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      The Zelenskyy-Trump deal – podcast

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      After the heated exchange between Donald Trump and Volodymyr Zelenskyy in the Oval Office in February, the prospect of a deal between the US and Ukraine was uncertain.“Every week, it feels like we get a new position from Donald Trump,” Andrew Roth, the Guardian’s global affairs correspondent based in Washington DC, tells Michael Safi. “Sometimes we get multiple new positions from Donald Trump in a single morning. Nobody really believed that that was going to happen until the two names were on the dotted line.”And yet, last week the countries agreed a momentous minerals deal, agreeing to split future profits of the minerals industry in Ukraine 50/50.“We’re talking about natural gas, oil, possibly, but more importantly we’re talking about critical earth minerals. These include a couple of things, lithium, graphite, titanium. These are rare, important, critical minerals that are used in all kinds of industries around the world,” says Roth.Does US economic interest in Ukraine bring the country closer to peace?Support the Guardian today: theguardian.com/todayinfocuspod More

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      Trump blocks grant funding for Harvard until it meets president’s demands

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      The US Department of Education informed Harvard University on Monday that it was ending billions of dollars in research grants and other aid unless the school accedes to a list of demands from the Trump administration that would effectively cede control of the nation’s oldest and wealthiest university to the government.The news was delivered to Dr Alan Garber, Harvard’s president, in a deeply partisan letter from Linda McMahon, the education secretary, which she also posted on social media.“This letter is to inform you that Harvard should no longer seek grants from the federal government, since none will be provided,” McMahon wrote.The main reason for the crackdown on Harvard is the school’s rejection of a long list of demands from the Trump administration’s antisemitism taskforce, prompted by campus protests against Israel’s brutal military campaign in Gaza following the Hamas-led attacks of 7 October 2023. McMahon also accuses the university of “a systematic pattern of violating federal law”.As Garber explained in a message to the Harvard community last month, the university decided to sue the federal government only after the Trump administration froze $2.2bn in funding, threatened to freeze an additional $1bn in grants, “initiated numerous investigations of Harvard’s operations, threatened the education of international students, and announced that it is considering a revocation of Harvard’s 501(c)(3) tax-exempt status”.The government’s “sweeping and intrusive demands would impose unprecedented and improper control over the university”, Garber wrote.In its lawsuit against the Trump administration, Harvard said the government’s funding cuts would have stark “real-life consequences for patients, students, faculty, staff [and] researchers” by ending crucial medical and scientific research.The text of McMahon’s letter, much like a Truth Social post from Donald Trump, is littered with all-caps words. “Where do many of these ‘students’ come from, who are they, how do they get into Harvard, or even into our country – and why is there so much HATE?”“Harvard University has made a mockery of this country’s higher education system. It has invited foreign students, who engage in violent behavior and show contempt for the United States of America, to its campus,” McMahon claims.The university recently published its own, in-depth investigation of allegations that Gaza solidarity protests had crossed the line into antisemitism, and a second that looked at anti-Muslim, anti-Arab, and anti-Palestinian bias.But McMahon’s letter is not mainly about the claim that Jewish students feel unsafe at Harvard – a view the school’s president, who is himself Jewish, has some sympathy with – but is filled with extended diatribes about a series of other grievances, including: the supposed far-left politics of Penny Pritzker, a member of the university’s governing board who previously served as US commerce secretary during the Obama administration; the complaints of Harvard alumnus and Trump supporter Bill Ackman; what McMahon calls the “ugly racism” of Harvard’s efforts to diversify its student body; complaints about what Fox News has termed a “remedial math” course which is intended to address gaps in new students’ math skills following the Covid pandemic; accusations that the Harvard Law Review has discriminated against white authors; and two brief fellowships the Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health offered to the former mayors of New York and Chicago, Bill de Blasio and Lori Lightfoot.In language that seemed to echo Donald Trump’s own, McMahon told Harvard’s president that De Blasio and Lightfoot, who were recruited to share their experiences of bringing universal pre-kindergarten to New York, and leading Chicago through the pandemic, are “perhaps the worst mayors ever to preside over major cities in our country’s history”.“This is like hiring the captain of the Titanic to teach navigation,” McMahon wrote.“Harvard will cease to be a publicly funded institution, and can instead operate as a privately-funded institution, drawing on its colossal endowment, and raising money from its large base of wealthy alumni,” McMahon wrote. “You have an approximately $53bn head start.” More

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      Trump news at a glance: immigrants offered money to leave US and White House walks back film tariff plan

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      The Trump administration will offer undocumented immigrants $1,000 to leave the US as part of its latest crackdown on immigration, drawing criticism for saying that participation in the program “may help preserve the option” for an individual to re-enter the US “legally in the future”.“It is an incredibly cruel bit of deception for DHS [Department of Homeland Security] to be telling people that if they leave they ‘will maintain the ability to return to the US legally in the future’,” said Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, a senior fellow at the American Immigration Council, in a social media post.The White House meanwhile said it was “exploring all options” on protecting the US film industry, a day after Donald Trump triggered a drop in production company shares by announcing a 100% tariff on movies produced outside the US.Here are the key stories at a glance:Undocumented immigrants offered $1,000 to leave USThe Trump administration announced a new program offering a $1,000 payment to people in the US without immigration status as an incentive to return to their home country voluntarily. The Department of Homeland Security outlined the initiative, pledging “financial and travel assistance” to undocumented immigrants who agree to leave the country using an app called CBP Home.Read the full storyWhite House says ‘no final decisions’ on foreign film tariffsThe White House said on Monday that no final decisions have been made about imposing tariffs on foreign films, just a day after Donald Trump declared a 100% tariff on all movies produced outside the United States – an announcement that sparked widespread alarm across the global film industry.Read the full storyTrump to continue Biden’s court defense of abortion drug mifepristoneDonald Trump’s administration on Monday pushed forward in defending US rules easing access to the abortion drug mifepristone from a legal challenge that began during Democratic former president Joe Biden’s administration.Read the full storyTrump orders reopening of Alcatraz prison Donald Trump has said he is directing the administration to reopen and expand Alcatraz, the notorious former prison on an island off San Francisco that has been closed for more than 60 years. California Democrats and civil rights activists were critical of the announcement and questioned the feasibility of converting the historic site back into a high-security prison.Read the full storyApp used by Waltz suspends service over suspected hackThe communications app used by Mike Waltz, Donald Trump’s former national security adviser, says it is temporarily suspending services following a reported hack that exposed some of its potentially sensitive messages. Oregon-based Smarsh, which runs the TeleMessage app, said it was “investigating a potential security incident” and was suspending all its services “out of an abundance of caution”.Read the full storyAdvocates reject RFK Jr’s national autism databaseAutism researchers and advocates are pushing back against the creation of an autism database – meant to track the health of autistic people in a major research study – and pointing to the ways such databases could be misused.Read the full storyTrump cuts will lead to more deaths in disasters, expert warnsThe Trump administration’s sweeping cuts to disaster management will cost lives in the US, with hollowed-out agencies unable to accurately predict, prepare for or respond to extreme weather events, earthquakes and pandemics, a leading expert has warned.Read the full storyMichigan attorney general drops all charges against seven pro-Palestinian protestersMichigan’s attorney general, Dana Nessel, announced on Monday that she was dropping all charges against seven pro-Palestinian demonstrators arrested in May last year at a University of Michigan encampment, after a Guardian report detailed her extensive links to university regents calling for prosecution.The announcement came just moments before the judge was to decide on a defense motion to disqualify Nessel’s office over alleged bias.Read the full storyWhat else happened today:

      A Trump ally who promoted hydroxychloroquine for Covid-19 despite limited evidence has reportedly been appointed to a top US pandemic prevention role.

      Mexico’s president downplayed growing fears of US military intervention to fight drug trafficking, citing good communication with Trump after a sharp weekend exchange heightened tensions.

      As Elon Musk steps back from leading Doge, experts say it failed to actually improve public services for the American people.

      A coalition of Democratic state attorneys general are suing in an attempt to block Donald Trump’s move to suspend leasing and permitting of new wind projects, saying it threatens to cripple the wind industry and a key source of clean energy.
      Catching up? Here’s what happened on 4 May 2025. This article was amended on 6 May 2025 to change an incorrect reference to Trump’s proposed film tariff being “10%”. More

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      Trump to continue Biden’s court defense of abortion drug mifepristone

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      Donald Trump’s administration on Monday pushed forward in defending US rules easing access to the abortion drug mifepristone from a legal challenge that began during Democratic former president Joe Biden’s administration.The US Department of Justice in a brief filed in Texas federal court urged a judge to dismiss the lawsuit by three Republican-led states on procedural grounds.While the filing does not discuss the merits of the states’ case, it suggests the Trump administration is in no rush to drop the government’s defense of mifepristone, used in more than 60% of US abortions.Missouri, Kansas and Idaho claim the US Food and Drug Administration acted improperly when it eased restrictions on mifepristone, including by allowing it to be prescribed by telemedicine and dispensed by mail.The justice department and the office of Missouri’s attorney general, Andrew Bailey, did not immediately respond to requests for comment.Trump said while campaigning last year that he did not plan to ban or restrict access to mifepristone. Robert F Kennedy Jr, the health and human services secretary, told Fox News in February that Trump has asked for a study on the safety of abortion pills and has not made a decision on whether to tighten restrictions on them.Last year, the US supreme court rejected a bid by anti-abortion groups and doctors to restrict access to the drug, finding that they lacked legal standing to challenge the FDA regulations.Those plaintiffs dropped their case after the high court ruling, but US district judge Matthew Kacsmaryk, a Trump appointee, allowed the states to intervene and continue to pursue the lawsuit.The US justice department moved to dismiss their claims days before Trump took office in January.In Monday’s filing, government lawyers repeated their arguments that Texas is not the proper venue for the lawsuit and that the states lack standing to sue because they are not being harmed by the challenged regulations.“Regardless of the merits of the States’ claims, the States cannot proceed in this Court,” they wrote.The three states are challenging FDA actions that loosened restrictions on the drug in 2016 and 2021, including allowing for medication abortions at up to 10 weeks of pregnancy instead of seven, and for mail delivery of the drug without first seeing a clinician in person. The original plaintiffs initially had sought to reverse FDA approval of mifepristone, but that aspect was rebuffed by a lower court.The Republican-led states have argued they have standing to sue because their Medicaid health insurance programs will likely have to pay to treat patients who have suffered complications from using mifepristone.They have also said they should be allowed to remain in Texas even without the original plaintiffs because it would be inefficient to send the case to another court after two years of litigation. More

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      Loyalty matters most in race to become Trump’s next national security adviser

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      The race is officially on to become Donald Trump’s next national security adviser – but in this White House, the personalities and egos surrounding the president can matter far more than the titles they hold.Speaking from Air Force One on Sunday evening, Trump suggested secretary of state Marco Rubio could continue to double-hat as the interim national security adviser. But he also praised Stephen Miller, whom he said was “at the top of the totem pole” for the appointment and said he was in effect already doing the job.“I think he sort of indirectly already has that job … because he has a lot to say about a lot of things,” Trump said of Miller on board Air Force One. “He’s a very valued person in the administration, Stephen Miller.”Rubio will have around six months to test drive the dual roles. “A lot of people say it really works in with what Marco is doing,” he said. “But we have a lot of people. I’m going to be naming somebody.”The two men represent distinct wings of Trump’s Republican support: Rubio is a former rival who has tried to shapeshift into a Maga Republican, preserving his role in the Trump administration and potentially setting up a 2028 presidential run. Miller is a rightwing ideologue who has staked out a reputation as the administration’s driving hawk on immigration and a Trump enforcer among his top aides.The fact that two men with such disparate backgrounds could both vie for the position indicates how the president relies more on the personalities around him than the positions they hold.Mike Waltz was always the odd man out – a hawk who reportedly conspired with Benjamin Netanyahu on options to bomb Iran, and perhaps more importantly failed to jell with key Trump aides like chief of staff Susie Wiles. Then there was Signalgate, when Waltz accidentally added the Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg into a top-level group chat discussing strikes against Yemen’s Houthis.The country’s national security adviser is tasked with briefing the president and coordinating discussions among the key foreign policy and national security advisers. While Henry Kissinger famously served as secretary of state and national security adviser for two years during the Vietnam war, that was 50 years ago and there are doubts that Rubio can both travel the world as the US’s top diplomat and also fulfill a role where he should be attached to Trump’s hip at the White House.“If Rubio is going to maintain his role as secretary of state, there is absolutely no way for him to do both jobs sustainably,” said Edward Price, a former senior adviser to secretary of state Antony Blinken who also served on the national security council. “2025 is not 1975 [when Henry Kissinger served in both roles] in terms of the issues that the foreign policy establishment has to deal with and running a department of 80,000 people and being the nation’s top diplomat should be more than a 24/7 job.“If it’s not, you’re you’re not doing it right,” he said.The role of national security adviser “really can’t be performed by someone who’s also got a cabinet department to run”, said John Bolton, Trump’s former national security adviser during his first term, in a CNN interview.Miller is among the most ardent members of the Maga wing of Trump’s coterie. While he mainly focuses on domestic issues – in particular curating the government’s aggressive anti-immigration policy – he has also matched the president’s skepticism of Ukraine and his pro-Israel policies as well, particularly regarding the crackdown on anti-war protestors in the United States.But more importantly, he has proven himself as a powerful enforcer in the administration.The leaked transcripts of the Signal chats among top officials showed that Miller effectively cut off a discussion of whether or not the timing was right to strike the Houthis in Yemen by citing the desires of the president. “As I heard it, the president was clear: green light, but we soon make clear to Egypt and Europe what we expect in return,” he wrote, prompting defense secretary Pete Hegseth to respond: “Agree.”Many took that to signal his weight in the administration. “I think that Signal chat is exhibit A,” said Price. “He goes in there and speaks on an issue that, as homeland security Adviser and deputy chief of staff, really shouldn’t be clearly within his purview.” He said “the president has spoken, and this is what he said, and this is what we’re going to do. And everyone sort of got in line, and, you know, it’s clear that he’s the power center of this White House.”That matters far less than policy bonafides, of which Miller has few when it comes to US foreign policy. “Miller’s a very bright person, no one should underestimate him,” said Bolton. “If he were to become national security adviser, you would have a clear merging of the homeland and national security adviser jobs … but it’s hard to see what [he] would contribute to discussions on national nuclear weapons strategy.” More

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      TeleMessage app used by Mike Waltz suspends service over suspected hack

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      The communications app used by Mike Waltz, Donald Trump’s former national security adviser, says it is temporarily suspending services following a reported hack that exposed some of its potentially sensitive messages.Oregon-based Smarsh, which runs the TeleMessage app, said in an email to Reuters that it was “investigating a potential security incident” and was suspending all its services “out of an abundance of caution”.A Reuters photograph showed Waltz using TeleMessage, an unofficial version of the popular encrypted messaging app Signal, on his phone during a cabinet meeting on Wednesday.Waltz was ousted the following day and Trump named his secretary of state, Marco Rubio, to take on Waltz’s job on an interim basis. At the same time, Trump said he would nominate Waltz to be the US ambassador to the United Nations.The move capped weeks of controversy over Waltz’s creation of a Signal group to share real-time updates on US military action in Yemen. That chat drew particular attention because Waltz, or someone using his account, accidentally added a prominent US journalist to the group.Concerns over the security of Waltz’s communications were further heightened, when it was reported on Sunday that a hacker had broken into TeleMessage’s back-end infrastructure and intercepted some of its users’ messages.Tech news site 404 Media said the hacker provided them with stolen material, some of which the news site was able to independently verify.Smarsh did not immediately respond to a request by Reuters for more detail about the breach.Reuters contributed to this report More

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      Trump administration offers $1,000 to undocumented immigrants to leave US

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      The Trump administration has announced a new program offering a $1,000 payment to people in the US without immigration status as an incentive to return to their home country voluntarily.The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) outlined the initiative on Monday, pledging “financial and travel assistance” to undocumented immigrants who agree to leave the country using an app called CBP Home.That is a version of the app devised in the Biden administration called CBPOne that gave people approaching the US-Mexico border without official arrangements a strictly limited channel to request asylum in the US and enter legally when issued an appointment. Donald Trump shut that down upon inauguration, as vowed, stranding many, and later changed its name and function so that CBP Home is a tool to exit the US, not enter.The agency claimed that the $1,000 payment would be issued only after the individual has returned to their home country and it has been confirmed through the app. DHS made the announcement in a news release emphasizing many of the terms, some legally questionable, favored by the administration in its hardline anti-immigration policy, such as “illegal alien” and “self-deport”.“If you are here illegally, self-deportation is the best, safest and most cost-effective way to leave the United States to avoid arrest,” said Kristi Noem, the DHS secretary.In the news release, DHS stated that one individual had already participated in the program, receiving a plane ticket for a flight from Chicago to Honduras, and “additional tickets have already been booked for this week and the following week”.The department estimates that even with the cost of the stipend, the program “will decrease the costs of a deportation by around 70%”.Currently, the DHS claims, the average cost to arrest, detain and deport someone from the US is $17,121.The agency also stated in the announcement that individuals who use the CBP Home app to declare their intent to leave the US will be “deprioritized for detention and removal ahead of their departure as long as they demonstrate they are making meaningful strides in completing that departure”.The DHS further claimed that participation in the program “may help preserve the option” for an individual to re-enter the US “legally in the future”.On Monday afternoon, Trump pushed similar claims, telling reporters from the Oval Office: “We’re going to work with them so that maybe someday, with a little work, they can come back in if they’re good people.”But critics sounded the alarm.“It is an incredibly cruel bit of deception for DHS to be telling people that if they leave they ‘will maintain the ability to return to the US legally in the future’,” said Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, a senior fellow at the American Immigration Council, in a social media post. “Many people who might see this as an option would be put in a WORSE OFF legal position. So this is a TRAP.”The new initiative, centered on the Trump administration’s concept of “self-deportation” – which is the notion that conditions in the US can be made so unbearable for undocumented immigrants that they will choose to leave – is their latest action to crack down on immigration. More

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      Democratic-led states sue Trump for blocking wind energy projects

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      A coalition of Democratic state attorneys general sued on Monday in an attempt to block Donald Trump’s move to suspend leasing and permitting of new wind projects, saying it threatens to cripple the wind industry and a key source of clean energy.Seventeen states and the District of Columbia argued, in a lawsuit filed in federal court in Boston, that the decision by the Republican president’s administration to indefinitely pause all federal wind-energy approvals was unlawful and must be blocked.Trump announced the pause on his first day back in office on 20 January when he directed his administration to halt offshore wind lease sales and stop the issuance of permits, leases and loans for both onshore and offshore wind projects.“This administration is devastating one of our nation’s fastest-growing sources of clean, reliable and affordable energy,” the New York attorney general, Letitia James, a Democrat, said in a statement.The lawsuit seeks a court order declaring the indefinite pause unlawful and barring the agencies including the US Departments of Commerce and Interior and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) from implementing Trump’s directive.The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.Meanwhile, attorneys general in 19 states and DC are challenging cuts to the US Health and Human Services (HHS) agency, saying the Trump administration’s massive restructuring has destroyed life-saving programs and left states to pick up the bill for mounting health crises, the Associated Press reported.The lawsuit was filed in federal court in Rhode Island on Monday, the New York attorney general said.The health secretary, Robert F Kennedy Jr, restructured the agency in March, eliminating more than 10,000 employees and collapsing 28 agencies under the sprawling HHS umbrella into 15, the attorneys general said. An additional 10,000 employees had already been let go by the Trump’s administration, according to the lawsuit, and combined the cuts stripped 25% of the HHS workforce. More