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Oct. 22, 2025, 5:24 AM EDT / Updated Oct. 22, 2025, 5:35 AM EDTBy Alexander Smith and Daryna MayerJust hours after President Donald Trump said peace talks with Russia’s Vladimir Putin were on hold to avoid wasting his time, the Kremlin launched intense overnight strikes that killed at least six people in Ukraine.Ukrainian officials said the Russian attacks on Kyiv and other cities were the latest proof that Putin was not ready for peace and merely wanted to use negotiations to drag out the war.Asked about Trump’s remarks, the Kremlin said Wednesday that neither president wanted to waste time — and cautioned that any meeting would require further “preparation.”Two children were among those killed in the overnight strikes on the Ukrainian capital and other cities, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said in a post. In total over the past 24 hours, at least 13 people were killed and dozens others injured in Russian attacks across Ukraine, according to local officials.An apartment building damaged by a drone strike in Zaporizhzhia, southern Ukraine, on Wednesday.Stringer / ReutersAs in previous years, when the frigid months are about to bite, Russia has targeted energy facilities in an attempt to put Ukrainians in the cold and dark.“Another night proving that Russia does not feel enough pressure for dragging out the war,” Zelenskyy said. He called on Western allies to supply Ukraine with long-range missiles capable of striking deeper into Russia, saying that Moscow had been emboldened to up its attacks by Kyiv’s current lack of such capabilities.“Russia continues to do everything to weasel out of diplomacy,” he said in his nightly address. “The greater Ukraine’s long-range reach, the greater Russia’s willingness to end the war.”A firefighter works at the site of a Russian strike in Zaporizhzhia.State Emergency Service Of Ukraine In Zaporizhzhia Region / via ReutersThe attacks came after Trump confirmed his much anticipated meeting with Putin in Hungary had been shelved.“I don’t want to have a wasted meeting; I don’t want to have a waste of time,” Trump said, adding that he would “see what happens” as events played out.Asked about Trump’s comments Wednesday, Putin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters that neither Trump nor Putin “wants to waste time.” He called them “two presidents who are accustomed to working effectively and efficiently, but effectiveness always requires preparation.”The American president’s remarks came after Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov reasserted Tuesday that Russia opposed an immediate ceasefire before talks begin.”This is the basic difference which is existing now between Russia and the United States,” Andrei Fedorov, former deputy foreign minister of Russia, told NBC News in an interview in Moscow on Wednesday.Putin and his team have not shifted publicly during these talks about talks, insisting on hardline demands and balking at the insistence from Kyiv and its European allies to halt fighting along current lines before conducting deeper negotiations.Trump this week echoed that European position.Though Trump has claimed victories in helping calm other global conflicts, Ukraine — a war he once said he could solve in 24 hours — has so far proved more difficult. He has variously sought to strongarm Zelenskyy and Putin with few tangible results.Trump essentially pressed pause on his latest effort, believing both sides in the conflict were not ready to seriously talk peace, after he was briefed on a “productive” call between Lavrov and Secretary of State Marco Rubio, a senior White House official told NBC News. The Kremlin insisted it wanted to adhere to what it said was agreed in Alaska between Trump and Putin.Jae C. Hong / APDespite this, the would-be host of the Trump-Putin summit said it could still happen.Viktor Orban, Hungary’s Prime Minister who is a long-time ally of Trump’s and has warm relations with Putin, said that his ambassador in Washington was still working on the meeting.”Preparations for the peace summit continue,” Orban wrote on Facebook. “The date is still uncertain. When the time comes, we will organize it.”Alexander SmithAlexander Smith is a senior reporter for NBC News Digital based in London.Daryna MayerDaryna Mayer is an NBC News producer and reporter based in Kyiv, Ukraine.Keir Simmons and Natasha Lebedeva contributed.

- Latest News - October 22, 2025

President Donald Trump said meeting Russia’s Vladimir Putin would be a “waste of time” just before Russia carried out strikes across Ukraine

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Oct. 21, 2025, 5:38 PM EDT / Updated Oct. 21, 2025, 6:12 PM EDTBy Scott Wong and Kyle StewartWASHINGTON — Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes on Tuesday filed a lawsuit to try to force House Speaker Mike Johnson to swear in Rep.-elect Adelita Grijalva, the Arizona Democrat who won her late father’s seat in a special election nearly one month ago.Johnson, R-La., has said he will seat Grijalva once Senate Democrats agree to reopen the government. But the two parties haven’t been talking for weeks, and there is no indication when the shutdown might end.House Dems march to demand Johnson swear in Grijalva00:56The lawsuit, which Mayes threatened in a letter to Johnson last week, argues that the speaker’s delay is depriving the 813,000 residents living in Arizona’s 7th District of congressional representation. It lists the state of Arizona and Grijalva herself as plaintiffs and the U.S. House, as well as the House clerk and sergeant at arms, as defendants.“Speaker Mike Johnson is actively stripping the people of Arizona of one of their seats in Congress and disenfranchising the voters of Arizona’s seventh Congressional district in the process,” Mayes said in a statement. “By blocking Adelita Grijalva from taking her rightful oath of office, he is subjecting Arizona’s seventh Congressional district to taxation without representation. I will not allow Arizonans to be silenced or treated as second-class citizens in their own democracy.”As he left the Capitol on Tuesday evening, Johnson blasted the Arizona lawsuit as “patently absurd.”Mayes, he said, has “no jurisdiction.”Grijalva and congressional Democrats have been holding news conferences on Capitol Hill, doing TV interviews and staging protests outside Johnson’s office to try to pressure the speaker to relent. But Mayes’ move escalates the standoff and gets the courts involved.House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y., and other Democrats have argued that Johnson is delaying seating Grijalva because she represents the 218th — and final — signature on a discharge petition needed to force a House vote to compel the Justice Department to release all of its files related to the Jeffrey Epstein investigation.Johnson has repeatedly denied that the delay has anything to do with the Epstein files. The speaker has said he is happy to swear in Grijalva as soon as the government, now on the 21st day of the shutdown, reopens.And Johnson accused Mayes, a Democrat who is running for re-election in 2026, of seeking publicity following a public clash he had with Arizona’s two Democratic senators, Ruben Gallego and Mark Kelly, over the Grijalva issue earlier this month.“So, yet another Democrat politician from Arizona is trying to get national publicity. So now it’s the state AG, who’s going to sue me because … Rep.-elect Grijalva is not yet sworn in,” Johnson told reporters Monday.He said he is following what he called the “Pelosi precedent,” noting that then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., took 25 days to administer the oath of office to then-Rep.-elect Julia Letlow, R-La. Letlow won a 2021 special election to fill the seat of her husband, who died of Covid complications days before he was set to be sworn into office. The House was out on recess following her election, amid the pandemic, and she was sworn in the week that it returned to session.“So I will administer the oath to [Grijalva], I hope, on the first day we come back to legislative session. I’m willing and anxious to do that,” Johnson told reporters in the Capitol.Grijalva handily won her special election on Sept. 23, 28 days ago, and just four days after the House voted to pass its short-term government funding bill and left town.Johnson continued: “In the meantime, instead of doing TikTok videos, she should be serving her constituents. She could be taking their calls. She could be directing them, trying to help them through the crisis that the Democrats have created by shutting down the government.”Grijalva is the daughter of former Rep. Raúl Grijalva, D-Ariz., a progressive power broker and former Natural Resources Committee chairman who died in March after serving more than two decades in the House.”There is so much that cannot be done until I am sworn in,” Grijalva said Tuesday at a news conference with Jeffries. “While we’re getting a lot of attention for not being sworn in, I’d rather get the attention for doing my job.”Once she is sworn in, Grijalva is expected to quickly sign the bipartisan discharge petition — led by Reps. Thomas Massie, R-Ky., and Ro Khanna, D-Calif. — which would allow them to bypass Johnson’s leadership team and force a vote on releasing the Epstein files.For months, the Epstein issue has been a nagging headache for both Johnson and President Donald Trump. Many of the president’s MAGA supporters have called for transparency and the release of all of the documents related to the case. On Tuesday, Johnson pointed out that the House Oversight Committee is investigating the matter and has released more than 43,000 pages of documents from DOJ and the Epstein estate. “The bipartisan House Oversight Committee is already accomplishing what the discharge petition, that gambit, sought — and much more,” Johnson, standing alongside Oversight Chairman James Comer, R-Ky., said Tuesday. In an interview in the Capitol, Khanna said Johnson should just swear Grijalva in and hold the vote on the Epstein files because the issue is not going away.“They gotta swear in Adelita Grijalva. I don’t know why they’re delaying the inevitable. They’re kind of hoping this story dies and they get it out of the front pages, but then it comes roaring back once we get the votes,” Khanna told NBC News. “I wish we could just swear Adelita Grijalva in and have a vote on the release of the Epstein files.”Democrats are expected to win another vacant House seat in the coming weeks. On Nov. 4, voters will choose someone to fill the vacancy left by the unexpected death in March of Rep. Sylvester Turner, D-Texas, who represented a heavily Democratic district.If Democrats prevail in that special election, it would trim the GOP majority in the House to 219-215 and mean Johnson could only lose a single GOP defection on any vote.Scott WongScott Wong is a senior congressional reporter for NBC News. Kyle StewartKyle Stewart is a producer and off-air reporter covering Congress for NBC News, managing coverage of the House.Julie Tsirkin and Gabrielle Khoriaty contributed.

- Latest News - October 22, 2025

Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes filed a lawsuit to force House Speaker Mike Johnson to swear in Democrat Adelita Grijalva due to the government shutdown.

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Savewith a NBCUniversal ProfileCreate your free profile or log in to save this articleOct. 22, 2025, 12:01 AM EDTBy David IngramHundreds of public figures, including Nobel Prize-winning scientists, former military leaders, artists and British royalty, signed a statement Wednesday calling for a ban on work that could lead to computer superintelligence, a yet-to-be-reached stage of artificial intelligence that they said could one day pose a threat to humanity.The statement proposes “a prohibition on the development of superintelligence” until there is both “broad scientific consensus that it will be done safely and controllably” and “strong public buy-in.”Organized by AI researchers concerned about the fast pace of technological advances, the statement had more than 800 signatures Tuesday night from a diverse group of people. The signers include Nobel laureate and AI researcher Geoffrey Hinton, former Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Mike Mullen, rapper Will.i.am, former Trump White House aide Steve Bannon and U.K. Prince Harry and his wife, Meghan Markle.The statement adds to a growing list of calls for an AI slowdown at a time when AI is threatening to remake large swaths of the economy and culture. OpenAI, Google, Meta and other tech companies are pouring billions of dollars into new AI models and the data centers that power them, while businesses of all kinds are looking for ways to add AI features to a broad range of products and services.Some AI researchers believe AI systems are advancing fast enough that soon they’ll demonstrate what’s known as artificial general intelligence, or the ability to perform intellectual tasks as a human could. From there, researchers and tech executives believe what could follow might be superintelligence, in which AI models perform better than even the most expert humans.The statement is a product of the Future of Life Institute, a nonprofit group that works on large-scale risks such as nuclear weapons, biotechnology and AI. Among its early backers in 2015 was tech billionaire Elon Musk, who’s now part of the AI race with his startup xAI. Now, the institute says, its biggest recent donor is Vitalik Buterin, a co-founder of the Ethereum blockchain, and it says it doesn’t accept donations from big tech companies or from companies seeking to build artificial general intelligence. Its executive director, Anthony Aguirre, a physicist at the University of California, Santa Cruz, said AI developments are happening faster than the public can understand what’s happening or what’s next.“We’ve, at some level, had this path chosen for us by the AI companies and founders and the economic system that’s driving them, but no one’s really asked almost anybody else, ‘Is this what we want?’” he said in an interview.“It’s been quite surprising to me that there has been less outright discussion of ‘Do we want these things? Do we want human-replacing AI systems?’” he said. “It’s kind of taken as: Well, this is where it’s going, so buckle up, and we’ll just have to deal with the consequences. But I don’t think that’s how it actually is. We have many choices as to how we develop technologies, including this one.”The statement isn’t aimed at any one organization or government in particular. Aguirre said he hopes to force a conversation that includes not only major AI companies, but also politicians in the United States, China and elsewhere. He said the Trump administration’s pro-industry views on AI need balance.“This is not what the public wants. They don’t want to be in a race for this,” he said. He said there might eventually need to be an international treaty on advanced AI, as there is for other potentially dangerous technologies.The White House didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment on the statement Tuesday, ahead of its official release.Americans are almost evenly split over the potential impact of AI, according to an NBC News Decision Desk Poll powered by SurveyMonkey this year. While 44% of U.S. adults surveyed said they thought AI would make their and their families’ lives better, 42% said they thought it would make their futures worse.Top tech executives, who have offered predictions about superintelligence and signaled that they are working toward it as a goal, didn’t sign the statement. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in July that superintelligence was “now in sight.” Musk posted on X in February that the advent of digital superintelligence “is happening in real-time” and has earlier warned about “robots going down the street killing people,” though now Tesla, where Musk is CEO, is working to develop humanoid robots. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said last month that he’d be surprised if superintelligence didn’t arrive by 2030 and wrote in a January blog post that his company was turning its attention there.Several tech companies didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment on the statement.Last week, the Future of Life Institute told NBC News that OpenAI had issued subpoenas to it and its president as a form of retaliation for calling for AI oversight. OpenAI Chief Strategy Officer Jason Kwon wrote on Oct. 11 that the subpoena was a result of OpenAI’s suspicions around the funding sources of several nonprofit groups that had been critical of its restructuring.Other signers of the statement include Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, Virgin Group co-founder Richard Branson, conservative talk show host Glenn Beck, former U.S. national security adviser Susan Rice, Nobel-winning physicist John Mather, Turing Award winner and AI researcher Yoshua Bengio and the Rev. Paolo Benanti, a Vatican AI adviser. Several AI researchers based in China also signed the statement.Aguirre said the goal was to have a broad set of signers from across society.“We want this to be social permission for people to talk about it, but also we want to very much represent that this is not a niche issue of some nerds in Silicon Valley, who are often the only people at the table. This is an issue for all of humanity,” he said.David IngramDavid Ingram is a tech reporter for NBC News.

- Latest News - October 22, 2025

The call, signed by Nobel laureates, ex-military leaders and public figures worldwide, seeks a ban on research that could create machines smarter than people.

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