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WASHINGTON (AP) — President Volodymyr Zelenskyy says Ukraine won’t enter peace talks with Russia until it has security guarantees against another offensive. Zelenskyy added Friday’s contentious spat with President Donald Trump was “not good for both sides.” But Zelenskyy said that Trump — who insists Russian President Vladimir Putin is ready to end the three-year grinding war — needs to understand that Ukraine can’t change attitudes toward Russia on a dime.

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump upended three years of U.S. policy toward Ukraine on Wednesday, saying that he and Russian leader Vladimir Putin had agreed to begin negotiations on ending the war following a sudden prisoner swap.Trump said in a social media post that he and Putin held a lengthy phone call and committed to “work together, very closely” to bring the conflict to an end and would meet in person, including perhaps in each other’s countries.Trump subsequently announced that he'd also spoken with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, but only after his talk with Putin. After the calls, White...

President Donald Trump said Tuesday that he’s given his advisers instructions to obliterate Iran if it assassinates him. “If they did that they would be obliterated,” Trump said in an exchange with reporters while signing an executive order calling for the U.S. government to impose maximum pressure on Tehran. “I’ve left instructions if they do it, they get obliterated, there won’t be anything left.”

FLETCHER, N.C. (AP) — President Donald Trump has ended the federal security detail for Dr. Anthony Fauci, the infectious disease expert who advised him on the COVID-19 pandemic, a person familiar with the matter said Friday. ... A person familiar with the matter, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive security issues, said that Fauci’s federal security detail was ended on Thursday and that he has since hired private security. (Excerpt)

ABOARD AIR FORCE ONE (AP) — President Donald Trump said Saturday he’d like to see Jordan, Egypt and other Arab nations increase the number of Palestinian refugees they are accepting from the Gaza Strip — potentially moving out enough of the population to “just clean out” the war-torn area to create a virtual clean slate.During a 20-minute question-and-answer session with reporters aboard Air Force One on Saturday, Trump also said he’s ended his predecessor’s hold on sending 2,000-pound bombs to Israel. That lifts a pressure point that had been meant to reduce civilian casualties during Israel’s war with Hamas in...

To a defiant President Joe Biden, the 2024 election is up to the public — not the Democrats on Capitol Hill. But the chorus of Democratic voices calling for him to step aside is growing, from donors, strategists, lawmakers and their constituents who say he should bow out. The party has not fallen in line behind him even after the events that were set up as part of a blitz to reset his imperiled campaign and show everyone he wasn’t too old to stay in the job or to do it another four years. On Saturday, a fifth Democratic lawmaker...

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Joe Biden's conduct behind closed doors, in the Oval Office, on Air Force One and in meetings around the world is described in the same dual way by those who regularly see him in action. He is often sharp and focused. But he also has moments, particularly later in the evening, when his thoughts seem jumbled and he trails off mid-sentence or seems confused. Sometimes he doesn't grasp the finer points of details. He occasionally forgets people's names, stares blankly and moves slowly around the room.

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Joe Biden’s conduct behind closed doors, in the Oval Office, on Air Force One and in meetings around the world is described in the same dual way by those who regularly see him in action. He is often sharp and focused. But he also has moments, particularly later in the evening, when his thoughts seem jumbled and he trails off mid-sentence or seems confused. Sometimes he doesn’t grasp the finer points of details. He occasionally forgets people’s names, stares blankly and moves slowly around the room.

WASHINGTON (AP) — As President Joe Biden visited five cities in a multiday trip last week, former President Donald Trump was hardly seen in public, spending most of his time in South Florida. Trump has held just a single public campaign event since he locked up the Republican presidential nomination on March 12: a rally in Ohio funded not by his campaign but by backers of a Senate candidate whom he had endorsed. The events page on his campaign website has had nothing listed. Biden, meanwhile, has been barnstorming the country. After a trip to North Carolina on Tuesday, the...

NUSA DUA, Indonesia (AP) — For President Joe Biden, an international trip scheduled for just days after the midterm election looked like it would offer an escape hatch, allowing him to jet far away as he faced what many thought would be a crushing verdict from voters. Instead his journey, which included stops in Egypt, Cambodia and Indonesia, turned into an around-the-world victory lap. Biden spent the trip making congratulatory calls to Democrats who fared better than expected in the midterms, emboldening him during three global summits where he pushed for stronger action on climate change, closer economic ties in...

NUSA DUA, Indonesia (AP) — President Joe Biden said Wednesday it was “unlikely” that a missile that killed two in NATO-ally Poland was fired from Russia, but he pledged support for Poland's investigation into what it had called a “Russian-made” missile. Biden spoke after he convened an “emergency” meeting of the Group of Seven and NATO leaders in Indonesia Wednesday morning for consultations on the attack that killed two people in the eastern part of Poland near the Ukraine border. “There is preliminary information that contests that," Biden told reporters when asked if the missile had been fired from Russia....

President Joe Biden on Monday will raise the possibility of imposing a ‘windfall tax’ on energy companies, as his administration aims to combat high gas prices just days before the midterm elections. The White House said Biden will deliver remarks to respond ”to reports over recent days of major oil companies making record-setting profits even as they refuse to help lower prices at the pump for the American people." A person familiar with the matter said Biden will float imposing a tax on the profits of energy companies, as he seeks to pressure them to lower prices for consumers. The...

WASHINGTON (AP) — One handshake, one hug and one selfie at a time. If President Joe Biden could greet every American this way, longtime allies say, his approval ratings would soar. Biden has never been at his best in big speeches, where his delivery can be stilted, his stories sometimes meandering. It’s the end of his speech that often marks the beginning of Biden’s favorite part of an event — the rope line, in the parlance of political operatives. He whirls around, scans the crowd and zeroes in on his first target for a one-on-one connection. It might be with...

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Joe Biden will sound an alarm Thursday night about what he views as “extremist” threats to American democracy from the restive forces of Trumpism, aiming to reframe the November elections as part of an unceasing battle for the “soul of the nation.” Nearly two years after he defeated Donald Trump, it’s a reprise of Biden’s 2020 campaign theme, casting the midterm election stakes in as dire terms as those that sent him to the Oval Office. His prime-time speech at Independence Hall in Philadelphia will lay out what he sees as the risks from those he...

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Joe Biden on Wednesday announced his long-awaited plan to deliver on a campaign promise to provide $10,000 in student debt cancellation for millions of Americans — and up to $10,000 more for those with the greatest financial need — along with new measures to lower the burden of repayment for their remaining federal student debt. If his plan survives legal challenges that are almost certain to come, it could offer a windfall to a swath of the nation in the run-up to this fall’s midterm elections. Proponents say cancellation will narrow the racial wealth gap —...

WASHINGTON (AP) — Over five decades in Washington, Joe Biden knew that the way to influence was to be in the room where it happens. But in the second year of his presidency, some of Biden’s most striking, legacy-defining legislative victories came about by staying out of it. A summer lawmaking blitz has sent bipartisan bills addressing gun violence and boosting the nation’s high-tech manufacturing sector to Biden’s desk, and the president is now on the cusp of securing what he called the “final piece” of his economic agenda with the sudden resurrection of a Democrats-only climate and prescription drug...

“Enough, enough,” President Joe Biden exclaimed over and over Thursday night, as he delivered an impassioned address to the nation imploring Congress to take action against gun violence after mass shootings he said had turned schools, supermarkets and other everyday places into “killing fields.” If legislators fail to act, he warned, voters should use their “outrage” to turn it into a central issue in November’s midterm elections. [Snip] “How much more carnage are we willing to accept?” Biden asked after last week’s shootings by an 18-year-old gunman, who killed 19 students and two teachers at an elementary school in Uvalde,...

WASHINGTON (AP) — Tearfully embracing a history-making American moment, Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson said Friday her confirmation as the first Black woman to the Supreme Court showed the progress of America, declaring, ″We’ve made it — all of us.” Jackson delivered emotional remarks on the sunny White House South Lawn a day after the Senate approved her nomination, saying, it was a moment the entire country could be proud of. “We have come a long way toward perfecting our union,” she said. “In my family, it took just one generation to go from segregation to the Supreme Court of the...

Ukraine says it has agreed with Russia to create safe corridors backed by cease-fires to evacuate civilians, deliver aid.

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Joe Biden hit back Thursday against Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, unleashing robust new sanctions, ordering the deployment of thousands of additional troops to NATO ally Germany and declaring that America would stand up to Russia's Vladimir Putin. He also acknowledged that the invasion -- and efforts to thwart Putin -- will have a cost for Americans. But he sought to reassure that the economic pain that may come with rising energy prices will be short lived in the U.S. As for the Russian president, Biden said, “He’s going to test the resolve of the West to...