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After call with Trump, Putin agrees to pause attacks on Ukraine’s energy and infrastructure targets

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CNN
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Russian President Vladimir Putin agreed to temporarily halt attacks on energy and infrastructure targets in Ukraine after a lengthy telephone call with President Donald Trump on Tuesday, the White House and Kremlin both said, even as Russia stopped short of signing off on a broader ceasefire to end the three-year-long conflict in Ukraine.

The two men’s conversation, their second since Trump entered office, appeared unsuccessful in convincing Putin to sign off on the 30-day truce that Trump has endorsed and Ukraine has agreed to. Instead, the White House said a narrower pause on hitting energy targets would go into place, while technical teams begin sorting out other areas in negotiations.

“The leaders agreed that the movement to peace will begin with an energy and infrastructure ceasefire, as well as technical negotiations on implementation of a maritime ceasefire in the Black Sea, full ceasefire and permanent peace,” the White House wrote in its description of the call. It said the technical negotiations would begin “immediately” in the Middle East.

A temporary moratorium on energy attacks, though short of a full ceasefire, would still amount to the first instance of Russia agreeing to halt certain strikes since it invaded Ukraine in 2022. Both Moscow and Kyiv could benefit from the pause. Ukraine’s energy grid has been among the biggest targets of Putin’s invasion, which has left the country to suffer periodic blackouts even in the freezing cold winters. That has prompted Ukraine to target Russian oil facilities using long-range drones.

The Kremlin’s description of the call said Trump “put forward a proposal for the parties to the conflict to mutually refrain from attacks on energy infrastructure facilities for 30 days.”

Putin “responded positively to this initiative and immediately gave the Russian military the corresponding order,” Moscow’s readout said.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said after the results of the call were announced that he would support a pause on striking energy targets. “Both sides, Russian and Ukrainian, can cease attacking the energy sector. Our side is going to support this,” he said at a news conference, adding that it was “part of our proposal, about the sky and the sea.”

As part of its demands for a broader ceasefire, Putin stressed the need for a halt of foreign military aid to Ukraine, the Kremlin said, though the White House made no mention of that in its statement. And neither the White House nor the Kremlin brought up land concessions in their official descriptions of Tuesday’s conversation. Ahead of the call, Trump said US negotiators had discussed “dividing up certain assets.”

The high-stakes call, which lasted about two hours, came as the White House has insisted it was closing in on a temporary ceasefire deal to pause the war between Russia and Ukraine.

The call was a key test of whether Trump, who’s largely echoed Putin’s view of the war since their call last month, can achieve his campaign trail promise of bringing the war to an end – and whether his friendliness toward Russia has paid off.

“The two leaders agreed that a future with an improved bilateral relationship between the United States and Russia has huge upside,” the White House said in its statement. “This includes enormous economic deals and geopolitical stability when peace has been achieved.”

Putin told Trump that a prisoner exchange would occur between Russia and Ukraine on Wednesday, according to the Kremlin.

The White House also said the men discussed the Middle East “as a region of potential cooperation to prevent future conflicts” as Russia offers to mediate a nuclear deal with Iran.

Trump supported an idea proposed by Putin to organize US-Russia hockey matches in their respective countries, the Kremlin said.

Ahead of the call, sources familiar with the conversation said a key priority would be securing an agreement on concessions Russia is willing to make – including whether it’s willing to withdraw forces from territory it seized in the past three years since invading Ukraine.

Trump himself suggested as much while speaking with reporters aboard Air Force One on Sunday, saying that US negotiators have discussed “dividing up certain assets.”

“We’ll be talking about land. A lot of land is a lot different than it was before the war, as you know. We’ll be talking about land, we’ll be talking about power plants, that’s a big question,” Trump said.

Negotiations to end the war kicked off after Trump and Putin spoke by phone last month, marking a resumption of communication after a long period of silence between the White House and the Kremlin. Since then, the president hosted Zelensky for an Oval Office meeting that ended with Trump and Vice President JD Vance shouting at him and asking the Ukrainians to leave, followed by the US temporarily pausing military assistance and intelligence sharing.

Weeks of intense back-and-forth negotiations between top US officials — led by Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and national security adviser Mike Waltz — and top Ukrainian and Russian officials led to a breakthrough, with the announcement of a US-led ceasefire proposal. After Zelensky said last week that his country had accepted the 30-day proposal, the US made clear the onus was on Russia to agree, with Trump saying, “Russia holds all the cards.”

Efforts to bring Russia closer to an agreement intensified with Witkoff’s visit to Moscow on Thursday, where he met directly with Putin for several hours, CNN previously reported. Witkoff told CNN the meeting with Putin — his second known meeting with the Russian president this year — was “positive” and that the two sides had “narrowed the differences between them.”

Putin believes “philosophically in a truce,” Witkoff argued, after the Russian leader laid out numerous reservations he had.

Witkoff later flew to Florida to brief Trump on the discussions, and the president was so encouraged by Witkoff’s readout, the sources said, that he directed his team to begin preparations for a phone call with Putin.

Over the weekend, Rubio spoke with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov.

“We are on the 10-yard line of peace,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters on Monday, adding that the US has “never been closer to a peace deal than we are in this moment.”

A White House official reiterated that sentiment in a conversation with CNN, arguing that just a week ago they were “hundreds of miles apart, now we’re a couple hundred yards apart.” The official described Tuesday’s Trump-Putin phone call as the “natural next step” in negotiations.

Trump and his team have repeatedly argued the fighting needs to stop before they can proceed to the far more complicated issues that need to be resolved in a longer-term peace deal, like drawing territorial lines and negotiating security support for Ukraine.

But Putin has publicly shared skepticism over the US proposal, with one of his top negotiators, Yuriy Ushakov, dismissing the idea as “nothing more than a temporary respite for the Ukrainian military.”

Asked by CNN on Friday about Putin’s reservations and whether he was playing for time, Rubio: “We’re not going to make our foreign policy decisions on the basis of what a leader says, simply says at a press conference.”

“This is going to play out the way things of this nature and caliber have traditionally and normally play out,” he added, “and that is with the leaders of the countries involved speaking, not in front of the cameras, not in front of the media, but in these negotiations that happen.”

Ahead of the call, senior US officials had repeatedly argued that any permanent off-ramp from the Russia-Ukraine war would include all sides making concessions, but they had also been reticent to publicly discuss details.

After meeting with the Russians in Riyadh last month, Waltz said, “The practical reality is that there is going to be some discussion of territory.” Asked by CNN if it would be acceptable for Russia to retain territory it has annexed since 2022, Waltz said it was something “to be discussed.”

Rubio, ahead of a meeting with the Ukrainians last week, said they were in “listening mode” and “not going to be sitting in a room drawing lines on a map,” but wanted to “get a general sense of what concessions are in the realm of the possible.”

In an interview Sunday, Waltz was asked if “Russia could be given the Donbas in addition to hanging onto Crimea” – two Ukrainian regions it has occupied.

“Are we going to drive every Russian off of every inch of Ukrainian soil, including Crimea?” he told ABC News. “We can talk about what’s right and wrong. And we also have to talk about the reality of the situation on the ground. And that’s what we are doing through diplomacy, through shuttle diplomacy, through proximity talks,” he said.

This story and headline have been updated.



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Man convicted of Meredith Kercher’s murder facing trial for sexual assault

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CNN
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Rudy Guede, the only person definitively convicted of the brutal 2007 murder of British student Meredith Kercher in Perugia, Italy, will be back in court this fall facing charges of sexual assault and violence against a former girlfriend.

Guede, a 38-year-old Ivory Coast native who has lived in Italy since the age of five, was sentenced to 30 years in prison for Kercher’s murder in October 2008. His sentence was reduced on appeal before he was released early for good behavior in 2021.

The case sparked a media frenzy, spawning more than two dozen books and three films.

More than 100,000 photos, thousands of chats and audio messages between Guede and the unnamed victim are among the evidence to be considered in the trial, according to the investigating magistrate Rita Cialoni, who ordered Guede to stand trial in a preliminary hearing in Viterbo on Friday.

The two began dating while Guede was still in prison and ended their relationship in 2023 when the woman pressed charges against him, according to Italian media.

American student Amanda Knox, who was Kercher’s roommate at the time she was killed, and Knox’s then-boyfriend Italian Raffaele Sollecito, were convicted in tandem for their alleged role in Kercher’s murder in 2009, but were fully exonerated by Italy’s Supreme Court in 2015 following a topsy-turvy legal battle.

A reproduction made 06 November 2007 of an undated picture shows British exchange student Meredith Kercher in Perugia.

Knox, remains convicted of slander for accusing her former nightclub boss Patrick Lumumba of Kercher’s murder in 2007.

Guede’s new indictment and trial stems from 2023 accusations of sexual assault, mistreatment and stalking, by a 25-year-old woman Guede dated from Viterbo, where Guede worked first on work release from prison and then after his release. His first hearing will be held November 4 in Viterbo.

His lawyer Carlo Mezzetti told CNN his client was innocent and feared he would not get a fair trial given his previous conviction.



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Trump announces new tariffs of 30% on Mexico and the European Union

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CNN
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President Donald Trump on Saturday threatened duties of 30% on products from Mexico and the European Union, two of America’s biggest trading partners, in an ongoing tariff campaign that’s upended global trade since he retook office in January.

“The United States of America has agreed to continue working with the European Union, despite having one of our largest Trade Deficits with you. Nevertheless, we have decided to move forward, but only with more balanced and fair TRADE,” Trump wrote in the letter to Ursula von der Leyen, president of the European Commission, which he posted to Truth Social.

Trump has imposed a slate of tariffs on US trading partners this year – then paused, modified, raised or lowered them, in a chaotic barrage of policy actions that’s left everyone from major nations to individual Americans trying to figure out how to plan for the future even as economic uncertainty grows.

The EU and Mexico join a growing list of countries whose imports will face updated duties on August 1, since Trump began posting tariff letters on Monday with rates of up to 40%.

In his letters to the EU and Mexico, Trump said that all imports were subject to the 30% tariff, excluding “Sectoral Tariffs,” such as the 25% auto tariff.

Von der Leyen said in a statement that the EU remains “ready to continue working towards an agreement” by the August 1 deadline.

But, she said, a 30% tariff on EU exports would hurt supply chains, businesses and consumers on both sides of the Atlantic. The EU “will take all necessary steps to safeguard EU interests, including the adoption of proportionate countermeasures if required,” von der Leyen wrote.

Products from Mexico, meanwhile, have mostly been able to enter the country duty-free, granted they were compliant with the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA) Trump negotiated in his first term. In his letter addressed to Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum, Trump said that tariff barriers were imposed to stop the flow of fentanyl into the United States, which he has previously used to justify earlier tariffs on Mexico as well.

“Mexico has been helping me secure the border, BUT, what Mexico has done, is not enough,” Trump wrote.

Mexico’s economy minister Marcelo Ebrard posted on X that a Mexican delegation told United States officials during a Friday meeting that plans to establish a new tariff rate would be “unfair treatment and that we did not agree.” But the United States and Mexico are negotiating to find an “alternative to protect businesses and jobs on both sides of the border.”

In the tariff letters, which were dated on Friday, Trump said that any retaliation of tariffs charged on US imports would be met with pushback from the United States. Trump said that “whatever the number you choose to raise (tariffs) by, will be added onto the 30% that we charge.”

He blamed both tariff and non-tariff trade barriers as additional reasons for imposing tariffs on the EU and Mexico.

Tractor-trailers wait in line at the Ysleta-Zaragoza International Bridge port of entry, on the US-Mexico border in Juarez, Mexico, on April 3.

The Trump administration has taken particular issue with value-added and digital services taxes, which are prominent in several EU member countries.

Digital service taxes are levied on the gross revenue that online firms collect from offering services to users. Countries with these taxes would be able to tax all the revenue large companies that operate online collect — even if the business is unprofitable. That can include what they collect from selling data, advertising as well as payments they receive for subscriptions, software and other kinds of online services users pay for.

Trump and members of his administration said on multiple occasions that the EU was not negotiating in good faith. And two months ago, Trump was so enraged by the lack of progress in trade talks that he was prepared to slap a 50% tariff on goods from the EU come June 1. “I’m not looking for a deal,” he said at the time.

A 30% tariff on the EU is more than the 20% “reciprocal” tariff which goods from there faced before Trump paused them in mid-April.

After Trump made the threat in May, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said in a Fox News interview that the “EU proposals have not been of the same quality that we’ve seen from our other important trading partners.”

The letters to the EU and Mexico come after Trump threatened 35% tariffs on some Canadian goods on Thursday.

This story has been updated with additional content.



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Giant 13-inch shoes found in ancient Roman fort near Hadrian’s Wall

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CNN
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An ancient Roman mystery is afoot in the rolling hills of northern Britain.

Archaeologists have unearthed a stash of unusually large shoes at the ruins of a first-century military fort along Hadrian’s Wall, a 73-mile (117-kilometer) stone barrier that famously shielded the Roman Empire’s northwestern perimeter from foreign invaders. The discovery is raising new questions about the lives and origins of the fort’s inhabitants.

The giant leather soles were found at Magna Fort in May among 34 pieces of footwear, including work boots and baby-sized shoes, that are helping to paint a picture of the 4,000 men, women and children who once lived in and around the English site just south of the Scottish border.

Eight of the shoes are over 11.8 inches (30 centimeters) in length — a US men’s size 13.5 or greater based on Nike’s size chart — making them larger than average by today’s standard and sparking suspicions that unusually tall troops may have guarded this particular fortress at the empire’s edge.

By contrast, the average ancient shoe found at a neighboring Roman fort was closer to a US men’s size 8, according to a news release about the discovery.

“When the first large shoe started to come out of the ground, we were looking for many explanations, like maybe it’s their winter shoes, or people were stuffing them, wearing extra socks,” recalled Rachel Frame, a senior archaeologist leading the excavation. “But as we found more of them and different styles, it does seem to be that these (were) just people with really large feet.”

As digging continues at Magna Fort, Frame said she hopes further investigation could answer who exactly wore these giant shoes. A basic sketch of the site’s past is just starting to come together.

When the Magna Fort was in use, multiple different Roman military troops and their families moved into the site every few years after it was built around AD 85, archaeologists suspect.

Inscriptions on the fort’s walls and altars recount settlements of Hamian archers from what is now Syria, Dalmatian mountain soldiers from Croatia and Serbia, and Batavians from the Netherlands, but the length of time each group stayed at the stronghold remains unknown.

Likely following orders from the Roman army, the troops would often leave the fort for distant regions and in their haste, ditch shoes, clothing and other belongings in the surrounding trenches, Frame explained.

Additionally, new occupants requiring more space would have built larger structures on top of the existing fort, packing rubble and clay between the walls and trapping any belongings left by the previous tenants, Frame said.

“As archaeologists, we like trash,” said Dr. Elizabeth Greene, an associate professor of classics at the University of Western Ontario. “You get those habitational layers where things were just left behind, maybe forgotten about, and that tells us more about the space.” Greene has studied thousands of shoes collected from the nearby Vindolanda Roman Fort, which has been excavated since the 1970s and is among the most well-studied of the Roman forts along Hadrian’s Wall.

The recently discovered Magna shoes share some similarities with those in the Vindolanda Fort collection, said Greene, who was not involved in the Magna excavation process, but has viewed the artifacts.

For one, the soles of the shoes from both sites are made from thick layers of cowhide leather held together with iron hobnails, she explained. While only a couple of the shoes discovered at Magna have some of the upper portions still intact, the Vindolanda Fort shoe styles include closed military boots and open work boots, as well as sneaker-like shoes reaching just below the ankle and sandals with leather fasteners.

It’s likely that the leather soles of the Magna shoes survived thousands of years in the ground thanks to ancient tanning techniques that used crushed up vegetative matter to create a water and heat resistant coating, Greene said. Testing is still underway to confirm this hypothesis.

Only two of the 34 shoes discovered at Magna Fort have the upper portions attached.

The length of the extra-large Magna shoes suggests the original owners may have been exceptionally tall, Greene said. At Vindolanda, only 16 out of the 3,704 shoes collected measured over 11.8 inches (30 centimeters).

Ancient Roman military manuals often described the ideal recruit as being only 5 feet, 8 inches or 5 feet, 9 inches in height, according to Rob Collins, a professor of frontier archaeology at Newcastle University in England. But the soldiers stationed around Hadrian’s Wall came from all around the far-reaching empire, bringing a wide diversity of physical traits to their settlements, he said.

Still, why Magna specifically might have needed troops of towering stature remains unclear.

To piece together the shoe owners’ identities, researchers will examine the Magna shoes for any signs of wear, Frame said. Any foot impressions left in the shoes could be used to model the feet of the original wearers.

Linking the shoes to real human remains, however, could prove difficult. For one, the Romans near Hadrian’s Wall generally cremated their dead, using a headstone to mark the graves, Collins said. Any bones that remain around the settlements are likely from enemy, illegal or accidental burials.

So far, the few bones that have been found at the Magna site were too soft and crumbly to provide insight, Frame said, but the team continues to search for new burial spots. Pottery and other artifacts found around the site may also help with dating and matching the timelines of the known occupants, she said.

But the researchers worry they could be running out of time.

Excavation of Magna Fort began in 2023.

The 2,000-year-old leather found at both the Vindolanda and Magna sites is preserved by the anaerobic, or low-oxygen, conditions of the soil, Frame said.

The 34 shoes found at the Magna fort, however, are in worse condition than those retrieved from Vindolanda decades ago — a problem Frame attributes to the changing climate.

“The more our climate changes, the more we get heat waves and droughts, or months’ worth of rain in one weekend type (of) scenarios, the more that influences the underground soil conditions and introduces more oxygen into these environments,” Frame explained.

In oxygen-rich soil, microbes thrive, contributing to decay, and acidic pH levels erode natural materials like leather.

Frame said the rapid weather changes only make their excavation of Magna more urgent.

“I’m not saying I don’t get excited about the shiny objects and precious treasures, but for me, archaeology is about the story of everybody else … the stories of the people whose lives weren’t written down, who weren’t kings or emperors or famous heroes,” she said. “These personal objects really put the real human people back into the picture.”



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