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Iran is preparing to deliver in the near future launchers for short-range ballistic missiles that the U.S. said Tehran sent to Russia last year for use against Ukraine, according to two Western security officials and a regional official. The delivery of the Fath-360 launchers - if it occurs - would help support Russia's grinding assault on its neighbor and reaffirm the deepening security ties between Moscow and Tehran. With a 75-mile (120-km) range, the Fath-360 would give Moscow's forces a new weapon to fire at Ukrainian frontline troops, nearby military targets, and population centers close to the border with Russia,...

When U.S. President Donald Trump decided to seek a second term in the White House, Doris Davis and Susie Bartlett - an interracial lesbian couple living in New York City - made a life-changing decision. If he won, they would move abroad. The couple said they had been willing to give Trump a go during his first term, but they'd watched in alarm as he returned to office and ended a range of policies aimed at promoting racial equity and rights for LGBTQ+ people. "We love this country, but we don't love what it has become," Davis, a 69-year-old educational...

Christmas decoration suppliers should have received their first orders for trees and ornaments by now. But they haven't. Chinese producers of plastic Christmas trees and other festive decorations say orders from US clients, which are crucial for their business, have stopped amid a tariff tit-for-tat tariff announcements. President Donald Trump has raised tariffs on Chinese imports by 104 percent so far this year US retailers are almost completely reliant on China for Christmas decorations, where they source 87 percent of the holiday's goods — worth roughly $4 billion. Chinese factories are also heavily dependent on the US market, where they...

(Reuters) - Ukrainian troops appeared on the point of losing their hard-won foothold inside Russia's Kursk region on Wednesday as Moscow claimed further advances there and military bloggers on both sides said Kyiv's forces were withdrawing.Ukraine sprang one of the biggest shocks of the war on August 6 last year by storming across the border and grabbing a chunk of land inside Russia, boosting citizens' morale and gaining a potential bargaining chip. But after clinging for more than seven months to a gradually shrinking area, Ukraine has seen its position worsen sharply in the past week.Russia's defence ministry on Wednesday...

Ukrainian and U.S. officials held crunch talks in Saudi Arabia on Tuesday to find a path towards ending the war with Russia, hours after Kyiv's forces launched their largest drone attack on Moscow to date. -snip- "The meeting has begun very constructively," Andriy Yermak, Zelenskiy's chief of staff who is leading the Ukrainian delegation, wrote on Telegram. -snip- Ukraine overnight launched its biggest drone attack on Moscow yet, deploying at least 91 drones, killing at least three people, sparking fires, closing airports and forcing dozens of flights to be diverted, Russian officials said. The strike - in which 337 drones...

Russian forces damaged Ukrainian energy and gas infrastructure overnight in their first major missile attack since the U.S. paused intelligence sharing with Ukraine, piling pressure on Kyiv as President Donald Trump seeks a swift end to the war. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy, seeking to shore up Western support for his country after Trump's diplomatic pivot towards Moscow, called for a truce covering air and sea, though not ground troops - an idea first mooted by France. "The first steps to establishing real peace should be forcing the sole source of this war, Russia, to stop such attacks," Zelenskiy said on...

Turkey, with the second largest army in NATO after the United States, could contribute to a potential peacekeeping mission in Ukraine, a Turkish defence ministry source said on Wednesday. "The issue of contributing to a mission will be considered if deemed necessary for establishing regional stability and peace, and will be assessed mutually with all relevant parties," the source told reporters in Ankara. -snip- Turkish media reported last week that President Tayyip Erdogan had discussed a possible deployment with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov during separate meetings in Ankara last month. Turkey has maintained cordial...

U.S. President Donald Trump's administration and Ukraine plan to sign the much-debated minerals deal following a disastrous Oval Office meeting Friday in which Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy was dismissed from the building, four people familiar with the situation said on Tuesday. President Donald Trump has told his advisers that he wants to announce the agreement in his address to Congress Tuesday evening, three of the sources said, cautioning that the deal had yet to be signed and the situation could change. The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Ukraine’s presidential administration in Kyiv and the...

The Kremlin said on Tuesday that pausing US military aid to Ukraine would be the best contribution to the cause of peace, but cautioned that Russia needed to clarify the details of the move by US President Donald Trump. -snip- Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov was cautious on reports of a pause in US aid and said the details needed to be seen. “If this is true, then this is a decision that can really encourage the Kyiv regime to (come to) the peace process,” Peskov said. “It is obvious that the United States has been the main supplier of this...

The Kremlin said in remarks published on Tuesday that the next round of Russia-U.S. talks on ending the war in Ukraine is unlikely to happen before the embassies of both countries resume normal operations. "Unlikely," Dmitry Peskov, the press secretary of President Vladimir Putin, told RIA state news agency in response to a question whether the negotiations could start before the two countries' embassies fully reopen. Operations have been curtailed since Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022. -snip- Last week, Russia said it was sending a new ambassador to Washington, the latest sign of a thaw between the two countries, but...

Russia said on Tuesday that any normalisation of relations with the US would require the lifting of sanctions against Moscow. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov was responding to a question about a Reuters report that said the US is drawing up a plan to potentially give Russia sanctions relief as President Donald Trump seeks to restore ties with Moscow and stop the war in Ukraine. "It is probably too early to say anything. We have not heard any official statements, but in any case, our attitude towards sanctions is well known, we consider them illegal," Peskov said. "And, of course, if...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The Trump administration is directing immigration agents to track down hundreds of thousands of migrant children who entered the United States without their parents, expanding the president's mass deportation effort, according to an internal memo reviewed by Reuters. The Immigration and Customs Enforcement memo outlines an unprecedented push to target migrant children who crossed the border illegally as unaccompanied minors. It lays out four phases of implementation, beginning with a planning phase on January 27, though it did not provide a start date for enforcement operations. More than 600,000 immigrant children have crossed the U.S.-Mexico border without...

WASHINGTON, Feb 18 (Reuters) - When Russian President Vladimir Putin launched his invasion of Ukraine nearly three years ago, then-U.S. President Joe Biden took a firm stand in solidarity with Kyiv, forged a bulwark of European allies and set veteran advisers to the task of isolating Moscow economically and diplomatically. Washington's approach changed dramatically with Tuesday's initial meeting between U.S. and Russian negotiators. The officials met just a month after Donald Trump returned to the White House, with Ukraine and NATO partners sidelined by a relatively inexperienced team of Trump aides and Putin granted concessions even before the talks got...

Argentine President Javier Milei could face an impeachment trial in Congress, opposition lawmakers said on Saturday, after the libertarian leader touted a cryptocurrency which crashed soon after.

Ukraine finished work on a draft minerals agreement and handed it back to the United States for review, two sources in the Ukrainian delegation at the Munich Security Conference told Reuters on Friday. The sources said the U.S. side asked for until 5 p.m. (1600 GMT) to review the agreement, which is at the heart of Kyiv's push to win the backing of U.S. President Donald Trump as he strives to bring about a rapid end to the war with Russia. "The Ukrainian side passed its vision and the U.S. side took a pause until 1700 to assess," one of...

President Donald Trump unleashed on “Radical Left Reuters” over a 2018 Pentagon contract to “study large-scale social deception”—a contract awarded during his own administration—and demanded the news agency “GIVE BACK THE MONEY, NOW!”The brief but furious outburst was pushed out early on Thursday as the president cited the revelation as a finding of his newly minted Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). Trump posted on Truth Social:DOGE: Looks like Radical Left Reuters was paid $9,000,000 by the Department of Defense to study “large scale social deception.” GIVE BACK THE MONEY, NOW!Indeed, DOGE’s agency head Elon Musk boosted a post on X...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) -FBI employees were ordered on Sunday to answer a questionnaire about any work they may have done on criminal cases related to the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol, stoking fear about a fresh round of firings at the law enforcement agency. The list of questions in the memo, seen by Reuters, direct employees to give their job title, any role they played in the investigations into the Jan. 6 riot by supporters of President Donald Trump and whether they helped supervise such investigations.

...California denies Trump claim US military turned on water in state... \/ .... The federal government restarted federal water pumps...

Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping discussed on Tuesday how to build ties with Donald Trump, prospects for a peace deal to end the war in Ukraine and Moscow's firm support for Beijing's position on Taiwan. Xi and Putin, who spoke for an hour and 35 minutes by video call after Trump was sworn in as U.S. president on Monday -snip- Putin, 72, speaking from his Novo-Ogarevo residency outside Moscow and Xi, 71, speaking from the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, called each other "dear friends", and Xi told Putin about a call with Trump...

U.S. President-elect Donald Trump said on Sunday that Russia's abandonment of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad led to his downfall, adding Moscow never should have protected him in the first place and then lost interest because of a war in Ukraine that never should have started. "Assad is gone. He has fled his country. His protector, Russia, Russia, Russia, led by (President) Vladimir Putin, was not interested in protecting him any longer," Trump wrote on his social media platform Truth Social. "There was no reason for Russia to be there in the first place," Trump wrote. "They lost all interest in...