The moment Vladimir Putin has craved - a red carpet from Donald Trump for a man with blood on his hands
The two leaders greeted each other with a handshake after stepping off their planes at the Elmendorf-Richardson military base in Anchorage, Alaska - and a smiling Trump even applauded Putin as he approached him on a red carpet that had been laid out.
It is exactly the moment Putin has craved, writes Moscow correspondent Ivor Bennett. The Russian leader has been welcomed on to US soil as an equal for a meeting of great powers.
Trump-Putin summit - latest updates
The red carpet, the handshake, the flypast - only North Korea would give an indicted war criminal a greeting like this.
It marks the end of his isolation from the West in the most spectacular fashion.
Instead of sanctions, Trump has rewarded the Russian president with the equivalent of a state visit.
The pariah looks more like a partner.
, reporting from the ground in Alaska, describes the meeting on the tarmac as "extraordinary".
There was the red carpet and more for a man with blood on his hands, he writes. Putin - aggressor, pariah and wanted for war crimes.
Quite the CV for a man who was applauded on to the airbase by his host, the US president.
It couldn't have looked more cordial - a superpower moment with a smile and a shake between the men who hold peace in their hands.
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If that wasn't enough, there followed a military flypast to dress the spectacle.
A smiling Putin seemed duly impressed, but what it says about the power dynamic in the relationship will trouble onlookers in Ukraine - and one moment they may have found particularly galling.
Posing for photographs with Trump before waiting media, Putin was asked: "Will you stop killing civilians?"
To which he smiled, and gave it a deaf ear
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The only other state that gives its governor the power to veto parole grants is Oklahoma, according to the American Civil Liberties Union. The proposition does limit the window of reversal to 30 days, meaning if the parole board votes to release the brothers, Newsom has 30 days from when the decision is released to change it. Since the proposition's passing, the power bestowed on the California governor has been curbed slightly by court rulings over the past two decades, said Christopher Hawthorne, clinical professor of law and director of the Juvenile Innocence & Fair Sentencing Clinic at Loyola Law School. In one, the California Supreme Court ruled the governor must reasonably assess the defendant's risk against public safety, Hawthorne said. Another ruling several years later allowed the governor to consider whether the defendant had insight into their crime, he added. 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Hawthorne cited the case of Leslie Van Houten, a former Charles Manson follower and convicted murderer, as an illustration of when governors repeatedly denied parole despite the board approving it. Newsom also denied parole for Sirhan Sirhan, who assassinated US Sen. Robert F. Kennedy in 1968, with the governor citing Sirhan's 'refusal to accept responsibility for his crime' and 'lack of insight and accountability,' among other reasons. 'He does not understand, let alone have the skills to manage, the complex risks of his self-created notoriety. He cannot be safely released from prison because he has not mitigated his risk of fomenting further political violence,' Newsom wrote in a 2022 Los Angeles Times op-ed explaining his decision. 'Every governor is fairly allergic to releasing high-profile defendants,' Hawthorne said, though 'California has done really well in the last 10 years or so' in increasing the availability of parole overall. 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