ICC arrest warrant for Putin limits where Trump summit could take place – as it happened

The Department of Veterans Affairs announced on Wednesday that it was breaking union contracts with more than 370,000 federal workers employed in the nation’s largest integrated healthcare system, including nurses, doctors, benefits specialists, housekeepers, electricians, painters, food service workers, lawyers, dentists, pharmacists, crisis responders, mental health specialists, cemetery workers and janitors.

In a statement, the VA said that it had notified five unions that it was immediately terminating their collective bargaining agreements, in line with an executive order signed by Donald Trump in March that sought to eliminate collective bargaining or workers at dozens of federal agencies on supposed “national security” grounds.

Everett Kelley, president of the American Federation of Government Employees, said that VA secretary Doug Collins’ decision “to rip up the negotiated union contract for majority of its workforce is another clear example of retaliation against AFGE members for speaking out against the illegal, anti-worker, and anti-veteran policies of this administration”.

“We know this administration is hellbent on silencing nurses and other VA workers to steamroll the destruction of the VA,” a statement from National Nurses United said. “This administration is marching toward the privatization of veteran care so they can move billions of taxpayer money out of the VA system, which is proven to provide excellent veteran-centric care, and into the coffers of private health care corporations run by billionaires.”

“This union-busting decision is an ambush on the people who care for our country’s veterans and their right to stand together in a union, and will without a doubt harm the lifesaving services veterans desperately need,” AFL-CIO president Liz Shuler said. “It’s clear this is explicit retaliation against VA workers whose unions are standing up to the administration’s illegal actions in court and in the streets.”

During an impromptu news conference in the Oval Office on Wednesday, Donald Trump was asked a tough question on Gaza by Nadia Bilbassy Charters, the Washington bureau chief for Al Arabiya, a news channel owned by the Saudi government.

“You’ve said many times that you want to stop wars in the Middle East. Now prime minister Netanyahu is contemplating re-occupying Gaza entirely. Is he defying you, sir, or are you giving him a green light?” Bilbassy Charters, who grew up in Gaza, asked.

Trump avoided the thorny question of whether or not he supports the Israeli prime minister’s reported plan to forgo a peace deal with Hamas and opt for full-scale military occupation of the Palestinian territory. Instead, he pivoted to the boast that, “we have stopped wars in the Middle East, by stopping Iran from having a nuclear weapon.”

The president was far more comfortable with questions laced with praise from two correspondents from far-right news outlets the White House invited to be present.

One of them, Daniel Baldwin, the chief White House correspondent for the fringe, pro-Trump cable channel One America News, asked the president to talk about how the “manufacturing renaissance” he is bringing about “will positively impact the millions of Americans that trusted you with their vote”.

The other, Brian Glenn, a correspondent for Real America’s Voice, a network set up to host Steve Bannon’s podcast, told Trump he had “an entertainment-based question”.

“A few weeks ago, Stephen Colbert announced that he was leaving his show. Howard Stern announced that him and SiriusXM radio are parting ways. Do you think the ‘Hate Trump’ business model that’s been in the entertainment business is going out of business?” Glenn asked.

Stern has made no such announcement, although he is near the end of his contract with the satellite radio provider and there are rumors that the 71-year-old shock jock might end his show.

Trump, a ratings-obsessed, former game-show host, eagerly took the invitation to trash late-night comedians who have mocked him. “Colbert has no talent,” he said. “Fallon has no talent. Kimmel has no talent. They’re next, I hear they’re going to be going.”

As for Stern, who frequently hosted Trump on his show before the developer turned reality TV host entered politics, “I haven’t heard that name in a long time,” Trump said.

“You know when he went down?” Trump asked. “When he endorsed Hillary Clinton, he lost his audience.” That seems unlikely, given that SiriusXM increased Stern’s salary from $90m a year in 2020, four years after he endorsed Clinton. In December 2020, as Trump was frantically lying about his election loss to Joe Biden, SiriusXM offered Stern an improved five-year, $500m deal which he accepted.

The White House confirmed on Wednesday that Donald Trump could meet Vladimir Putin to try to broker an end to the Russian war on Ukraine as soon as next week, but finding a neutral venue to host the summit might not be easy, given that the Russian president was indicted for war crimes in 2023 by the international criminal court, and so is subject to arrest in 125 countries.

That rules out Helsinki, where Trump and Putin met in 2018, since Finland is one of the 125 state parties to the Rome statute authorizing the ICC, and so would be obliged to act on the court’s arrest warrant should Putin visit. Switzerland, Austria, Iceland, Malta, France, Spain and the United Kingdom, which all hosted cold war era summits between American and Soviet leaders, are also out, for the same reason.

Potsdam, where Truman met Stalin in 1945, is also impossible, since Germany is also a signatory to the ICC treaty.

Yalta, where FDR met Stalin and Churchill earlier the same year, would no doubt appeal to Trump’s sense of his own historic importance, but it is, inconveniently for the subject matter of these talks, in Crimea, which was the first part of Ukraine seized by Russia in 2014.

Trump is also unlikely to be welcome in Tehran, where FDR, Stalin and Churchill met in 1943, given the US air strikes on Iran’s nuclear enrichment facilities six weeks ago.

That could mean organizing a summit in Saudi Arabia or Turkey, where talks between Russia and Ukraine have already been held.

Another possibility is Hungary, given that its prime minister, Viktor Orbán, is close to both Trump and Putin, and announced his government’s intention to leave the ICC in April, while welcoming Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, to Budapest, despite an ICC warrant against him for war crimes in Gaza.

Speaking to reporters in the Oval Office earlier today, Trump said: “We had some very good talks with president Putin today and there’s a very good chance that we could be ending the, ending the round — ending the end of that road. That road was long, and continues to be long, but there’s a good chance that there will be a meeting very soon”.

Speaking to reporters in the Oval Office on Wednesday, Donald Trump said that White House lawyers “are already studying” the possibility of legislation to overturn the law granting the District of Columbia self-rule and imposing direct federal control of the capital. The president added that part of the plan would include “bringing in the national guard” to police the district’s streets.

The DC Home Rule Act, signed into law in 1973 by Richard Nixon, gives DC residents the right to elect the mayor, DC council members, and advisory neighborhood commissioners to run day-to-day affairs in the District.

Trump suggested that DC was unsafe based on the anecdotal evidence of one assault early Sunday in the district on Edward Coristine, a former member of Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency who uses the nickname “Big Balls” online. Although Trump suggested that the incident was proof that the district was unable to police its streets, DC police said patrol officers had intervened to stop the assault and arrested two suspected attackers, both 15, on the spot. Emergency technicians then provided medical care to Coristine.

During a White House event to announce new investments in manufacturing by Apple, Donald Trump said the United States will impose a tariff of about 100% on semiconductor chips imported into the country.

Trump told reporters in the Oval Office that the new tariff rate would apply to “all chips and semiconductors coming into the United States” but would not apply to companies that had made a commitment to manufacture in the United States.

“So 100% tariff on all chips and semiconductors coming into the United States”, Trump said. “But if you’ve made a commitment to build [in the US], or if you’re in the process of building, as many are, there is no tariff,” Trump said.

The White House has released a statement to reporters in which the press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, suggests that the idea of a direct meeting between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin, the president of Russia, was proposed by the Russians during Putin’s meeting with US special envoy Steve Witkoff in Moscow on Wednesday.

“As President Trump said earlier today on TRUTH Social, great progress was made during Special Envoy Witkoff’s meeting with President Putin”, Leavitt said. “The Russians expressed their desire to meet with President Trump, and the President is open to meeting with both President Putin and President Zelensky. President Trump wants this brutal war to end.”

The president plans to meet with Russian president Vladimir Putin as early as next week, according to reporting from the New York Times.

Sources tell the Times that Trump plans to follow up with a meeting between himself, Putin and Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy.

The newspaper reports that Trump disclosed the details on a call with European leaders. Although, the meeting with Trump, Putin and Zelenskyy will not include any European counterparts, two people familiar with the plan tell the Times.

This comes after a three-hour meeting today between special envoy Steve Witkoff and Putin, which Trump described as “highly productive” in a post on Truth Social.

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said, in a post on X, that Donald Trump has been briefed on the shooting at Fort Stewart in Georgia, and the White House is monitoring the situation.

Five soldiers were shot and wounded today on the military base in south-east Georgia, before the shooter was taken into custody.

Parts of the base had been locked down earlier on Wednesday after a shooter was reported on the sprawling army post, a spokesperson said.

In an analysis by Politico, Democratic lawmakers from Texas stand to amass almost $400,000 in penalties, for leaving the state in protest during the special session that ends on 19 August.

Politico crunched the numbers and worked out the total based on the fewest lawmakers needed to break quorum, the anticipated length of their out-of-state trips, and the $500-per-day fee they’re being charged.

“Should Democrats refuse to return for the length of the entire special legislative session, which will end on Aug. 19, they could rack up fines totaling at least $382,500,” Politico estimated.

In a post on Truth Social, the president said that “great progress” was made at the meeting between special envoy Steve Witkoff and Russian president Vladimir Putin.

“Afterwards, I updated some of our European Allies. Everyone agrees this War must come to a close, and we will work towards that in the days and weeks to come,” Trump added.

The meeting comes just two days before a deadline the president set for Russia to reach a peace deal in the war with Ukraine, or face fresh sanctions.

Texas state lawmakers – many of whom decamped to Illinois to break quorum over the new GOP-drawn congressional map – were forced to evacuate from their hotel earlier near Chicago today.

The St Charles police department said they responded to a report of a potential bomb threat at the Q-Center hotel and convention complex. Four hundred people were immediately evacuated, and the area was secured as bomb squad units conducted their investigation. No device was found.

On social media, Democratic state representative John Bucy III said that “this is what happens when Republican state leaders publicly call for us to be ‘hunted down’,” referring to the Texas attorney general’s earlier calls to bring absent lawmakers back to the state house.

Illinois governor JB Pritzker said he was aware of the threats, in a post on X. “Threats of violence will be investigated and those responsible will be held accountable,” he added.

JD Vance will reportedly host top administration officials at his residence tonight, where they will discuss a strategy to address the fallout of the government’s mishandling of the Jeffrey Epstein case and come up with a “unified response”, CNN reports.

Among the attendees will reportedly be, attorney Pam Bondi, her deputy Todd Blanche, FBI director Kash Patel and White House chief of staff Susie Wiles.

It comes as the administration weighs whether to release the contents of Blanche’s interviews, including over 10 hours of audio and a transcript, with Epstein accomplice and convicted sex trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell. Two officials told CNN that the materials could be made public as early as this week.

One official told CNN that some of the conversation within the White House has focused on whether making the details from the interview public would bring the Epstein controversy back to the surface, at a time when many officials close to Trump believe the story has finally died down.

Former Democratic congressman Beto O’Rourke, who has emerged as a top funder covering the costs of Texas lawmakers’ exodus, told CNN earlier that he believes they can “stay out long enough to stop this deal in Texas”.

Donald Trump, Texas governor Greg Abbott, and Texas attorney general Ken Paxton are, O’Rourke said, “trying to steal these five seats in Texas because without them Trump’s going to lose a majority in the House of Representatives”.

Without that majority, there’s a check on his lawlessness, accountability for his crimes and corruption, and the possibility of free and fair elections going forward.

The 56 Texas Democrats who left the state are, O’Rourke said, “all that stand between that future and where we are right now”.

I think what they’re doing is the highest form of public service. They’re trying to stop the consolidation of authoritarian power in America.

They are the champions for this democracy, for America, for the rule of law and for our constitution.

Paxton has called their leaving a “dereliction of the duty as elected officials” and said he would pursue a court ruling to declare the seats of “any rogue lawmakers” vacant if they do not return to work at the statehouse by Friday.

“This matters more than any other priority,” said O’Rourke. “We have to stop their power grab.” He added:

The election of 2026 is going to be decided in the summer of 2025, so we have to fight now and every day going forward.

US envoy Steve Witkoff’s meeting with Russian president Vladimir Putin in Moscow on Wednesday went well, a White House official has told Reuters, adding that Washington still planned to proceed with secondary sanctions on Friday.

The Russians are eager to continue engaging with the United States. The secondary sanctions are still expected to be implemented on Friday.

My colleague Jakub Krupa is covering this in greater detail over on our Europe live blog:

If state legislators in California move ahead with governor Gavin Newsom’s plan to hold a special election – and begin the process of redrawing the state’s congressional maps in response to Texas’s plans – they’ll have just five days to announce their decision.

The California legislature returns from its recess on 18 August, and it will have to declare a special election by 22 August, according to KCRA News.

“They’re doing a midterm rejection of objectivity and independence, an act that we could criticise from the sideline, or an act that we can respond to in kind – fight fire with fire,” Newsom said in a press conference last week, referring to Texas Republicans’ plans to pass a new congressional map.

In a post on his Truth Social platform, the president said he would “federalize” the city if local authorities failed to address crime, specifically calling for minors as young as 14 to be prosecuted as adults.

Trump’s threat could theoretically take several forms. The constitution grants Congress broad authority over the federal district, though completely suspending local governance would likely require congressional legislation. Trump could also deploy federal law enforcement or national guard troops under executive authority, as he did during 2020 protests when federal forces cleared Lafayette Square outside the White House over local officials’ objections.

But fully stripping the city’s home rule would likely face fierce Democratic opposition in Congress. Any such move would require congressional legislation that Democrats could block or attempt to challenge in federal courts.

Washington DC, with a population of about 700,000, has actually seen violent crime decline in the first half of 2025 compared with the previous year, and 2024 marked a 30-year low, according to a pre-Trump January report by the Department of Justice. The Democratic-controlled city has frequently clashed with Trump over federal interventions and has long sought statehood, which would grant it full self-governance and congressional representation – which Republican lawmakers have opposed.

The office of the DC mayor, Muriel Bowser, declined a request for comment.

Donald Trump has issued an executive order today imposing an additional 25% tariff on goods from India, saying the country directly or indirectly imported Russian oil, adding to 25% tariffs already announced.

Last week Trump had said the White House would impose a 25% tariff “plus a penalty” of an unspecified amount.

The additional tariffs, which would come into effect after 21 days, mean India will face the highest levy along with Brazil, putting it at a significant disadvantage against regional competitors such as Vietnam and Bangladesh. There is thus mounting pressure on the Indian government to reach a deal.

The move threatens to further complicate US-Indian relations and comes shortly after a Indian government source told Reuters Indian prime minister Narendra Modi would visit China for the first time in over seven years later this month.

US-India ties are facing their most serious crisis in years after talks with India failed to produce a trade agreement.
The White House move, first signalled by Trump on Monday, follows meetings by Trump’s top diplomatic envoy Steve Witkoff in Moscow aimed at pushing Russia to agree to peace in Ukraine.

Trump has threatened higher tariffs on Russia and secondary sanctions on its allies, if Vladimir Putin does not soon move to end the war in Ukraine.

When Donald Trump fought for and won the 2024 presidential election, his victory was built partly on the false assertion that Democrats were responsible for an out-of-control crime wave in the US, with murders and rapes at record highs.

Figures released by the FBI on Tuesday, however, confirm that the nation was as safe as it ever had been during the final full year of the Biden administration. Every category of crime decreased in frequency, and violent crime in particular dropped to levels not seen since the 1960s, per the report.

The bureau’s annual Reported Crimes in the Nation Statistics report reflects a 4.5% year-on-year decrease in all violent crime nationally in 2024, with murder and non-negligent manslaughter falling 14.5% from the 2023 figure.

Reported rapes were down 5.2% from the year before, while aggravated assaults and robberies declined 3% and 8.9% respectively.

The figures belie Trump’s oft-repeated fear-mongering during the election campaign that “soft-on-crime” Democrats had fueled surging crime rates, particularly in major cities under their control.

In May 2024, for example, Trump told reporters attending his hush-money trial in Manhattan that New York prosecutors were fixated on his prosecution while “people are being mugged and killed outside … [I’ve] never seen anything like it in my life”.

Another story we’re keeping tabs on throughout the day is the ongoing redistricting battle in Texas. It’s one that has grown by the day, so here’s where things stand at the moment.

State Democratic lawmakers broke quorum for two consecutive days – forestalling the Texas legislature’s special session. Democrats fled the state over the weekend to protest a new GOP-drawn congressional map that could see Republicans pick up five extra House seats in the 2026 midterms if it passes.

While the legislators camp out in blue states like Illinois, New York and Massachusetts for “as long as it takes”, they’ve also set the stage for a showdown between the Texas governor and nationwide Democrats. The Texas Tribune reports that former Texas congressman Beto O’Rourke has been a top funder covering the costs of the lawmakers’ exodus. A reminder, fleeing Democrats are also facing a $500-a-day fine for leaving the special session without permission. It’s a fee that representatives the Guardian has spoken to are paying out of their own pocket.

Meanwhile, senator John Cornyn of Texas has asked the FBI to aid Texas law enforcement in locating and arresting Democrats who left the state. For his part, the state’s Republican attorney general Ken Paxton said he would pursue a court ruling to declare the seats of “any rogue lawmakers” vacant if they do not return to work at the statehouse by Friday.

Beyond Texas’s borders, a redistricting “arms race” – as state representative Gina Hinojosa described to the Guardian – has ensued. California governor Gavin Newsom is pushing for a special election to ask voters to override the state’s redistricting commission, and approve new maps that would favor California Democrats if Texas moved forward with its gerrymandering plan.

Senator Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee announced today that she plans to run for governor of the state. The Republican lawmaker is now serving her second senate term. Outgoing governor Bill Lee, also a Republican, is term-limited.

In a video announcement posted on social media, Blackburn said she is “ready to deliver the kind of conservative leadership that will ensure our state is America’s conservative leader for this generation and the next”.

Blackburn is a staunch Trump ally, and aligned on many of his agenda items: from immigration to school choice.

Currently, her main contender is Tennessee congressman John Rose, who announced his candidacy for governor back in March.

Hello, and welcome to the day’s live US politics coverage. I’m Shrai Popat and I’ll be bringing you the latest.

Donald Trump has threatened a federal takeover of Washington DC, after an attempted carjacking of a former “department of government efficiency” (Doge) employee.

On Truth Social, the president shared a picture of Edward Coristine – a 19-year-old former Doge staffer – who appeared bloodied after the assault.

Trump wrote that DC is “totally out of control”, and if the city doesn’t “get it’s act together” he will have “no choice but to take Federal control”.

At the beginning of his second term, Trump said he supports a federal takeover of the nation’s capital. As of now, the DC Home Rule Act of 1973 means that DC residents elect their local politicians who run the daily functioning of the city.