Category World News

European foreign ministers are holding emergency talks to discuss their next steps before a meeting between United States President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin in Alaska on Friday, as Europe fears Ukraine will be excluded and forced into unacceptable territorial compromises to end the Russia-Ukraine war, now in its fourth year.

In a pre-US-Russia summit push aimed at consensus, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz invited Trump, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, the NATO secretary general and several European leaders to a virtual meeting on Wednesday.

The European Union’s top diplomats held a meeting by video link on Monday with their Ukrainian counterpart Andrii Sybiha.

“The path to peace in Ukraine cannot be decided without Ukraine,” leaders from France, Germany, Italy, Poland, Britain and Finland, and EU Commission chief Ursula von der Leyen said in a joint statement ahead of the call.

Zelenskyy said on Monday that concessions to Moscow would not persuade it to stop fighting and that there was a need to ramp up pressure on the Kremlin. “Concessions do not persuade a killer,” he said.

Zelenskyy insists he will never consent to any Russian annexation of Ukrainian territory nor give up his country’s bid for NATO membership. European leaders have also underscored their commitment to the idea that international borders cannot be changed by force.

The EU has insisted that Kyiv and European powers should be part of any deal. The EU’s top diplomat, Kaja Kallas, said “the US has the power to force Russia to negotiate seriously”, but “any deal between the US and Russia must have Ukraine and the EU included, for it is a matter of Ukraine’s and the whole of Europe’s security.”

Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk on Monday said that the US had pledged to consult with Europe ahead of the summit. “I will wait… for the effects of the meeting between Presidents Trump and Putin – I have many fears and a lot of hope,” he said.

British Prime Minister Keir Starmer also expressed support for Trump’s efforts to end the war with Ukraine, as long as the terms for ending the war are not dictated.

“Any peace must be built with Ukraine, not imposed upon it, and we will not reward aggression or compromise sovereignty. Ukraine will decide its own future, and we will support it every step of the way,” he said.

Trump announced last week that he would meet Putin in Alaska on Friday to try to resolve the ongoing conflict. The meeting will be the first between a sitting US and Russian president since 2021.

The US president is reportedly open to inviting Zelenskyy to Alaska, but there has been no confirmation as of yet. Putin has insisted the conditions must be right for him and the Ukrainian leader to meet in person.

Aerial assaults intensifying

In the meantime, aerial exchanges have intensified with diplomatic momentum to end the war in play, with Ukraine claiming to have hit a facility that produces missile components in Russia’s Nizhny Novgorod region.

Local authorities said one person was killed in the attack and two were wounded. An official told Reuters that at least four drones hit the Arzamas manufacturing plant producing control systems and other components for Russian X-32 and X-101 missiles.

The Russian Defence Ministry said its air defence units destroyed a total of 59 Ukrainian drones overnight, including 12 over the Tula region, as well as over the Crimean Peninsula that Russia annexed in 2014.

The ministry also said its forces had taken control of the settlement of Lunacharske in the Donetsk region of eastern Ukraine, which Ukraine renamed Fedorivka in 2016.

United States President Donald Trump has announced that he is placing the nation’s capital under direct federal control and will be sending in the US National Guard.

At a press conference on Monday, Trump announced it was “liberation day” in DC, claiming a crime spree that is not supported by evidence.

“I’m officially invoking Section 740, of the District of Columbia Home Rule Act. You know what that is, and placing the DC Metropolitan Police Department under direct federal control,” he said.

“I’m deploying the National Guard to help re-establish law, order and public safety in Washington, DC. They’re going to be allowed to do their job properly.”

He said 800 National Guard troops will be deployed and that the government “will bring in the military if needed”.

Critics have said the plan would trample on the rights of residents in a city where advocates have for decades pushed for more autonomy, including statehood.

Trump said that under the newly declared “public safety emergency”, Attorney General Pam Bondi is taking control of Washington, DC’s Metropolitan Police Department.

While Washington, DC has for years grappled with high crime rates, violent crime has been on the decline since 2023.

The city’s crime rates in 2024 were already their lowest in three decades, according to figures produced by the Department of Justice before Trump took office.

The news conference on Monday comes after Trump surged federal law enforcement across the city last week, deploying agents from several federal agencies to work alongside the local Metropolitan Police Department.

Critics have dismissed the move as a short-term publicity stunt.

Trump deployed the National Guard and the Marine Corps to respond to immigrant-rights protests in Los Angeles in June. Trump also deployed the National Guard to Washington, DC to respond to Black Lives Matter protests during his first term.

The mayor of Washington, DC, Muriel Bowser, has questioned the effectiveness of deploying the National Guard to enforce local laws, saying that more funding for prosecutors would make a more meaningful difference.

Bowser has also criticised Trump’s portrayal of the capital as “one of the most dangerous cities anywhere in the world”.

“Any comparison to a war-torn country is hyperbolic and false,” she said in an interview with MSNBC on Friday.

Trump has also taken aim at the homeless population in Washington, DC, saying that they must be cleared immediately. He offered no further information on where they would go.

“The Homeless have to move out, IMMEDIATELY,” Trump wrote Sunday. “We will give you places to stay, but FAR from the Capital. The Criminals, you don’t have to move out. We’re going to put you in jail where you belong.”

As president, Trump wields broad authority over the US capital, particularly when it comes to law enforcement, but he remains limited in more fully taking control of the city.

The 1973 Home Rule Act created some standards of self-governance, including the right for residents to elect local officials.

Congress would need to overturn the law to bring the city more firmly under the control of the White House.

A United States judge has denied a request by the Department of Justice (DOJ) to unseal transcripts from a grand jury that indicted sex offender Ghislaine Maxwell, the imprisoned former girlfriend and associate of deceased sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.

In a decision issued on Monday, Judge Paul A Engelmayer said lawyers for the government failed to convince the court that extraordinary circumstances warranted the release of the grand jury testimony, which is typically delivered privately and sealed.

“[The government’s] entire premise – that the Maxwell grand jury materials would bring to light meaningful new information about Epstein’s and Maxwell’s crimes, or the Government’s investigation into them – is demonstrably false,” Engelmayer wrote in his decision.

The DOJ in June announced it would not release any additional documents from the investigation into Epstein, causing an uproar among President Donald Trump’s base, which holds a number of conspiracy theories about the well-connected sex trafficker.

In an effort to quell the backlash, the DOJ at the order of Trump then sought to unseal transcripts both from Maxwell’s grand jury as well as Epstein’s.

In 2021, Maxwell was convicted of luring teenage girls to be sexually abused by Epstein – a one-time friend to the powerful and influential in the US – and was sentenced to 20 years in prison for her crimes.

India’s opposition parties have held a protest demanding the rollback of a revision of the voter list in the eastern state of Bihar, where elections are scheduled for its legislature in November.

Hundreds of lawmakers and supporters began Monday’s protest from parliament and were confronted by police who stopped them from marching towards the Election Commission office in the capital, New Delhi. Police briefly detained dozens of lawmakers, including the leader of the opposition Rahul Gandhi.

“This fight is not political but for saving the constitution,” Gandhi, who is an MP from the Indian National Congress party, told reporters after being detained.

“The truth is before the entire country,” he added.

More than 200 people took part in the protest, according to police officials quoted by the NDTV channel.

India’s opposition accuses the Election Commission of rushing through a mammoth electoral roll revision in the eastern state of Bihar, saying the exercise could render vast numbers of citizens unable to vote.

Gandhi last week said the revision of electoral rolls in Bihar is an “institutionalised chori [theft] to deny the poor their right to vote”.

The revision of nearly 80 million voter registrations

The revision affecting nearly 80 million voters involves strict documentation requirements from citizens, triggering concerns it could lead to the exclusion of vulnerable groups, especially those who are unable to produce the paperwork required to prove their citizenship.

Some of the documents required include birth certificates, passports and matriculation records.

Critics and opposition leaders said they are hard to come by in Bihar, where the literacy rate is among the lowest in India. They said the exercise will impact minorities the most, including Muslims, and bar them from voting.

India does not have a unique national identity card. The widely used biometric-linked identity card, called Aadhaar, is not among the documents listed by the Election Commission as acceptable proof for the electoral roll revision.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi‘s ruling Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) called the opposition leaders’ protest a “well-thought-out strategy” to create a “state of anarchy”, the NDTV reported.

‘Intensive revision’ needed, Election Commission says

The election body has denied the voter disenfranchisement allegations and has promised to ensure that no eligible voter is “left behind”. It has also said the “intensive revision” is a routine update needed to avoid the “inclusion of the names of foreign illegal immigrants”.

According to the commission, 49.6 million voters whose names were included in a similar exercise in 2003 are not required to submit any further documents. But that still leaves almost 30 million other voters potentially vulnerable. A similar roll revision of voters is scheduled to be replicated across the entire country of 1.4 billion people.

Bihar is a crucial election battleground where the BJP has only ever governed in a coalition. Election results there could likely impact the balance of power in India’s Parliament.

The BJP has backed the revision and said it is necessary to update new voters and delete the names of those who have either died or moved to other states.

It also claimed the exercise is essential to weed out undocumented Muslim immigrants from neighbouring Bangladesh. But many Indian citizens, most of them Muslims, have been arrested and even deported to Bangladesh as part of a campaign launched by the BJP.

Critics and opposition leaders have also warned that the exercise is similar to that of a 2019 citizenship list in eastern India’s Assam state, which left nearly 2 million people at risk of statelessness.

Many of those left off the final citizenship list were Muslims who were declared “foreigners”. Some faced long periods of detention.