This concludes our live coverage of the second Trump administration for the day. Here are the latest developments:

• Eight US navy personnel assigned to the USS Abraham Lincoln carrier strike group have attempted suicide since the start of their lengthy deployment as part of the US war on Iran, Hung Cao, the acting US navy secretary, revealed in a letter to the US senator Kirsten Gillibrand obtained by the Guardian.

• A US district judge heard arguments in the showdown between Donald Trump and CNN, MS Now and Politico, suggesting in comments that he was more inclined to side with the media plaintiffs who sued the president on Monday.

• Trump welcomed Xi Jinping to the US, taking the unusual step of greeting the Chinese leader on the tarmac at Joint Base Andrews to kick off his state visit.

• There was one discordant note in the carefully orchestrated arrival ceremony, when Trump visibly winced at the sound of a US military jet flying overhead as he stood alongside Xi on the red carpet, listening to the US national anthem. Video of the moment showed that while Trump recoiled from the sound of the flyover, Xi remained impassive, as did the wives of both men.

• Democrats in Maine accused Republican senator Susan Collins of corruption after ProPublica reported that the FBI had proposed investigating her for allegedly accepting bribes – before Trump derailed the inquiry.

• The United States has invited Vladimir Putin to take part in the meeting of the G20 scheduled in Miami in December in what would be the first major summit with the Russian leader present since he launched his invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

The White House appeared to confirm on Wednesday night that what it called sensitive national security information on the Iran war published by Politico, which it pointed to this week as justification for Donald Trump banning the news outlet, was provided to the publication by vice-president JD Vance.

The White House statement was released in response to reporting on Wednesday from the media outlet Status, which identified Vance as the anonymous “senior administration official” quoted by Politico in a 12 June 2026 article on the progress of US talks with Iran.

“Indeed, Vance not only briefed POLITICO on the state of the Iran deal talks, but spoke to a group of reporters from several news organizations”, Status reported. “In exchange for the information, those outlets agreed to grant Vance anonymity.”

A social media post from the White House then seemed to acknowledge Vance was the source for what the White House had called, in a letter to Politico on Tuesday, an article with “sensitive security information, and misinformation about national security information” so reckless that it justified the news outlet being banned from covering Trump in person.

“For more context, the White House holds regular press briefings to ensure accurate information is provided — but even then the media lies and peddles misinformation,” the White House statement responding to the Status report said. “That article was included to highlight the White House going to great lengths to provide important access, only to have it distorted and manipulated by the propagandists in the media.”

Updated at 03.59 CEST

A US district judge on Wednesday heard arguments in the extraordinary showdown between Donald Trump and CNN, MS Now and Politico, suggesting in comments that he was more inclined to side with the media plaintiffs who sued the president on Monday.

Lawyers representing the media organizations have asked Timothy J Kelly, a district judge, to force the White House to return the press badges that were taken over the weekend after Trump banned their journalists from the building. While the judge declined to rule on Wednesday, he acknowledged that due process had not been followed in revoking access.

The three news organizations were not given advance notice that they were in violation of any set of standards and only received formal notice – in letters sent to each news organization on Tuesday – that they “exhibited behavior in violation of the standards of professionalism and decorum expected of those given access to the White House Complex, including by trafficking in verifiable falsehoods about national security and other issues, and publishing sensitive or classified information”.

When he originally announced the ban in a Friday post on Truth Social, Trump cited “their constant ‘reporting’ FAKE NEWS”, rather than any violation of national security protocols.

During a tele-hearing on Wednesday afternoon, Kelly cited past case law that clearly laid out the need for a distinct process that involved advance notice of an infraction and the opportunity to plead one’s case.

“I think it is fair to say that the processes that the circuit laid out in those two cases wasn’t followed here,” the judge said, referring to two similar cases involving journalists who had either lost access or were denied access to the White House. The judge said that the cases made clear that “before a journalist’s White House hard pass was suspended or revoked, that the journalist was entitled to pre-deprivation notice and an opportunity to be heard”.

Congressman Ro Khanna, the progressive Democrat whose California district sits across a swath of Silicon Valley, has called for an agreement between the US and China to pace and monitor AI development as he led a “shadow hearing” on Thursday of Democrats on the House select committee on “the Strategic Competition Between the United States and the Chinese Communist Party”.

“The American people are deeply concerned about the future of AI and the potential risks,” Khanna said in a statement. “We urgently need an agreement with China on basic inspections and safety standards.”

The virtual hearing included testimony from Geoffrey Hinton, British-Canadian computer scientist and Nobel laureate often called “the godfather” of artificial intelligence, on what kind of US-China agreement might be possible. Khanna said OpenAI and Anthropic had not agreed to testify.

The progressive Democrat also said he’d sent letters to leading Chinese AI companies, including Moonshot AI, Alibaba, and DeepSeek requesting commitments to join American AI labs in a binding international agreement to responsibly pace the development of the technology.

On Tuesday, members of the committee sent a letter to the White House saying that US calls to “pace the frontier” of AI “do not need to conflict with ensuring American AI leadership and maintaining our strategic edge against the PRC, which is also an imperative.”

The signatories called on Donald Trump to use his summit with Xi in Washington tjis week to press for “a binding, enforceable, and verifiable international accord to prevent any country from losing control of AI or unleashing misaligned superintelligence on the world.”

The letter acknowledged that when engaging with China on the issue, “the US cannot assume commitments will be upheld unless there are clear mechanisms for verifying compliance. We recognize that this is a complicated topic and there are no easy solutions.”

The letter also requests that Trump meet with committee members after his sit-down with China’s leader. “Just as humans must be kept in the loop of this technology, Congress must be kept in the loop of your diplomacy,” it says.

In remarks earlier this week at the Asia Society, Khanna addressed the issue of US-China AI competition, days after Trump proposed an “AI Force” and an AI czar as the issue of data centers have become a potent midterm issue.

Kahnna was asked how managing competition between the two AI superpowers would be possible if the stated goal of the US is to win the AI race, leaving China with little incentive for China to co-operate.

“Winning the AI war is like winning a nuclear war – it would just lead to devastation,” Khanna said. “I don’t think the US should be trying to win an AI war – I think we need to come to an agreement about basic safety and basic standards to prevent a loss of control and misuse.”

The US, he added, could continue to have the best chips and researchers. “It’s like nuclear weapons,” he said. “Both sides want to have the most advanced weapons, but there are still arms control agreements.”

The call for US-China co-operation comes after the congressman published a bill of rights proposal for managing data centers in the US.

At the the meeting in New York, he told the Guardian that levies on data centers he proposes would not affect US competitiveness.

“The data issue is about economic balancing at home. There are a lot of places in the US you can build data centers that are away from residential communities, but big tech has just been lazy in building them where its easy but they need to build them only where communities want them and where there is real community benefit.”

“I believe we need to tax agentic AI and robots,” he added. “There should be a tax to have neutrality in our tax code so that we are not incentivizing the replacement of human beings.” Workers, he added should also benefit from increased productivity as a result of AI.

“There has to be a value to social cohesion in this country,” he added. “We need to be on the side of workers more than tech billionaires in terms of how this AI revolution takes place.”

Khanna said that in keeping with regulations and safeguards in place for the nuclear power industry, the AI industry should embrace oversight and monitoring. “If something negative should happen the call would be for total nationalization,” he warned. “It’s a reasonable proposal that the private sector should get behind.”

A bill of rights around AI should include investment in communities around data centers because most of what was currently proposed in the US amounts to “data center extraction”.

“There should be a fund of $10m per 100 megawatts of data processing power to invest in schools, parks, jobs programs and infrastructure” and that “could easily be paid by the companies setting these data centers up.”

Updated at 02.21 CEST

Commentators and news outlets on the left and the right of the US political spectrum mocked Donald Trump on Wednesday for visibly wincing during a loud flyover of US military jets he staged for his Chinese counterpart, Xi Jinping, at Joint Base Andrews in Maryland.

Video of the US president recoiling as the jets flew overhead, as Xi, his wife, Peng Liyuan, and Melania Trump all remained calm, was captured in a live broadcast on Britain’s Sky News.

The leftwing streamer Hasan Piker, who featured the Sky News broadcast on his live Twitch stream, exclaimed “What the fuck was that face! Xi didn’t even flinch!” After replaying the moment, Piker added: “Oh my god! Fucking mogged! Trump, it’s your air show! How do you get scared at your air show?”

The moment, from a different angle, was captured on a White House live stream, and then posted online with mocking captions by both the rightwing New York Post and the leftwing MeidasTouch.

Lindell TV, the partisan rightwing news outlet published by Mike Lindell, a Trump supporter and 2020 election conspiracy theorist, which was chosen by the White House to provide pool video, zoomed out at exactly the moment Trump winced, so did not capture the president’s startled reaction in its video.

As mockery of Trump spread across social media, the White House shared edited video of the arrival ceremony that did not include the flyover.

Updated at 02.41 CEST

The United States has invited Vladimir Putin to take part in the meeting of the G20 scheduled in Miami in December in what would be the first major summit with the Russian leader present since he launched his invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

The invitation, which marks a significant reversal by the Trump administration of Russia’s international isolation, was announced by Marco Rubio, the US secretary of state, during a press conference on the sidelines of the United Nations conference in New York.

“We’ve invited President Putin to the G20,” Rubio said in a televised press conference following a meeting with Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov. “We think it’s an opportunity for him to engage not just with [Trump] but with other world leaders. We hope that’s an invitation he’ll accept.”

The Kremlin has not yet responded publicly to the invitation, which is likely to raise concerns from Ukraine and other European leaders who have recently accused Russia of launching hybrid attacks to disrupt logistics and spread political uncertainty among Kyiv’s allies.

Russia remains a member of the G20 but Putin has not attended a summit of the body since 2019. He did attend one session virtually in 2023. The December summit is set to take place at the Trump National Doral golf club.

Donald Trump just greeted China’s leader, Xi Jinping, at Joint Base Andrews in Maryland.

The US president rolled out the red carpet for his Chinese counterpart, and a ceremony is ongoing – in which a very loud flyover of jets just punctuated the US national anthem.

Reuters provided live video of the ceremony, in the absence of the US pool cameras, which are boycotting the event in solidarity with three news organizations banned by Trump on Friday over what he sees as overly critical coverage of his performance as president.

According to an update from the pool’s print reporter at the base:

double quotation markStaff from Fox, CBS and NBC are here but not shooting, as journalists wait to see whether the judge will issue a ruling after hearing arguments today. Some of the networks appear to be breaking down their cameras.

There are signs in front of other tripods/cameras that say: NewsNation, Newsmax, RSBN, One America News and Lindell.

Trump and his wife, Melania, have just ushered Xi and his wife, Peng Liyuan, into limousines to leave the airport, and boarded a helicopter to return to the White House.

According to the White House, the arrival ceremony also featured:

• a 100-foot-long red carpet

• a salute battery

• a 21-Person honor cordon

• two three-person color teams to include the
  US and Chinese flags

• a US air force band playing fanfare and the U.S. and Chinese national anthems

• platoons from each US military service

• two B-1 bomber flyovers

• two American flower presenters

Updated at 00.27 CEST

Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, a New York Democrat, has confirmed to the Guardian an earlier report from CNN, that the acting US Navy secretary, Hung Cao, told her in a letter on Tuesday, that there have been “eight suicide attempts” by US Navy personnel assigned to the USS Abraham Lincoln carrier strike group since the start of their lengthy deployment as part of the US war on Iran.

Gillibrand also provided a copy of Cao’s written responses to her questions to the Guardian.

The revelation about the attempted suicides came in response to the fifth of the senator’s 12 questions. Here is the full text of the exchange:

double quotation mark5. Have there been any suicides aboard the ship during this deployment? How many instances of detected suicidal ideation or attempted self-harm, including attempts to go overboard, has the Department recorded?

There have been no suicides onboard during this deployment. Since the beginning of LINCOLN’s deployment, there have been a total of eight suicide attempts across the strike group - this number includes the LINCOLN crew and Sailors from the carrier air wing, strike group and destroyer squadron staff, escorting destroyers, and all embarked aviation squadrons.

In a statement to the Guardian, Gillibrand said: “What Trump and Secretary Hegseth dismissed as ‘fake news’ turned out to be serious and deteriorating conditions for our service members. Our troops and their families make immense sacrifices every single day, yet the president dismissed them with open disrespect. That this administration can find endless taxpayer dollars for bombs, ballrooms, and billionaires, but cannot take care of our service members, is completely unacceptable.”

Here is the complete text of Cao’s response to Gillibrand’s questions:

Updated at 00.18 CEST

Ted Boutrous, a prominent First Amendment lawyer who represented CNN, Politico and MS NOW in court on Wednesday, reportedly told the judge that, when he first saw three unsigned letters sent to the news organizations on Tuesday, four days after they were banned from the White House by Donald Trump, which attempted to justify the bans on national security grounds, he “didn’t think they were real”, the legal journalist Adam Klasfeld reports.

Boutrous pointed out that the three letters – to CNN, Politico and MS NOW – were unsigned and not on White House letterhead. All three cited articles published by the outlets months ago, most of them written by reporters who do not have passes to the White House.

The letters, Boutrous said, looked a “post hoc” attempt to justify the bans that the president himself told reporters on Friday were in response to overly negative coverage of his performance as president, by grafting on national security grounds.

In a supplemental declaration filed with the court Sudeep Reddy, MS NOW’s Washington bureau chief, pointed out that only one of the three articles cited in the White House press office letter, a report published on 11 June 2026 by Jake Traylor, “was written by a journalist who held a White House hard pass.”

Reddy also noted that the broadcaster submitted a request for the renewal of Traylor’s hard pass on 18 June 2026, a week later, “and his hard pass was subsequently renewed.”

There have been “eight suicide attempts” by US Navy personnel assigned to the USS Abraham Lincoln carrier strike group since the start of their lengthy deployment as part of the US war on Iran, the acting US Navy secretary, Hung Cao, revealed in a letter to senator Kirsten Gillibrand obtained by CNN.

“Since the beginning of Lincoln’s deployment, there have been a total of eight suicide attempts across the strike group,” Cao wrote to Gillibrand, a New York Democrat who is a member of the Senate armed services committee, the broadcaster reports.

“This number includes the Lincoln crew and sailors from the carrier airwing, strike group and destroyer squadron staff, escorting destroyers and all embarked aviation squadrons”, Cao reportedly wrote in a letter this week responding to written oversight questions from the senator.

The Guardian has asked the US Navy for comment on the report.