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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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.”