Dozens of world leaders and national delegations will meet in Washington DC on Thursday for the inaugural meeting of Donald Trump’s Board of Peace, as major European allies declined to join the group and criticised the organisation’s murky funding and political mandate.
The White House has indicated that the summit for the US president’s new ad hoc council at the renamed Donald J Trump Institute of Peace will heavily function as a fundraising round, with Trump announcing on social media that countries have pledged more than $5bn toward rebuilding Gaza, which has been devastated in the war with Israel and remains in a humanitarian crisis.
The board was initially formed with the reconstruction of Gaza as its stated primary goal, though its mandate has since been widened by the Trump to include responding to other global conflicts.
But despite the president’s characteristic bombast, the Board of Peace summit will open to heavy scepticism, with expectations limited both for Thursday’s meeting in Washington and in the Middle East, where the 100-day peace and recovery plan announced by Jared Kushner in Davos has stalled and aid into Gaza remains at a trickle.
“The board is a convenient way for a president who’s interested in quick wins, transactions and a lot of motion in lieu of serious movement as a way to project that things are somehow … not dead,” said Aaron David Miller, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and former US diplomat, referring to diplomacy. “So you could get some impressive pledges. But pledges are one thing, delivering is another.”
Major European allies decline to join first meeting of Trump’s Board of Peace
The White House initiative received another blow this week as Pope Leo XIV announced that the Vatican would not join the board, which critics have said was an attempt to usurp authority from other major international organisations, including the United Nations, and may allow Trump to remain as its chair even after his presidency ends.
Billionaire Les Wexner testifies before Congress about ties to Epstein
Lex Wexner, the former boss of the Victoria’s Secret lingerie brand, said he has “done nothing wrong” and has “nothing to hide”, as he testified on Wednesday before a congressional committee in relation to his past ties to Jeffrey Epstein.
Environmental groups sue Trump’s EPA over repeal of landmark climate finding
More than a dozen health and environmental justice non-profits have sued the Environmental Protection Agency over its revocation of the legal determination that underpins US federal climate regulations.
Filed in the Washington DC circuit court, the lawsuit challenges the EPA’s rollback of the “endangerment finding”, which states that the buildup of heat-trapping pollution in the atmosphere endangers public health and welfare and has allowed the EPA to limit those emissions from vehicles, power plants and other industrial sources since 2009. The rollback was widely seen as a major setback to US efforts to combat the climate crisis.
Trump tells Starmer that handing Chagos Islands to Mauritius is a ‘big mistake’
Donald Trump has urged Keir Starmer not to hand the Chagos Islands over to Mauritius, warning he was “making a big mistake”.
Under the deal agreed last year, Britain would cede control over the British Indian Ocean territory but lease the largest island, Diego Garcia, for 99 years to continue operating a joint US-UK military base there.
Trump’s immigration siege is rattling hospitality industry, say workers
Donald Trump’s immigration policies are having a chilling effect on the hospitality industry, where nearly a third of workers are immigrants, according to the largest hospitality union in the US.
US union membership soared to 16-year high in 2025 despite Trump assault
The number of workers covered under union contracts increased to a 16-year high in 2025, despite ongoing attempts by the Trump administration to wipe out collective bargaining agreements for tens of thousands of federal workers, according to new data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
What else happened today:
Eight skiers who went missing after an avalanche swept the Castle Peak area of the Sierra Nevada mountains in California have been confirmed dead, authorities said on Wednesday.
The Trump administration transferred the balance of federal funds it owed to the Gateway rail tunnel initiative on Wednesday, along with additional money beyond the original amount, clearing the path for work on the project to restart as early as next week.
Meta’s CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, testified at a landmark trial of social media companies on Wednesday. Plaintiffs’ lawyers grilled Zuckerberg about internal complaints that not enough was being done to verify whether children under 13 were using the platform.
Environmental group Extinction Rebellion said on Wednesday it was under federal US investigation and that some of its members had been visited by FBI agents, including from the agency’s taskforce on extremism, in the last year.
NYU Langone Health, one of New York City’s major hospital networks, announced this week that it will shut down its gender‑affirming care program for minors, as the Trump administration escalates threats to strip federal funding from providers that treat trans youth.
The chair of the US’s top media regulator claimed that journalists had been tricked into covering claims by the late-night host Stephen Colbert that he had been blocked by his network from interviewing Texas Senate candidate James Talarico.
Catching up? Here’s what happened on Tuesday 17 February.
