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U.S. President Donald Trump's senior envoys Steve Witkoff and Keith Kellogg will travel to Istanbul for potential talks on Thursday on how to end Russia's war in Ukraine, three sources familiar with the plans said on Tuesday. However, a senior U.S. official said it was unclear whether anyone from the Russian government would show up. The White House, State Department, National Security Council and a spokesperson for Witkoff did not immediately respond to a request for comment. President Volodymyr Zelenskiy will only attend the talks this week if Russia's Vladimir Putin is also there, an aide to the Ukrainian leader...

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...

Russia has attacked at least eight Ukrainian energy facilities since March 18 when Moscow says it halted such attacks, a senior Ukrainian presidential official said on Wednesday. Ihor Zhovkva, speaking on national television, also said that, contrary to Russian statements, no preconditions were discussed with U.S. officials as they agreed a Black Sea truce with Russia during talks in Saudi Arabia this week. The Kremlin said earlier that a number of conditions must be met before the Black Sea maritime security deal negotiated with the United States can be activated.

The Russian central bank kept its key rate on hold at 21% on Friday, in line with expectations, and said more rate hikes were still possible in the future as inflationary pressures have decreased but remain high. "The Bank of Russia estimates that the achieved tightness of monetary conditions creates the necessary prerequisites for returning inflation to the target in 2026," the regulator said in a statement. "If disinflation dynamics do not ensure achieving the inflation target, the Bank of Russia will consider raising the key rate," it added. -snip- President Vladimir Putin urged his economic officials this week not...

Iran has the right to peaceful nuclear energy and is acting in line with international law, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said on Friday. Peskov said Moscow accepted Iran's statements that it has no intention of obtaining nuclear weapons.

(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...

The White House yanked a reporter at a left-leaning news outlet from the rotation of journalists given special access to President Trump, making good on its pledge to rip control away from the White House Correspondents’ Association (WHCA). HuffPost’s White House correspondent S.V. Date had been slated to serve as the daily print pool reporter Wednesday, but the Trump administration booted him in the wee hours of the night and replaced him with an Axios reporter. The administration also kicked Reuters out of the spot it enjoyed as a wire service. In the past, Reuters, the Associated Press and Bloomberg...

Some U.S. Food and Drug Administration scientists have been told to stop using the words "woman," "disabled" and "elderly" in external communications, two sources familiar with the matter said, part of a list of banned terms that a White House spokesman said had misinterpreted President Donald Trump's executive order. A list with the file name "Prohibited words" has been circulating since at least last week in official work chats, according to two FDA scientists with direct knowledge of the matter who requested anonymity for fear of professional repercussions. The list, which has not been previously reported, is sowing further confusion...

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.

NEW YORK (Reuters) - President Donald Trump's drive to shake up the U.S. government drove out a rising star in conservative legal circles: A career federal prosecutor who once clerked for the late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia. Danielle Sassoon, tapped to lead the Manhattan federal prosecutor's office on Trump's second day in office, quit on Thursday rather than go along with a Justice Department order to drop a criminal corruption case against Democratic New York Mayor Eric Adams. The department ordered the case dropped, citing the city's approaching November mayoral election and saying that prosecuting Adams could interfere with...

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...

(Reuters) -A federal judge on Tuesday ordered U.S. health agencies to restore websites that they abruptly took offline in response to an executive order by President Donald Trump telling them to scrub websites of "gender ideology extremism." The temporary restraining order by U.S. District Judge John Bates in Washington, D.C. came in response to a lawsuit by the left-leaning medical advocacy group Doctors for America, which said the sudden removal of websites by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and Food and Drug Administration hampered doctors' and researchers' ability to fight disease. Bates ordered all websites specifically identified...

The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) only runs a program to house migrants that is funded by U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP), contrary to posts online saying that FEMA disaster relief funds were diverted by the Biden Administration to house migrants in the U.S. illegally. FEMA and its Disaster Relief Fund have been targets of disinformation in the wake of Hurricane Helene, which devastated parts of the U.S. Southeast in late September.