Fears persist about Trump ‘sucking up’ to Xi on Taiwan, but few concrete outcomes anticipated from US meeting

When Xi Jinping, China’s leader, touches down in Maryland on Wednesday, he will step out into the arms – perhaps a hug, if Donald Trump’s wishes come true – of a US president who has shown China more bonhomie than any of his recent predecessors.

The meeting between Xi and Trump this week will be the second time that the leaders of the world’s two biggest economies have talked face to face this year. At the previous summit, held in Beijing in May, there was much talk of building a “strategic stability” between the two powers. But there was little by way of concrete outcomes: the countries remain at loggerheads over trade, export controls and geopolitics.

US officials have begun to buy back wind leases as president seeks to block renewables in favor of fossil fuels

Democratic attorneys general from California and New York have sued the Trump administration over its plans to buy back offshore wind leases as Donald Trump seeks to discourage the expansion of wind energy in favor of fossil fuels.

California’s attorney general, Rob Bonta, said he was suing over removal of a project off his state’s coast planned by Chicago-based Invenergy. The Trump administration said in June it was buying back the company’s US offshore wind leases for four wind projects on the east and west coasts.

Gone was any shred of US idealism. It was a spectacle of raw power – a power that is likely to only diminish in the years ahead

Expectations were low for Donald Trump’s address to the UN on Tuesday, and yet somehow it was even worse than expected. He does not perform well in formal settings, like chambers of government, preferring a blingier room, like Mar-a-Lago, or an outdoor rally. For years, he has made no secret of his hostility to the UN, and the very principles of international order that define it.

In recent years, that hostility has deepened into something more like a full-on assault, with frequent attacks on the international criminal court (perhaps out of fear that he will someday be indicted), on the UN’s climate agenda, and on Unesco (which the US decided to withdraw from in July 2025).

President made more than 440 purchases and 700 sales despite voter anger over elected officials trading stocks

Donald Trump made over a thousand stock sales and purchases worth between $79m and $270m in July, according to a Guardian analysis of his latest financial disclosure released Tuesday.

His two largest sales were of Amazon and Microsoft stock, selling between $5m and $25m each on 20 July. That same day, he also sold up to $5m worth of Oracle and Costco stock, $500,000 to $1m in Nvidia, and bought up to $5m worth of shares in Intuit and Salesforce, among dozens of other transactions.

US president calls UK prime minister ‘a natural businessperson’ as leaders meet at UN assembly in New York

Donald Trump has asserted his relationship with the UK is “more up” with Andy Burnham than under Keir Starmer despite tensions between the two countries on a range of thorny issues including regulation of artificial intelligence, the Chagos islands and the war in Iran.

At their first face-to-face meeting, the US president praised Burnham, who sat nervously alongside him, as a “natural businessperson”, saying he thought he had “lots of assets on his side” and would be a “great” prime minister.

But industry trade group says plan would backfire and lead to even higher prices for gasoline

• US politics live – latest updates

Donald Trump on Tuesday said he backed ⁠the idea of a ban on diesel exports, which some US politicians are calling for ⁠as a way ⁠to curb ​the soaring cost of energy.

Diesel prices have rallied in Europe and the US to ⁠record highs as wars in Iran and Ukraine sharply cut exports from some of the biggest producers ⁠such as Russia, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. A gallon of diesel fuel in the US was $6.53 on Tuesday, the highest average on record and over 75% higher than a year ago.

Meeting at the UN in New York, the UK prime minister showed signs he can handle trash-talking President Trump

• US politics live – latest updates

How do you deal with a problem like The Donald? The simple answer is that you don’t. You can’t. The normal rules of political engagement don’t apply. The US president is like a five-year-old child with the world as his set of toys: a King Baby.

Nothing is ever constant or predictable. What’s agreed one day can be forgotten the next. Any deal can be interrupted with a temper tantrum at any time. Trying to second-guess Donald Trump is a fool’s errand.

US president may have upstaged the ghost of Soviet leader Khrushchev by musing destruction of fellow member state

Donald Trump has a habit of discomfiting delegates to the United Nations general assembly. But this year, he may have upstaged the ghost of former Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev by openly contemplating the annihilation of a fellow UN member state.

Eleven minutes into a 40-minute address, the US president announced he had “a big decision to make” over Iran, which has staged a much more determined resistance than Trump anticipated when he decided to go to war against the country in February.

GOP nominee for governor Byron Donalds removes multiple mentions of president from his campaign website

• US politics live – latest updates

Another prominent Florida Republican has publicly distanced himself from Donald Trump, days after María Elvira Salazar called out the US president’s immigration-enforcement policy targeting law-abiding undocumented immigrants.

Byron Donalds, the Republican nominee for governor in November’s US midterm elections, launched an updated campaign website on Tuesday that was stripped of almost every mention of Trump and removed a photograph of the congressman and his wife, Erika, posing with the president, the Miami Herald reported.

Jake and Logan Paul were invited to give a motivational speech. Just don’t let them get involved with military policy

We’re now approaching month seven of a war against Iran that Donald Trump repeatedly assured us would be over in a matter of weeks. Prices are rising, troop morale is plummeting, and there is little evidence things will improve.

The situation is so desperate that the decision makers at the Pentagon have decided to bring out the big guns. I’m not talking about nuclear weapons, although Trump recently threatened to “blow the entire nation [of Iran] up”. No, I’m talking about influencers Jake and Logan Paul, who are famous for doing idiotic stunts on YouTube and getting hit in the face during boxing matches. Last Thursday, Pete Hegseth’s Department of Defense or whatever they’re calling it these days (the Department of War Crimes?) welcomed the Paul brothers to Washington DC “to meet with our warriors” and deliver a motivational speech. In response, former Republican congressman and air force officer Adam Kinzinger wrote, “We aren’t a serious country at the moment.” That about sums it up.

‘I’ll cross that bridge when I get to it,’ the progressive US representative says

• US politics live – latest updates

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the progressive Democratic congresswoman, has refused to rule out a potential run against the party’s Senate leader Chuck Schumer amid mounting speculation around her political ambitions.

When asked by the New York Times whether she would challenge Schumer in 2028, when his current term is up, Ocasio-Cortez declined to exclude the possibility – even if Democrats win back the Senate majority.

Putin ally helped cover cost of renting private island in the Bahamas for wedding of Trump Jr and Bettina Anderson

• US politics live – latest updates

A Republican senator has accused Donald Trump Jr of corruption and demanded a Senate investigation into revelations that a Russian oligarch bankrolled part of his recent wedding in the Bahamas.

John Curtis, of Utah, wrote to the leaders of the US Senate judiciary committee on Tuesday, urging them to subpoena Trump Jr over his business dealings, his relationships with foreign individuals, gifts he has received – and any occasions where his connection to his father, Donald Trump, “was invoked or understood to provide value”.

Mark Rutte has the right idea – go beyond Washington and make the case for the transatlantic alliance to the public. They may well have a willing ear

At a moment when Europe is focused on persuading Donald Trump to remain committed to Nato, it needs to convince Americans, too. So the presence this evening of the Nato secretary general, Mark Rutte, in front of a public audience in Des Moines, Iowa, is significant. This is the home town of Trump’s ambassador to Nato, Matthew Whitaker, and the visit brings the debate over Nato’s future directly to a midwestern audience in a red state that operates far from elite foreign-policy circles in Washington. Rutte’s appearance is long overdue.

Russia’s war in Ukraine and uncertainty over the US commitment to European security have forced European leaders to confront their dependence on Washington. While some are pressing for building European capabilities as a means to separate from the US, others see greater European defence spending as essential to keeping the US engaged. Either way, European governments can’t rely solely on meetings with Trump to secure the alliance’s future.

Prime minister pledges to work hard to settle row over Chagos Islands after president slates ‘terrible deal’

Veronica Escobar tells Guardian she was prevented from speaking to detainees at much-criticized Texas facility

Federal immigration officials in Texas prevented US representative Veronica Escobar from fully conducting her congressional oversight duties at a controversial Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention center, the lawmaker said in an interview with the Guardian.

Escobar, a Democrat who represents El Paso and surrounding areas on the US-Mexico border in west Texas, conducted an oversight visit last month at the Camp East Montana ICE tent facility housed in the Fort Bliss military base, after two separate “disturbances” had been reported there in recent weeks.

It’s becoming obvious to many Americans that corporations have been raking it in while workers take it on the chin

Last week, the unlikely duo of Bernie Sanders and Steve Bannon spoke before a Washington group demanding a stop to AI and its datacenters.

Notably, both lambasted the corporate oligarchs behind AI.

The rights of overseas voters are protected by US federal law. It’s not hard – but Americans should start planning now

The UK hosts the second largest population of voting-age US citizens outside the United States, but Americans living in the UK vote at very low levels in US elections.

The US government’s Federal Voting Assistance Program (FVAP) estimated that there were 298,268 voting-age US citizens in the UK in 2022, second only to Canada. But FVAP also estimated that only 3.8% of these US citizens in Britain voted in that year’s midterm elections. Why do hundreds of thousands of eligible US voters in the UK not exercise their right to vote, even though US rules for voting abroad are relatively welcoming compared to many other countries?

Trump’s announcement on Russia ally comes as he steps up his trade war with Canada, a long-term US ally and top supplier of potash

President Donald Trump has said he is working on a “massive” deal to buy fertiliser from Belarus, pivoting away from main supplier Canada amid an escalating trade dispute, and moving instead toward an ally of Russia.

“The United States is working on a massive deal with respect to the purchase of Potash from Belarus,” Trump said on his Truth Social network. “The pricing would be for substantially less than we are currently paying to Canada, very good news for our farmers and ranchers.”

Trump Truth Social post likens AI skeptics to global warming and climate change warnings from environmentalists

CNN, MS Now and Politico accurately call last week’s sudden lockout ‘a direct assault on the first amendment’. That’s right

On Monday, the three news organizations that had been kicked out of the White House because of Donald Trump’s latest fit of pique sued the president and three top advisers.

An accompanying statement by CNN, MS Now and Politico accurately calls last week’s sudden lockout “a direct assault on the first amendment”.

The Made in Europe scheme is designed to protect the continent’s manufacturing from global competition like China

Ukraine's Prosecutor General Ruslan Kravchenko resigned on 7 September, hours after publicly defending himself, as anti-corruption investigators closed in on an alleged criminal organization operating inside his own office.

"I do not want the position of prosecutor general to be used as an instrument of political confrontation," Kravchenko said, announcing his departure on Telegram. "My position regarding the charges remains unchanged"—a denial he has held throughout, including in a 6 September statement rejecting any role in protecting the call centers.

President Volodymyr Zelenskyy confirmed the resignation on the evening of 7 September. "I had a fairly long meeting with the prosecutor general; he submitted the relevant resignation letter, and the submission will be sent to the Verkhovna Rada," Zelenskyy said, adding that he had spent the day on personnel matters and had also met the heads of the National Anti-Corruption Bureau (NABU) and the Specialized Anti-Corruption Prosecutor's Office (SAPO). The resignation is not final until parliament acts on it.

It reads as a scandal. It is closer to the opposite.

Kravchenko was appointed in June 2025, as the anti-corruption agencies were pressing toward figures close to the president—and his appointment came alongside the draft law, No. 12414, that would have put NABU and SAPO under his control. That law triggered the first street protests since Russia's invasion; within ten days, parliament reversed the part stripping the agencies' independence.

The provisions handing Kravchenko a personnel monopoly over the prosecution service were never repealed.

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Ukraine’s anti-corruption cops just beat the president—but the fight’s not over

Since then, those agencies have forced out Andriy Yermak, the second-most-powerful man in the country. Now they have reached the prosecutor general—whose office kept, even after the capture law was reversed, a personnel monopoly over the prosecution service.

The corruption is not new. What is new is that it is being caught, and that being caught now costs the powerful their offices. The story of the past year is not that Ukraine is coming apart, but that its watchdogs have stopped being toothless.

What Operation Carthage found

On 5 September, NABU and SAPO announced they had uncovered a criminal organization run, investigators say, by a department head inside the Prosecutor General's Office. Its members allegedly took regular bribes from fraudulent call centers—operations that defraud victims in Ukraine and abroad—in exchange for shielding them from prosecution, then laundered the money through property, assets registered to other people, and associates' bank accounts.

The group was formed in mid-2025 and recruited serving prosecutors and associates, NABU and SAPO said. Over 20 million hryvnias (about $449,000) went on property, jewelry, and other high-value assets, according to NABU.

NABU described the organization as run by the head of a department inside the Prosecutor General's Office. Sources told Ukrainska Pravda that the official is Serhii Kropyva, deputy head of the office's International Legal Cooperation Department. He was remanded in custody on 6 September with bail set at 120 million hryvnias (about $2.7 million).

In recordings released by NABU, a figure using the codename "Chancellor," reported to be Kropyva, is described as protected by a "boss." Two details identify that boss: the patronymic "Andriiovych," and a previous job leading the State Tax Service. Ruslan Andriiovych Kravchenko ran the State Tax Service from December 2024 until he became prosecutor general in June 2025. The investigation understands the "boss" to be Kravchenko, the Kyiv Independent reported.

NABU has not publicly named Kravchenko as a suspect. He denies instructing anyone to protect illegal call centers or using his office to shield them. He resigned nonetheless.

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Ukraine’s anti-corruption agencies target Prosecutor General’s Office official linked to fraudulent call centers

The searches, and the surveillance files

NABU searches also reached the offices of Kravchenko himself, his deputy Mariia Vdovychenko, and the head of the Odesa Regional Military Administration, Oleh Kiper. Kravchenko defended the handling of those searches at a 7 September press conference—the same day he resigned.

The investigation into the Prosecutor General's Office is the latest in a widening confrontation between Ukraine's anti-corruption bodies and the institutions around the presidency. When NABU announced the case, it described a senior official running a criminal ring from inside the office meant to prosecute exactly such crimes.

Why it matters

The Prosecutor General's Office is one of the institutions Kyiv relies on to supervise—and, critics say, to restrain—NABU's investigations into figures close to the president. That an investigation reached the prosecutor general himself is a measure of how far the anti-corruption bodies have pushed against that restraint, not a sign they have failed.

It caps a run of accountability cases since July 2025 that would have been unthinkable earlier in the war.

In June 2025, NABU charged Deputy Prime Minister Oleksiy Chernyshov—the only official at Zelenskyy's private birthday during lockdown—with a $24 million land scheme, the first case to reach the president's "family."

The attempt to capture the agencies came weeks later, and failed: in November, Operation Midas exposed a $100 million scheme that forced out Zelenskyy's chief of staff and two ministers, one of them later detained at the border. Other resonant cases include Operation Forest Gump, targeting officials inside the President's Office. Now Carthage has reached the prosecutor general himself.

The pattern that looks like a government in crisis is also a state where stealing at the top is no longer safe—and where the public has twice in a year come into the streets over how power is used: in July 2025 to defend NABU and SAPO, and in July 2026 for a sacked minister.

Kravchenko took office in June 2025. He is the second prosecutor general to leave under a cloud in three years, after Andriy Kostin.

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First real crash test for Ukraine’s anti-corruption institutions

The Prime Minister spoke to Mr Trump on Monday afternoon

Moldova's Victory bloc, a pro-Russian political alliance, plans to participating in the country's September parliamentary elections, the bloc's founder Ilan Shor announced on July 6.

Shor, an exiled pro-Kremlin oligarch, established the Victory bloc in August 2024. The bloc includes his own Shor party, which is banned in Moldova.

Victory will submit documents in the coming days registering the bloc for participation in the September vote, Shor said.

"Our main goal in these elections is to overthrow the fascist regime and hold early democratic elections within the next six months," Shor said.

The candidate list will be headed by Evghenia Gutul, the head of Moldova's Gagauzia region, who is currently on trial for illegally funding the banned Shor party. Gutul maintains ties to Moscow and is currently under U.S. sanctions.

The upcoming September elections carry high stakes for Moldova, one of the pooerest countries in Europe. Moldovan President Maia Sandu said on July 4 that Chisinau's European path rests on the outcome of the vote.

European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen pledged on July 4 that the European Union will help Moldova defend itself against hybrid threats by "agents of autocracy" as elections approach.

Moldova was granted EU candidate status in 2022. Sandu's ruling Party of Action and Solidarity aims to maintain its parliamentary majority and move the country closer to full membership by 2030.

Ukraine war latest: Drones attack Russia’s Black Sea Fleet; Russian pipelines explode in country’s Far East, HUR says

Key developments on July 5-6: * Drones reportedly attack Russia’s Black Sea fleet * Pipelines supplying Russian military explode in Russia’s Far East, HUR source says * Ukrainian drone strike on Russian airfield hits bomb depot, aircraft * Ukraine hits Russian electronic warfare facility making Shahed, Iskander components, General Staff says * Ukraine’s army chief warns of new Russian offensives in northeast as he visits Kharkiv Oblast front Drones attacked Russia’s Black Sea Fleet at the

The Kyiv IndependentThe Kyiv Independent news desk

Andriy Yermak, head of Ukraine's Presidential Office, has been leading campaigns to supplant three top officials in the Ukrainian government, the Economist reported on July 6, citing multiple anonymous officials.

The story follows a corruption probe into Deputy Prime Minister Oleksii Chernyshov, the highest-ranking official in Ukrainian history to face such charges while still in office. According to the Economist's sources, Yermak was a driving force behind the investigation.

Yermak, President Volodymyr Zelensky's close friend and chief adviser, spurred on the Chernyshov probe while also renewing attempts to replace Kyrylo Budanov, head of Ukraine's military intelligence agency (HUR) , and Prime Ministery Denys Shmyhal, three unnamed officials told the Economist.

There is no evidence that Yermak ordered an investigation into Chernyshov, the Economist reports, but officials told the outlet that he influenced the case by allowing it to progress while freezing other investigations.

Chernyshov ran afoul of Yermak by offering himself as an alternative liaison to Washington, the officials claimed. His removal would also reportedly clear the way for Deputy Prime Minister Yuliia Svyrydenko, a Yermak protege, to assume the role of Prime Minister in the event of Shmyhal's dismissal.

Rumors of a government reshuffle unseating Shmyhal have circulated for months. Ukrainian media reported last summer that Zelensky was considering replacing the prime minister with Svyrydenko. While several key officials were replaced in a reshuffle in September 2024, Shmyhal kept his post.

Chernyshov, too, has said he will not step down from his role as deputy prime minister despite the ongoing corruption probe.  

Reports of imminent dismissal have also periodically surrounded Budanov, Ukraine's spy chief. Budanov has rejected such rumors as "Russian propaganda" in the past.

Sources told the Economist that Yermak was leading another effort to oust Budanov in June 2025. According to the outlet, warnings from the White House not to fire Budanov may have helped secure his position.

Politico reported in June that U.S. officials, particularly those working in the Trump administration, found Yermak's diplomatic style abrasive and off-putting, potentially risking U.S.-Ukrainian relations at a critical time.

Ukraine imposes sanctions on Russian financial, cryptocurrency schemes

Restrictions were imposed on 60 legal entities and 73 Russian citizens.

The Kyiv IndependentKateryna Hodunova