‘I know how much it hurts’: Biden to release US oil in bid to lower gas prices – live

Joe Biden has suggested that the Russian president Vladimir Putin may be in some kind of “self-isolation” as the war in Ukraine continues, and that some senior advisers believed to have misled him have been fired.

“It’s an open question. There’s a lot of speculation,” Biden said when asked about Putin’s whereabouts during the earlier White House briefing on energy.

“But he seems to be, I’m not saying this with certainty, he seems to be self isolated. And there’s some indication that he has fired or put under house arrest some of his advisers.

“But I don’t want to put too much stock in that at this time because we don’t have that much hard evidence.”

Both British and US intelligence have concluded that some of Putin’s military advisers were too frightened to tell him the truth over how badly the Russian offensive in Ukraine was going.

A bipartisan “agreement in principle” has been struck to authorize a $10bn Covid-19 relief package from Congress, the Republican Utah senator Mitt Romney has said.

The money is less than half the $22.5bn the White House was seeking, which it said was necessary to fund the provision of coronavirus testing, vaccines, therapeutics and masks into the fall.

The deal reportedly struck on Thursday, following lengthy negotiations between senior Democrats and Republicans in the US Senate, also does not include $5bn wanted by the Biden administration for vaccine measures abroad, according to Politico.

“That was a real missed opportunity,” the Virginia Democratic senator Tim Kaine told Politico, adding that he was “very upset.”

The compromise package could face a Senate vote next week, although time is tight with the confirmation of Joe Biden’s supreme court pick Ketanji Brown Jackson already on the schedule.

Romney told reporters the package must also receive an estimate from the congressional budget office.

Achieving energy independence, and advancing clean energy have long been goals of the Biden administration, which set out…