Putin, Kim Jong Un share info ahead of Trump summit in Alaska
Nikkei staff writers
August 13, 2025 04:43 JST
MOSCOW/NEW YORK -- Russian President Vladimir Putin spoke with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un by phone, the Kremlin said Tuesday, in a show of unity before Putin's meeting with U.S. President Donald Trump in Alaska.
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Yomiuri Shimbun
a minute ago
- Yomiuri Shimbun
Europe Is Escaping Reliance on American Science
BRUSSELS/WASHINGTON/BERLIN (Reuters) — European governments are taking steps to break their dependence on critical scientific data the United States historically made freely available to the world, and are ramping up their own data collection systems to monitor climate change and weather extremes, according to Reuters interviews. The effort — which has not been previously reported — marks the most concrete response from the European Union and other European governments so far to the U.S. government's retreat from scientific research under U.S. President Donald Trump's administration. Since his return to the White House, Trump has initiated sweeping budget cuts to the National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration, the National Institutes of Health, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Centers for Disease Control and other agencies, dismantling programs conducting climate, weather, geospatial and health research, and taking some public databases offline. As those cuts take effect, European officials have expressed increasing alarm that — without continued access to U.S.-supported weather and climate data — governments and businesses will face challenges in planning for extreme weather events and long-term infrastructure investment, according to Reuters interviews. In March, more than a dozen European countries urged the EU Commission to move fast to recruit American scientists who lose their jobs to those cuts. Asked for comment on NOAA cuts and the EU's moves to expand its own collection of scientific data, the White House Office of Management and Budget said Trump's proposed cuts to the agency's 2026 budget were aimed at programs that spread 'fake Green New Scam 'science,'' a reference to climate change research and policy. 'Under President Trump's leadership, the U.S. is funding real science again,' Rachel Cauley, an OMB spokesperson, said via email. European officials told Reuters that — beyond the risk of losing access to data that is bedrock to the world's understanding of climate change and marine systems — they were concerned by the general U.S. pullback from research. 'The current situation is much worse than we could have expected,' Sweden's State Secretary for Education and Research Maria Nilsson, told Reuters. 'My reaction is, quite frankly, shock.' The Danish Meteorological Institute described the U.S. government data as 'absolutely vital' — and said it relied on several data sets to measure sea ice in the Arctic and sea surface temperatures. 'This isn't just a technical issue, reliable data underpins extreme weather warnings, climate projections, protecting communities and ultimately saves lives,' said Adrian Lema, director of the DMI's National Center for Climate Research. Reuters interviewed officials from eight European countries who said their governments were undertaking reviews of their reliance on U.S. marine, climate and weather data. Officials from seven countries — Denmark, Finland, Germany, the Netherlands, Norway, Spain and Sweden — described joint efforts now in the early stages to safeguard key health and climate data and research programs. Leaning on U.S. As a priority, the EU is expanding its access to ocean observation data, a senior European Commission official told Reuters. Those data sets are seen as critical to the shipping and energy industries as well as early storm warning systems. Over the next two years, the senior official said, the EU plans to expand its own European Marine Observation and Data Network, which collects and hosts data on shipping routes, seabed habitats, marine litter and other concerns. The initiative was aimed at 'mirroring and possibly replacing U.S.-based services,' the senior European Commission official told Reuters. Europe is particularly concerned about its vulnerability to U.S. funding cuts to NOAA's research arm that would affect the Global Ocean Observing System, a network of ocean observation programs that supports navigation services, shipping routes and storm forecasting, a second EU official told Reuters. The insurance industry relies on the Global Ocean Observing System's disaster records for risk modeling. Coastal planners use shoreline, sea-level and hazard data to guide infrastructure investments. The energy industry uses oceanic and seismic datasets to assess offshore drilling or wind farm viability. In addition, the senior EU Commission official said, the EU is considering increasing its funding of the Argo program, a part of the Global Ocean Observing System which operates a global system of floats to monitor the world's oceans and track global warming, extreme weather events and sea-level rise. NOAA last year described the program, in operation for over 25 years, as the 'crown jewel' of ocean science. It makes its data freely available to the oil and gas industry, marine tourism and other industries. The United States funds 57% of Argo's $40 million annual operating expenses, while the EU funds 23%. The European moves to establish independent data collection and play a bigger role in Argo represent a historic break with decades of U.S. leadership in ocean science, said Craig McLean, who retired in 2022 after four decades at the agency. He said U.S. leadership of weather, climate and marine data collection was unmatched, and that through NOAA the U.S. has paid for more than half of the world's ocean measurements. European scientists acknowledge the outsized role the U.S. government has played in global scientific research and data collection — and that European countries have grown overly dependent on that work. 'It's a bit like defense: we rely heavily on the U.S. in that area, too. They're trailblazers and role models — but that also makes us dependent on them,' Katrin Boehning-Gaese, scientific director of Germany's Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research, told Reuters. 'Guerrilla archivists' A number of European governments are now taking measures to reduce that dependence. Nordic countries met to coordinate data storage efforts in the spring, Norwegian Minister of Research and Higher Education Sigrun Aasland told Reuters. European science ministers also discussed the U.S. science budget cuts at a meeting in Paris in May. Aasland said Norway was setting aside $2 million to back up and store U.S. data to ensure stable access. The Danish Meteorological Institute in February started downloading historical U.S. climate data in case it is deleted by the U.S. It is also preparing to switch from American observations to alternatives, Christina Egelund, Minister of Higher Education and Science of Denmark, said in an interview. 'The potentially critical issue is when new observations data stop coming in,' the institute's Lema said. While weather models could continue to operate without U.S. data, he said the quality would suffer. Meanwhile, the German government has commissioned scientific organizations, including the center, to review its reliance on U.S. databases. Since Trump returned to the White House, scientists and citizens worldwide have been downloading U.S. databases related to climate, public health or the environment that are slated for decommissioning — calling it 'guerrilla archiving.' 'We actually received requests — or let's say emergency calls — from our colleagues in the U.S., who said, 'We have a problem here … and we will have to abandon some datasets,' said Frank Oliver Gloeckner, head of the digital archive PANGAEA, which is operated by publicly funded German research institutions. About 800 of NOAA's 12,000-strong workforce have been terminated or taken financial incentives to resign as part of Trump's Department of Government Efficiency cuts. The White House 2026 budget plan seeks to shrink NOAA even further, proposing a $1.8 billion cut, or 27% of the agency's budget, and a near-20% reduction in staffing, bringing down the NOAA workforce to 10,000. The budget proposal would eliminate the Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research, NOAA's main research arm, which is responsible for ocean observatory systems including Argo, coastal observing networks, satellite sensors and climate model labs. It is also reducing its data products. Between April and June, NOAA announced on its website the decommissioning of 20 datasets or products related to earthquakes and marine science. Gloeckner said there were no legal hurdles to storing the U.S. government data as it was already in the public domain. But without significant funds and infrastructure, there are limits to what private scientists can save, said Denice Ross, a senior fellow at the Federation of American Scientists, a nonprofit science policy group and the U.S. government's chief data officer during Joe Biden's administration. Databases need regular updating — which requires the funding and infrastructure that only governments can provide, Ross said. Over the last few months, the Federation and EU officials have held a series of talks with European researchers, U.S. philanthropies and health and environment advocacy groups to discuss how to prioritize what data to save. 'There is an opportunity for other nations and institutions and philanthropies to fill in the gaps if U.S. quality starts to falter,' she said.
Yomiuri Shimbun
2 hours ago
- Yomiuri Shimbun
White House Sharply Lowers Expectations for Trump-Putin Summit
President Donald Trump expects his encounter with Russian President Vladimir Putin this week to be a 'listening exercise,' White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said Tuesday, sharply downplaying the possibility that a deal to end the war in Ukraine could be imminent despite a warning from the president last week that Kyiv needed to 'get ready to sign something.' The lowered expectations for Friday's meeting in Alaska came as Russia made significant battlefield gains in eastern Ukraine and appeared to be in little mood to offer concessions that might be necessary to achieve a durable halt in the fighting. European leaders plan a video conversation with Trump on Wednesday that will include Ukraine. They have been concerned that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky was not invited to the meeting and that Putin could take advantage of the moment, and have pressed to speak to Trump ahead of time. Leavitt made clear that the White House intends the summit as an opening face-to-face encounter, and not one that Trump expects will lead to a deal on the spot. Asked whether Trump might be willing to engage on issues that stray from resolving the war, such as thawing trade between Russia and the United States, Leavitt said the president intends to keep the focus on Ukraine. The summit 'is a listening exercise for the president. Look, only one party that's involved in this war is going to be present, and so this is for the president to go and to get, again, a more firm and better understanding of how we can hopefully bring this more to an end,' Leavitt told reporters. Her comments amplified Trump's remarks at a news conference Monday in which he had already started to dial back expectations, saying that 'I may leave and say 'good luck,' and that'll be the end.' That's a notably dampened outlook compared with last week, when Trump floated the idea of territorial concessions as part of a peace deal, with Ukraine giving up territory it controls in exchange for Russian pullouts from elsewhere in the country. The Kremlin has indicated it is uninterested in the idea for now, European officials say. The change in expectations is 'good news,' said one senior European diplomat, speaking on the condition of anonymity to talk frankly about internal assessments of the summit's prospects. European friends of Ukraine have been unsettled by the possibility that Trump and Putin could work out a deal over Zelensky's head, so the stepped-back ambition is likely to be met with relief. A one-on-one meeting with Trump is already a victory from the perspective of Putin, who has long sought to restore the era when Washington and Moscow were the world's two dominant capitals. Ever since he annexed Ukraine's Crimean Peninsula by force in 2014, he has said that the road to resolving the conflict involves sitting down with a U.S. leader, not a Ukrainian one. Apart from a 2015 visit to the United Nations, the Russian leader has not set foot on U.S. soil since 2007, the year before he invaded Georgia, another of Russia's neighbors. Previous presidents have typically used meetings with adversaries as leverage to win concessions, and the encounters usually take place after extensive preparatory work by less-senior officials to flesh out agreements. Trump has departed from that precedent, putting heavy faith in his own ability to quickly size up his counterparts and hammer out deals through face-to-face meetings. In his first term, he met repeatedly with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, although he ultimately walked away from those talks (after declaring that 'we fell in love'). And he has long declared that his toughness is what is necessary to push Putin into better behavior. 'People have to understand. For President Trump, a meeting is not a concession,' Secretary of State Marco Rubio told WABC radio on Tuesday. Trump 'doesn't view it that way. A meeting is what you do to kind of figure out and make your decision. 'I want to have all the facts. I want to look this guy in the eye.' And that's what the president wants to do. So honestly, I think we're going to know very early in that meeting whether this thing has any chance of success or not.' Trump 'has a tremendous instinct for deciphering human nature,' Rubio said. 'I've seen it be very successful in these trade deals when he comes in and closes them, and they're always in person. It's hard to do that on the phone. So I think that's what Friday is going to be about.' Last week, during a meeting with Armenian and Azerbaijani leaders, Trump gave a more expansive view of the potential for a deal on the Ukraine war, saying Zelensky needed to stop saying that he wasn't authorized 'to do certain things' under Ukrainian law, such as giving up territory. 'I said, 'Well, you're going to have to get it fast because, you know, we're getting very close to a deal,'' Trump told reporters. 'President Zelensky has to get all of his, everything he needs, because he's going to have to get ready to sign something.' Zelensky has been less positive about the talks than U.S. officials are. The Friday meeting is Putin's 'personal victory,' Zelensky told reporters in Ukraine on Tuesday, saying that the Russian president will be able to use it as a photo opportunity to demonstrate his waning isolation. 'I don't know what they will talk about without us,' he said. 'Ukrainian issues should be discussed by at least three people.' Asked why Zelensky was not being included in Friday's summit, Leavitt said that it was because Trump 'is agreeing to this meeting at the request of President Putin.' She said the hope was that the three leaders could meet together sometime soon. On the ground, meanwhile, Russia's military is pressing a significant manpower and equipment advantage to nearly encircle the strategic eastern Ukrainian town of Pokrovsk. The town has been an important logistical hub for Kyiv during the three-year conflict, although its importance has ebbed as Russia has broken some of its transportation lines.
Yomiuri Shimbun
2 hours ago
- Yomiuri Shimbun
Putin Holds Call with North Korea's Kim, Discusses US-Russia Talks, Kremlin Says
MOSCOW, Aug 12 (Reuters) – President Vladimir Putin held a phone call with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un and updated him on planned talks the Russian leader will hold with U.S. President Donald Trumpin Alaska this week, the Kremlin said on Tuesday. North Korea's state news agency KCNA later reported the two leaders' call without mentioning the meeting scheduled on Friday between Putin and Trump. Kim and Putin discussed the development in the countries' ties under a strategic partnership agreement signed last year 'confirming their will to strengthen cooperation in the future,' KCNA said. Putin expressed appreciation for North Korea's help in 'liberating' the Kursk region in western Russia in the war against Ukraine and 'the bravery, heroism and self-sacrificing spirit displayed by service personnel of the Korean People's Army,' it said. North Korea has dispatched more than 10,000 troops to support Russia's campaign in western Russia in the Ukraine conflict and is believed to be planning another deployment, according to a South Korean intelligence assessment.
