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu arrived to red carpet treatment in the country’s capital despite an arrest warrant from the world’s only permanent global tribunal for war crimes and genocide.

Prime Minister Viktor Orbán gave the Israeli leader a welcome with full military honors in Budapest’s Castle District. The two close allies stood side by side as a military band played and an elaborate procession of soldiers on horseback and carrying swords and bayoneted rifles marched by.

As the ceremony unfolded, Orbán’s chief of staff, Gergely Gulyás, released a brief statement saying that “the government will initiate the withdrawal procedure” for leaving the court, which could take a year or more to complete. Netanyahu’s visit to Hungary, which is scheduled to last until Sunday, was only his second foreign trip since the ICC issued the warrant against him in November.

The ICC, based in The Hague, Netherlands, said when issuing its warrant that there was reason to believe Netanyahu and former Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant had committed crimes against humanity in connection with the war in Gaza.

The war began when Hamas-led militants attacked southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, killing around 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and taking 251 hostages, most of whom have since been released in ceasefire agreements and other deals. Israel rescued eight living hostages and has recovered dozens of bodies.

Israel’s offensive has killed more than 50,000 Palestinians, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry, which doesn’t say whether those killed are civilians or combatants. Israel says it has killed around 20,000 militants, without providing evidence. Israeli military’s response resumed last month, shattering a ceasefire.

After the ICC issued the warrant, Orbán invited Netanyahu to Budapest, and accused the court of “interfering in an ongoing conflict for political purposes.” That invitation was in open defiance of the court’s ruling and contradicted Hungary’s obligations as a signatory to arrest any suspects facing a warrant if they set foot on their soil.

All countries in the 27-member European Union, including Hungary, are signatories, but the court relies on member countries to enforce its rulings. Hungary joined the court in 2001 during Orbán’s first term as prime minister.

As congressional lawmakers scramble to respond to President Donald Trump’s slashing of the federal government, one group is already taking a front and center role: military veterans.

From layoffs at the Department of Veterans Affairs to a Pentagon purge of archives that documented diversity in the military, veterans have been acutely affected by Trump’s actions. And with the Republican president determined to continue slashing the federal government, the burden will only grow on veterans, who make up roughly 30% of the federal workforce and often tap government benefits they earned with their military service.

“At a moment of crisis for all of our veterans, the VA’s system of health care and benefits has been disastrously and disgracefully put on the chopping block by the Trump administration,” said Sen. Richard Blumenthal, the top Democrat on the Senate Veterans Affairs Committee, at a news conference last week.

Most veterans voted for Trump last year — nearly 6 in 10, according to AP Votecast, a nationwide survey of more than 120,000 voters. Yet congressional Republicans are standing in support of Trump’s goals even as they encounter fierce pushback in their home districts. At a series of town halls this week, veterans angrily confronted Republican members as they defended the cuts made under Trump adviser Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency.

“Do your job!” Jay Carey, a military veteran, yelled at Republican Rep. Chuck Edwards at a town hall in North Carolina.

“I’m a retired military officer,” an attendee at another forum in Wyoming told Republican Rep. Harriet Hageman before questioning whether DOGE had actually discovered any “fraud.”

Although Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson advised his members to skip the town halls and claimed that they were being filled with paid protesters, some Republicans were still holding them and trying to respond to the criticism.

“It looks radical, but it’s not. I call it stewardship, in my opinion,” Republican Rep. Gus Bilirakis of Florida said on a tele-town hall. “I think they’re doing right by the American taxpayer. And I support that principle of DOGE.”

Still, some Republicans have expressed unease with the seemingly indiscriminate firings of veterans, especially when they have not been looped in on the administration’s plans. At a town hall on Friday, Texas Republican Rep. Dan Crenshaw told the audience, “We’re learning about this stuff at the speed of light, the way you are. I think there’s been some babies thrown out with the bath water here, but we’re still gathering information on it.”

Crenshaw, a former Navy SEAL, added, “If you’re doing a job that we need you to do, you’re doing it well, yeah, we’ve got to fight for you.”

The Republican chair of the House Veterans Affairs Committee, Rep. Mike Bost, assured listeners on a tele-town hall last week that he and Veterans Affairs Secretary Doug Collins are talking regularly. As the VA implements plans to cut roughly 80,000 jobs, Bost has said he is watching the process closely, but he has expressed support and echoed Collins’ assurances that veterans’ health care and benefits won’t be slashed.

“They’ve cut a lot, but understand this: Essential jobs are not being cut,” Bost said, but then added that his office was helping alert the VA when people with essential jobs had in fact been terminated.

Two federal judges this month ordered the Trump administration to rehire the probationary employees who were let go in the mass firings. At the VA, some of those employees have now been put on administrative leave, but a sense of dread and confusion is still hanging over much of the federal workforce.

President Donald Trump signed an executive order imposing sanctions on the International Criminal Court over investigations of Israel, a close U.S. ally.

Neither the U.S. nor Israel is a member of or recognizes the court, which has issued an arrest warrant for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for alleged war crimes over his military response in Gaza after the Hamas attack against Israel in October 2023. Tens of thousands of Palestinians, including children, have been killed during the Israeli military’s response.

The order Trump signed Thursday accuses the ICC of engaging in “illegitimate and baseless actions targeting America and our close ally Israel” and of abusing its power by issuing “baseless arrest warrants” against Netanyahu and his former defense minister, Yoav Gallant.

“The ICC has no jurisdiction over the United States or Israel,” the order states, adding that the court had set a “dangerous precedent” with its actions against both countries.

Trump’s action came as Netanyahu was visiting Washington. He and Trump held talks Tuesday at the White House, and Netanyahu spent some of Thursday meeting with lawmakers on Capitol Hill.

The order says the U.S. will impose “tangible and significant consequences” on those responsible for the ICC’s “transgressions.” Actions may include blocking property and assets and not allowing ICC officials, employees and relatives to enter the United States.

Human rights activists said sanctioning court officials would have a chilling effect and run counter to U.S. interests in other conflict zones where the court is investigating.

“Victims of human rights abuses around the world turn to the International Criminal Court when they have nowhere else to go, and President Trump’s executive order will make it harder for them to find justice,” said Charlie Hogle, staff attorney with American Civil Liberties Union’s National Security Project. “The order also raises serious First Amendment concerns because it puts people in the United States at risk of harsh penalties for helping the court identify and investigate atrocities committed anywhere, by anyone.”

Hogle said the order “is an attack on both accountability and free speech.”

“You can disagree with the court and the way it operates, but this is beyond the pale,” Sarah Yager, Washington director of Human Rights Watch, said in an interview prior to the announcement.

Like Israel, the U.S. is not among the court’s 124 members and has long harbored suspicions that a global court could arbitrarily prosecute U.S. officials. A 2002 law authorizes the Pentagon to liberate any American or U.S. ally held by the court. In 2020, Trump sanctioned chief prosecutor Karim Khan’s predecessor, Fatou Bensouda, over her decision to open an inquiry into war crimes committed by all sides, including the U.S., in Afghanistan.

However, those sanctions were lifted under President Joe Biden, and the U.S. began to tepidly cooperate with the tribunal — especially after Khan in 2023 charged Russian President Vladimir Putin with war crimes in Ukraine.

Driving that turnaround was Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., who organized meetings in Washington, New York and Europe between Khan and GOP lawmakers who have been among the court’s fiercest critics.

Now, Graham says he feels betrayed by Khan — and is vowing to crush the court as well as the economy of any country that tries to enforce the arrest warrant against Netanyahu.

Elon Musk made a clear promise after Donald Trump decided to put him in charge of making the government more efficient.

“It’s not going to be some sort of backroom secret thing,” Musk said last year. “It will be as transparent as possible,” maybe even streamed live online. It hasn’t worked out that way so far.

In the three weeks since the Republican president has been back in the White House, Musk has rapidly burrowed deep into federal agencies while avoiding public scrutiny of his work. He has not answered questions from journalists or attended any hearings with lawmakers. Staff members for his so-called Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, have sidelined career officials around Washington.

It is a profound challenge not only to business-as-usual within the federal government, which Trump campaigned on disrupting, but to concepts of consensus and transparency that are foundational in a democratic system. Musk describes himself as “White House tech support,” and he has embedded himself in an unorthodox administration where there are no discernible limits on his influence.

Donald K. Sherman, executive director of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, said Trump has allowed Musk to “exert unprecedented power and authority over government systems” with “maximal secrecy and little-to-no accountability.”

The White House insisted that DOGE is “extremely transparent” and shared examples of its work so far, such as canceling contracts and ending leases for underused buildings. House Republicans said the Trump administration also discovered that Social Security benefits were being paid to a dozen people listed as 150 years old.

“We’re going to find billions, hundreds of billions of dollars of fraud and abuse and, you know, the people elected me on that,” Trump said in a Fox News interview to be aired along with the Super Bowl on Sunday. He described Musk as “terrific” and said he would soon focus on the Department of Defense, the country’s largest government agency.

That is true, at least judging by Musk’s social media, where no thought appears to be suppressed. His X account is a flood of internet memes, attacks on critics and professions of loyalty to the president. He has made clear the grand scope of his ambitions, talking in existential terms about the need to reverse the federal deficit, cut government spending and roll back progressive programs.

“This administration has one chance for major reform that may never come again,” he posted on Saturday. “It’s now or never.”

Musk is used to doing things his own way. The world’s richest person, he became wealthy with the online payment service PayPal, then took over the electric car manufacturer Tesla and founded the rocket company SpaceX. More recently, he bought Twitter and rebranded it as X, cutting jobs and remaking its culture.

Advocates for transgender rights are turning to a conservative-dominated Supreme Court after a presidential election in which Donald Trump and his allies promised to roll back protections for transgender people.

The justices on Wednesday are taking up the issue of gender-affirming care for transgender minors, which has been banned by Tennessee and 25 other Republican-led states.

The fight over whether transgender adolescents can access puberty blockers and hormonal treatments is part of a broader effort to regulate the lives of transgender people, including which sports competitions they can join and which bathrooms they can use.

Trump backed a national ban on such care as part of his 2024 campaign in which he demeaned and mocked transgender people.

In its waning days, the Biden administration, along with families of transgender adolescents, will appeal to the justices to strike down the Tennessee ban as unlawful sex discrimination and protect the constitutional rights of vulnerable Americans.

“The stakes are high, of course, for transgender adolescents, but also for the parents who are watching their children suffer, who are just trying to do right by their kids,” Chase Strangio, who represents the families at the Supreme Court, said in an interview. Strangio, a lawyer for the American Civil Liberties Union, will be the first openly transgender person to argue before the high court.

A lawyer for Tennessee will argue that the “life-altering gender-transition procedures” are risky and unproven and that it’s the state’s role to protect children.

Trump nominated three justices in his first term who pushed the court in a more conservative direction that included the decision in 2022 overturning the landmark Roe v. Wade ruling, which had protected abortion rights for nearly 50 years.

Yet one of Trump’s appointees, Justice Neil Gorsuch, also authored a ruling in 2020 that protected LGBTQ people from discrimination in the workplace under federal civil rights law.

The administration and transgender families both rely on that decision to bolster their arguments.

After Trump takes office on Jan. 20, 2025, it’s possible the new administration could weigh in on the case, which is not expected to be decided until the spring.

There are about 300,000 people between age 13 and 17, and 1.3 million adults who identify as transgender in the United States, according to the Williams Institute at the UCLA School of Law. The Williams Institute is a think tank that researches sexual orientation and gender identity demographics to inform laws and public policy decisions.

Most Republican-controlled states have adopted a ban similar to the one in Tennessee, and those laws mostly are in effect, despite legal challenges. The Tennessee case is the first time the nation’s top court will consider the constitutionality of the bans.

Sivan Kotler-Berkowitz, a 20-year-old college student in Massachusetts who is transgender, said his life would have been very different if he were just a few years younger and living in one of the states.

“These bans are denying people the opportunity to live and excel,” he said in an interview. “There are thousands of transgender youth across the country that are thriving just like me because we’ve had the love and understanding of our families and because we’ve had access to proper care.”

The bans in Tennessee and elsewhere have put families in the position of deciding whether to travel for ongoing health care, go without or wait until their children turn 18.

Erin Friday, a leader of Our Duty, an international group that supports the bans on gender-affirming care for minors, said the case is going to be as important as Roe v. Wade. She said upholding the Tennessee law would bolster the cases for the laws restricting sports participation and bathroom use.