European leaders to meet Trump in White House with Zelensky
The trip will serve as an exchange of information with US President Donald Trump following his meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Alaska.
Chancellor Merz will discuss the status of peace efforts with the heads of state and government and underscore Germany's interest in a swift peace agreement in Ukraine, the government said in a statement.
The talks will address, among other things, security guarantees, territorial issues, and continued support for Ukraine in its defense against Russian aggression. This includes maintaining the pressure of sanctions.
This comes around 6 weeks after Merz's first official visit to the White House, when he told Trump 'I'm here, Mr President, to talk to you later on how we could contribute to that goal [to end the war]. We are all looking for measures and for instruments to bring this terrible war to an end.'
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Reuters
28 minutes ago
- Reuters
Russia expects India to keep buying its oil and seeks China-India-Russia talks
NEW DELHI, Aug 20 (Reuters) - Russia expects to continue supplying oil to India despite warnings from the United States, Russian embassy officials in New Delhi said on Wednesday, adding that Moscow hopes trilateral talks will soon take place with India and China. U.S. President Donald Trump has announced an additional tariff of 25% on Indian goods exported to the U.S. from August 27, as a punishment for buying Russian oil, which constitutes 35% of India's total imports compared with a negligible 0.2% before the Ukraine war. "I want to highlight that despite the political situation, we can predict that the same level of oil import (by India)," Roman Babushkin, the charge d'affaires at the Russian embassy in India, told a press briefing. He predicted India and Russia would find ways to overcome Trump's latest tariffs in their "national interests". Trade talks between India and the U.S. broke down over the opening up of India's vast farm and dairy sectors, as well as its purchases of Russian oil. The total tariff announced on Indian goods entering the U.S. is 50%. The Indian foreign ministry did not immediately reply to an emailed request for comment. It has previously said the U.S. decision to single out India for Russian purchases was "extremely unfortunate". Russia's Deputy Trade Commissioner Evgeny Griva on Wednesday said buying oil from Russia is "very profitable" for India, which will not want to change its supplier. On average Russia gives a 5%-7% discount to Indian buyers, he said, adding that Russia has a "very, very special mechanism" to continue oil supplies to India. In addition, he said Russia had started accepting Indian rupee payments for its goods after the resolution of issues that had trapped billions of dollars worth of funds in Indian banks. As tensions between Washington and New Delhi rise, high-profile visits from New Delhi and Beijing in recent weeks have raised hopes on the part of the Asian neighbours that ties damaged by a 2020 border clash can be repaired. Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi plans to visit China for the first time in over seven years later this month. The planned visit was reported by Reuters last week, even as other high profile exchanges, including Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi's two-day visit to New Delhi, concluded. At the same time, Russia is trying to revive long-standing plans for a trilateral meeting with India and China to help them forge a "greater Eurasian partnership". "As far as the trilateral is concerned, we are quite hopeful that this format will be resumed sooner rather than later because its importance is not questioned," Babushkin said. "This is closely linked to the Russian initiative of the establishment of the greater Eurasian partnership," Babushkin said. Russian President Vladimir Putin will meet Modi in New Delhi by the end of year, he said. Putin, Modi and Chinese President Xi Jinping are also expected to all attend the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation starting August 31.
Telegraph
28 minutes ago
- Telegraph
Boomers behaving badly: Why the over-60s are the wildest generation
Gransnet, the popular social networking site for grandparents, is aflame. Not with disputes over how to roast a chicken or subdue a pack of feral toddlers, but with the question of whether joining Palestine Action is morally acceptable or not. And this, rather than student unions or the bars of Dalston in east London, is the place to be debating it, as baby boomers take up the cause of an organisation that was banned under terror legislation last month. New figures from the Met Police reveal that of the 532 people arrested for supporting Palestine Action in London earlier this month, the average age was 54 but the largest group was people in their 60s (147 arrests), closely followed by 97 arrests of those in their 70s. Twentysomethings, long thought to be the natural foot soldiers of protest, trailed in third place with just 54 arrests. 'It's important to remember these people came of age in a period obsessed with social justice,' says Bobby Duffy, an academic and author of The Generation Myth: Why When You're Born Matters. 'They had the spirit of May 1968, [a period of civil unrest in] France, behind them, and experienced regular protests against the status quo in the UK and US. Retirement also gives you more time – there's a squeezed middle of people too busy with work, children, mortgages and ageing parents to look outward. But when you're young and when you're old, you have the space to focus on what you really care about.' Patricia, 75, has spent decades on the picket line protesting against nuclear weapons and the Iraq war, and for abortion rights and marriage equality. Joining Palestine Action, she believed, would have been the logical next step. 'We're the right people to be doing it,' she says. 'I'm not planning to become a lawyer or travel to America, so the worst-case scenario of a criminal record doesn't really affect me.' But in the end it was her millennial children that intervened. 'My daughters were so upset by the idea I might be arrested that I reconsidered.' Increasingly, we are all having to upend our notions that protest is the preserve of idealistic undergraduates. Many of the marches against Donald Trump have seen retirees outnumber students, while the Extinction Rebellion protests have been almost as thick with grey hair as pink. Who could forget the photographs of a then 60-year-old Emma Thompson perched on a boat in Oxford Circus a few years ago? 'I have often said that baby boomers are going to fundamentally reshape what ageing looks like,' says Jennifer Ailshire, a professor of gerontology at the University of Southern California. 'We had the stereotype of a grandma knitting or an old fellow gardening because we have associated ageing with frailty and ill-health and a lack of ability to be out in social spaces. Boomers are the first generation in the history of the world to have really benefited from new medical interventions and advice on how to stay fitter for longer, and as a result a great number feel younger and seem younger than those who came before them.' Duffy agrees that health is the largest reason for this culture-changing shift. 'Life expectancy in the UK is now over 80; for many, that means a second act spanning decades,' he says. Another important factor is wealth. 'This generation of retirees has far more disposable income than any other. They benefited from rising house prices, golden economic conditions, generous final-salary pensions and free higher education. That creates the means to have an unusual level of freedom.' The third is attitudes. 'This is the post-war generation that drove changes in gender equality, sexual behaviour and individual freedom,' says Duffy. 'They're distinct from their parents in almost every social measure so it's no wonder they are approaching old age with a very different mindset.' This last point is evidenced by the fact that boomers are wilder in their politics – and their pleasures. This is in comparison to both the silent generation and (somewhat shamingly for anyone under 40) their own adult children. Around Britain, millennials and older Gen Zs – who have largely moderated their drinking and swapped clubbing for 6am yoga classes – are quietly watching their parents' social calendars and holiday plans completely outpace their own. Lucy, 33, now refuses to have dinner with her parents during the week. It's not because she is too busy, or because she has too much on to leave work on time. It's not even because they live too far away – after they retired, her parents sold the family home in Wimbledon and bought a two-bedroom flat in Bloomsbury so they could be closer to the best restaurants and bars in the capital. 'I can't see my parents because I can't take the hangovers at my desk the day after,' says Lucy. 'My friends and I tend to stick to one or two drinks, or we meet up to exercise if it's a Monday or Tuesday, but my parents ply me with cocktails and wine and when I refuse they joke about me being pregnant. I love them to bits but I've realised I need to limit my time with them to weekends. They're just too much for me.' This isn't just anecdotal. Baby boomers now drink more alcohol than any other age group, according to figures from the now defunct Public Health England. Studies show that three in 10 boomers drink five days or more a week, while less than 1 per cent of Gen Z does the same. 'Alcohol drinking is incredibly generational,' says Duffy. 'It's about what you were socialised into, but also other changes: it is more difficult and more expensive for young people to get alcohol, whereas boomers were brought up on the idea that going out means drinking. Back then, there was massive sponsorship of big events by alcohol companies, and the advertising of alcohol was embedded everywhere; now young people tend to associate heavy drinking with health problems.' As for going out, Ailshire argues that boomers have always been a particularly social generation. 'Younger adults today have far less time for leisure, and the idea of a single-earner household has almost completely gone out the window,' she says. As a result, millennials are struggling to pay childcare bills and mortgages, and simply don't have the money for babysitters and restaurants. Similarly, those in cities often don't have space in their houses for dinners and parties. 'Then there is the fact that phone addiction eats up so much of younger generations' free time,' says Ailshire. 'It all adds up to a picture where over-60s are socialising much more than those coming up behind them.' And where drinking goes, other traditionally 'bad' behaviours often follow. The over-65s have experienced a 20 per cent rise in STIs in the UK in the last five years, while in Australia, a government report this year found that alcohol, tobacco and drug use among the over-60s had doubled in a decade. Globally, the pattern repeats itself. In France, Les Papy Boomers have become a political force, organising environmental protests from Marseille to Paris. In the US, the 'Raging Grannies' have made headlines for turning up at demonstrations in feather boas and floppy hats, singing protest songs rewritten to target companies in the fossil fuel industry. In Japan, a wave of 'silver start-ups' has seen retirees launching fashion brands, dance studios and even underground nightclubs. Boomers, in other words, are not quietly retiring to potter around the garden and watch Midsomer Murders. And while younger generations may be physically fitter and more socially progressive on paper, they are finding it difficult to match the heady mix of financial freedom and healthy, work-free years their parents are clearly benefiting from. What remains to be seen is whether this is a generational anomaly – the final flourish of a cohort born into a rare period of post-war prosperity who went on to dominate the culture of nearly every decade they have been adults in – or whether it is the new template for ageing in the 21st century. 'I think sadly this is unique to the boomers,' says Ailshire, who was born in 1981. 'I just don't think we will be able to retire at the age baby boomers have, and nor will many of us have the same level of wealth when we are no longer working. The boomers are the aberrant generation – and I'm not confident that the concept of a wild retirement will endure much beyond them.'
The Independent
an hour ago
- The Independent
Trump is ready to ‘crush' the Russian economy if Putin doesn't meet with Zelensky, says Lindsey Graham
Sen. Lindsey Graham has said that Donald Trump is ready to 'crush' the Russian economy if Vladimir Putin refuses to meet with Volodymyr Zelensky in the coming weeks to discuss an end to the Ukraine war. Graham has reportedly been pressuring Trump for months to support a sweeping sanctions bill designed to punish the Kremlin by placing massive tariffs on any country that continues to buy Russian oil and gas, thereby indirectly helping to bankroll its invasion of its western neighbor state. The legislation would most obviously hurt rival superpowers China and India, who currently account for 70 percent of Russia's energy exports and would face 500 percent U.S. tariffs if it were to be enacted. The Independent 's Owen Matthews has argued that Zelensky's European allies have already missed their opportunity to hold Putin to account by starving Russia of fossil fuel revenues. However, the senator believes there is still time. 'If we don't have this thing moving in the right direction by the time we get back, then I think that plan B needs to kick in,' Graham told the Associated Press in a phone interview this week. His bipartisan bill has been endorsed by 85 of his fellow senators to date, but does not have the expressed support of the White House. Graham argues that its moment may come when the upper chamber of Congress reconvenes in September following its summer recess. Graham said he had spoken to Trump on Tuesday, a day after he hosted several European heads of state and senior officials at the White House, including Zelensky, Keir Starmer, Emmanuel Macron, Friedrich Merz, Giorgia Meloni, Ursula von der Leyen and Mark Rutte. 'Trump believes that if Putin doesn't do his part, that he's going to have to crush his economy. Because you've got to mean what you say,' Graham told reporters in his home state after his call with the president. 'There will come a point where if it's clear that Putin is not going to entertain peace, that President Trump will have to back up what he said he would do. And the best way to do it is to have congressional blessing.' Connecticut Sen. Richard Blumenthal, the top Democrat in support of Graham's bill, has warned against excessive optimism regarding the prospects of a peace deal, given that the Russian leader emerged from his Alaska summit with Trump last week without making any definite commitments, suggesting he could be employing 'rope-a-dope' tactics. 'The only way to bring Putin to the table is to show strength,' Blumenthal told the AP. 'What Putin understands is force and pressure.'
