Closing summary
Our live coverage is ending now. In the meantime, you can find all of our live US politics coverage here. Here is a summary of the key developments from today:
Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin will not attend what may be the first direct peace talks between Moscow and Kyiv in three years, scheduled for Thursday, Reuters reports. Instead, the Kremlin will send a team of technocrats. A US official said the US president would not attend, despite earlier comments suggesting he was considering the trip.
Health secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr described the downsizing of his department as necessary cost-cutting measures as he defended his spending plans under Donald Trump’s budget proposal. The plans include an $18bn cut to National Institutes of Health funding and $3.6bn from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Kennedy’s back-to-back testimonies before House and Senate committees were his first appearances before lawmakers since his confirmation in February.
Protesters interrupted Robert F Kennedy Jr’s opening remarks before the Senate health committee this afternoon, shouting: “RFK kills people with Aids!” The health secretary was visibly startled and jumped from his chair when protesters began shouting, before being removed by Capitol police.
Tulsi Gabbard, the US director of national intelligence, has fired the two highest-ranking officials at the National Intelligence Council just weeks after the council released an assessment that contradicted Donald Trump’s justification for using the Alien Enemies Act to deport alleged Venezuelan gang members without due process. Mike Collins was serving as acting chair of the National Intelligence Council before he was dismissed alongside his deputy, Maria Langan-Riekhof. They each had more than 25 years of intelligence experience.
A Russian-born researcher at Harvard University who has been held for weeks in an immigration detention center in Louisiana has been criminally charged with attempting to smuggle frog embryo samples into the US. Federal prosecutors in Boston announced the smuggling charge against Kseniia Petrova, 31, hours after a federal judge in Vermont heard arguments in a lawsuit she filed that argues the Trump administration has been unlawfully detaining her.
The Trump administration’s commerce secretary, Howard Lutnick, and his family have had extensive business interests linked to El Salvador, whose authoritarian leader Nayib Bukele has grown close to the White House and who has courted controversy by imprisoning people deported from the US in an aggressive immigration crackdown. El Salvador also plays host to a booming cryptocurrency and new media industry, which has numerous ties to Donald Trump allies who are seeking to make money from various ventures which have sometimes drawn the attention of authorities or ethics watchdogs.
Donald Trump has doubled down on why he wants to accept a luxury Boeing 747 from Qatar, a country where he traveled to today to negotiate business deals, with the US president portraying the $400m aircraft as an opportunity too valuable to refuse. “The plane that you’re on is almost 40 years old,” Trump told Fox News host Sean Hannity during an Air Force One interview on the Middle East trip, where he is also visiting Saudi Arabia and the UAE.
Congressional Republicans advanced elements of Donald Trump’s sweeping budget package on Wednesday after a debate that lasted through the night, as a key committee voted along party lines to approve tax cuts that would add trillions of dollars to the national debt. The 26-19 vote by the tax-writing House ways and means committee amounts to an initial victory for Republicans, who still have many hurdles to clear before they can get the sprawling package of tax cuts, spending hikes and safety-net reductions to Trump’s desk to sign into law.
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A Russian scientist held in Ice jail was charged with smuggling frog embryos into US.
Cy Neff brings us the full story on the Harvard scientist facing smuggling charges and the possibility of being deported:
A Harvard scientist who has been held in US immigration detention for months was charged on Wednesday with smuggling frog embryos into the United States, and likely faces deportation.
Kseniia Petrova, a Russian scientist and research associate working at Harvard University, was originally detained by immigration officials in February after attempting to enter the United States at Boston Logan international airport.
In a 14 May press release, the US district attorney’s Massachusetts office said smuggling charges can bring sentences of up to 20 years and fines up to $250,000. The press releases alleges that Petrova’s text messages show she knew of the requirement to declare the embryos before entering the United States. Petrova has spent the last three months in a Louisiana detention facility.
Petrova’s lawyer, Gregory Romanovsky, called the case “meritless” and questioned the timing of her being transferred into criminal custody, saying it happened after the judge in her lawsuit set a 28 May bail hearing to consider releasing her.
“The charge, filed three months after the alleged customs violation, is clearly intended to make Kseniia look like a criminal to justify their efforts to deport her,” he said in a statement.
Petrova detailed her research and detention experience in a New York Times op-ed this week. Petrova said that she left Russia after being arrested for protesting against the Ukraine war, and found “a paradise for science” at the Harvard Medical School in 2023. Petrova, who also shared Facebook posts supporting the impeachment of Russian president Vladimir Putin, said that she fears deportation to Russia due to her political stances.
Read the full story here:
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