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Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump have held a rare phone call, which the US leader described as “excellent,” but the Kremlin refused to agree to a ceasefire in the war with Ukraine, despite pressure from Washington and European allies.

Speaking to reporters in Sochi after the two-hour conversation on Monday, Putin described the call as “very meaningful and frank,” and said he was prepared to work with Ukraine on drafting a memorandum for future peace talks.

However, the Russian leader declined to support the US-proposed 30-day unconditional ceasefire, which Ukraine had already agreed to – and which Washington had framed as the call’s primary objective.

The Supreme Court on Monday allowed the Trump administration to strip legal protections from 350,000 Venezuelans, potentially exposing them to deportation.

The court’s order, with only one noted dissent, puts on hold a ruling from a federal judge in San Francisco that kept in place Temporary Protected Status for the Venezuelans that would have otherwise expired last month. The justices provided no rationale, which is common in emergency appeals.

The status allows people already in the United States to live and work legally because their native countries are deemed unsafe for return due to natural disaster or civil strife.

The high court’s order appears to be the “single largest action in modern American history stripping any group of non-citizens of immigration status,” said Ahilan Arulanantham, one of the attorneys for Venezuelan migrants.

A federal judge called DOGE’s actions at the United States Institute of Peace “unlawful.”

The courts have decided against DOGE and the US government in their legal battle to take full control of the United States Institute of Peace, including a headquarters building with an estimated value of $500 million.

In a memorandum opinion, US district court judge Beryl Howell ruled in favor of the former institute board and staff who had sued to be reinstalled at the agency after DOGE affiliates forcibly removed them in March. She also gave a strong rebuke to the defendants in the case, who include the US DOGE Service, Donald Trump, secretary of defense Pete Hegseth, and several other government representatives and agencies.

“The purported removal of members of the Board of Directors of the United States Institute of Peace (“USIP”) … was unlawful,” Howell wrote in the order, “and therefore null, void, and without legal effect.”

Drugmaker Regeneron Pharmaceuticals will buy genetic testing firm 23andMe for $256 million through a bankruptcy auction, the companies said Monday.

Regeneron said it will comply with 23andMe’s privacy policies and applicable laws with respect to the use of customer data and that it is ready to detail its intended use of the data to a court-appointed overseer.

The bankruptcy proceedings, filed in March, had drawn scrutiny from lawmakers who warned that millions of customers’ genetic data could be sold to unscrupulous buyers.

Staff tell Guardian ripped-off Americans will have ‘nowhere to turn’ if Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is undone

Donald Trump’s bid to gut the top US consumer watchdog has left the agency unable to protect consumers amid mounting fears of recession, according to workers.

For months the Trump administration has pushed to dismantle the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and fire the vast majority of its workforce. Ripped-off Americans will have “nowhere to turn” if it succeeds, staff told the Guardian.

“The agency that Congress created after the last financial crisis to help prevent another financial crisis is currently completely handcuffed from working,” said one attorney at the CFPB, who asked to remain anonymous for fear of retaliation. “And we are on the verge of another major financial crisis, so it’s terrifying.

“The one thing we were created to do we can’t do – at a time when we’re most needed.”

Donald Trump Jr. and MAGAworld pounced on the news of Joe Biden’s cancer diagnosis with wild speculation about a long term “cover-up” of the former president’s disease.

Hours after Biden’s office announced Sunday that he had been diagnosed with a “more aggressive form” of prostate cancer that has spread to his bones, Trump Jr. boosted a conspiracy that was already circulating among MAGA influencers and pundits.

“What I want to know is how did Dr. Jill Biden miss stage five metastatic cancer or is this yet another coverup???” he wrote on X.

The FDA has been tasked with re-evaluating the safety of mifepristone after a flawed report claimed it has a high rate of serious complications.

Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has tasked the Food and Drug Administration with conducting a safety review of mifepristone, a pill used in most U.S. abortions. Kennedy said this week that the review was warranted due to an “alarming” new report on serious adverse events released last month.

“Clearly it indicates that, at very least, the label should be changed,” he told Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., at a Senate budget hearing on Wednesday. “I’ve asked Marty Makary, who’s the director of FDA, to do a complete review and to report back.”

The report in question, which was neither peer-reviewed nor published in a medical journal, claims to find a 22-times higher rate of serious complications from mifepristone than reported by the FDA. It calls on the agency to “further investigate the harm mifepristone causes to women” and “reconsider its approval altogether.”

The military alliance's procurement agency is under scrutiny for deals on arms and munitions. In a sector with notoriously patchy oversight, defense boom corruption risks are very real.

Revelations of an unfolding corruption investigation involving staff and ex-staff at the NATO Support and Procurement Agency (NSPA) have continued to emerge, with a total of five detentions — two in Belgium and three in the Netherlands — made public so far.

The Belgian public prosecutor reported the first detentions late Wednesday, saying they concerned "possible irregularities" in contracts awarded to buy ammunition and drones via NATO.

The Belgian authorities said in a statement that NSPA employees or former employees in Luxembourg may have passed information to defense contractors. "There are indications that money obtained from these illegal practices would have been laundered, partly by setting up consultancy companies."

A suspect believed to have carried out the bombing outside a California fertility clinic on Saturday has been identified as 25-year-old Guy Edward Bartkus.

In one writing, Bartkus described being a “pro-mortalist” as someone who intends to bring about their own death as soon as possible in order “to prevent your future suffering, and, more importantly, the suffering your existence will cause to all the other sentient beings.”

In addition to his writings, Bartkus also recorded a 30-minute audio clip describing his motives.

“I figured I would just make a recording explaining why I’ve decided to bomb an IVF building, or clinic. Basically, it just comes down to I’m angry that I exist and that, you know, nobody got my consent to bring me here,” he said in the recording.

Chris Murphy says Trump strategically visited Gulf states ‘willing to pay him off’ as backlash rises against luxury offer

Donald Trump’s acceptance of a $400m Boeing jet from Qatar is the “definition of corruption”, a leading Democrat said on Sunday, as several senior Republicans joined in a bipartisan fusillade of criticism and concern over the luxury gift.

Chris Murphy, a Democratic senator for Connecticut, condemned the “flying grift” on NBC’s Meet the Press as he assailed the president’s trip to several Gulf states this week that included a stop in Qatar.

“Why did he choose these three countries for his first major foreign trip? It’s not because these are our most important allies or the most important countries in the world,” he said of Trump’s visit to the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia and Qatar.

According to a bombshell report from the Washington Post, the Department of Justice under Attorney General Pam Bondi is considering a plan that would let federal prosecutors investigate and indict members of Congress unfettered by traditional oversight designed to stop political persecution.

Traditionally, before such an investigation could proceed, a prosecutor would have their case reviewed by the lawyers in the Justice Department’s Public Integrity Section. But that would go away under the new proposal.

The report notes that, should the proposal go into effect, "a long-standing provision in the Justice Department’s manual that outlines how investigations of elected officials should be conducted" would be shunted aside and allow possible prosecutions based purely on politics.