Category: 2. World

Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin lavished praise on each other but offered no details of their nearly three-hour meeting in Alaska on Friday, with the US president saying “great progress” but no deal had been made on ending Russia’s war in Ukraine.

“There’s no deal until there’s a deal. I will call up Nato … I’ll of course call up [Ukraine’s] President Zelenskyy and tell him about today’s meeting,” he said.

Putin, speaking through an interpreter, described Trump’s efforts on Ukraine as “precious” and suggested the two leaders had hammered out “an understanding”. He urged Europe to “not throw a wrench in the works” and “not use backroom dealings” to torpedo it.

As the press conference ended, Putin suggested their next meeting might take place in Moscow and dozens of reporters shouted questions in vain. The US president, who can typically never resist a free-wheeling press conference, left the stage without answering any of them.

Here are the key US politics stories at a glance:

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No deal after brief Trump-Putin talks on Ukraine in Alaska

Donald Trump left more questions than answers on Friday as he claimed “great progress” in his high-stakes summit with Vladimir Putin, but said that no deal had been reached to end Russia’s war on Ukraine.

“I believe we had a very productive meeting,” the US president said at a joint press conference in Anchorage, Alaska. “There were many, many points that we agreed on.”

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Washington DC and White House agree to scale back Trump ‘takeover’ of city police

White House officials and attorneys for Washington DC have agreed to scale back the Trump administration’s takeover of the city’s police department.

Under an agreement announced early Friday evening, the US capital city’s metropolitan police department will remain under the control of its chief, Pamela Smith, instead of Terry Cole, the top administrator for the Drug and Enforcement Administration, according to reports.

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Trump says Xi told him China will not invade Taiwan while he is in office

The US president, Donald Trump, has said that his Chinese counterpart, Xi Jinping, told him China would not invade Taiwan while Trump is in office.

“He told me, ‘I will never do it as long as you’re president’. President Xi told me that and I said, ‘Well, I appreciate that’, but he also said, ‘But I am very patient and China is very patient’,” Trump said.

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Obama praises Texas Democrats as state legislature ends special session

Texas lawmakers adjourned their first special session without passing new congressional maps on Friday – though Greg Abbott, the state’s governor, has said he will immediately call another session – and Democratic lawmakers signaled they are likely to return to the state.

Former president Barack Obama spoke to the Texas Democrats via video, praising them for fighting against the redistricting plan. He told them they should return to Texas “feeling invigorated” and with the knowledge that they helped lead what will be a long fight. Former attorney general Eric Holder also joined the call.

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Republicans accepted more than $105m from big oil

The Republican lawmakers who voted for Donald Trump’s anti-environment tax and spending bill have accepted more than $105m in political donations from the fossil fuel industry, a new analysis has found, raising concerns about their relationship with big oil.

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Scrutiny on officials for raising river water level for Vance’s birthday

The US Secret Service and US military engineers are facing scrutiny after Adam Schiff, the California senator, demanded they answer questions about the Trump administration’s recent decision to change the water level of a lake in Ohio to facilitate a family boating trip for the vice-president, JD Vance, on his birthday.

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What else happened today:

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Catching up? Here’s what happened on 14 August 2025.

Israel has imposed man-made starvation on the population of Gaza since the aggression against the enclave began in October 2023. This campaign intensified drastically after March 2025, when the Zionist occupation implemented even harsher restrictions on the already scarce aid allowed into Gaza. Since then, hundreds of men, women, and children have died from severe malnutrition. Doctors survive on meagre crumbs of bread and oil each day, often resorting to seawater to ingest much-needed electrolytes. Journalists have become too weak to carry out their duties, and men are too frail to risk their lives at GHF sites. The population now resembles skin stretched taut over bones.

Such severe malnutrition has, unfortunately, been witnessed throughout history, and its effects on the human body are well documented. Systems shut down one by one, fatigue envelops the victims, and the body begins to consume itself to death. Chilling accounts between 1920 and 1940 in the Soviet Union paint a similar picture. Performers collapsed mid-performance, dying where they stood. People dropped dead in the streets as if simply falling asleep. Desperation reached such extremes that court records tell of a mother dismembering her unconscious husband, believing him dead, to feed their children.

What is often overlooked, however, is that recovery from starvation can be just as devastating. Ironically, one of the earliest recorded accounts of this phenomenon comes from the siege of Jerusalem in 70 CE. For five months, under the command of Titus, son of Emperor Vespasian, the Roman army cut off all aid to the then-holy Jewish city. Like Gaza’s population today, Jerusalem’s citizens were wasted, disease-ridden, and forced to eat leather. After the Romans breached the gates and captured the city, Flavius Josephus, a Jewish commander who defected to the Romans, reported that many survivors died soon after eating. Malnourished citizens would gorge themselves on food to the point of vomiting, with many dying within hours.

Following World War II, similar accounts emerged involving Japanese prisoners of war. Malnourished soldiers liberated from captivity in the Philippines, New Guinea, and elsewhere gorged themselves on calorically rich food provided by their liberators. Approximately one in five of these prisoners died because of this refeeding process. Medical examinations revealed shrunken organs, heart failure, and other severe complications. Comparable observations have been reported repeatedly in starved civilian populations after famine relief, among post-operative patients, individuals suffering from anorexia nervosa, and chronic alcoholics.

Now commonly known as refeeding syndrome, this condition describes a dangerously rapid metabolic shift from a catabolic to an anabolic state. In starvation, the body suppresses insulin and relies on breaking down muscle and fat, depleting essential intracellular ions. Once feeding resumes, insulin surges, causing glucose and electrolytes to flood into cells. This sudden cellular shift sharply lowers blood levels of phosphate, potassium, and magnesium. Insulin also promotes sodium and water retention in the bloodstream, leading to fluid overload. If untreated, these changes can cause catastrophic damage to the heart, lungs, nerves, and blood, resulting in arrhythmias, respiratory failure, and death.

Excerpted: ‘Food alone won’t save Gaza’s starving population’. Courtesy: Aljazeera.com

Talks aimed at a global treaty to cut plastic pollution fizzled in Geneva this week, with no agreement to meaningfully reduce the harms to human health and the environment that come with the millions of tons of plastic water bottles, food containers and packaging produced today.

Though as many as 100 countries sought caps on production, powerful oil-producing nations like Saudi Arabia and the United States stood against them. They argued the caps were unnecessary and a threat to their economies and industries.

That means any progress continues to depend on efforts to improve recycling, reuse and product design — the very things that powerful nations argued were sufficient to address the problem without resorting to production cuts.

Here’s what to know about how successful those efforts have been.

The world makes more than 400 million tons of new plastic each year, and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development estimates that could increase by about 70% by 2040 without meaningful change. A great deal of that ends up in landfills or, worse, the environment.

Pollution isn’t the only problem. Plastics, made almost entirely from fossil fuels, are a major contributor to greenhouse gas emissions. Plastics generated 3.4% — or 1.8 billion tons — of planet-warming emissions across the globe in 2019, the United Nations says.

Not very.

It’s notoriously difficult to recycle plastics; only 6% of what’s made gets recycled, according to the OECD. That’s largely because different kinds of plastic cannot be recycled together. They have different chemical compositions, making it costly and time-consuming, and requiring a lot of manual sorting.

“There are many different colors of plastics, many different types of plastics called polymers, and 16,000 to 17,000 different chemicals used to make plastics, so by design, plastics are not easily recyclable,” said Judith Enck, president of Beyond Plastics, an organization that works to cut plastic pollution.

Experts say plastic is different from materials like paper, cardboard, metal and glass, which all get reused at much higher rates. The Environmental Protection Agency estimates glass recycling at about 31%, and things like steel cans at about 71%. As much as 64% of paper and 74% of cardboard get recycled, according to the American Forest & Paper Association.

But “If you just think of your own home or apartment, you might have a bright orange hard plastic detergent container on top of your washing machine, and then you might have a plastic bag,” Enck said. “Those two things cannot get recycled together.”

The plastics industry says innovations in material science are helping to incorporate more recycled plastics into products and enable more plastic products to be recyclable. Ross Eisenberg, president of America’s Plastic Makers, noted the need for an “all-of-the-above approach.”

He said this also includes upgrading recycling infrastructure or improving sorting to capture more used plastics. This also means making recycling more accessible and helping consumers know what can and can’t go in the recycling bin.

But there are a lot of limitations to this.

Depending on consumers for accurate pre-sorting is a lot to ask. And cities may hesitate to make costly infrastructure improvements to their recycling programs if there is little financial incentive or market for the recycled material.

“Local recycling facilities, or markets for the recycled material, don’t always exist. Where the collection and processing infrastructure does exist, the recycling plants are essentially plastic production facilities, with the same air, water, and soil pollution problems that are harmful to local residents,” said Holly Kaufman, director of The Plastics & Climate Project and senior fellow at World Resources Institute.

Further, mechanical recycling mixes used plastic with new plastic, and the addition of more chemicals. It also requires other steps that shed much smaller plasticparticles into the environment.

Plastics recycling also usually requires plastic that’s never been recycled before — called virgin plastic — as used plastic is weak, Kaufman said. “It does not make much of a dent.”

California is currently suing oil and gas giant Exxon Mobil, alleging deception about the possibilities of plastic recycling.

Because of this, Kaufman says, “The aim should be to significantly reduce plastic production, use, and waste, not recycle more.”

“Reuse means creating packaging or products designed to be used multiple times, like refillable containers, or more durable zippered bags that can be washed and refilled many times, extending their lifespan and reducing waste,” Eisenberg, of America’s Plastic Makers, said.

Experts say reuse is extremely important, but reusable products shouldn’t necessarily be used for consumables because of the risk of microplastics.

Redesigning plastic often means making it easier to recycle. That can be using one material in packaging instead of several, or printing labels directly onto a container rather than using a separate one that is glued on, but that is more complex.

Alternatives to plastics could also be made out of sustainable, less harmful and even regenerative materials, such as seaweed, Kaufman said. There has been progress on this front, but most solutions have not scaled up yet.

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Alexa St. John is an Associated Press climate reporter. Follow her on X: @alexa_stjohn. Reach her at ast.john@ap.org.

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Read more of AP’s climate coverage at http://www.apnews.com/climate-and-environment

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The Associated Press’ climate and environmental coverage receives financial support from multiple private foundations. AP is solely responsible for all content. Find AP’s standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at AP.org.

ISLAMABAD:

Kashmiris across both sides of the Line of Control (LoC) and around the world marked India’s 78th Independence Day on Friday as Black Day, staging protests and rallies to denounce New Delhi’s forcible and illegal occupation of Jammu and Kashmir.

The coordinated observance – called by the All Parties Hurriyat Conference (APHC) and endorsed by pro-freedom groups — unfolded under sweeping restrictions in IIOJK and against the backdrop of heightened tensions between India and Pakistan.

Reports from Srinagar described an unprecedented security presence, with heavily armed troops patrolling streets, manning checkpoints, and blocking key intersections.

Authorities, fearing large-scale demonstrations in support of Pakistan and against Indian rule, imposed movement restrictions and intensified surveillance. The entire city feels like a fortress. Even small gatherings are being dispersed, said media reports.

According to APHC leaders, the clampdown is part of a long-standing strategy to “suppress peaceful political dissent” in the region.

“Black Day is a reminder to the world that the Kashmir dispute remains unresolved and our demand for self-determination is non-negotiable,” an APHC spokesperson said in a statement.

The observance extended far beyond the valley. In cities including London, Brussels, Washington D.C., and Toronto, Kashmiri diaspora communities and their supporters staged rallies carrying black flags, placards, and banners calling for an end to Indian occupation.

The protestors said the demonstrations aimed to break the international silence over human rights abuses in IIOJK and press for a United Nations-supervised plebiscite.

Pakistan’s political leadership also marked the day with statements reaffirming solidarity with the Kashmiri people. The annual Black Day observance dates back to October 27, 1947 – the day Indian troops entered the former princely state of Jammu and Kashmir following its illegal accession to India.