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Trump admits he and Putin did not reach key agreements

Trump admits he and Putin did not reach key agreements

Times of Oman2 days ago
During the leaders' joint press conference in Alaska, US President Donald Trump did not offer much more insight into how his talks with President Vladimir Putin over Russia's war in Ukraine went.
Trump said that, although the meeting was "productive," there were a few points on which the two sides could not agree.
"Some of the points are not so significant and one is very significant," Trump told a press conference at Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson. "There are a couple of big ones that we haven't quite got there on, but we've made some headway."
Talking about his next steps, Trump added: "I will call up NATO, the various people I think are important, and of course President Zelenskyy, and tell him about the meeting."
At the end of the press conference, during which no questions were allowed, Trump said that a resolution to end the war would come soon and added, "There are thousands of people being killed every day, and I know everyone wants that to stop. I know President Putin wants that to stop."US President Donald Trump and his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin have both left Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson, with Air Force One departing a minute after Putin's plane.
The talks between the two leaders ended after only two-and-a-half hours, with many having expected discussions to stretch to six-seven hours.
Seemingly little progress was made during the talks over bringing an end to Russia's war in Ukraine.
Trump used the presidents' joint press conference to admit that there were a "few points we could not agree on."
'There was a real lack of meaningful outcomes'
The world was watching — and saw nothing but a very uncomfortable US President and his Russian counterpart taking over the room, according to DW's Washington Bureau Chief Ines Pohl.
Trump and Putin ended their highly anticipated meeting, and it seemed to yield very little of substance. There was a real lack of meaningful outcomes, with no concrete agreements on key issues like security guarantees for Ukraine or a potential ceasefire, leaving many of us skeptical about any real progress.
It felt like Putin managed to control the narrative, achieving a symbolic victory just by being there, while Trump's hesitant demeanor allowed Putin to overshadow him, which was surprising given Trump's usual flair for the dramatic.
There are also growing concerns about the long-term implications for European security. This situation feels eerily reminiscent of past negotiations that ignored local voices, raising fears that Ukraine's interests could be sidelined in favor of a deal that benefits both the US and Russia.
Moving forward, it's crucial for Trump to team up with NATO allies and put pressure on Putin for a ceasefire to ensure some level of stability.
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International students turn to Asian universities as a refuge
International students turn to Asian universities as a refuge

Observer

time20 hours ago

  • Observer

International students turn to Asian universities as a refuge

SEOUL, South Korea — For Jess Concepcion, a microbiology student from the Philippines, obtaining a doctorate from a university in the United States had been a dream. It was where most of his academic mentors had studied and done research, and he wanted to follow in their footsteps. But when the United States, under President Donald Trump, started pausing visa interviews during peak season this spring, threatening to deport international students for political speech and slashing funding for academic research, he quickly changed plans. Applications for doctoral programs take years and have to be tailored to specific schools, so he is aiming for programs in Switzerland and Singapore instead. 'That uncertainty made me stop in my tracks and choose another country,' Concepcion, 24, said. 'Immigration policy is quite restrictive, and I'm on a different side of the world. So living in that kind of instability that far away isn't healthy for me.' It's a quandary facing many young people around the world. According to the United Nations, 6.9 million people studied outside their home country in 2022. The United States has long attracted the most foreign students, 1.1 million in the 2023-24 academic year. It's too soon to know whether more foreign students will choose not to attend U.S. schools. But warning signs abound. Major international education search platforms, including IDP and Keystone Education Group, have detected a marked decline in student interest in American programs. Among academic administrators polled by the Institute of International Education this spring, more than usual reported drops in international applications for the coming year. These are not the first signs that American higher education is losing its dominant position. For years, countries in Asia have been strengthening their universities and marketing them to students around the world. With more appealing alternatives, the Trump administration's hostile stance may hasten the decline in U.S. higher education preeminence. 'We're shifting from a world in which there were only a few primary target destination countries to a much more multipolar world,' said Clay Harmon, the executive director of the Association of International Enrollment Management, which represents recruitment agencies. 'It's all adding up to this narrative that 'maybe that's not the right destination for me after all,'' Harmon said. ''And there are a whole bunch of other countries that are eager to take my money instead.'' Asia Steps Up For decades, in the English-speaking world, Oxford and Cambridge in Britain, the Ivy League in the United States, and other name-brand universities in Australia and Canada tended to top application checklists. Gradually, schools in China, Japan, Taiwan and Singapore started showing up in annual rankings of the top universities — and with lower prices. Governments dispatched representatives to college fairs and set goals for the number of students they wanted to bring in every year. So when Trump, soon after starting his second term, began pushing international students away, Asian nations started welcoming students who couldn't continue their studies at American schools. Take South Korea, where Concepcion went for his master's degree after winning a scholarship from the South Korean government that covered living expenses and tuition. He added a year of mandatory language study and enrolled at Korea University in Seoul, where his program starts in earnest this fall. In the spring, Korea University was among several institutions to offer relief measures as the U.S. government began canceling some student visas and terminating funding programs. Another South Korean school, Yonsei University, will open rolling admissions for undergraduate transfers year round starting in 2026 and is planning a customized visiting program for students whose coursework is interrupted in the United States. Trump has added urgency to such plans, but this effort has been underway in Asia for decades. South Korea has for years sent students to other countries, while attracting few from overseas. In the early 2000s, leaders started to think of that imbalance as a kind of trade deficit and set out to boost their international recruitment. They took guidance from a similar effort in Japan, which had about 337,000 foreign students last year and is aiming for 400,000 by 2033. South Korea's latest target was set in 2023: 300,000 international students by 2027. For 2026, Seoul was named the top city for international students in the closely followed Quacquarelli Symonds World University Rankings. Early on, the South Korean government's work was intended to buoy flagging schools in smaller towns, where low birthrates and emigration to larger cities have shrunk classes of high school graduates. Foreign students are also not subject to tuition caps that apply to domestic students, creating a new revenue stream to keep universities afloat. Meekyung Shin, the director of educational globalization for South Korea's Ministry of Education, said that at first those foreign students were generally expected to return home after their studies. More recently, officials have started to see foreign students as an answer to the nation's labor shortage as well. Seoul established a support center to help foreign students get jobs, and visa policies have been loosened to help them work after graduation. 'Now we are very interested in how we help them decide to stay here,' Shin said. There are about 70,000 students in South Korea from China and 50,000 from Vietnam. Myanmar and Nepal send thousands each year. For South Korean companies, the students offer an opportunity: potential hires who could help expand the business into their home countries or manage overseas factories. Hyundai, for example, makes many of its cars in Vietnam and is trying to sell them in Singapore. Kyle Guadana is a Singaporean student studying at Yonsei University, where he leads the Foreign Student Union. He said Hyundai, among other companies, had reached out directly. 'They are looking for foreigners who will be able to work with them,' Guadana, 24, said. 'They are specifically targeting Southeast Asian students, because they are trying to expand their bases here.' The recruiting drive has had some complications, however. To hit its targets, the government has accepted a wider range of language proficiency tests and lowered the minimum bank balance required to obtain a visa. It has also increased the number of hours students can work in a week. Some students have used university enrollment primarily as a way to earn money in South Korea, which is not otherwise easy to do. That's particularly true outside Seoul, according to Jun Hyun Hong, a professor at Chung-Ang University who was involved in earlier efforts to bring international students to South Korea's higher education system. Local governments are happy to have more people willing to work in factories and on farms, something that colleges facilitate. 'If we focus mainly on achieving the numerical goal,' Hong said, 'and ignore the quality of international students and the educational capacity of the university, there are concerns about whether maintaining these numbers will be sustainable in the long term.' Shin, the education official, said the government was working to ensure the quality of the programs. Right now, international students make up about 10% of the total student population, and she thinks that's a good ratio to maintain. But the larger challenge may be making sure that those who come primarily to study are able to work in South Korea when they graduate — and that they want to stay. Keity Rose Mendes, 21, grew up in Mozambique and received the same scholarship granted to Concepcion, studying industrial engineering at Seoul National University. She chose South Korea for its safety and because she wanted to learn about its manufacturing techniques. But after three years of classes, she felt that collaboration wasn't valued and that foreign students weren't well integrated. 'A lot of them, especially non-Asian international students, just want to finish their studies and leave,' said Mendes, who is the president of the school's International Student Association. 'I wish that the same effort that they're putting into bringing international students, they also tried to put into creating facilities to maintain them here.' Hedging Their Bets For millions of students deciding where to study, the United States is still the leading destination. Degrees from top American universities command societal respect — and lucrative job offers — in countries like South Korea. But even that shine has been dulled by new obstacles since Trump took office, said Pierre Huguet, the CEO of the global admissions consulting firm H&C Education. 'Many saw the U.S. as offering more freedom and an escape from rigid social pressures in Korea,' Huguet said. 'Now they fear visa revocations, invasive online presence reviews, and a chilled campus climate, which is the opposite of what they were hoping for.' Huguet said his clients were focusing on Britain and Australia. The number of South Korean students studying abroad overall has been dropping as the country's universities climb the rankings. And the United States isn't the only developed country to push back against international students. Canada and Australia limited international student visas last year, while Britain raised visa fees and was contemplating shortening postgraduate work visas. 'No country is being extremely welcoming at this stage,' said Yash Sharma, who runs an admissions consultancy called Longshore Education focused on the market in India. 'Everywhere in the English-speaking world, there is anti-immigration sentiment going around.' To add to political uncertainty, post-graduation job opportunities are changing. Tech companies, which have long been a strong draw to the United States, have pulled back on hiring entry-level workers as artificial intelligence reduces the number of people needed to do simpler tasks. That's what ultimately changed Divyank Rawat's mind. After working as a data analyst in India after college, he decided to pursue a master's degree in the United States because he felt it was the only place he could learn certain skills. Rawat, 25, was admitted to a handful of good programs. But after he spoke with other Indians who had recently graduated in the United States, the job market looked grim. Combined with the risk of not getting a student visa and new threats to the three-year, post-graduation period when students are allowed to work using their student visas, he decided to stay in India to work for the time being. 'Let's suppose I end up in the U.S. with $70,000 debt and no kind of job security,' Rawat said. 'It is really scary to imagine that.' He regrets not applying to European programs: 'The mistake was that I didn't have a backup plan.' This article originally appeared in

Zelenskyy to meet Trump in Washington on Monday, days after US-Russia talks in Alaska
Zelenskyy to meet Trump in Washington on Monday, days after US-Russia talks in Alaska

Times of Oman

time21 hours ago

  • Times of Oman

Zelenskyy to meet Trump in Washington on Monday, days after US-Russia talks in Alaska

Kyiv: Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy announced that he would be meeting with US President Donald Trump on Monday for diplomatic efforts to end the Russia-Ukraine conflict, just two days after the "historic" bilateral meeting between Trump and his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin in Alaska. In a post on X on Saturday, Zelenskyy revealed that he and Trump had held a "long and substantive" call, beginning with one-on-one talks and later including European leaders in a broader discussion, where Trump briefed him on his recent meeting with Putin. Zelenskyy underscored that Washington has a vital role in efforts to end the conflict. "We had a long and substantive conversation with @POTUS. We started with one-on-one talks before inviting European leaders to join us. This call lasted for more than an hour and a half, including about an hour of our bilateral conversation with President Trump," the Ukrainian President said. "Ukraine reaffirms its readiness to work with maximum effort to achieve peace. President Trump informed about his meeting with the Russian leader and the main points of their discussion. It is important that America's strength has an impact on the development of the situation," he added. Zelenskyy also welcomed Trump's proposal for a trilateral meeting involving Ukraine, the US and Russia, underlining Kyiv's commitment to peace and close coordination with international partners. "We support President Trump's proposal for a trilateral meeting between Ukraine, the USA, and Russia. Ukraine emphasises that key issues can be discussed at the level of leaders, and a trilateral format is suitable for this," the post read. "On Monday, I will meet with President Trump in Washington, D.C., to discuss all of the details regarding ending the killing and the war. I am grateful for the invitation," it added. Zelenskyy reiterated Ukraine's commitment to peace and said Kyiv remains ready to work with maximum effort to achieve a resolution, adding that European involvement would be critical in securing lasting and reliable security guarantees. "It is important that Europeans are involved at every stage to ensure reliable security guarantees together with America. We also discussed positive signals from the American side regarding participation in guaranteeing Ukraine's security. We continue to coordinate our positions with all partners. I thank everyone who is helping," the post concluded. Earlier, Trump also stated that the Ukrainian President will be coming to Washington on Monday, and if things work out then a meeting will be scheduled with Russian President Vladimir Putin. "President Zelenskyy will be coming to D.C., the Oval Office, on Monday afternoon. If all works out, we will then schedule a meeting with President Putin. Potentially, millions of people's lives will be saved. Thank you for your attention to this matter!" Trump stated in a post on Truth Social. Earlier on Friday, the US and Russia held the much-anticipated truce talks meeting in Alaska to discuss bringing an end to the conflict in Ukraine.

US team not coming to India for next round of trade negotiations: Govt sources
US team not coming to India for next round of trade negotiations: Govt sources

Times of Oman

timea day ago

  • Times of Oman

US team not coming to India for next round of trade negotiations: Govt sources

New Delhi: The US team is not coming to India for the next round of bilateral trade negotiations, according to government sources. The team was scheduled to arrive on August 25 for the sixth round of negotiations. "US Trade team not coming to India for the next round of trade negotiations. The US team was scheduled to visit India on 25th August for the 6th round of negotiations," government sources told ANI. Five rounds of negotiations have already been held, with the last round taking place from July 14-18, 2025, in Washington DC. India and the US are discussing tariff concessions and market access in key sectors, aiming to finalise an interim deal. The talks cover various areas, including market access, Sanitary and Phytosanitary Measures (SPS), Technical Barriers to Trade (TBT), digital trade, customs, and trade facilitation. Officials from both sides have engaged in in-depth talks, making progress towards crafting a balanced agreement with early wins. On whether the US team is coming for negotiations scheduled in the last week of August, Commerce Secretary Sunil Barthwal said, "Closer to the date, which is the end of the last week of August, we will be able to know how that round will be progressing." Commenting on US BTA negotiations, he said, "Our Bilateral Trade talks negotiations with the United States are going on. We are engaged. Bilateral deliberations are happening at different levels. One is at the negotiating team's level. Another one happens at the minister's level. Third, happens at the diplomatic level, and we also engage with different industries of the US, companies and everybody to look into their issues. So this negotiation is happening across various channels." "These negotiations are happening and we are engaged. The US is a very important partner for us. For the US, India is also an important partner," he added. During Prime Minister Narendra Modi's visit to Washington, DC, a Joint Statement was issued setting the goal to expand bilateral trade to USD 500 billion by 2030, and to pursue a Bilateral Trade Agreement (BTA) toward that end. Both countries aim to conclude the first tranche of the BTA by fall 2025. India and the US have set a target to double their trade to USD 500 billion by 2030. India is seeking improved market access for its goods and services, while the US is pushing for greater market access in key sectors. Addressing concerns over the impact of US tariffs on Indian exports earlier, a senior government official said that the government is closely monitoring the sectors most exposed to the US market and is working with key stakeholders to assess vulnerabilities. "We are in touch with the stakeholders. We understand which sectors are more exposed to us, and our commodity divisions are in discussions with various EPCs. The Minister has also taken meetings with the EPCs, particularly with those sectors which are labour-intensive. I have also taken a meeting with our officials, who are talking to the EPCs, trying to understand their exposure to the US," the official said. Highlighting the varying levels of export dependence, the official explained, "There are other companies which are more diversified, which are not only exporting to the US, but also exporting to the EU, exporting to the UK, exporting to other countries. Now, companies are also involved in standardising their exports; they may face some challenges that they are identifying, but they are also looking at other possibilities for diversification. And therefore, you know, our focus on this diversification and this export promotion mission is very, very important." US President Donald Trump has said there will be no trade negotiations with India until a dispute over tariffs is resolved, following his administration's decision to double tariffs on Indian imports. When pressed by ANI at the Oval Office, whether he expected talks to resume in light of the new 50 per cent tariff. "No, not until we get it resolved," he replied. The White House on Wednesday issued an Executive Order imposing an additional 25 percentage points in tariffs on Indian goods, raising the total levy to 50 per cent. The administration cited national security and foreign policy concerns, pointing specifically to India's ongoing imports of Russian oil. The order claims that these imports, whether direct or via intermediaries, present an "unusual and extraordinary threat" to the United States and justify emergency economic measures. In early August, the US imposed a 25 per cent tariff on most Indian goods, effective August 7, with exemptions for pharmaceuticals, electronics, semiconductors, and energy products. But US President Donald Trump further imposed an additional 25 per cent tariff on India, making the total imposition at 50 per cent. According to US officials, the initial 25% tariff came into effect on 7 August. The additional levy will take effect in 21 days and apply to all Indian goods entering US ports -- with exceptions for items already in transit and certain exempt categories. The order also provides flexibility for the president to modify the measures, depending on changing geopolitical circumstances or retaliatory actions by India or other nations. Prime Minister Narendra Modi responded defiantly during a speech at the MS Swaminathan Centenary International Conference in New Delhi, signalling that New Delhi would not back down in the face of economic pressure. "For us, the interest of our farmers is our top priority," PM Modi said. "India will never compromise on the interests of farmers, fishermen and dairy farmers. I know we will have to pay a heavy price for it, and I am ready for it. India is ready for it."

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