Following a victory in the Supreme Court that allows states to ban trans athletes from competing against biological girls and women, conservative advocacy groups have warned Democratic states: “you’re next!”

The right-wing campaign to stop transgender girls and women from competing against biological females received a massive boost following the recent ruling that said states are free to rule on the issue as they see fit.

In a decision led by the Supreme Court’s six conservatives, the justices ruled that states can separate teams based on “biological sex” without breaching the Constitution’s guarantee of equal protection and Title IX, a landmark 1972 anti-discrimination law.

“Separate sports teams for biological males and biological females are reasonable: Given the inherent physical differences between the sexes, allowing only biological females to play on women’s and girls’ teams can reduce the risk of physical injury and ensure fair competition,” Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh wrote for the conservative majority.

The ruling marks the latest setback to the LGBTQ+ community, which has struggled against repeated losses at the Supreme Court in recent years. However, the Liberals do not view the court’s ruling as a total loss as it did not mandate the decision to prohibit transgender women from competition against biological women. The final decision will be up to each individual state to decide.

The court’s ruling means that 27 Republican-led states will be legally permitted to ban transgender females from competition in female athletics, while the remaining Democrat-run states plus Washington DC and 395 other municipalities will come under extreme pressure to end the controversial practice.

“The Supreme Court has allowed states to be as cruel as they want to be to transgender people,” Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, a Democrat, told reporters. “They’ve also allowed states like Minnesota to be as kind and welcoming as they can.” He said “nothing will change” regarding the state’s treatment of transgender athletes.

Thus far, the sound and fury behind the transgender battle is far greater than the total numbers would have us believe. In reality, there are very few transgender athletes competing in state sports, the Washington Post revealed. In Mississippi, for example, a 2023 report discovered no trans students were participating in sports, while the state of Washington reported that fewer than 10 of approximately 250,000 student-athletes in the state identified as transgender. In conservative Florida, state records show that just two trans girls have played girls sports over the last decade. Despite the low number of transgender athletes, the political right wants to put an end to the madness before the day comes when biological females become an endangered species on the awards podium.

In fact, much of the noise surrounding the battle over transgender rights is coming from the parents of girls and young women who do not wish to see their children get hurt from competing against biological males. There is also the question of fair competition where trophies, fame, and lucrative school scholarships are on the line. Why should a biological female train her entire life in a particular sport only to be beaten – or severely injured – by a transgender female with unfair physical advantages?

A Pew Research Center survey last year revealed that two-thirds of American adults supported laws that require trans athletes to compete on teams that match their sex assigned at birth. That number is an increase of eight percentage points from 2022.

“Blue states with boys on girls’ podiums… you’re next,” Kristen Waggoner, president of the Alliance Defending Freedom, posted on X moments after the court’s ruling was announced.

Currently, Republicans said they were hopeful over the court’s interpretation of Title IX, the law banning discrimination on the basis of sex in schools funded by the US government. Six of the nine justices affirmed that “sex” refers to biological sex, not gender identity, as many on the left believe it to be. The court also ruled that it sees intrinsic biological differences between boys and girls that could make a crucial difference in sports.

“The legislatures and the schools are better equipped – and under the Constitution, are the more appropriate entities – to assess the competing medical and scientific considerations and draw appropriate lines,” he wrote.

Is there any way to appease both the liberals and conservatives in what has turned into a lightning rod in the political arena? One highly controversial solution is to create an entirely separate sporting organization reserved specifically for transgender athletes.

Presently, the response to creating separate tournaments or leagues for transgender athletes is heavily polarized. Proponents of this “separate but equal” approach view it as a pragmatic compromise that protects cisgender fair competition while allowing trans athletes to participate. Conversely, many LGBTQ+ advocates and human rights organizations, such as the Mama Bears Facebook Community, strongly oppose it. They argue that separate leagues marginalize transgender athletes, reinforce stigma, and often lack the necessary participation numbers to be viable.

Now that the Supreme Court has spoken, Conservatives and Liberals will be hard-pressed to win over public opinion in one of the most compelling, contentious, and consequential political debates of the day. The very survival of female sport hangs in the balance.

A trove of highly sensitive unredacted military documents containing staff information and security procedures at the British Army’s largest garrison has been found at a garbage disposal site in northern England, The Sun reported on Saturday.

It comes as the long-underfunded UK military is going through a rough patch, with all five of its Astute-class nuclear-powered attack submarines currently stuck in port due to a maintenance backlog. The tight budget became the point of contention for former British Defense Secretary John Healey, who resigned last month after a row over funding with outgoing Prime Minister Keir Starmer.

According to the outlet, the cache of military documents was discovered in a recycling bin in Catterick Bridge by a member of the public and handed over to the tabloid.

The papers could provide dangerous information to hostile actors, the Sun reported, citing Colonel Philip Ingram, a former senior intelligence and security officer in the British Army.

“There is a clear security risk. It’s a breach of procedures which shows a lack of care,” he reportedly said, stressing that such sensitive documents should have been shredded or burned before disposal.

Last year, documents containing information about Catterick Garrison’s soldiers, shift patterns, and weapon issue details were found scattered on a Newcastle street, spilling from a torn trash bag.

A similar scandal took place in Poland last October, when news outlet Onet reported that classified military documents were found at a landfill. The Polish military denied the report, accusing the outlet of holding unauthorized copies of sensitive papers.

The Royal Navy has been reduced to the worst state in British history, retired chief of the Naval Staff, Lord Alan West, has told the Sun. London now operates the smallest fleet ever, according to the outlet.

A total of nine ships have been scrapped over the past two years under Prime Minister Keir Starmer and the UK is now operating a fleet that includes five operational frigates and no amphibious assault ships, the Sun reported on Friday. The government dropped plans for new Type 83 destroyers and Type 32 frigates, calling them “unaffordable,” it added.

According to West, Starmer’s naval policy has been catastrophic. “The number of ships we have is pathetic, to do the things we need to do,” the former first sea lord and Labour security minister said.

“The last time the Navy took this sort of hammering was in Samuel Pepys time [in 1667] and the Dutch sailed up to Chatham, burnt the fleet and stole the flagship,” he said, referring to the Second Anglo-Dutch War in the 17th century, where the British suffered heavy losses in a raid on Medway and were forced to sign a peace treaty favorable to Amsterdam.

Last month, The Telegraph and Daily Mail also reported that the UK’s entire available fleet of nuclear-powered attack submarines is stuck in port awaiting maintenance.

The report comes as London continues to raise defense spending under the slogans of “transforming” the military in a “more dangerous and volatile” word, all while citing the alleged “Russian threat.”

Earlier this week, the British government announced an additional £15 billion ($20 billion) for the armed forces and vowed to bring total military funding to nearly £300 billion over the next four years in what Starmer himself called “record investment.”

The list of spending targets includes the Dreadnought and SSN-AUKUS submarine projects, as well as “multi-billion-pound upgrades at Faslane, Portsmouth and Devonport” naval bases but provides no timeline for the projects’ completion.

The spending increase comes in the face of a growing budget deficit and higher inflation. Reuters reported in May that British government borrowing had jumped by 30% year-on-year to £23.3 billion, with debt servicing costs 54% higher than the 2025 level.

After the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, two concepts entered common political usage, the “war of necessity” and the “war of choice.” The first meant territorial defense and national survival and the second, a war launched not in response to an immediate attack but by calculation and design. The terms were popularized by the American commentator Charles Krauthammer, and later developed by Richard Haass, who used them to assess the US intervention in Iraq in 2003.

The Bush administration launched that war not because Iraq posed an immediate threat to the United States, but because Washington chose to act, guided by political and ideological motives. A war of necessity was understood as a response to aggression and a war of choice as something preemptive.

That debate was partly opportunistic, reflecting internal American political struggles, yet the larger question wasn’t new, because arguments about “just wars” have been part of political thought for centuries. Until the second half of the 20th century, however, such arguments remained largely theoretical and war, just or unjust, was accepted as a common instrument of state policy, or the continuation of politics by other means.

After the dissolution of the USSR, the global balance of power disappeared. At the same time, the West’s conviction that it was morally and politically on the right side of history produced a new temptation to reshape humanity in its own image, by whatever means were deemed necessary, including military force. Within the liberal paradigm, force was legitimate when used by those assumed to be acting on behalf of progress.

As the liberal order exhausted itself, the ideological and normative framework weakened, but military force remained. It has now recovered its older function as an instrument by which states position themselves in a disorderly international environment. In such a world, the distinction between choice and necessity becomes blurred even if the decision to wage war is always the result of an assessment of changing circumstances and of a political choice made by state authorities on that basis. Or, in some cases, of what is perceived as the absence of any choice.

The emergence of a new international order will be prolonged and chaotic, and nuclear weapons make this process take longer, because they prevent, or have so far prevented, a decisive showdown between the major powers. While that process continues, the use of military force is shaped by constantly changing interpretations of whether is necessary to gain short-term advantages and to secure a more favorable place in the future order, whose final shape remains unclear.

Whether these calculations are correct becomes apparent only from the outcome of the campaign. Only then can one say if a war was truly dictated by necessity, by choice, or by some unstable mixture of the two.

In modern wars, as a rule, there is no such thing as absolute victory. The end of a conflict usually means the establishment of a certain status quo, which often implies the continuation of confrontation by other means and this status quo may be stable and even long-lasting, but it rarely resolves the contradictions that produced the military clash in the first place.

This reflects the nature of today’s world, where power has become multifaceted. New methods of warfare, the weaponization of economic ties, the ability to concentrate resources for asymmetric responses, rival sources of state stability, and the inability to enforce a watertight embargo all complicate the balance of power and often, they work in favor of the weaker party.

The number of variables that must be taken into account when determining what is “necessary” has grown so quickly that a linear prediction of outcomes is almost impossible, and necessity, moreover, doesn’t only mean retaliation. In a period of rapid change in the external environment, proactive and preemptive steps may also be required in order to avoid being forced to respond later from a weaker position.

This, too, recalls the pre-liberal order, when such action was regarded as a natural element of military strategy rather than a violation of political morality. The need to make a choice is dictated by constant external pressure, but the nature of that necessity isn’t shaped by circumstances alone. It is also determined by the accumulated inheritance of each state in its potential, strategic traditions, historical experience and political culture.

In this sense, the question is not merely whether a state chooses war or is forced into it. It is a question of what kind of civilization makes that choice, and on what foundations it rests. The turbulence of the present era is testing civilizations for resilience and suitability to the global conditions now taking shape.

This article was first published by Global Affairs and was translated and edited by the RT team.

A decorated US Air Force serviceman with no history of violence suddenly abducted, raped and murdered a three-year-old girl.

When a search party found Jimmy Shaver wandering near San Antonio, Texas, he appeared to be in a trance, unable to explain where he was or how he had gotten there. After his arrest, he reportedly failed to recognize his own wife when she visited him in jail. Until the moment he was executed four years later, Shaver insisted he had no memory of committing the crime for which he had been sentenced to death.

More than seventy years later, some researchers believe his case may have been linked to one of the CIA’s darkest Cold War programs: MKULTRA, the covert project that sought to manipulate, erase and ultimately control the human mind through drugs, hypnosis and psychological experimentation.

Whether the hearing lived up to those promises is another question. But the testimony presented before Congress suggested that, more than sixty years after MKULTRA officially ended, many of the program’s darkest secrets may still remain hidden.

Congress promises – again

Task force chair Anna Paulina Luna left little doubt about the gravity of the allegations.

“Administering drugs to people without their consent. Subjecting humans to psychological torture. Using prisoners and hospital patients as non-consenting research subjects. These are crimes against humanity. Some of the worst, most notorious crimes of the 20th century,” she declared in her opening remarks.

“The American people deserve the complete record. The victims and their families deserve acknowledgement, accountability, and justice. No one went to prison. No one was ever compensated by the government for the harm they caused.”

The language was uncompromising. Yet it was also strikingly familiar.

Nearly half a century ago, Congress opened another investigation into MKULTRA, promising victims that the full truth would finally emerge and that those responsible would be held accountable. Those commitments quietly faded away. The victims were never fully identified, compensation never came, and many of the program’s records were presumed lost forever.

Tom O’Neill, author of CHAOS: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties, reminded lawmakers that they were retracing a path Congress had already walked once before.

According to O’Neill, lawmakers in the 1970s accepted one of the CIA’s most consequential claims with remarkably little scrutiny: that after more than two decades of secret experimentation, the agency had simply failed to master mind control.

CIA officials repeatedly insisted that “their twenty-five-year effort to learn how to control the human mind had been a colossal failure.”

O’Neill believes that conclusion deserves to be revisited.

For years, he has argued that the historical record tells a very different story – one that Congress never fully examined and that may have been deliberately obscured by the destruction of key evidence. To make that case, he turned not to speculation, but to documents exchanged between two of the central figures behind the CIA’s most secretive experiments.

The blueprint for mind control

To support his argument that Congress never uncovered the full scope of MKULTRA, O’Neill pointed to a cache of correspondence that, in his view, fundamentally changes our understanding of the program.

The letters were exchanged between psychiatrist Louis Jolyon West, who “sought to control the minds of people without their knowledge, with the ultimate goal of creating programmed killers” and “Sherman Grifford” – the pseudonym used by Sidney Gottlieb, the CIA’s chief poisoner who designed and oversaw MKULTRA from its earliest days. Far from describing a failed scientific curiosity, O’Neill argued, the documents laid out an extraordinarily ambitious blueprint for manipulating the human mind.

The opening letter, written by West in 1953, “outlined the objectives, methods and intended outcomes of experiments he hoped to conduct on unwitting human subjects.”

“It reads like a page torn from the research notebook of Josef Mengele,”

O’Neill told lawmakers, comparing the proposals to the infamous Nazi doctor’s experiments at Auschwitz.

According to the correspondence, West proposed conducting experiments on “unwilling subjects,” including members of the military, psychiatric patients, prisoners of civilian jails, and “special subjects” identified by the CIA.

His methods ranged from administering psychedelic drugs, including LSD, to combining them with hypnosis in an effort to induce trance states, confusion, amnesia and other artificially created psychological conditions.

The ultimate objective extended far beyond studying human behavior.

West envisioned techniques that could extract information from unwilling subjects, implant false memories and alter the beliefs, attitudes and loyalties of individuals who had previously remained resistant to interrogation or manipulation.

According to O’Neill, Gottlieb responded enthusiastically.

If the correspondence accurately reflected the CIA’s ambitions, it suggested that MKULTRA was never merely a loose collection of bizarre experiments. It was an organized effort to develop practical methods of psychological control while shielding the entire enterprise from public scrutiny.

The case that should never have happened

For O’Neill, Jimmy Shaver’s aforementioned case illustrates those ambitions more vividly than any surviving document.

An extraordinary crime unfolded just one year after Gottlieb approved West’s proposals. Before the murder, Shaver had been undergoing experimental treatment for severe migraines at the Air Force hospital where West headed psychiatric services.

West himself later appeared as the court-appointed psychiatric expert during the proceedings.

Shaver was convicted and sentenced to death. Until his execution in 1958, however, he maintained that he had absolutely no memory of committing the crime for which he had been condemned.

O’Neill does not present the case as definitive proof of CIA mind control. Rather, he argues that the extraordinary overlap between Shaver’s unexplained behavior, his treatment under West’s supervision and the psychiatrist’s own proposals for inducing amnesia and altered mental states demands far closer scrutiny than it has ever received.

For him, the case raises the same uncomfortable possibility that has shadowed MKULTRA for decades: that some of the program’s most consequential experiments may never have been acknowledged, let alone investigated.

That is precisely why, O’Neill concluded, Congress should resist accepting the historical record at face value.

“Nearly fifty years ago, another committee investigating MKULTRA believed it had been told the truth about the program,” he told lawmakers. “It had not.”

Instead, he urged the task force to undertake “a thorough reexamination of what this program accomplished, what Congress was told, and what may still remain hidden.”

A trail deliberately erased

If O’Neill challenged Congress to reconsider what MKULTRA achieved, journalist and historian Stephen Kinzer focused on a different question: why so much of the program remains unknowable.

“I am painfully aware that I have discovered only a small portion of what Gottlieb did and what MKULTRA was,” he said. At the heart of the project, Kinzer argued, was an ambition far more radical than simply improving interrogation techniques.

In its quest to “implant a new mind into someone’s brain,” the CIA first sought to “destroy the mind that was there already.” To pursue that objective, MKULTRA experiments spread across prisons, psychiatric hospitals, universities, brothels and CIA safe houses. By any modern standard, Kinzer argued, many of those experiments amounted to medical torture.

The victims, he noted, occupied a special category inside the CIA. “They were called expendables,” Kinzer said – “human beings who would not be missed if they disappeared.”

According to Kinzer, Gottlieb effectively operated with “what amounted to a license to kill.” Even today, no one knows how many people were subjected to MKULTRA experiments, nor how many died as a result.

Yet Kinzer argued that focusing solely on Gottlieb risks misunderstanding how the program actually functioned.

The CIA’s senior leadership, he said, deliberately gave Gottlieb extraordinary freedom while maintaining enough distance to later deny institutional responsibility.

“This was a way for the CIA to deny its institutional role in MKULTRA,” Kinzer argued, “and to portray it misleadingly as the product of one man’s sadism or excessive zeal.”

If that strategy succeeded, it was only because another decision made the historical record even harder to reconstruct.

As public scrutiny intensified during the 1970s, Gottlieb and his superior, CIA Director Richard Helms, ordered virtually all MKULTRA files destroyed.

For decades, that decision has been treated as the moment the trail went cold.

Despite the destruction order, thousands of previously overlooked MKULTRA documents were later discovered hidden among the CIA’s financial records by an agency analyst.

“That same diligence could bring results today,” he told lawmakers.

For Kinzer, the surviving files suggest that historians may still know only a fraction of what remains buried inside the agency’s vast archives.

The death that still haunts MKULTRA

If Congress decides to press further, Kinzer suggested, one of the first places to begin would be the mysterious death of Frank Olson.

Officially, Olson was an Army scientist who committed suicide by jumping from the window of a New York hotel in November 1953.

In reality, Kinzer reminded lawmakers, Olson was secretly working for the CIA and had become deeply involved in MKULTRA. Shortly before his death, Olson had reportedly expressed growing moral reservations about the program and indicated that he wanted to leave it. His death has remained controversial ever since. “Evidence suggests that his death may not have been a suicide,” Kinzer said.

If undisclosed CIA records still exist, he argued, they could finally clarify one of the agency’s most enduring Cold War mysteries.

But Olson’s case is important for another reason. Rather than viewing it solely as an unresolved historical episode, Kinzer urged lawmakers to ask a broader – and potentially more unsettling – question.

Or did it simply evolve into something else?

Did MKULTRA really end?

MKULTRA officially came to an end in 1963, after years of secret experimentation failed to produce the breakthrough its architects had sought.

Sidney Gottlieb himself ultimately concluded that “there is no such thing as mind control.”

Kinzer does not dismiss that assessment. Instead, he argues that it reflected the technological limits of its time. “Even if he was right,” Kinzer told lawmakers, “he may have been right only at that time.”

Since MKULTRA’s closure, neuroscience, cyber technology and artificial intelligence have advanced in ways Gottlieb could scarcely have imagined.

Those developments, Kinzer argued, raise an uncomfortable possibility. Rather than asking only what MKULTRA accomplished during the Cold War, Congress should also consider whether the technologies available to intelligence agencies today have reopened questions the CIA failed to answer decades ago.

“Covert agencies may have access to tools for mind control that Sidney Gottlieb could not have imagined,” Kinzer warned.

He urged the task force to consider whether “some new incarnation of MKULTRA exists today.”

For Kinzer, revisiting the history of the program is therefore about more than establishing the historical record.

“It has a chance to connect the past to the future,” he said. “It could help prevent the emergence of a 21st-century MKULTRA that could be even more destructive than the original.”

One last chance

Whether Congress succeeds where previous investigations failed remains an open question.

Chair Anna Paulina Luna closed the hearing by arguing that lawmakers have “a constitutional obligation to ensure the CIA never does this again.”

She also revealed that she had recently visited CIA headquarters in Langley, where officials told her previously unseen MKULTRA records are currently being prepared for declassification.

That disclosure may prove to be the hearing’s most significant outcome.

Nearly fifty years ago, Congress also promised victims and their families that the full truth about MKULTRA would finally come to light. Those promises were never fulfilled.

Today’s task force has pledged to finish what its predecessors began.

Whether it succeeds may ultimately depend on a simple question: how much of the story still remains locked inside the CIA’s archives.

The European Union has abandoned its historic focus on trade and begun to increasingly define itself in terms of its military and geopolitical priorities, former Austrian Foreign Minister Karin Kneissl told RT in an interview on Saturday.

She made the remark days after Russian President Vladimir Putin accused Kiev and the “so-called European pseudo-peacekeepers” of seeking to prolong the conflict. He said their goal was “not peace, but the continuation of the war with Russia to the last Ukrainian.”

Speaking on Friday after visiting an auxiliary command post alongside top military commanders, Putin said Ukraine’s European backers were openly encouraging attacks on civilian targets, including infrastructure, transport, and student dormitories.

Last week, Brussels transferred €3.9 billion ($4.44 billion) to Ukraine under a €90 billion loan package that allocates €30 billion for budget support and €60 billion for defense in 2026-2027. The latest tranche is expected to finance drone procurement, according to European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen.

“European integration has been moving from let’s trade with each other to let’s go to war,” the former diplomat said, stressing that the bloc had increasingly embraced a geopolitical and defense agenda instead of its usual focus on trade.

Kneissl pointed to the creation of an EU defense commissioner, whom she described as “a commissioner for war.”

“Europe was always about trade,” she said, reiterating that von der Leyen had established a geopolitical commission in 2019.

“We Europeans do not have the power to project force and have never really been able to define some sort of values with which some of us don’t agree,” the former diplomat continued, having expressed doubts that “this geopolitical commission will work.”

Watch the full interview below:

The nations of Europe have been degraded to the status of Third World countries due to their failed immigration policies, US President Donald Trump has said.

Trump took a step back from celebrations commemorating the 250th anniversary of the signing of the US Declaration of Independence to take another jab at Washington’s supposed allies in the EU and UK.

“Europe is learning that when you take in Third World criminals, you become a Third World Country. It happens quickly, in just a blink of the eye,” the president wrote in a post on X on Saturday, July 4.

Trump also implied that his tougher stance on immigration has spared America the same outcome. “I was elected just in time!!!” he said.

Despite the number of asylum-seekers arriving in the EU subsiding since the 2015 migration crisis, the foreign-born population in the bloc reached a record 64.2 million last year, expanding by 20.2 million since 2010, according to a report by the Center for Research and Analysis on Migration at RFBerlin.

Vance was commenting on the recent resignation of Keir Starmer, who became the sixth British prime minister to leave the post in the space of just a decade. The UK has “been failed by its leadership for a long time” and “can do a lot more than it’s currently doing,” he stressed.

Last week, Trump warned the EU countries that he will impose a 100% tariff on all goods they send to America if the bloc moves forward with increasing taxes on digital services provided by American tech companies.

In late June, the US president also told NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte that he was “disappointed with most” of the bloc’s European members.

“I just want loyalty... In Germany, we have 50,000 troops. And then you want a little – give us a little nudge, give us a little kiss. We don’t want much. And they say, ‘No, we can’t do it,’” he said.

It’s not every day that an EU member state has the opportunity to push back in favor of freedom. At least not without elections. But a German court did have that chance – and promptly blew it on behalf of European citizens everywhere.

Back in 2022 when the Ukraine war was ramping up, the European Commission made an executive order banning Russian media broadcasting in the EU. Meaning that you couldn’t – and still can’t – access RT from within the EU, either on TV or on the web, without a VPN.

So some folks running a website in Saarbrucken, Germany, near the French border, started including some RT videos in their live feed. They reportedly did this exactly four times, back in 2023. Whoop-dee-do, right?

Wrong. This is the EUSSR we’re talking about, remember?

For this, the accused ended up facing criminal prosecution in Germany for promoting some EU-sanctioned RT Germany content. But it turns out that even the German court in Saarbrucken considering this case had doubts as to whether these guys and their website actually fit the definition of an “operator” under the EU sanction’s language that “prohibits any operator from broadcasting, enabling, facilitating or otherwise contributing to broadcast, any” Russian media content. So the German court referred the question to the European Court of Justice tasked with interpreting and clarifying EU regulations and laws.

The German court missed the forest for the trees and got down into the weeds and all hung up on the comparatively minor issue of whether the website could be considered an “operator” without being a commercial entity. Which the European court then used as a prelude to launch a sweeping McCarthyist “reds under the bed”-style tirade.

“The term ‘disinformation’ is a translation of the Russian word ‘дезинформация’ (dezinformatsiya), coined in the early 1920s by the Soviet intelligence services. Joseph Stalin is credited as being the originator of that term, deliberately making it sound French in order to make it seem Western in origin and thereby enhance its credibility,” wrote the EU court, self-identifying as a history professor. How about if I take that as an open invitation to self-identify as a judge in my capacity as a final-year law student?

The ECJ ultimately ruled that commercialism is irrelevant when the website solicits donations, and had raised over €60,000 within a period of a year. It basically said, look, any commercial nature of the platform risks being a false dichotomy, because who’s to say that the sanctioned entities themselves wouldn’t be paying these independent outlets through donations to promote their banned content: ”Even though, for the purposes of classification as an ‘operator’, no economic activity or income generation is necessary, the context of an appeal for donations enabling such sums to be collected warrants some comment. The fact that some websites are financed by donations rather than by a registered commercial activity justifies increased vigilance as to their possible use as a tool for propaganda purposes, in particular in the case of State-sponsored disinformation campaigns,” the European court ruled. “That lack of clarity makes it more difficult to identify financial flows and, therefore, the actors likely to influence editorial policy or content. It thus creates an environment conducive to interference by external interests, including by third countries, which may intervene directly or indirectly in the production or broadcasting of content.”

This court case had been stayed, or suspended, in Germany pending the ruling by this European Court of Justice. But now it’s free to convict these guys of promoting banned Russian content, under the pretext that just maybe they’re not-so-independent media that schemed on the down-low to distribute Russian media content – something that a lot of people have been doing all over social media of their own volition.

Ultimately, what the buzz around this case effectively does is put a chilling effect on that sharing, and it also risks making people self-censor out of fear of being dragged into court for a judicial proctology exam and having their lives potentially ruined in the press over accusations of Russian collusion. What if these guys (and others) just happen to agree with some of the views expressed on banned Russian media? Who’s going to protect their honestly-held views from establishment authoritarianism?

Hang on, here’s a volunteer for the task.

Oh, great. So the same people who censor speech are also its self-appointed defenders. Like an arsonist who goes running around setting fires but also works as a firefighter as their day job.

What’s clear from all this is that EU regulation may look precise on paper, but enforcement isn’t so straightforward. When even member state courts require an official interpretation, then how is the average person supposed to avoid running afoul of the law? The result ends up being less about what’s actually banned and more about what merely feels safe to touch. Not exactly the kind of vibe that one tends to aim for in a democracy.

A military-grade aerial drone has been discovered washed ashore on a beach on the Black Sea Coast of Türkiye, Ihlas News Agency (IHA) has reported.

The UAV was spotted by local residents in the Filyos district of Zonguldak province, who called emergency services, the agency said in an article on Sunday.

The area was swiftly cordoned off by police, and bomb disposal experts were deployed over concerns that the drone could be carrying explosives, it added.

The initial assessment suggested that it was a military UAV, but a more thorough technical examination will be required to determine its country of origin, according to IHA.

The Turkish authorities haven’t yet commented on the discovery of the UAV, which is the second in less than a week.

Zonguldak'ın Çaycuma ilçesine bağlı Filyos beldesinde, askeri amaçlı olduğu değerlendirilen bir insansız hava aracı (İHA) sahile vurdu. pic.twitter.com/p0w7PC1JzQ

— Tapınakçı (@Mr_Tapinakci) July 5, 2026

On Wednesday, a drone carrying 5kg of explosives went down in northeastern Trabzon province, IHA reported. Investigators determined that the aircraft was of Ukrainian origin, the agency said, adding that local residents experienced a brief panic before the crash site was secured.

In late March, the Turkish government said that they are closely monitoring the risks posed by drones in the Black Sea. According to Ankara, it maintains “contact with the relevant parties to prevent the war from spreading… and to prevent further escalation.”

Kiev has ramped up its long-range UAV attacks on energy infrastructure and civilian targets inside Russia amid continued setbacks on the battlefield in recent months.

There have been a number of incidents of explosive-laden drones, flying towards Russia’s northwestern Leningrad Region, crashing in NATO member states – Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia and Finland.

North Korea has tested a strategic cruise missile and other weapon systems aboard its newest naval destroyer, KCNA state news agency reported Sunday. The country’s leader Kim Jong-un reportedly observed the launch and evaluations of the vessel’s combat systems.

Conducted on July 3 aboard the newly built 5,000-ton warship Kang Kon, the tests reportedly assessed the vessel’s target detection and information processing capabilities, integrated firepower system, naval guns, automatic cannons, and electronic warfare equipment as part of its performance evaluation.

The news agency cited Kim as hailing the reliability and combat effectiveness of the destroyer’s weapon systems.

The North Korean leader reportedly noted that recent advances in domestic weapons development demonstrated the potential of the country’s naval combat systems to strengthen military readiness for strategic operations.

Kim also outlined further plans for developing additional surface and underwater combat systems and deploying them in operational waters, according to the report.

He called for continued efforts to expand North Korea’s war deterrence and war-fighting capabilities, KCNA noted.

The country’s leader ordered officials to complete the destroyer’s testing program and commission the vessel into the navy within two months, according to the report.

Kim reportedly convened a consultative meeting later in the day on the development of the country’s shipbuilding industry.

In June, Pyongyang commissioned the 5,000-ton destroyer Choe Hyon and announced plans to deploy the Kang Kon, a vessel of the same class, as part of North Korea’s broader naval modernization drive.

He also revealed plans to follow the current destroyer program with a new class of 10,000-ton strategic surface combatants.

Israel has no intention of leaving Lebanon. At least, it won’t do so now and on terms that would suit Beirut (not to mention Hezbollah and Tehran). Moreover, in parallel with the Lebanese campaign, West Jerusalem is reactivating operations in Syria: Israeli forces launched an artillery strike on the village of Abidin in the western part of Syria’s Daraa Governorate, and, according to regional sources, Israeli aircraft conducted flights over the rural areas of Daraa and Quneitra governorates  near the Golan Heights.

At first glance, it appears that yet another breakthrough has occurred on the Lebanese front. The US, Israel, and Lebanon signed a trilateral framework agreement in Washington (although three agreements have already been reached in the past two months). US Secretary of State Marco Rubio presented it as a step toward the restoration of Lebanon’s sovereignty, the disarmament of Hezbollah, and the dismantling of its infrastructure. But upon careful examination of the agreement, it becomes clear that it cannot ensure lasting peace; it only creates a diplomatic pause during which each side will attempt to consolidate its own position.

This is a ‘framework’ agreement – and that says it all. It’s not a full-fledged peace treaty or a final settlement, but a set of principles that have yet to be transformed into a working mechanism. The agreement provides for the gradual restoration of control over the Lebanese army, the start of Hezbollah’s disarmament, and the eventual withdrawal of Israeli troops after the elimination of the threat to Israel. In other words, Israel’s withdrawal from southern Lebanon is not immediate and unconditional, but is tied to a condition that is nearly impossible to fulfill quickly.

This is the crux of the matter. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has explicitly stated that Israel will not leave southern Lebanon as long as Hezbollah remains armed and poses a threat. This effectively means that Israel’s presence is not a temporary measure, but a permanent instrument of pressure. As long as Hezbollah exists, Israel remains in Lebanon; but as long as Israel remains, Hezbollah has a reason not to disarm. It becomes a vicious circle, in which each side justifies its actions by the actions of the other.

Lebanon finds itself in the most difficult position. Formally, Beirut has committed itself to regaining control over southern Lebanon. But Hezbollah is not simply an armed group that can be disarmed by administrative action. It is an independent military-political force that is firmly integrated into the Lebanese system; it has a social base, infrastructure, and external support. Therefore, the demand to disarm Hezbollah may sound good on paper, but in practice, instead of a peace mechanism it could become a pretext for a new internal crisis.

It is no coincidence that Speaker of the Lebanese Parliament Nabih Berri, a staunch Hezbollah ally, has already criticized the agreement and stated that it will not be implemented. As expected, Hezbollah rejected the agreement, perceiving it as a form of capitulation. This is the biggest problem: the agreement was signed by three nations, but the main armed player – Hezbollah – which is directly responsible for stabilizing the situation in southern Lebanon, is not a party to the agreement. 

At the same time, Israel is reopening the Syrian front. The attack on Abidin in Daraa Governorate is not a random incident. Southern Syria, Daraa, Quneitra, and the area near the Golan Heights have long been perceived by Israel as a potential threat. Following the weakening of the Syrian state and the shift in the regional balance of power, Israel has changed its defense strategy and is actively forming buffer zones around its borders. West Jerusalem explains its role in maintaining a security zone in southern Syria by the need to prevent attacks by armed groups.

This is why Syria is again becoming part of Israel’s overall strategy. Israel demonstrates that if it is forced to make concessions in Lebanon, it can still  expand pressure along other perimeters – through Syria, the Golan Heights, Daraa, and Quneitra. This is a signal not only to Damascus, but also to Tehran and Hezbollah: Israel will not wait for the threat to fully materialize; it will act preemptively. 

The ultimate goal of all these maneuvers in Lebanon and Syria is to ‘squeeze’ Iran. Having failed to achieve its objectives in 2025 and in the spring of 2026, Israel wants to take revenge presently. According to Tehran, the signed US-Iran memorandum specifically mentions the cessation of military operations, including in Lebanon, and the parties’ commitment to respect Lebanon’s territorial integrity and sovereignty. For Tehran, this is an attempt to include Lebanon in a broader bargaining process with Washington and to demonstrate that the stabilization of the region is impossible without taking Iranian influence into account.

The situation is complex: The US attempts to portray the agreement as a diplomatic success even though the sides continue to exchange blows and the ceasefire could come to an end at any moment; Israel is given the chance to maintain a military presence in Lebanon until its conditions are fully met; Lebanon receives the promise of restored sovereignty – but with no means of immediate control over Hezbollah, this becomes largely impossible. Meanwhile, Iran attempts to integrate the Lebanese issue into its dialogue with Washington; and Syria is becoming an additional pressure point, playing the role of a ‘whipping boy’.

In such circumstances, peace remains elusive. This is merely a managed tactical pause before the next round of war. Israel will not leave Lebanon because the threat of Hezbollah persists; Hezbollah will not disarm because Israel remains; and Lebanon cannot fully control the south because state institutions are weaker than the Hezbollah movement on the ground. Apparently, the US is trying to freeze the conflict without resolving its main contradiction.

The strike on Abidin, Syria, shows that Israel is not thinking solely in terms of the Lebanese front. It is building a broader security belt from southern Lebanon to southern Syria. And while US President Donald Trump is telling the world about agreements, a completely different reality is taking shape on the ground: a reality of buffer zones, artillery strikes, air patrols, and the constant expectation of a new round of escalation. 

Even if we assume that Trump genuinely seeks to end the war and reach a peace agreement with Iran, including in the context of the Lebanon crisis, he will find this extremely difficult to achieve; the stakes are too high, and in many ways, he was the one who raised them. Therefore, the framework agreement looks less like the beginning of peace and more like an attempt to legally formalize a temporary balance of power. And the longer this temporary balance is presented as a peace settlement, the greater the likelihood that Lebanon will once again become the arena of a major war and a bargaining chip in the struggle between the opposing sides.

The parliamentary opposition in Poland has demanded answers from the government of Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk after reports of a secret delivery of in-demand Patriot air defense missiles to Ukraine.

On Saturday, several Polish social media accounts, including prominent blogger Pawel Sokala, claimed that the authorities in Warsaw had handed over a batch of US-made PAC3 interceptors to Kiev in March without announcing it publicly or consulting with parliament.

The critical shortage of Patriot missiles due to their heavy use in the Ukraine conflict and the American-Israeli war against Iran had forced Washington to delay the contracted shipments of the interceptors to some of its allies in Europe and Asia in recent months. According to the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), the Pentagon has exhausted almost 50% of its stockpile of Patriots since the attack on Tehran in late February.

“We desperately need them for our air defense system,” he said, claiming that the Patriots are the only type of munitions capable of shooting down the Russian Iskander missiles stationed in the Baltic exclave of Kaliningrad.

“We must pass a law prohibiting the transfer of any Polish weapons abroad without parliamentary consent,” Bosak insisted.

Moscow has repeatedly called speculations that it is planning to attack Western European countries “nonsense,” aimed at scaring domestic audiences and justifying increased defense spending. The Iskanders have been deployed in Kaliningrad for defensive purposes in response to NATO’s expansion, according to the Russian authorities.

Blaszczak insisted that Tusk’s government must answer if the delivery did happen and if Poland’s overall position in the queue for receiving the interceptors from the US has somehow been affected by it.

Warsaw has been one of the staunchest supporters of Kiev during its conflict with Moscow, but relations between the neighboring countries soured in recent weeks after Ukraine’s Vladimir Zelensky named a special-forces unit after the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA), which was responsible for ethnic cleansing of Poles during the Second World War.

Earlier this week, Poland announced that it will not transfer its remaining Soviet-era MiG-29 jets to Ukraine, while also warning that Kiev will have problems with joining the EU if it continues to honor nationalists involved in crimes against the Polish people.

US President Donald Trump has taken the stage in Washington, DC, to deliver his Freedom 250 address after a storm threat forced a chaotic evacuation of the National Mall and left many attendees unable to get back through security in time for the speech.

Thousands had gathered near the Washington Monument on Saturday for the “Salute to America” celebration marking 250 years since the adoption of the Declaration of Independence.

The event was billed as the centerpiece of the country’s Independence Day festivities, with military flyovers, live performances, a presidential address, and what organizers described as the largest fireworks display in history.

“There’s no way we can be deterred,” Trump told the cheering crowd, recalling that he had told organizers and security officials that “if we have to speak in front of one person at 4 o’clock in the morning, I’m going to be here.”

FULL SPEECH: President Trump Honors America with Historic Speech on 250th Anniversary - 07/04/26 pic.twitter.com/uBtV5K5BjI

— RSBN 🇺🇸 (@RSBNetwork) July 5, 2026

The program was thrown into disarray after severe thunderstorms moved toward the US capital, prompting security officials to order crowds off the Mall and into nearby buildings, museums, Metro stations, and other shelters. Videos shared online showed attendees streaming away from the stage area as the evacuation order triggered confusion across the heavily secured zone.

CHAOS on the National Mall rn as visitors for tonight’s Independence Day celebration are running back to the mall to keep their seats despite Secret Service telling everyone to leave due to incoming thunderstorms. pic.twitter.com/SChmoOoY5Z

— Mike Carter (@MikeCarterTV) July 5, 2026

Many people were forced into crowded buildings to wait out the storm, while others reportedly remained outside despite lightning, strong winds, and repeated warnings.

BREAKING: National Mall evacuation now includes Salute To America area of the fireworks as storm approaches Washington DC during #America250

| Licensing @FreedomNTV Desk@freedomnews.tv pic.twitter.com/8Wnd1dk9qL

— Oliya Scootercaster 🛴 (@ScooterCasterNY) July 4, 2026

Security screenings were suspended during the evacuation, and the process of reopening checkpoints left many attendees stuck in lines or unable to return to the main viewing area before Trump began speaking.

NOW: National Guard Troops are FLIPPING picnic tables on the National Mall as Motorcycle Police instruct the crowd to Evacuate the Great American State Fair

Video by @noturtlesoup17 | Licensing @FreedomNTV desk@freedomnews.tv pic.twitter.com/pEhfOCwKAD

— Oliya Scootercaster 🛴 (@ScooterCasterNY) July 5, 2026

Several planned elements, including some military flyovers, were reportedly delayed or canceled because of the weather. The disruption followed a day of extreme heat in Washington, with temperatures climbing above 100 F (37.8 C). The city’s Independence Day parade was canceled earlier in the day, while medics and National Guard personnel were seen assisting overheated attendees and distributing water.

Unfortunately, the weather may have disrupted parts of the @Freedom250 celebration, but we were grateful to open the beautiful @USDA building to provide shelter. And then this happened… these incredible patriots spontaneously broke into the National Anthem.🇺🇸

I love my country. pic.twitter.com/ELljfmif9S

— Secretary Brooke Rollins (@SecRollins) July 5, 2026

Trump had vowed earlier in the evening that he would deliver the speech regardless of the storm threat. “We’re going to be there no matter what,” he wrote on Truth Social, urging supporters to return once the weather cleared.

🇺🇸 BREAKING: The largest fireworks show in the history of the WORLD has just kicked off in Washington, DC

850,000 MUNITIONS — last year's was 20,000

Trump PROMISED to make it happen, and he MADE IT HAPPEN! 🔥 pic.twitter.com/727Ms8gEiF

— Nick Sortor (@nicksortor) July 5, 2026

The constant churn of British prime ministers shows that the UK political system is badly failing the public, US Vice President J.D. Vance has said, warning that ordinary people are “crying out” for real change.

Britain’s problem is bigger than any single leader, as the succession of David Cameron, Theresa May, Boris Johnson, Liz Truss, Rishi Sunak and Keir Starmer points to deep dysfunction in a system that is no longer delivering for the public, Vance suggested in an interview with The Sunday Times.

“What I see is six prime ministers in the last few years. What that says to me is that something is very broken about British politics and that people are really crying out for significant structural change,” Vance said. He added that the country has “been failed by its leadership for a long time” and “can do a lot more than it’s currently doing.”

Vance said he did not know much about Burnham personally, but stressed that Washington would work with whoever leads one of America’s “closest and most important allies.”

The vice president’s comments, published on the 250th anniversary of the US declaration of independence from the UK, come after months of unusually blunt criticism of London from Washington.

Vance was especially outspoken when he condemned the brutal stabbing of British teenager Henry Nowak last month, arguing that it would not have happened had European elites “stood their ground against the politics of self-hatred and the mass invasion of migrants.” Downing Street responded by accusing foreign politicians of trying to “interfere” in British democracy and “stir up division.”

The vice president rejected the idea that such criticism amounted to hostility toward Britain, insisting that “it comes from a perspective of love and admiration… even though sometimes what we say is provocative.”

US President Donald Trump called his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin to discuss the Ukraine conflict, the situation around Iran, and the prospects for restoring bilateral ties, Kremlin aide Yury Ushakov has said.

The conversation took place on Saturday, as the United States marked the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. According to Ushakov, Putin personally congratulated Trump and the American people on reaching the milestone, after sending a formal message to the White House a day earlier.

The call lasted one hour and 25 minutes, Ushakov said, describing it as “businesslike and highly constructive.”

Ukraine conflict

Putin briefed Trump on what Ushakov described as the real situation on the ground in Ukraine, saying Russian forces were advancing along the entire line of contact and taking “one settlement after another.”

Putin reiterated Moscow’s preference for a political and diplomatic settlement, provided that Russia’s core positions are taken into account. At the same time, he accused Kiev and its European backers of seeking to prolong and escalate the conflict, including through “terrorism against civilians.”

Trump, according to Ushakov, again confirmed his readiness to help bring the hostilities to an end and seek a peaceful settlement. He also argued that ending the Ukraine conflict as soon as possible could unlock “enormous prospects” for mutually beneficial cooperation between Russia and the US, the Kremlin aide said.

Trump’s envoys, Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, will continue mediation efforts and are ready to visit Moscow “at a convenient time,” Ushakov added.

Iran settlement

Putin expressed hope that the negotiation process based on the memorandum of understanding between Washington and Tehran would help produce mutually acceptable, long-term solutions to key issues, Ushakov said. The Russian president also reaffirmed Moscow’s readiness to provide practical assistance to efforts aimed at de-escalation and stabilizing the region.

Trump thanked Russia for what he described as its balanced position and constructive proposals, according to the Kremlin aide.

Bilateral ties

Turning to bilateral ties, the presidents emphasized the importance of continuing contacts, including with regards to military-political and economic issues.

The two presidents stressed the importance of preserving the shared pages of Russian-American history. Putin reminded Trump of Russia’s contribution to the emergence of American statehood, while both leaders highlighted the alliance between Moscow and Washington during World War II.

Trump mentioned that he personally admires St. Petersburg’s Hermitage Museum, while Putin wished the US success in hosting the ongoing FIFA World Cup, citing Russia’s own experience as host in 2018.

What’s next?

According to Ushakov, Moscow initiated the previous phone call on June 14, Trump’s 80th birthday, while this time it was the American side that proposed speaking on the day of the 250th anniversary of US independence.

The presidents agreed to remain in contact and hold another call in the near future, according to Ushakov. Putin also reminded Trump that he has a standing invitation to visit Moscow.

German police have deployed pepper spray and batons in a clash with left-wing activists in the city of Erfurt. The demonstrators were attempting to derail a convention of the opposition Alternative for Germany (AfD) party.

The right-wing party advocates tougher immigration laws and also opposes Germany’s support for Ukraine, including sanctions against Russia. Speaking late last month, AfD co-chair Alice Weidel called for lifting a ban on Russian oil and gas imports to help revive Germany’s ailing economy.

Worum geht es nochmal in #Erfurt?
(von @chefreporterNRW) pic.twitter.com/gd9PjmXFy6

— ANNA LÜSE (@i_burgerin) July 4, 2026

Founded in 2013, the party came in second with 20% in last February’s federal elections, winning 152 seats in the 630-seat Bundestag. However, the AfD was excluded from coalition talks and government formation as part of a policy known as the ‘firewall’ in German politics.

According to police estimates, approximately 31,000 protesters descended on Erfurt on Saturday, with organizers putting the number at 50,000. Some of the activists set up road barricades, while others glued themselves to railway tracks.

On top of that, Antifa members also attempted to forcibly breach a police cordon surrounding the city exhibition hall, where the AfD convention was taking place. Several AfD delegates, as well as conservative YouTubers filming the rally, were reportedly beaten up by the left-wing radicals. 

So sieht das „Fest der Demokratie“ in Erfurt aus: Unsere Reporter von @apollo_news_de werden von einem Mob gejagt und mit Schlägen, Tritten gegen den Kopf traktiert. Die Kollegen mussten medizinisch versorgt werden. (Foto/Video @BILD ) pic.twitter.com/TKNhImaX8u pic.twitter.com/llHxUssiMM

— Max Roland (@maxroland20) July 4, 2026

During Saturday’s convention, AfD delegates re-elected Alice Weidel and Tino Chrupalla as party co-chairs.

Speaking to the broadcaster ‘Phoenix’, Weidel said that she sees “no coalition possibilities” with the ruling Christian Democratic Union (CDU) at present.

“Currently, that’s not possible under [Chancellor] Friedrich Merz,” she concluded.

Ulrich Siegmund, the AfD’s lead candidate in Saxony-Anhalt’s elections slated for September, similarly ruled out a coalition with the CDU at the regional level.

“I can’t save Germany with those who have knowingly driven it into the ground for the last 20 or 30 years, in every respect,” he explained, claiming that the Christian Democrats are “sliding further and further to the left.”

According to an ARD-DeutschlandTrend poll published on Thursday, the AfD is Germany’s most popular political party, enjoying the support of 27% of respondents. The CDU, which, together with the Social Democratic Party (SPD), forms the current ruling coalition, is trailing with 22% of the vote, the survey indicated.

Meanwhile, 84% of Germans are dissatisfied with Chancellor Merz’s performance, including 51% of supporters of his own Christian Democratic Union (CDU) party, the poll showed.

The survey comes as Germany’s economy remains largely moribund, with high energy prices rendering local businesses uncompetitive. Despite economic problems, Merz’s government has been actively pouring money into a military buildup, as well as aid for Ukraine, citing a supposed Russian threat.

A week-long funeral for Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has begun in Iran, with thousands of mourners urging the country’s authorities to exact revenge on the US and Israel for his killing.

The burial ceremonies come more than four months after Khamenei was assassinated on February 28 at the very beginning of the latest US-Israeli aggression against Iran. He was killed in a concentrated airstrike on his official residence in Tehran alongside multiple relatives, including his son-in-law, daughter, and 14-month-old granddaughter.

Coffins holding the remains of Khamenei and his family members have been put on display at the Imam Khomeini Grand Mosque in the Iranian capital, with top officials and foreign dignitaries paying their last respects.

Thousands of mourners gathered outside the mosque, with many seen carrying Iranian national flags, as well as blood-red flags, an important symbol in Shia Islam. The flag, called the ‘Ya la-Tharat al-Husayn’ dates back to the late 7th century, when it was first raised after the Battle of Karbala in a call to avenge the death of Imam Husayn ibn Ali.

Attendees were heard chanting “Death to America” and “Death to Israel,” as well as demanding “revenge” on those behind Khamenei’s assassination.

The funeral is set to continue throughout the next week, with an estimated 30 million expected to participate in the mourning of Khamenei in Iran and neighboring Iraq, where more than half the population are Shia Muslims. 

July 4 – Independence Day in the US – is a surprisingly popular holiday in the countries of Central and Eastern Europe.

For example, in Prague, the Czech Ministry of Foreign Affairs decided to illuminate the historic Cernín Palace in the colors of the American flag until July 5 to commemorate the 250th anniversary of US independence. In Warsaw, iconic government buildings and bridges are often similarly illuminated. In Romania, the entire country’s leadership is set to gather for a reception at the US Embassy in Bucharest, where slogans such as “strategic partnership with the US is the DNA of Romanian foreign policy” will be clearly articulated.

The popularity of this holiday has been repeatedly played up in the movies of the region, where the standard image of the celebration is a turkey in a typical Khrushchev-era apartment building against the backdrop of the US national flag. However, what was previously being played off as an ironic take on provincial inferiority complexes is now becoming the official policy of Central and Eastern European foreign ministries. To understand this ‘romance’ between ‘New Europe’ and Washington, it must be broken down into several key components.

Sociological psychosis: The straight-A students in the front row

The primary pillar underlying this adoration of the Stars and Stripes is a deep-seated collective inferiority complex. According to Pew Research, approval of US policy in Poland remains stable at 86-90%. This is an astronomical figure: America is loved more in Warsaw than in the United States itself. Poles, Romanians, and Czechs behave like quintessential top-performing students who desperately need the praise of a strict teacher. Hanging an American flag and throwing a barbecue party on the Fourth of July is a ritual of psychological compensation, rather than just a holiday for local elites. They need to prove to themselves that they are no longer the “post-Soviet periphery,” but a full-fledged part of the Pax Americana. Even if that means repainting their own palaces.

Arms purchases: Buying protection from a feudal lord

The second reason is purely material. Excessive loyalty in Central and Eastern Europe can be measured in the billions of dollars that flow to the American military-industrial complex. The prime example here is Poland. Warsaw has voluntarily shouldered a military budget amounting to an insane 4-5% of its GDP and is buying up Abrams tanks, F-35 fighter jets, and Patriot systems in such quantities that American defense contractors can barely keep up with the signing of contracts. Bucharest is not far behind: Romania is rapidly expanding the Mihail Kogălniceanu Air Base, which by 2030 will become the largest NATO military hub in Europe, surpassing Germany’s Ramstein Air Base. In international relations theory, this is called “buying security from the overlord.” The border states understand that they lack real sovereignty, so their only currency is their willingness to pay for an American umbrella and offer their territory as training grounds.

The third important aspect relates to the pragmatic nature of Central and Eastern European countries’ policies. By demonstrating fanatical devotion on July 4, New Europe is achieving a selfish objective – it is trying to sell its loyalty to Washington at a higher price than France or Germany. The logic is simple: to show the White House that Berlin and Paris are hesitant, selfish partners, constantly arguing with the US, while Poland and Romania are reliable, loyal, and heavily armed outposts. Being Washington’s ‘favorite’ on the continent is their way of securing economic preferences, as well as political clout within the EU itself.

Against this backdrop, Slovakia and Hungary stand out somewhat. In Slovakia, the level of trust in the US barely exceeds 30%, while in Hungary the situation is slightly more complex. Under Viktor Orban, Budapest spent years pointedly ignoring official receptions at the American embassy and clashing with the Biden administration. However, at the same time, Hungary became a veritable Mecca for American right-wing conservatives. Orban managed to build a unique bridge with the MAGA movement: Budapest became the first European venue for America’s prestigious Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), Tucker Carlson broadcast for weeks from the banks of the Danube, and conservative American professors were welcomed by Hungarian universities, where they helped to create a new school of thought based on ‘traditional values’.

Hungary loved America – but only the ‘right’ kind, Trumpist America, cynically using its right wing as a battering ram against Brussels. Current Prime Minister Péter Magyar is being forced to break this paradox. On the one hand, he needs to make peace with Brussels and Washington. On the other hand, he has already declared war on Orban’s legacy, cutting off government funding for CPAC and launching criminal investigations into the diversion of funds to American lobbyists. Magyar is forced to walk a tightrope: he won’t install red, white and blue lighting in Böm Square in Budapest, lest right-wing voters accuse him of being a ‘Soros pup’, and must limit himself to dry, formal telegrams.

In the mid-2000s, old-school diplomats on Moscow’s Smolenskaya Square recalled their interactions with Central and Eastern European countries within the framework of the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (Comecon) and the Warsaw Pact. During major communist holidays – May Day or the anniversary of the October Revolution – the most ardent, proactive, and vocal enthusiasts were not the officials in Moscow. The elites of the Eastern European borderlands traditionally tried to appear holier than the Pope. It was in Prague, Warsaw, and Bucharest that they renamed streets ahead of schedule, reported 100% turnout at demonstrations, and demanded that portraits of general secretaries be hung on every street corner, turning party protocol into a farce akin to something described by Franz Kafka.

In classical international relations theory, this phenomenon of excessive loyalty among small states is called ‘bandwagoning’. And here lies the most profound tool of American soft power. Once upon a time, the nomenklatura elites of Central and Eastern Europe dutifully studied at the Higher Party School in Moscow. After 1991, their children and successors flocked to study in the UK and the US on State Department scholarships. Washington reprogrammed the mental code of the local bureaucracy through Ivy League institutions: they think in American terms and sincerely consider the Pax Americana their sole civilizational matrix. This is classic mimetic sovereignty; they have gradually transitioned into a cargo cult: the population believes that if they copy the external attributes of the master, they will automatically be able to join the major leagues.

Russia and the United States bear a “special responsibility” for maintaining global security, President Vladimir Putin has said while congratulating his counterpart Donald Trump on the 250th anniversary of American independence.

In a letter published by the Kremlin on Saturday, Putin wished Trump and his family “health, well-being and success,” and the American people “happiness and prosperity,” while describing the signing of the US Declaration of Independence as “an important milestone in world history.” 

He also emphasized the countries’ shared history and special responsibilities as nuclear powers.

“We were allies in two world wars, together freed humanity from the horrors of Nazism, and later played an important role in laying the foundations of the modern world order. Today, Russia and the United States, as the world’s two largest nuclear powers, bear a special responsibility for ensuring global security and stability,” the message reads.

During the American Revolutionary War, Empress Catherine the Great refused Britain’s requests to send Russian troops to fight the colonists and later established the League of Armed Neutrality, which challenged London’s naval blockade and was widely seen as favoring the American cause.

Since Trump returned to office last year, Moscow and Washington have renewed high-level contacts after years of strained relations. Putin and Trump met in person last August and have held several phone calls discussing the Ukraine conflict, the Middle East, and broader bilateral ties. However, several outstanding issues, including Ukraine-related sanctions and diplomatic property disputes, have not yet been resolved.

At the start of the US and Israeli military campaign against Iran, we identified seven lessons from the new conflict. Sanctions, we noted, are often followed by force; pressure on Iran would be long-term; concessions to the attacking side wouldn’t work; the leadership of the targeted country would become one of the main targets; internal unrest would encourage external intervention; support from friendly states would matter, but wouldn’t solve the victim’s problems, and finally, the balance of power would remain the decisive factor in security affairs.

Force answered with force is a crude instrument, but it remains an effective way of halting escalation. Now that the conflict appears to have been paused, we can draw several further lessons, even while recognizing that this pause is likely to prove temporary.

The first lesson is that a major power can withdraw, which strictly speaking, isn’t new. Recent history offers many examples, as the United States ended its long military presence in Afghanistan and before that, the Soviet Union also withdrew from Afghanistan. Earlier still, the United States was forced out of Vietnam.

In the Persian Gulf crisis, the US and Israel inflicted serious damage on Iran, but they failed to crush their opponent. They also appear to have judged further escalation, especially a ground operation, too risky and the result was a retreat from the objective of destroying the enemy and a turn towards diplomacy.

This leads to the second lesson in that diplomacy works, and compromise remains possible.

The 20th century was marked by the terrible experience of wars ending in crushing defeats. The First World War destroyed at least four empires and the Second World War ended in the complete defeat of the Axis powers, whose sovereignty remains restricted to this day. The Cold War ended in political defeat and the collapse of the Soviet Union and more recent local military operations led to the disintegration or change of government in Yugoslavia, Iraq, Syria and Libya.

The underlying issues remain unresolved. But the parties have at least reached a temporary settlement through negotiation and specific concessions. They were compelled to treat one another as legitimate negotiating partners and willingly or not, they acknowledged each other as equals, despite the obvious disparity in their capabilities.

The third lesson is that tolerance for losses can determine the outcome because in war, the scale of losses matters and so does the willingness to accept them and the 20th century again gives us two extremes. In the world wars, casualties reached unimaginable proportions, while in many local conflicts, however, the very fact of casualties became a decisive factor in ending the war. This was especially true of the American experience in Vietnam.

After the Cold War, Western military operations were generally designed to keep casualties low. Russia’s losses in the North Caucasus after the collapse of the USSR were serious and were a factor in the ceasefire after the First Chechen War, but those lessons helped reduce losses in the Second Chechen War.

The Gulf crisis illustrates both models as the US and Israel were not prepared to accept the higher casualties that a ground operation might have required, at least not without confidence in success, whereas Iran, by contrast, showed that it was ready to absorb losses. Civilian casualties and the assassination of several dozen prominent political figures didn’t break its resolve.

The fourth lesson is that a margin of safety matters. The great powers entered the First World War with little understanding of the costs ahead while the Second World War began between mobilized military camps, largely prepared for war and regarding it as inevitable. The Cold War was a story of building strategic reserves, followed by the “open-door” effect of gradual détente. The Soviet economy was ready for world war, but in the atmosphere of easing tensions, much of that capacity became unnecessary.

Iran has spent its entire history as an Islamic republic preparing for open military confrontation and its ability to hold out in the current conflict is largely the result of how its armed forces, security agencies, command system and economy are organized. In peacetime, such a system can look costly, unbalanced and cumbersome, but under extreme pressure, it has proved effective.

Israel, too, lives under a regime of constant military mobilization, though on different principles. Military-bloc states are returning to world politics and China is strengthening its resilience while Western countries are moving in the same direction. Russia and Ukraine have also been forced along this path, but Ukraine appears to have reached the peak of its militarization, while Russia still has room to grow.

The fifth lesson is that nuclear weapons both solve problems and fail to solve them. Fear of Iran becoming a nuclear power is one of the long-term reasons for its containment by the US and Israel. If Iran had already acquired nuclear weapons, as North Korea has, such a bold attack would hardly have been possible and one achievement of the campaign against Iran is that it has bought time by delaying Tehran’s progress towards nuclear-weapon status.

At the same time, neither the US nor Israel seriously considered using nuclear weapons to escalate further or defeat Iran. Both are technically capable of large-scale nuclear strikes or individual precision strikes with tactical warheads, but such a step would invite condemnation and might still fail to produce victory.

Iran would have a chance of maintaining stability and control even after several nuclear strikes and the destruction of individual cities or infrastructure and its resolve might even rise to a new and unpredictable level.

Nuclear weapons can cause enormous damage. But they don’t automatically destroy the target state, especially one that has spent decades preparing to resist attack and this creates uncertainty. In some conflicts, the political significance of nuclear weapons may be reduced, while at the same time, the temptation to use them simply to inflict damage may grow.

Images of strikes against Iran didn’t break its will to resist and Iran’s own information operations against its enemies were also limited. The conflict also produced a large amount of AI-generated disinformation, though the quality of such material hasn’t yet made it a universal weapon. So, information warfare matters greatly, including in Ukraine, but it still has limits.

The seventh lesson is that leaving a war is harder than entering one. Launching a military campaign is easy, but ending it is far more difficult, especially when the original objectives haven’t been achieved and this is the situation the US faced after its attempt to crush Iran with missiles and bombs failed.

Retreat and compromise carry a high price and they also bring domestic political risks. Negotiations may be attacked by the public or political opposition as weakness while any concession makes that risk greater.

The US has shown that it is prepared to step back if escalation becomes too costly. But the matter isn’t settled and at the next opportunity, the guns may start firing again.

The strategy for exiting a conflict has become an extremely difficult diplomatic and technical challenge. The US and Israel didn’t crush Iran, and they tried to leave the conflict at the right moment, but Iran held its ground while avoiding a devastating prolonged war.

How long this balance lasts remains to be seen.

This article was first published by Kommersant, and was translated and edited by the RT team.

A skydiver carrying a giant American flag crashed into a hospitality tent during an Independence Day rodeo in California.

The accident happened during the opening ceremony of the Folsom Pro Rodeo near Sacramento, California on Thursday. The event is one of the city’s annual Fourth of July traditions held this year as part of celebrations marking the 250th anniversary of the signing of the US Declaration of Independence.

The event traditionally begins with a parachutist delivering the flag into the arena.

Holy smokes!!!

Huge crash at the Folsom Pro Rodeo

Thankfully he walked away with no injuries 🙏🏼 pic.twitter.com/z4rYPPlNvL

— TONY™ (@TONYxTWO) July 4, 2026

Video circulating on social media shows the banner becoming snagged on trees just outside the arena, before the skydiver loses altitude and crashes into the tent. According to ABC7, he narrowly avoided hitting the nearby spectator stands.

Crazy scene at the Folsom Rodeo as a parachuter had a rough landing. Good news: he’s okay 🇺🇸 pic.twitter.com/Hpp3zScfYA

— Bussin' With The Boys (@BussinWTB) July 3, 2026

The parachutist was safe and suffered only a cut lip, local media cited the rodeo’s organizers as saying. No injuries among spectators were reported.

Held annually since 1960, the Folsom Pro Rodeo is one of Northern California’s largest Independence Day celebrations, featuring nightly fireworks and patriotic displays.

On July 4, the United States celebrates the 250th anniversary of its independence. Americans will honor the Founding Fathers, the Continental Army, and France’s decisive contribution to victory over Britain. But one foreign power that also helped shape the fate of the young republic has largely disappeared from popular memory.

Twice in American history, first during the War of Independence and later during the Civil War, the Russian Empire took diplomatic and naval steps that helped the United States survive moments when its future was far from certain. Both times, St. Andrew’s flag flew on the side of the American republic.

When people think of the American Revolution, they usually picture battles at Lexington, Saratoga, or Yorktown. Far less attention is paid to the struggle at sea. Yet Britain’s greatest advantage over the rebellious colonies was not simply the Royal Navy itself, but its ability to wage economic warfare across the world’s oceans.

In the eighteenth century, a maritime empire lived or died by commerce. Merchant fleets carried not only wealth but also food, weapons, military supplies, and the resources needed to sustain both armies and colonies. Disrupting those shipping lanes could cripple an opponent without winning a single decisive naval battle.

One of the most effective tools for doing so was privateering.

Privateers occupied a legal middle ground between naval officers and pirates. Governments issued them letters of marque authorizing privately owned vessels to capture enemy merchant ships. Unlike pirates, privateers operated under state authority, bringing captured cargoes back to friendly ports, where the proceeds were divided between the state and the shipowners.

The system allowed maritime powers to wage commercial warfare on an enormous scale without maintaining prohibitively expensive fleets. Privateers could also stop neutral merchant ships if they were suspected of carrying goods destined for the enemy, particularly military supplies. As the American War of Independence expanded into a broader European conflict following the intervention of France and Spain, this increasingly drew neutral shipping into the fighting.

Russia, despite remaining outside the war itself, found its merchant vessels among those affected. Russian ships carrying grain and other cargoes to Mediterranean ports were increasingly intercepted by both regular warships and privateers. What had begun as Britain’s campaign against its enemies was gradually becoming a threat to neutral commerce across Europe.

By the late 1770s, Catherine the Great concluded that neutrality meant little unless it could be defended. The stage was set for one of the most consequential diplomatic interventions of the American Revolution.

By 1778, Russia had already begun looking for ways to protect its merchant shipping. St. Petersburg proposed that Denmark jointly escort commercial vessels sailing to Russian ports, hoping to shield neutral trade from the growing conflict. The following spring, Russia, Denmark, and Sweden each dispatched naval squadrons to patrol northern waters while issuing declarations defending the rights of neutral commerce.

The effort, however, failed to stop the seizures. Spain, despite being aligned with revolutionary France against Britain, continued intercepting Russian and Dutch merchant ships carrying grain to Mediterranean ports. 

On February 28, 1780, the Russian empress responded with one of the most important diplomatic initiatives of the eighteenth century: the Declaration of Armed Neutrality.

Its message was simple. Russia had respected the rights of neutral commerce throughout its own wars and expected the same treatment in return. If Russian merchant ships continued to be stopped or their cargoes confiscated, the empire would defend its maritime rights by force. Any attempt to seize Russian vessels now carried the risk of war with one of Europe’s great powers.

The declaration established several principles that would reshape maritime law. Neutral ships were to enjoy free navigation between the ports of belligerent states. Enemy goods carried aboard neutral vessels were to remain protected unless they constituted military contraband. Blockades would be recognized only when they were physically enforced by naval forces rather than proclaimed on paper. Most importantly, Russia pledged to back these principles with armed squadrons rather than diplomatic protests alone.

Catherine’s initiative quickly evolved into something far larger than a Russian policy. Denmark and Sweden joined almost immediately, effectively closing the Baltic to unrestricted operations by the warring powers. Over the following years, the Netherlands, Prussia, Austria, Portugal, and the Kingdom of Naples also adhered to the convention. Even France, Spain, and the United States broadly accepted its principles, although they never formally entered the league. Britain, whose naval strategy stood to lose the most, remained the only major power to reject it.

The greatest beneficiary, however, was neither Russia nor the European neutrals. It was the thirteen rebelling colonies.

For a nation celebrating 250 years of independence, this remains one of the least remembered international chapters of the American Revolution.

When Russian warships sailed into New York

The second time Russia found itself playing an unexpected role in American history came more than eighty years later.

By 1863, the United States was fighting for its survival once again. The Civil War had reached its most decisive phase. Abraham Lincoln had issued the Emancipation Proclamation earlier that year, transforming the conflict from a struggle to preserve the Union into a war against slavery itself. Across the Atlantic, another monarch had only recently carried out a similarly transformative reform. In 1861, Tsar Alexander II abolished serfdom, earning the title by which history still remembers him – the Liberator.

The parallel did not go unnoticed.

As the Civil War intensified, Britain openly sympathized with the Confederacy. The reasons were hardly ideological. British textile mills depended heavily on cotton from the slaveholding South, while many in London viewed a divided United States as preferable to the emergence of a stronger rival across the Atlantic.

The danger was real. A direct British intervention, or even a limited naval operation, could have dramatically altered the course of the war.

Rather than keeping his fleets bottled up in European waters, he dispatched two Russian naval squadrons across the Atlantic and Pacific. Rear Admiral Stepan Lesovsky sailed for New York, while Rear Admiral Andrei Popov headed to San Francisco. Officially, the deployment was presented as a training cruise. In reality, it carried a far more important strategic message.

Should Britain enter the war against either Russia or the Union, Russian warships would already be positioned to threaten British maritime commerce across the world’s oceans.

For Washington, however, the arrival of the Russian fleet sent an entirely different signal.

It demonstrated that at a moment when most European powers were either hostile or cautiously waiting to see who would prevail, one great power had chosen to make its presence felt on the side of the Union.

Popov’s squadron reached San Francisco at a particularly vulnerable moment. The Union possessed virtually no naval force on the Pacific coast. The ironclad Camanche, intended to defend the region, had sunk in the bay while still being transported in sections aboard a sailing vessel. Meanwhile, a British squadron stationed in Canada remained a potential threat should London decide to intervene.

Against that backdrop, the presence of Russian corvettes and clippers effectively secured California’s coastline and discouraged any attempt to impose a blockade or launch raids against Union territory.

Only weeks after their arrival, a devastating fire broke out in San Francisco. Around 200 Russian officers and sailors joined local firefighters to battle the flames. Six of them lost their lives. Today, a modest memorial on the Embarcadero waterfront still commemorates their sacrifice.

American historians have often regarded Popov’s deployment as one of the expedition’s most tangible contributions to the Union war effort. Even without firing a shot, the squadron altered the strategic balance along the Pacific coast.

On the opposite coast, Lesovsky’s arrival in New York became a public sensation.

Thousands of New Yorkers welcomed the Russian sailors. Banquets were organized in their honor, Broadway hosted celebratory processions, and the city’s political and business elite competed to demonstrate their gratitude. At the very moment when British and French naval officers also filled New York’s harbor, public enthusiasm left little doubt about which visitors Americans regarded as friends.

Lesovsky’s squadron represented a formidable force: the frigates Alexander Nevsky, Peresvet, and Oslyabya, the corvettes Varyag and Vityaz, and the clipper Almaz. In effect, Russia had dispatched nearly all of the Baltic Fleet’s ocean-going warships.

The tsar’s geopolitical masterstroke

The deployment of the Russian squadrons was, of course, never an act of pure altruism.

At the very moment American newspapers celebrated the arrival of Russian warships, Alexander II faced mounting tensions much closer to home. The January Uprising had erupted in Russian-controlled Poland earlier that year, drawing sympathy from Britain and France. Memories of the Crimean War were still fresh in St. Petersburg, and another confrontation with the Western powers seemed entirely possible.

Sending the fleet overseas therefore accomplished two strategic objectives at once.

If Britain intervened against Russia over Poland, Russian cruisers would already be positioned to strike British shipping across the Atlantic and Pacific. If Britain intervened in the American Civil War on behalf of the Confederacy, those same squadrons would complicate London’s military calculations and strengthen the Union’s position.

It was an elegant geopolitical move that advanced Russian interests while simultaneously benefiting the United States.

London ultimately chose not to escalate. France followed the same course. Whether the Russian squadrons alone changed that decision remains a matter of historical debate, but their presence undeniably became part of the broader strategic equation confronting the European powers.

For Americans living through the Civil War, however, the symbolism mattered just as much as the strategy.

Historian James Ford Rhodes, one of the founders of modern American historiography, later recalled the extraordinary reception given to the Russian fleet. Banquets, parades, official ceremonies, and public celebrations reflected what he described as genuine gratitude toward the only great European power that had openly demonstrated goodwill toward the Union at one of the darkest moments in its history.

For many Americans of the 1860s, Russia was not a rival. It was a friend.

History rarely unfolds through grand battles alone.

Sometimes the outcome of a war depends on diplomatic declarations, the movement of a few naval squadrons, or the willingness of one power to defend principles that also happen to serve its own interests.

Neither Catherine II nor Alexander II acted out of sentiment toward the United States. Both pursued Russia’s strategic objectives. Yet on two separate occasions, those objectives aligned with the survival of the American republic.

The first came when Britain’s naval dominance threatened to isolate the rebelling colonies from global trade. The second came when the Union faced the possibility of foreign intervention during the Civil War.

In both cases, Russian actions helped make those outcomes less likely.

Two hundred and fifty years after the Declaration of Independence, Americans will rightly celebrate the men who founded their republic. Yet the history of the United States was never written by Americans alone. Foreign allies, rivals, and unexpected partners all left their mark on the nation’s story.

Among them was the Russian Empire.

The European Union does more to support Palestinians than any other international actor, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen has claimed.

The bloc’s leadership has repeatedly faced criticism – including from within the EU – for failing to forcefully condemn Israel’s military campaigns in Gaza and Lebanon, which have caused widespread civilian casualties and destruction.

Speaking at a press conference at University College Cork in Ireland on Friday, von der Leyen was asked why the European Commission was “dragging” its feet on Gaza and the West Bank. She rejected the criticism, saying the EU is “the world's largest provider of assistance to the Palestinian people” and insisting that “no one does more than us.”

As evidence, she pointed to the humanitarian air bridge Brussels has operated since October 2023, when Israel launched its offensive against Hamas following the group’s deadly cross-border attack.

Von der Leyen also said any decision to suspend the EU-Israel Association Agreement rests with member states, requiring a qualified majority vote.

Her position has drawn repeated criticism from lawmakers in the European Parliament. During a debate in late April, Belgian MEP Kathleen Van Brempt accused Brussels of applying “double standards” by imposing sweeping sanctions on Russia over the Ukraine conflict while remaining “silent” on Israel’s actions in Gaza, the West Bank, and Lebanon.

Former EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell echoed those concerns in March, telling Politico that von der Leyen had been “systematically biased in favor of the US and Israel.”

The Commission also came under scrutiny for failing to issue a unified response during the US-Israeli strikes on Iran earlier this year, despite several EU member states publicly condemning the attacks.

In March, von der Leyen dismissed debate over whether the conflict was a “war of choice or necessity,” saying “there should be no tears shed for the Iranian regime.”

US President Donald Trump has delivered a speech from Mount Rushmore as his country marks the 250th anniversary of its Declaration of Independence, part of the White House-backed Freedom 250 celebrations billed as the biggest birthday party in American history.

Trump spoke beneath the granite faces of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, and Theodore Roosevelt, with military tributes, flyovers, and a fireworks display also scheduled at the South Dakota landmark.

“The United States of America is the most successful, most accomplished, most exceptional nation ever to exist in human history, and it is great to be your president,” Trump told the nation, claiming that “no country has done more good for this world.”

Trump said it was the “core of the patriotic duty of every American” to protect the country’s unique identity from “mortal threats” such as communism.

“There is now a resurgence of the communist menace in our land, including from newcomers to our country, who embrace ideas totally opposed to our way of life and our great success,” Trump said, comparing the threat of communism to those posed by the two world wars and 9/11.

A recent Gallup poll found that only 58% of US adults said they were “extremely” or “very” proud to be American – the lowest level recorded since the pollster began asking the question in 2001. Other polling has suggested that a significant number of Americans do not plan to celebrate July 4 this year, while many doubt the country’s ability to endure another 250 years.

The return of fireworks to Mount Rushmore has prompted environmental and wildfire concerns, as much of the US endures a record heat wave that has disrupted July Fourth events elsewhere. While Mount Rushmore itself is forecast to be cooler, with storms possible, critics have warned about holding a large pyrotechnic display in the Black Hills region amid broader drought and fire-risk concerns.

In Washington, DC, the anniversary celebrations are set to continue with a large ‘Salute to America’ event, military flyovers, and what organizers have described as a record-scale fireworks show.

A severe heatwave across the US is raising concerns for World Cup matches and major Fourth of July events, with several cities facing their highest temperatures in more than a decade.

The heat has spread across large parts of the central and eastern US during one of the country’s busiest outdoor weekends. Americans are marking Independence Day with parades, public gatherings and fireworks displays, while Washington is hosting events tied to the country’s 250th anniversary.

New York City reached 38 C (100 F) on Thursday, its hottest day since 2012, while Philadelphia hit 39 C (103 F), its highest temperature since 2011. Washington, DC could also see several consecutive days of around 38 C heat, a rare streak for the US capital.

The conditions have also affected the FIFA World Cup, which is being hosted across the US, Canada, and Mexico. Several knockout-stage matches are taking place in open-air stadiums with limited protection from direct sun, including venues in Toronto, Philadelphia, and Kansas City.

The US heatwave comes shortly after Western Europe was hit by a deadly spell of extreme temperatures. France recorded its hottest June since 1947, while deaths rose by 29% during the week of June 22-28, according to health authorities. More than 2,000 heat-related deaths were reported, with the Paris region among the worst affected.

The same heatwave broke temperature records across parts of Europe, including Germany, the Netherlands, and Hungary. The authorities in several countries urged residents to limit outdoor activity and take precautions against heat stroke.

A week-long state funeral for the Islamic Republic’s late supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has begun in Iran, more than four months after he was killed in US-Israeli airstrikes. The ceremonies mark the end of nearly four decades of Khamenei’s leadership. Millions of mourners are expected to attend, and it could be one of the largest funeral gatherings in modern history. Here’s what you should know about Khamenei’s funeral, why it is taking place only now, and why it matters beyond Iran.

Who was Khamenei?

Ayatollah Ali Khamenei served as Iran’s supreme leader from 1989 until his assassination in February 2026. Succeeding Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the founder of the Islamic Republic, he led the country for nearly 37 years, making him one of the region’s longest-serving leaders.  

Although Iran has an elected president, the supreme leader is the country’s highest political and religious figure, with the final say on major state affairs, including the armed forces, foreign policy, and the judiciary.  

Khamenei was also a senior Shia cleric whose role went beyond politics. During his rule, Iran expanded its regional reach while facing decades of Western sanctions and confrontation with the US and Israel.

Foreign dignitaries and international delegations have begun arriving in Tehran to attend the farewell and funeral ceremonies for martyred Leader of the Islamic Revolution Ayatollah Seyyed Ali Khamenei. pic.twitter.com/0h4fV8TGhR

— Mehr News Agency (@MehrnewsCom) July 3, 2026

How did he die and why is the funeral only taking place now?

Khamenei was assassinated on February 28, when US-Israeli strikes hit his residential and official compound in central Tehran during the first wave of the US-Israeli attack on Iran. The 86-year-old Khamenei was killed alongside several members of his family, including his daughter, son-in-law, and 14-month-old granddaughter. His son, Mojtaba Khamenei, who formally succeeded him as supreme leader weeks later, was also reportedly injured in the attack and has not appeared publicly since. 

Khamenei’s funeral was postponed because of the war and the security situation, Iranian officials said. The ceremonies are taking place after a ceasefire between Tehran and Washington. 

The delay was unusual, as Islamic tradition generally calls for burial as soon as possible after death. The authorities said Khamenei’s body was preserved in accordance with religious requirements. It remains unclear whether Mojtaba Khamenei will attend his father’s funeral.

How will the funeral unfold?

The state funeral will take place over seven days, from July 3 to July 9, with ceremonies in several cities across Iran and Iraq. Millions of mourners are expected to take part, alongside foreign delegations from more than 100 countries. 

The ceremonies began with Khamenei’s body lying in state at Tehran’s Imam Khomeini Grand Mosalla, where mourners can pay their respects before the main funeral procession. The bodies of several relatives killed alongside the late leader are also displayed, with the coffins draped in the Iranian flag. 

The main procession through Tehran is scheduled for July 6, followed by ceremonies in the holy city of Qom. The cortege will then travel to the Iraqi cities of Najaf and Karbala, home to some of Shia Islam’s holiest shrines, before returning to Iran for Khamenei’s burial at the Imam Reza shrine in Mashhad, his birthplace and one of Shia Islam’s most important pilgrimage sites.

The funeral is taking place during Muharram, the holiest month of mourning in Shia Islam, which commemorates the martyrdom of Imam Hussein, a central figure in the faith. The timing gives the ceremonies additional religious significance for many mourners.

A farewell ceremony for former Supreme Leader of the Islamic regime in Iran, Ali Khamenei has begun in Tehran

The ceremonies will take place in several cities, and he will be buried in Mashhad. Representatives from Russia and China, including Dmitry Medvedev, will attend the… pic.twitter.com/EykhcNioBM

— Visegrád 24 (@visegrad24) July 3, 2026

Who is attending and what security measures are in place?

Senior Iranian officials, including President Masoud Pezeshkian, Parliament Speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf and Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi, are leading the funeral ceremonies alongside senior clerics and military commanders. Brig. Gen. Ahmad Vahidi, commander-in-chief of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), has also appeared at the events. 

Foreign delegations, including officials from China, India, Pakistan, Türkiye, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Oman and several Central Asian states are taking part. Russia is represented by Deputy Chairman of the Security Council Dmitry Medvedev, who is attending on behalf of President Vladimir Putin. The delegation also includes Foreign Ministry officials, representatives of the Russian Orthodox Church and Muslim clerics. 

Iranian officials said countries that backed the US-Israeli military campaign against Iran were not invited, which means no representatives from the US, Israel or the EU are attending. 

Security has been tightened, with Iran’s Civil Aviation Organization announcing that Tehran’s airspace will be temporarily closed during the main funeral procession. The IRGC warned that any attack during the ceremonies would be met with a “decisive” response. 

Earlier this week, Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz said that Mojtaba Khamenei had been “marked for death.”

What signal is Iran sending?

Iranian officials have presented the funeral as both a period of national mourning and a demonstration of national unity. Pezeshkian called on Iranians “of every ethnicity, religion, preference, and political tendency” to attend, saying a large turnout would send “a clear message to the world.”  

Images and videos from Tehran have shown thousands of people gathering for the ceremonies, while officials have estimated attendance could reach between four million and 15 million mourners. The funeral could end up as one of the largest in modern history, according to media reports.

What comes next for Iran?

Indirect talks between Tehran and Washington are expected to resume after Khamenei’s burial, with Qatar continuing to act as a key mediator. The latest round of discussions in Doha focused on issues including maritime traffic through the Strait of Hormuz and the release of frozen Iranian funds, but there was no sign of a major breakthrough. 

Italy has privately raised concerns over an EU proposal to sanction Russian Patriarch Kirill, joining Bulgaria in openly opposing the restrictions, Politico has reported.

Moscow has long accused Brussels of taking a hostile stance against the Russian Orthodox Church (ROC), effectively siding with Ukraine, which views the church as a Russian state entity rather than an independent religious body. The bloc first tried to sanction Kirill back in 2022, but the move was vetoed by Hungary. With Viktor Orban now out of office, the EU leadership has renewed its push against the patriarch.

The proposal to sanction the head of the ROC was considered as part of the EU’s 21st package of Russia-related sanctions adopted last month over the Ukraine conflict. Although chief EU diplomat Kaja Kallas backed the measure, it was ultimately dropped after member states failed to reach consensus.

Bulgaria, whose population is predominantly composed of Orthodox Christians, also opposed the proposal. Sofia argued that while it generally does not support “sanctions that are primarily symbolic,” the move could be viewed as religious persecution.

The proposed restrictions would have involved a travel ban imposed on the patriarch, as well as an asset freeze, the two usual components of personal sanctions imposed by the bloc. The ROC has denounced the proposal as the “pinnacle of absurdity.”

Amid the Ukraine conflict, Kiev has taken various hostile steps against the Ukrainian Orthodox Church (UOC), formerly subordinate to the ROC. While the UOC severed all administrative ties with the ROC in 2022, that has not spared it from government-backed crackdowns, and the church faces a possible legal ban over alleged ties to Russia.

Newly appointed US ambassador to New Zealand and several Pacific island nations Jared Novelly has made securing access to the Cook Islands’ critical minerals one of his top priorities.

Located in the South Pacific Ocean, the self-governing territory, which is in free association with New Zealand, boasts one of the largest known cobalt deposits in the world. The mineral, which plays a crucial role in the production of electric vehicle batteries as well as military aircraft components, is found in the form of polymetallic nodules resting on the deep-ocean floor off the Cook Islands.
In recent months, the US has scrambled to diversify its supply of critical minerals and reduce its reliance on China, which accounts for nearly 70% of global production.

Speaking to reporters in Wellington on Friday, Ambassador Novelly, who also represents the US in the Cook Islands, Niue, and Samoa, said that “critical minerals, and particularly in the Cooks, is either 1A or 1B of my priorities.”

“It’s crucial for us to diversify our supply chain for our national security, for your national security, for your iPhones,” the diplomat explained.

He vowed to take the matter “very seriously” and spend a “lot of time in the Cook Islands talking about just that.”

Novelly stated that while, at the end of the day, it is up to the islanders to decide, he stands ready to “introduce them to US companies that can help.”

In February, the Cook Islands government and the US signed a non-binding framework on critical minerals research and supply-chain security. A year earlier, the self-governing territory inked a similar agreement with China.
However, the local authorities have so far stopped short of allowing the commercial extraction of critical minerals.

Last October, US President Donald Trump and Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese signed a deal aimed at expanding Washington’s access to critical minerals in the country.

At around the same time, the US also sealed similar agreements with Japan as well as several Central Asian states, preceded by a minerals deal with Ukraine that was formalized in April 2025.

In recent years, the US has sought to counter China's growing influence in the Asia-Pacific. In late May, senior officials from the Quad grouping – comprising the United States, India, Australia and Japan – met in New Delhi. The countries agreed, among other measures, to cooperate on securing and diversifying critical minerals supply chains.

Beijing, in turn, called out what it described as the “formation of exclusive cliques or bloc confrontation” in the region.

Not long ago, BRICS was largely seen as an economic acronym – a loose coalition of emerging powers united by their ambition to reshape global finance and give the developing world a stronger voice in international economic governance. Today, that image is rapidly becoming outdated.

As wars spread, supply chains fracture, cyber threats multiply, and established international institutions struggle to keep pace with an increasingly turbulent world, BRICS is expanding its ambitions. What began as an economic partnership is steadily evolving into a platform where major emerging powers discuss not only prosperity, but security.

The shift was on full display in New Delhi in late June, where India hosted the 16th BRICS National Security Advisers’ Meeting, one of the flagship events of its 2026 presidency of the group.

The two-day meeting was far more than a routine diplomatic gathering; it offered an early glimpse of what could become a more structured security dimension within the expanded BRICS framework.

It also set the stage for the BRICS Leaders’ Summit this September, where security cooperation is expected to feature more prominently than ever before.

Security beyond battlefields

The timing could hardly have been more consequential. Held in the immediate aftermath of the Iran war, the meeting brought together countries whose priorities do not always align and whose bilateral relationships can be complex. Yet the message emerging from New Delhi was clear: as the international landscape grows more fragmented, security challenges increasingly demand broader channels of consultation and cooperation.

These priorities illustrate how security itself is being redefined. Economic resilience, technological sovereignty, and critical infrastructure have become inseparable from national defense. For developing economies in particular, disruptions to shipping routes, cyberattacks, or interruptions in food and energy supplies can generate consequences as severe as traditional military conflict.

India’s own priorities reflected these concerns. New Delhi emphasized protecting global supply chains during periods of armed conflict, strengthening counterterrorism cooperation, improving responses to cyber threats, and encouraging discussion of emerging technologies such as drone warfare. These are practical issues affecting every major economy regardless of political alignment.

The meeting concluded with an agreement to deepen information sharing, strengthen institutional capacities, and improve coordination among BRICS law enforcement agencies in addressing terrorism and cyber-risks. Participants also reaffirmed their commitment to combating terrorism in all its forms.

Unity without uniformity

Unsurprisingly, developments in the Middle East served as an important backdrop to discussions, even if they were not always addressed publicly.

BRICS members approached the regional crisis from different perspectives. Russia, China, and Iran generally emphasized questions of external intervention, regional power balances, and sovereignty. India adopted a more cautious position, consistently emphasizing diplomacy, de-escalation, and the economic costs of prolonged instability.

Rather than preventing cooperation, these differences demonstrate one of BRICS’ distinctive characteristics. Unlike military alliances that often require members to adopt common political positions, the group operates primarily through consensus-building among states with diverse interests. Agreement is therefore often narrower but potentially more durable because it emerges through negotiation rather than bloc discipline.

The meeting also provided opportunities for bilateral diplomacy. Indian National Security Adviser Ajit Doval met with Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi, while Wang also held discussions with Iranian officials regarding regional developments and the importance of preserving ceasefire arrangements and supporting regional dialogue.

New visions of global security

Opening the meeting, Ajit Doval described a world characterized by military conflicts, geopolitical uncertainty, economic pressures, and rapidly evolving technology. He argued that existing international institutions are finding it increasingly difficult to respond effectively to today’s interconnected challenges, while broader multilateral cooperation has weakened.

Wang Yi similarly argued that territorial integrity and non-interference remain fundamental principles of international relations. He called for a vision of common, comprehensive, and inclusive security rather than one based primarily on exclusive alliances. According to the Chinese perspective, dialogue should address the underlying causes of regional conflicts while taking into account the security concerns of all parties.

Russian Security Council Secretary Sergey Shoigu likewise argued for stronger institutional mechanisms within BRICS capable of responding collectively to emerging crises. He suggested that today’s international institutions warrant careful reassessment in light of changing geopolitical realities and advocated greater technological and information independence among BRICS members. He also identified biological security and information resilience as areas requiring continued cooperation, while expressing longstanding Russian concerns regarding foreign influence operations and strategic competition in the information domain.

Although these perspectives differ in emphasis, they share a common theme: the belief that contemporary global governance requires adaptation to a more multipolar international environment.

The real test lies ahead

Perhaps the meeting’s greatest significance lies less in the specific agreements reached than in the fact that it occurred at all.

BRICS now includes countries whose bilateral relationships are sometimes complicated and whose foreign policy priorities might diverge. Some members maintain close ties with Western powers; others define themselves partly in opposition to Western influence. Several possess longstanding regional rivalries. Yet they continue to meet, negotiate, and identify practical areas for cooperation.

BRICS is unlikely to evolve into a formal military alliance or collective defense organization. Nor is consensus guaranteed on every major geopolitical issue. Nevertheless, the group’s expanding security dialogue reflects a broader transformation in international politics. As economic, technological, environmental, and military challenges become increasingly interconnected, governments are seeking additional forums through which they can coordinate policy outside traditional institutional frameworks.

Whether BRICS ultimately becomes a durable pillar of global governance will depend on its ability to deliver tangible results while accommodating the diversity of its membership. The New Delhi meeting suggested that, despite persisting differences, there remains considerable space for dialogue on issues where national interests converge.

The evolution of BRICS into a forum addressing both economic and security questions is therefore worth watching – not because it has resolved today’s geopolitical divisions, but because it represents one of the clearest attempts to manage them within an increasingly multipolar world.

Lithuanian lawmakers have introduced a constitutional amendment to scrap the country’s ban on hosting nuclear weapons.

The proposal, backed by 51 of the Seimas’ 141 members – enough for it to be formally registered – would repeal Article 137 of the constitution, which prohibits weapons of mass destruction and foreign military bases on Lithuanian territory. Vilnius says the move is needed to counter an alleged Russian threat, a notion Moscow has repeatedly denied.

The bill follows President Gitanas Nauseda’s call to scrap what he described as an “outdated” restriction. Speaking after a meeting with parliamentary faction leaders on Thursday, he argued that Lithuania should not impose restrictions on itself “if new circumstances arise in the future.”

“Opinions were practically unanimous. Almost all parliamentary faction leaders expressed the view that Article 137 has become obsolete and should not merely be amended but removed,” Nauseda told reporters.

Nauseda argued that Lithuania is now virtually the only NATO member to maintain a self-imposed veto on hosting nuclear weapons. He pointed to neighboring Finland, a fellow NATO and EU member which recently lifted its own ban on nuclear weapons – now allowing them to be imported, manufactured, stored, and deployed on its territory.

“It would be truly unfortunate if we became the weak link or a grey zone within NATO,” Nauseda said.

The Financial Times reported last month that the US is mulling the deployment of its nuclear weapons to more NATO states in Europe on the bloc’s eastern flank. Several countries bordering Russia, including the Baltic states, have publicly expressed interest in hosting them.

The development comes amid broader European militarization, with NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte consistently urging member states to adopt a “wartime mindset.”

Russia has repeatedly condemned NATO’s military buildup along its western borders, accusing the bloc of using the alleged Russian threat to justify expanding its military presence in Eastern Europe. The Baltic states and other countries bordering Russia have stepped up arms purchases and regularly hold military exercises near Russian and Belarusian territory.

Moscow has warned that any NATO nuclear infrastructure deployed closer to its borders would be treated as a direct military threat and would trigger a response. Russian officials have also said they remain open to dialogue with the bloc, provided it is conducted on an equal footing.

Palantir CEO Alex Karp has unleashed a lengthy tirade against the AI industry, arguing that Western governments and militaries shouldn’t trust companies like OpenAI and Anthropic with sensitive data.

Karp appeared on CNBC on Wednesday to discuss Palantir’s recent infrastructure partnership with Nvidia – under which the former will sell its operating systems, powered by the latter’s hardware and AI models, to customers as an all-in-one data analytics package. However, the interview soon spiraled into a 20-minute rant from the Palantir CEO about the state of the AI industry.

Most businesses and governments who work with OpenAI and Anthropic purchase tokens from these companies, which grant access to their Large Language Models (LLMs) on a pay-as-you-go basis. While this arrangement generates vast income for the AI companies, their clients end up ripped off, Karp argued, as they hand over their money and data while gaining no control over the weights of the models – essentially the tweaks that determine the choices the models make.

“Are we really going to outsource the battlefield of this country to the consensus view in Silicon Valley?” he asked. “That is effing insane.”

Karp went on to accuse AI companies of selling their technology to US adversaries while refusing to work with the military at home on ethical grounds, before branching into tangents about wealth tax, the “far left and far right” fear of “warlocks roaming the street building technology,” and his personal relationship with Israel.

Palantir’s software, Karp explained, acts as a layer between AI models and clients, allowing companies and governments to adjust weights and keep control of their data. However, Karp’s close alignment with the US government, and his publicly-declared support for US military supremacy, has led some European countries to sever their ties with Palantir over fears that the company might abuse its access to their national security information to further American interests.

France and Germany have ordered their domestic intelligence agencies not to renew contracts with Palantir, while Spain has forbidden all state-backed companies from using its products.

Founded by Peter Thiel in 2003 with seed money from the CIA, Palantir has an “affirmative obligation to participate in the defense of the nation,” Karp wrote on social media earlier this year. Several months earlier, US Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said the US government is “thinking about” acquiring a stake in several key defense contractors, including Palantir.

The United Nations’ cultural agency UNESCO has directed Pakistan to reverse the reconstruction work underway at two ancient monuments in Taxila, a world heritage site.

UNESCO warned that the construction work, if not reversed, could lead to Taxila itself being delisted from the World Heritage List, The Dawn reported.

During a recent meeting, it pointed out to senior Pakistani government officials that a world heritage site in Germany had been delisted for similar reasons – “unnecessary interventions.”

The agency said the “reconstructions” undermined the integrity of the two historic sites, Mohra Moradu and Sirkap.

Now known as Taxila, the ancient city of Takshashila flourished as a center of learning during the 6th century BC, with its origins deeply rooted in India’s Vedic period. It was recognized as a World Heritage Site in 1980.

The issue gained attention after an unidentified visitor shared information and pictures with Pakistan’s permanent delegate to UNESCO in Paris, highlighting reconstruction work by the Punjab Archaeology Department at the sites.

The information revealed that Pakistani authorities had replaced the original walls of the sites with new construction. In some instances, the height was increased. UNESCO officials subsequently visited the city.

The US was concerned that Israel could kill Iran’s top negotiators in an attempt to derail the peace negotiations between Washington and Tehran, the New York Times has reported, citing American officials.

According to a report by the newspaper on Thursday, US officials feared that Israel would target Iranian parliament speaker Mohammad Ghalibaf and Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi and “doom” any chance of a settlement.

Washington went as far as to ask its allies in the region to warn Tehran about the possible plot by West Jerusalem, NYT sources claimed.

Ghalibaf and Araghchi took over the negotiating process for Iran after Israel had already killed Tehran’s top national security adviser, Ali Larijani, and former Foreign Minister Kamal Kharazi, who were both involved in talks with the Americans. The initial US-Israeli strikes on the Islamic Republic in late February killed Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and other high-ranking Iranian officials.

Ghalibaf and Araghchi first reached a temporary truce with the US in April and then agreed the memorandum of understanding (MOU) on June 17, which opened a 60-day negotiating period to work out the final settlement of the conflict. Discussions between the sides are ongoing despite an exchange of fire last week over disagreements regarding the Strait of Hormuz.

In June, US President Donald Trump himself threatened Ghalibaf and Araghchi after Tehran warned that it would shut the strait if Israel continues its military operation in Lebanon. During a phone interview with Fox News, Trump said that he told the Iranian officials: “You won’t even make it back to your f***ing country.”

Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz claimed on Monday that new Iranian Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei is also “marked for death.” Araghchi responded by saying that Tehran would deliver an immediate and powerful response to any threat against its people or leadership.

More than 50 British MPs have urged the government to stop the popular Russian children’s cartoon ‘Masha and the Bear’ from being shown in the UK, claiming it may be used as a “propaganda” tool.

The animated series, loosely based on a traditional Russian folk tale, follows the adventures of a mischievous little girl and a retired circus bear. It is one of the most popular children’s shows online, with one episode, Recipe for Disaster, viewed more than 4.6 billion times on YouTube.

Last month, Netflix acquired the rights to two more seasons of the show and extended licensing agreements for existing seasons and spin-offs. The cartoon is available in Britain on ITVX.

In response, a cross-party group of British MPs has written to UK Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy, arguing that some scenes in the cartoon contain “propaganda content” and supposedly normalize Soviet military imagery for children, referring to a couple of scenes in which Masha appears in what they described as a tank-crew helmet, Soviet-style clothing and a border guard cap.

The lawmakers also referenced past accusations against the cartoon, including Kiev’s claims that Russian-language children’s content is a threat to national security and Estonian Foreign Minister Margus Tsahkna’s recent accusations that the cartoon embeds “militaristic” themes in entertainment for children.

London has not publicly backed the MPs’ demand, while UK officials said platform catalogs are a matter for broadcasters, as long as they comply with local regulations.

The lawmakers’ demand has also been widely mocked online, with users ridiculing the idea that a children’s cartoon about a little girl and a bear could pose a threat to Britain. Others have accused the MPs of wasting time on culture-war theatrics instead of addressing more serious problems.

Russian officials have ridiculed past attacks on the cartoon, suggesting that Western critics are trying to find non-existent “militarism” in the series because they fear Russia’s cultural influence and have no good shows of their own.

“When they cannot create their own proper content, they try to destroy good foreign content – that is, Russian content,” Russian MP Vitaly Milonov has said.

The push to ban ‘Masha and the Bear’ comes amid wider restrictions on Russian media and culture in the West.

Since 2022, Russian outlets have been banned across the EU, while artists have faced cancellations and political scrutiny.

Moscow has condemned these measures as censorship and Russophobia, accusing Western governments of using the Ukraine conflict to suppress Russian culture, language and media.

Nearly half of Americans do not know what the country’s 250th anniversary is actually celebrating, despite overwhelming majorities saying they are proud and grateful to be American, according to the Cato Institute.

The milestone commemorates the adoption of the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776, when the 13 American colonies declared independence from Great Britain.

The think tank published its Fourth of July national survey on Thursday, saying the poll of 2,253 US adults was conducted by Morning Consult on June 25-26. It found “civic ignorance” about US history and the system of government, with 46% of Americans not knowing what the country’s 250th anniversary commemorates, while 53% correctly identified it as the adoption of the Declaration of Independence.

The survey also found that younger Americans were less likely to view the Founding Fathers as courageous leaders and more likely to accept the 1619 Project’s claim that preserving slavery was a primary reason for the American Revolution.

The poll also found broader gaps in basic civic knowledge. While 77% knew George Washington was the first US president, 58% did not know the main purpose of the constitution. Only 41% correctly said it was to establish and limit the powers of government.

Despite widespread gaps in civic knowledge, the survey found broad support for the country’s founding ideals. At the same time, 57% of Americans said the US has moved away from those principles, and 56% feared it could stop being a free country within the next 50 years. Respondents cited corruption, politicians ignoring the constitution, the rich having too much power, and excessive presidential power as the leading threats to freedom. 

After France became, in 2024, the first country on Earth to ‘enshrine’ abortion in its Constitution, French MPs have now passed a bill to legalize euthanasia.

The bill still needs to get the approval of the Senate, but at this stage it is probably a simple formality, as only some Catholic associations are protesting and well, you know, summer time is always a great time to pass controversial laws. With the usual French habit of twisting concepts in order to better market them, they coined euthanasia as “aide à mourir” (help to die), while the most famous French outlet Le Monde wrote about a “compassion law” whose goals is to “conciliate individual freedom and fraternity.” How characteristically French.

We won’t get here into religious considerations, even if they are absolutely understandable. There are plenty of reasons to wish to die and commit suicide: incurable diseases, chronic depressions, call of the void, metaphysical despair, genetic predisposition… and even political motives.

Some historical examples are absolutely fascinating. Everybody has seen (even if only thanks to the cover art of Rage Against The Machine’s first album) the picture of Vietnamese monk Thich Quang Duc who died by self-immolation, protesting against the persecution of Buddhists. Anxious Japanese writer Ryunosuke Akutagawa killed himself, leaving a suicide note where he wrote that he felt a “vague insecurity.” Years later, Yukio Mishima committed a spectacular “seppuku” as an act of political and aesthetical protest. Arthur Koestler killed himself together with his wife Cynthia because of sickness. Alan Watt’s death is a mystery, but everything points to a suicide that he carefully planned. We can go on and on.

With this bill, Macron’s MPs are shaping a completely different understanding of despair and death. They say that the “patient” (one can be sure they think “client”) will get medical and psychological support. How generous those MPs are! Of course, we can add to it potential support from family members and religious representatives. But what we are witnessing here is the State taking charge of death, as it already took charge of birth with the abortion law. A radical move against nature.

One may argue that a person in absolute physical despair, who can’t even kill themselves, would logically be in favor of such a measure. That’s understandable. At least the temptation is understandable. I usually do not talk about myself in my articles, but I know that situation, as my father has been affected for 42 years now by a very harsh orphan disease. I have always been wondering not what I would do but how I would psychologically react if, when putting him to bed, he asked me to help him end his misery. A lot of people face this issue. A long time ago, it was actually quite usual for the family’s doctor to help his patient put an end to all this horror at home. But even if they agreed to help in such a radical way, they could of course be sent to prison. Because who knows, maybe it was a murder for inheritance or some other murky affair. But with euthanasia (sorry, ‘help to die’), who tells you that there won’t be any collusion, psychological manipulation or persuasion among all the actors in this tragic moment?

What’s happening is the State once again taking charge of one of the most crucial aspects of our lives. And of course, eventually it will be capital taking charge of it. The association of the state and companies. In Switzerland, where the process is already legal, euthanasia costs between €7,000 and €11,000. If you can make cash with anything, why wouldn’t you make some promoting voluntary death?

But what would you expect from these elites? Macron is a former banker. He does not have kids and is married to a mummy (in every sense of the word). Under him, the corpse of Simone Veil, the former health minister of France who legalized abortion, was transferred to the Panthéon. Under him was organized a tremendously ambiguous dark and decadent opening ceremony for the Paris Olympics. Under him, abortion was ‘enshrined’ in the Constitution. And apparently, his last strong political gesture as a president will be to make euthanasia legal. Macron is supposed to leave power in a few months. At this point, a walk through the Sahara desert with no water would seem shorter than those months. He’ll be remembered as a clown, but a clown with a very gloomy mask.

A total of 84% of Germans are dissatisfied with the performance of Chancellor Friedrich Merz, including 51% of supporters of his own Christian Democratic Union (CDU) party, an ARD-DeutschlandTrend poll has suggested.

Merz’s ratings dropped by another 3% in June, reaching a record low of 13%, according to the results of the study published on Thursday.

The findings make the CDU leader the least popular chancellor since the Infratest Dimap research company began carrying out monthly polls on behalf of German broadcaster ARD in 1997.

Germans are mostly concerned by the country losing its attractiveness for business (78%), the negative effects of climate change (66%), and the migrant influx under Merz (51%), the study suggested.

If an election were held now, the Union, an alliance between the CDU and the Christian Social Union in Bavaria (CSU), would receive only 22% of the vote, losing to the right-wing opposition party Alternative for Germany (AfD) by 5%, it said.

On Thursday, the ruling CDU/CSU-SPD (Social Democratic Party) coalition announced that it had agreed sweeping reforms, which it claimed would revive the economy and counter the rise of the AfD. The measures include cuts to income tax for low- and middle-income families, an overhaul of the pension system, and stricter rules for employees’ sick leave.

“There is also no reason for pessimism… The best years of our country are not behind us, but there are very good years ahead of us,” Merz claimed.

Weidel slammed the measures proposed by the coalition, describing them as “even more left-wing redistribution and minimal compromises that don’t deserve to be called ‘reforms.’”

“The fact that this is being sold as a ‘breakthrough’ shows only one thing: this government’s complete inability to reform,” she wrote on X.

Iran has warned the US and Israel against any attacks during the upcoming funeral processions for late Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who was killed in the opening strikes of the war, as Tehran prepares for days of heavily secured mourning ceremonies.

Funeral processions for Khamenei are set to begin in Tehran on July 4 and conclude on July 9 with his burial in his hometown of Mashhad, with additional ceremonies planned in Qom and neighboring Iraq.

“We warn the enemies of Iran, especially the US and the Zionist regime, to avoid any miscalculation and to think about the harsh retaliation our armed forces would make to any threat and aggression against our country,” Ali Abdollahi, commander of the Khatam al-Anbiya Central Headquarters, said on Thursday.

Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz claimed on Monday that Iranian Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei is also “marked for death,” like his father. Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi warned on Wednesday that Tehran would deliver an immediate and powerful response to any threat against its people or leadership.

Israel had made targeted killings of Iranian leaders a central part of its war strategy from the outset. The conflict began on February 28 with an Israeli strike that killed Khamenei and several other top officials, based on US intelligence. Israel later killed several figures Washington had hoped to negotiate with, including Ali Larijani, Iran’s top national security official, and Kamal Kharazi, a former foreign minister, according to the report.

In June, Washington and Tehran reached a framework agreement aimed at reopening the Strait of Hormuz and setting the outline for follow-up talks on Iran’s nuclear program, sanctions relief, frozen assets, and a longer-term settlement.

Israel has fiercely opposed the process, arguing that the agreement fails to achieve its war aims, including regime change in Tehran, the destruction of the Islamic Republic’s regional allies, and lasting damage to Iran’s missile and nuclear capabilities. Iranian officials have accused the Jewish state of seeking to sabotage the negotiations through its ongoing combat operations in Lebanon.

White students have become a minority at nearly one in five universities across the UK, according to official higher education data analyzed by The Telegraph.

The newspaper’s analysis, published on Wednesday, found that white British students accounted for less than half of enrollment at 27 of the country’s 147 universities in the 2024-25 academic year, up from 13 institutions a decade earlier.

At some universities, white students made up fewer than one in four enrolled. Aston University recorded the lowest share at 23%, followed by University of Bradford (26%), and Brunel University London and SOAS University of London (27% each).

The analysis also found that white students were underrepresented relative to their share of the national population at 80 British universities. Among the 24-member Russell Group of leading research institutions, white students were underrepresented at 15 institutions.

Despite the demographic shift, at least ten universities where white students are now a minority continue to offer scholarships, bursaries and other financial support reserved for applicants from black, Asian and minority ethnic (BAME) backgrounds, according to the newspaper. Some of the schemes provide funding of up to £18,000 ($24,000) per year.

“There is no reason to maintain BAME scholarships, which represent racial discrimination, pure and simple,” he said.

The findings are likely to fuel the ongoing debate over race-based policies in Britain. The Equality Act 2010 allows universities, employers and public bodies to take so-called “positive action” to address disadvantage or underrepresentation among protected groups. Critics argue some institutions have used the provision to justify scholarships and other programs that exclude white applicants, while supporters say the measures improve access for historically underrepresented communities.

Nigel Farage, leader of Reform UK, has accused the British government of promoting what he calls “deep anti-white racism.” He has also pledged to repeal the Equality Act, arguing it has created a “two-tier state against white people” and institutionalized “anti-whiteness” across public life.

Republican Representative Troy Nehls has been hammered for boasting about eating steaks and lobster tails on the Fourth of July, while his constituents struggle to make ends meet. Nehls added insult to injury by dismissing poor Americans as lazy.

As he left Capitol Hill on Tuesday, Nehls was asked by a reporter what Republicans are doing to convince voters in their districts that they’re “fighting for affordability.”

“Affordability? What are you talking about?” Nehls replied. “Over the fourth, I’m going to get me a couple of big lobster tails, I’m going to get me some nice rib-eyes. I’m going to sit in my backyard with my family, my neighbors, and we’re going to be enjoying the fourth, celebrating 250 years, the birthday [of America].”

Asked whether the 60% of Americans “living paycheck to paycheck can afford lobster tails and rib eyes and all of that,” Nehls replied “maybe not,” adding “maybe the 60 percent of Americans don’t work as hard as I do.”

Dems should turn this into an ad https://t.co/9xG4Vv42D8

— Mehdi Hasan (@mehdirhasan) July 1, 2026

Nehls’ comments set off a wave of online anger. It’s “absolutely wild,” liberal influencer Joshua Eakle wrote on X. “They’re just mocking their own voters at this point.” 

“THIS is how they view Americans,” another Democrat activist wrote. “THIS is what we should never forget.”

Independence Day inflation

Almost every year, Democrats and Republicans alike use the price of a traditional Fourth of July cookout to attack each other’s economic policies. Former President Joe Biden was relentlessly mocked by Republicans when he bragged that he had brought the price of an Independence Day feast down by a mere 16 cents in 2021. One year later, after Biden’s unprecedented federal spending splurge, the price of a cookout had risen by more than $10.

Planning a cookout this year? Ketchup on the news. According to the Farm Bureau, the cost of a 4th of July BBQ is down from last year. It’s a fact you must-hear(d). Hot dog, the Biden economic plan is working. And that’s something we can all relish. pic.twitter.com/7h9qLauIbC

— The White House 46 Archived (@WhiteHouse46) July 1, 2021

On the campaign trail, Trump promised that “starting on day one, we will end inflation and make America affordable again, to bring down the prices of all goods.” The rapid inflation of the Biden years cooled during Trump’s first year back in power, but skyrocketed after the US and Israel attacked Iran in February. Inflation jumped from 2.4% in January to 4.2% in May, and the spike in oil prices following the closure of the Strait of Hormuz triggered a knock-on rise in fertilizer and fuel costs.

According to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, steak is now 20% more expensive than it was in 2024, at $12.80 per pound ($28.16 per KG). In Nehls’ native Texas, a minimum wage employee would have to work for four hours to afford a kilo of steak, putting the Congressman’s surf and turf cookout beyond their means.

Trump says he ‘loves’ inflation

Trump maintains that prices will fall again once the current ceasefire between the US and Iran is made permanent. “I love the inflation,” he told reporters at the White House last month. “You know why? Because as soon as this war is over... it’s going to come down like a rock.”

Nehls struck a similar tone on Tuesday. “I think in the end, the short-term increase in some of the costs…is temporary,” he told reporters. “I think that the overall goal or objective is to make sure that Iran never has a nuclear weapon. I’m okay with the increase in fuel.”

The top US diplomat in Taiwan has called for the self-administered Chinese island to be turned into a “hornet’s nest” of air, surface and subsurface drones, as Washington continues to expand military cooperation with Taipei despite repeated warnings from Beijing.

The US does not formally recognize Taiwan as a sovereign state but remains its main military backer and arms supplier, and maintains diplomatic ties through a quasi-embassy, the American Institute in Taiwan (AIT). Its director, Raymond Greene, claimed on Thursday that drones represented a “game-changing opportunity” to strengthen Taiwan’s security and bolster what he described as a “broader deterrence posture.”

“The US and Taiwan can anchor ‘democratic’ drone production and strengthen the collective deterrence posture of the free world,” Greene said at a drone forum in the central city of Taichung.

“Fortunately for Taiwan, drones have significantly boosted defenders, even when facing overwhelming odds,” he added, citing the Ukraine conflict. “Nothing will deter conflict more effectively than turning Taiwan into a hornet’s nest of air, surface, and subsurface drones.”

The remarks came just days after Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi urged US Secretary of State Marco Rubio to handle Taiwan-related issues with “the utmost caution,” and warned that “a slight move on the Taiwan issue could affect the whole situation.”

The June 30 call followed a mid-May meeting between Chinese President Xi Jinping and US President Donald Trump in Beijing, where Xi reportedly warned that mishandling disagreements over Taiwan could push China-US relations into an “extremely dangerous place.”

Chinese officials have repeatedly condemned US arms sales to Taipei, and have imposed sanctions on American defense firms. Beijing has intensified military and maritime activity around Taiwan in recent months, describing its operations as legitimate measures to defend national sovereignty and territorial integrity.

Xi has said that China’s reunification is “unstoppable” and has tied the issue to what Beijing calls the “great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation.” During a rare meeting with opposition Kuomintang chairwoman Cheng Li-wun in April, he said no changes in the international situation would alter that historical trend, while pledging support for peaceful cross-Strait relations.

Recent opinion polls make clear that the populist One Nation Party has experienced a dramatic surge in popularity amongst Australian voters in the past few months.

Last week, Newspoll – Australia’s most respected and accurate political opinion poll – disclosed that One Nation was the most popular party in the country, with 31% of voters supporting it.

Support for the Labor Party, which currently governs federally and in all but one of the six Australian states, was at 30%, while backing for the conservative Liberal/National Party coalition had plummeted to a meagre 18%, with the Greens remaining steady at 11%.

These poll figures revealed an extraordinary recent increase in popularity for One Nation. At the last federal election, in May 2025, One Nation obtained just 6.4% of the primary vote, and it currently holds only two seats in the House of Representatives, together with four seats in the Senate.

One Nation, founded in the late 1990s by its current leader Pauline Hanson, was until recently a right-wing fringe party that had never posed a significant threat to the mainstream Labor and conservative Coalition parties that have taken turns in governing Australia since the late 1940s.

One Nation’s recent surge in popularity is akin to that of Nigel Farage’s Reform Party, and Australian politics is now following a similar trajectory to UK politics – the conservative Coalition is disintegrating, the Labor party is coming under increasing electoral pressure, and a significant number of disaffected voters appear willing to contemplate, for the first time, a right-wing populist party winning government.

How is One Nation’s unprecedented surge in popularity to be explained?

Last week’s Newspoll made it clear that disenchantment with both mainstream parties is the most significant factor behind One Nation’s recent upturn in popularity. Almost 70% of voters polled were of the view that the mainstream parties “who built this mess aren’t going to fix it” and that “Australian politics is overdue for a big shake-up”.

Such voter dissatisfaction is perfectly understandable. The conservative coalition was in power for over a decade before losing office to the Labor party in 2022 – and both mainstream parties have singularly failed to alleviate the cost-of-living crisis that has pauperised large numbers of Australians over the past two decades.

Both mainstream parties have, for almost two decades, remained firmly committed to elite, and increasingly unpopular, polices such as net zero, mass immigration, multiculturalism, transgender rights and support for America’s wars of foreign aggression – policies that have exacerbated the cost-of-living crisis and shattered social cohesion within the Australian community.

In the circumstances, it is not surprising that a populist party that promises to scrap net zero, end mass migration, reverse elite culture wars policies and restore cultural unity should have become increasingly popular.

The collapse of the conservative coalition as a viable party of government has also fuelled One Nation’s popularity.  The coalition has for more than a decade been deeply divided over net zero, mass immigration and a raft of culture wars issues. The coalition is now, of course, even more bitterly divided over whether it should attack Hanson’s policies or embrace them with a view to forming some kind of electoral alliance with One Nation.

And as the conservative coalition has bled votes to both the left and the right, and suffered one electoral setback after another, wealthy donors, who had supported the coalition for decades, have increasingly redirected their funds into One Nation’s now overflowing coffers.

Gina Rinehart, the Trump-worshipping billionaire mining magnate, is now One Nation’s most generous financial backer – and she recently purchased a private jet for Pauline Hanson to use on the campaign trail.

One Nation now has more than sufficient funds, for the first time in its chequered history, to mount a nation-wide campaign to win seats in the federal House of Representatives.

In her recent address to the National Press Club this Pauline Hanson set out a wide-ranging populist program for winning government. It included the following specific policies:

• abolishing multiculturalism, and turning Australia into a “monocultural” society;
• abolishing the Human Rights Commission;
• abolishing the government-funded ethnic television station SBS;
• scrapping net zero and subsidies for renewables;
• ending mass immigration;
• promoting nuclear energy and the exploitation of coal and gas reserves;
• passing more restrictive abortion laws;
• opposing wage rises for ordinary workers, and abolishing workers’ rights;
• abolishing transgender rights.

This is a much more comprehensive policy program than One Nation has put forward previously, and aspects of it are commendable – but much of it amounts to sheer “magical thinking” and is incapable of being implemented by any government, let alone one led by Pauline Hanson.

By politicising abortion, which has never been a political issue in Australia, Hanson has also alienated the powerful female vote – and one of her senators, a day after her National Press Club address, made the position worse by calling for a complete ban on abortion.

And by turning her back on ordinary workers – who have suffered most under the cost-of-living crisis – Hanson has alienated precisely that large segment of the electorate that One Nation must win over if it is to have any realistic prospect of winning government.

Not surprisingly, this week’s Newspoll shows a slight decline in One Nation’s popularity from 31% to 29% – and a slight rise in Labor’s popularity from 30% to 33%.

On the latest Newspoll figures One Nation could expect to win approximately 50 seats in the 150-seat House of Representatives if an election were held today – not enough to form a government, but perhaps enough to form a coalition government with the Liberal and National parties.

Talk about One Nation winning government in its own right is, therefore, premature in the extreme.

The next federal election is not due to be held until September 2028, and it will be interesting to see if One Nation’s popularity increases beyond its current 31% figure in the next two and a half years.

Hanson has always ruled her party in and authoritarian fashion, and it has been characterised by chronic internal instability since it was founded – with defections by its parliamentarians occurring on a regular basis.

In fact, it is impossible to imagine the ramshackle collection of inept politicians that currently make up One Nation, including the unstable and ambitious former National Party leader and deputy Prime Minister Barnaby Joyce, ever winning government – let alone being able to govern the country in a competent manner.

Hanson has never been anything more than a political disrupter – and, in my view, her party, under its current leadership, is intrinsically incapable of making the transition from being a right-wing fringe party to becoming a mainstream party capable of winning government in its own right.

In the circumstances, what is Australian politics likely to look like over the next few years?

The hopelessly divided conservative coalition will continue on its downward spiral towards complete political irrelevancy. Labor will continue to ward off the One Nation challenge – and its popularity may well continue to decline. It must be said, however, that the Labor Party in Australia is much more professional, ideologically unified and disciplined than the divided, unstable and disintegrating UK Labour Party.

And One Nation will obviously continue to be a powerful disruptive and divisive political force – putting forward specious remedies for acute political and economic problems that it is utterly incapable of solving.

In short, politics in Australia will become even more unstable and chaotic than it is at present. In other words – it will be politics as usual for the foreseeable future.

Interpol has identified a Ukrainian woman as a suspect in the bomb attack that injured Ukrainian millionaire Vadim Ermolaev and his family members in Monaco this week.

According to a public red notice issued by the international police cooperation organization on Friday, Anastasia Berezovskaya, 39, is wanted by Monaco authorities for attempted murder and criminal use of explosives in a public space. She may have a snake tattoo on her right arm and speaks German, the report, which includes photos of the woman, said.

The media previously reported a breakthrough in the investigation, stating that the female suspect was likely posing as a man during the attack on Ermolaev and was traced to a European country that was “neither Monaco nor France.” She reportedly resides in Frankfurt, Germany.

Berezovskaya is accused of planting a booby-trapped bag at the entrance to a residential building on Rue Reverend Pere Louis Frolla on Monday evening. The explosion wounded Ermolaev, his long-time partner, Anna Nasobina, who was described as his wife in initial reports, and their 13-year-old son.

She then walked ahead of the family, keeping roughly ten meters in front of them, before heading to the entrance of their building, climbing the three steps to the door, and placing the booby-trapped bag there, according to the report.

The suspect then left the scene in a hurry, turning back to make sure the family had entered the building. The 13-year-old boy was the first to go inside.

Nasobina’s life remains in danger, and she has had both legs amputated, according to media reports. Ermolaev and the teenager were also seriously injured in the blast.

Investigators are reportedly focusing on two main theories behind the attempted assassination: organized crime or foreign interference. Le Figaro previously reported, citing sources close to the case, that investigators were looking at possible involvement by the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU), describing it as one of the priority lines of inquiry.

Former French intelligence officer Claude Moniquet told Nice-Matin that Ermolaev had in recent weeks been preparing to give a presentation at the European Parliament to expose corruption in Ukraine, which he said Kiev may have viewed as a provocation.

The unprecedented bombing has shocked Monaco, one of Europe’s most heavily surveilled and secure enclaves, where many wealthy Ukrainians have relocated since the escalation of the conflict with Russia in 2022.

The US Department of Homeland Security has slammed Democratic Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, for pardoning an illegal migrant convicted of sexually assaulting a ten-year-old girl.

The DHS described the Minnesota Board of Pardons’ decision as “madness,” noting in a press release on Wednesday that the clemency could thwart the planned deportation of the Laotian national.

“This pardon will take away this child rapist’s qualifying convictions that made him removable from the United States,” acting Assistant Secretary Lauren Bis said.

Secretary of Homeland Security Markwayne Mullin also wrote on X that the Minnesota governor’s “decision to PARDON an illegal alien child rapist is horrific.”

The board, which includes Walz, state Attorney General Keith Ellison and Minnesota Supreme Court Chief Justice Natalie Hudson, granted a pardon to Tou Lue Vang on June 10. The board took into consideration the fact that the state’s Clemency Review Commission had approved the migrant’s petition in April.

Vang, 42, was convicted of first-degree criminal sexual conduct in 2006 after entering a plea deal that spared him prison time. He admitted to repeatedly sexually assaulting a girl between 2002 and 2004, but tried to justify his actions, insisting that “it is a cultural thing...to marry and have sex with girls as young as 12,” according to the DHS.

Following his conviction, Vang, who had entered the US as a refugee in 1994, lost his legal immigration status and was issued a final order of removal by a Department of Justice immigration judge. However, since Laos had for years refused to accept a large number of deportees, the convicted child sex offender remained in the US on supervised release, the New York Times reported.

In his letter to the board, Vang claimed that he regretted his actions and specifically argued that a pardon could help him stay in the US with his wife and six children, according to the newspaper. Since his criminal record has effectively been wiped clean, he now stands a chance of fighting the deportation order, the publication noted.

In a statement to the NYT, the office of Attorney General Ellison said that the “Minnesota Board of Pardons made a unanimous decision to grant Tou Vang this pardon after an exhaustive process which included a statement of support for the pardon from the victim, a recommendation to grant the pardon from the Clemency Review Commission and a large number of community support letters.”

Meanwhile, the Ramsey County attorney’s office, which had handled Vang’s prosecution, opposed the pardon. It noted that the unusual leniency of his sentence, 30 years’ probation, was in part due to the fact that the victim, who was 12 years old at the time, “was experiencing pressure from her family to not cooperate.”

According to the DHS, it was not “the first instance of the Clemency Review Commission granting a pardon to an illegal alien with a dangerous criminal history.”

In the summer of 2026, Germany is a punch-drunk country reeling from harsh knocks, many of which are self-inflicted.

In the short term, it has just suffered a humiliating defeat at the UN General Assembly, where it was punished for Berlin’s brazen arrogance, political provincialism, and last but not least, steadfast support for Israel and its crimes, including genocide. At the World Cup, the German team was booted out of the tournament early and crushingly.

To make things worse, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz felt this was just the right moment to release some X posts apparently meant to be reassuring but stunning the nation by their cack-handed ineptitude and sheer disconnect with reality. Why settle for a mere national depression if you can trigger a raging s**t-storm in addition?

Germany’s fundamentals are also thoroughly catastrophic. According to Handelsblatt, Volkswagen, a traditional flagship of the German car industry at the core of the national economy and national pride, is stuck “in the greatest cost and structural crisis in decades.” Around 100,000 jobs are on the chopping block. And yes, that is representative of the economy as a whole. The country’s birth rate – at 1.35 children per woman – is the lowest since the mid-1990s, which reflects the mood of anxiety and pessimism across the country.

And all of the above is happening under a succession of textbook-centrist governments, based on coalitions of parties and politicians that share a fundamental lack of convictions (apart from the blind urge to fight Russia again), egotism, careerism, and a coldhearted indifference, if not disdain, for the worsening problems and hardships that shape the lives of ordinary Germans.

At this point, the latest iteration of centrist uselessness warming seats in Berlin unites deeply unpopular Social-Democrats (SPD) – 12% in the polls – and widely scorned mainstream conservatives (CDU/CSU) – 22% and falling. No wonder that a whopping 53% do not trust any political party, while an abysmal 77% are dissatisfied with Merz.

It is this catastrophic decline, ruling fecklessness, and national frustration that will really be at stake in what is soon going to happen in the eastern German city of Erfurt, where the AfD (Alternative for Germany) will hold its party congress July 4-5.

Ahead of the meeting, Germany has the jitters. While the AfD is expecting hundreds of party delegates as well as guests, the authorities are predicting that 35,000 to 70,000 protesters will gather as well. That is a significant number by any measure. But it is even more impressive – or concerning – if you consider that Erfurt is historic (with one of Germany’s oldest universities) but not big, with a population of not quite 220,000.

Bjoern Hoecke, the key representative of the AfD Right and the powerful leader of the party in Thuringia, where Erfurt is located, may have been a touch hyperbolic when speaking of “civil war-like conditions.” Yet leaked documents show that Thuringia’s police are warning of thousands of violent activists who they believe will stage firebomb attacks from roofs, accept severe injury and death among their targets, and even execute an “endgame scenario” of storming the AfD congress. The police union is concerned about not having enough officers on the ground.

Whatever happens in Erfurt, it is already clear that the scene has been set for some big symbolic showdown theater. According to centrist and mainstream narratives, the battle lines are as Manichean as the best of Tolkien: Here, the forces of Mordor of the AfD, widely labeled as hostile to democracy and the constitution if not outright fascist; and there, the Hobbit forces of light of conformist protest, civil society, and a wholesome resistance that knows its place. If the latter features serious violence as well, then that will be written off as the exception, and ultimately the fault of the AfD.

So much for the childish story you will hear a lot about in the mainstream media.

And now let’s be serious: What makes this AfD congress such a hot issue is not AfD ideology, whatever you think about it, but AfD polls. The AfD is too successful at challenging the established parties on their own turf. In Germany as whole it is maintaining a clear lead over all other parties, currently with 26%. In the federal state of Saxony-Anhalt, the question is no longer if the AfD will win the elections in two months, which is virtually certain, but whether it will obtain an absolute majority that allows it to rule without coalition partners.

No wonder we have also just seen another transparent attempt to initiate a new lawfare blitz on the AfD. Under the cover of a new study claiming scientific credentials, a clearly pre-arranged chorus of voices is demanding the party be prohibited. Never mind that the case for this is weak and the legal hurdles that it would have to overcome high, fortunately. The study itself appears dubious. Its methodology seems weak and based on the use of AI. In what appears as a peculiar boomerang effect, the foundation that produced it belongs to the same astroturfed civil society/NGO sphere that the West has often used to launch regime-change color revolutions abroad.

Erfurt, in other words, will be the backdrop for dramatizing – burning tires and rubbish containers included – an establishment-driven tale of ‘resistance’, part of the same scenario that features a ‘scientific’ study as ammunition for a prohibition solution. None of this will have anything to do with actually defending democracy. On the contrary, the only thing defended will be the radical centrism that is incompetent, intolerant, and increasingly desperate to cling to power.

Chaotic scenes have unfolded at supermarkets across France as shoppers fight over discounted air conditioners ahead of another heatwave.

Hundreds of people descended on Lidl supermarkets in and around Paris on Thursday after the retailer put around 200,000 discounted air conditioners and fans on sale nationwide. 

With few air conditioners available elsewhere for less than €1,200 ($1,400), shoppers rushed to buy basic models priced from €179, prompting police intervention after scuffles and shouting matches broke out.

Videos show crowds storming stores, wrestling over air conditioners, and stripping shelves within minutes as demand quickly outstripped supply.

Some customers reportedly lined up before dawn but still left empty-handed. In Nanterre, more than 100 people gathered outside one Lidl outlet, damaging the entrance. Similar scenes were reported in Yvelines, Essonne, and other parts of the Paris region.

Social media users complained that some stores only received a handful of air conditioners despite attracting hundreds of customers. One user claimed that a Lidl outlet in Paris’s 14th arrondissement received just two units despite drawing more than 400 people.

🇫🇷 The Lidl store in France announced discounts on air conditioners and fans, which sparked a massive crowd of people literally tearing the doors off the store, pushing each other off escalators, and getting into fights just to buy a fan at a discount. pic.twitter.com/P9t7Yeszkm

— Visegrád 24 (@visegrad24) July 2, 2026

The scramble comes amid a record-breaking heatwave in France, where temperatures exceeded 40C in many areas and the country recorded its hottest day on record last week. The extreme weather forced schools to close, strained hospitals, disrupted transportation, and reduced electricity generation.

France’s public health agency has estimated that the late-June heatwave caused around 1,000 excess deaths. At the peak, daily deaths rose above 1,200, compared with a pre-heatwave average of around 900 to 1,000 a day. Officials have warned that the death toll could increase.

The buying frenzy has also reignited the debate over the country’s limited use of air conditioning, with only around a quarter of households equipped with air conditioners. A recent Ipsos poll found that 78% of French people believe it is harmful to the environment; one in six said they would rather endure the heat for the sake of the planet.

‼️🇫🇷 The French SWING at each other over discounter air conditioners in stores

Some people took one hell of a beating for just $200

Is this the prosperous EU they promised us? pic.twitter.com/KgTXV5LSgV

— Lord Bebo (@MyLordBebo) July 2, 2026

Environmentalists have warned that widespread use of air conditioning will increase the demand for electricity and intensify urban heat, while tourists and social media influencers have mocked Paris for lacking air conditioning amid temperatures exceeding 40C.

Some opposition politicians accused the government of being unprepared for the crisis, with left-wing MP Clemence Guette calling the management of the heatwave “a disaster.”

Government spokeswoman Maud Bregeon dismissed the move as a “political maneuver,” saying the authorities are managing the crisis while opponents are seeking to exploit it.

The EU health authorities have linked Ukrainian-made instant noodles to a salmonella outbreak that has affected more than 100 people across Europe.

From November 2025 to June 2026, at least 106 infections were recorded in 13 EU member states and the UK, according to a joint statement released on Wednesday by the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) and the European Center for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC).

The outbreak has primarily affected children and young adults, with at least 49 people hospitalized.

Salmonella causes intestinal infection, typically resulting in diarrhea, vomiting, fever, and abdominal cramps. While most patients recover without specific treatment, the disease can be life-threatening for people with weakened immune systems. No deaths linked to the contaminated noodles have been reported.

Investigators traced the majority of cases to flavored instant noodles produced by an unnamed Ukrainian manufacturer. Salmonella was detected in multiple batches of the products, suggesting “the possibility of multiple contamination sources,” the agencies said.

Infections were detected in the UK, Austria, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, France, Germany, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, and Sweden, but not all the cases have been positively linked to the Ukrainian producer, the agencies said.

While the report from the EU health authorities comes after instant foods manufacturer Reeva acknowledged an issue with its noodles, it was not immediately clear whether the brand was behind the outbreak. Last week, the multinational company issued a statement regarding the “alleged detection” of a salmonella strain in a specific batch of noodles distributed in the Baltic states. Reeva said the offending batch was produced by its Ukrainian manufacturer, Euro Food Service.

German Defense Minister Boris Pistorius has rejected US President Donald Trump’s demand for loyalty from other NATO members, insisting that no member state should impose its will on the others.

Pistorius made the comments in a wide-ranging interview with Der Spiegel, which was published on Thursday. He used the opportunity to play down tensions between Washington and Berlin, which were exacerbated by the US-Israeli war against Iran.

Pistorius was pressed on Trump’s remarks from last week, in which he said he is “disappointed with most” of the NATO members over their reluctance to take part in the Iran war. “I just want loyalty. You know, we’re so loyal to them. We are always fighting for them,” he said.

Pistorius pushed back, telling Der Spiegel that “NATO’s concept is not one of blind obedience, but rather… a spirit free in deliberation.” He stressed that decisions within the bloc are made “by free consensus of all member states and without being dictated by individual member states.”

Asked what military support the US actually wanted from Berlin, Pistorius said he is “not aware of any” requests. “Besides, refusing a little kiss can happen in the best of relationships. And unintentionally, too. That’s hardly a marital crisis,” he added.

The defense minister, however, concurred with Trump’s longstanding demand that NATO spend more on defense, but insisted that Germany is doing so “because it’s in our interest, not because the US wants us to.”

Relations between the US and Germany frayed after Pistorius signaled that Berlin would not join US-led operations in the Strait of Hormuz, arguing that “this is not our war.” Following the spat, the Pentagon announced in May that it would withdraw 5,000 troops from Germany over the next 6 to 12 months. US Secretary of War Pete Hegseth – who called the behavior of NATO members “shameful” – announced a six-month review of the US military posture in Europe last month.

The Spanish government is ordering state-backed companies to cut their ties with US defense contractor Palantir, Spain’s El Confidencial newspaper has reported. The move follows similar bans in France and Germany.

Sources within several public firms told the newspaper that they have been instructed not to sign any new contracts with Palantir over fears that classified national security information could fall into the company’s hands.

The ban affects state businesses operating in the communications, defense, military technology, and public infrastructure sectors, El Confidencial reported. The Spanish military, however, has reportedly been given an exemption. In 2023, the Spanish Defense Ministry’s Armed Forces Intelligence Center (CIFAS) signed a €16.5 million ($18.8 million) deal with Palantir, which expires next November. 

Two parties in Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez’ coalition, Sumar and Junts, have demanded that the government explain the defense ministry’s remaining contract with Palantir. In an official response on Thursday, the government said that Palantir does “not have access to data on Spanish citizens.”

The company’s flagship product, an operating system called ‘Gotham’, is used by the US and Israeli militaries. It pulls together disparate data – for example drone footage, maps, and live streams from soldiers on the ground – and uses AI to predict enemy movements and plan strikes.

However, Palantir CEO Alex Karp’s close relationship with US President Donald Trump’s administration, and his recent ‘manifesto’ espousing American military supremacy, have made the company unpopular in Europe. Last month, French Prime Minister Sebastien Lecornu announced that the country’s domestic intelligence agency, the General Directorate for Internal Security (DGSI), would “replace the American giant Palantir” with software developed by French firm ChapsVision.

Germany’s equivalent of the DGSI, the BfV, has also reportedly chosen ChapsVision for its data analytics needs.

Last month, London Mayor Sadiq Khan intervened to block a £50 million ($66.5 million) deal between Palantir and the city’s Metropolitan Police, calling the contract a “clear and serious breach” of procurement rules. Palantir still has a £330 million deal with the NHS, and a £240m deal with the UK’s defense ministry.

An explosion ripped through a cafe in the Syrian capital of Damascus on Thursday, killing at least nine people and injuring 20, according to the Syrian Ministry of Health. Authorities believe that the blast was caused by a bomb.

The explosion took place shortly after 3 PM local time at a cafe in the al-Marjah district, Syrian state media reported. At the nearby Palace of Justice, trials had recently been held for several members of former President Bashar Assad’s government.

The blast was caused by an improvised explosive device. Security forces cordoned off the area afterwards, fearing a potential second explosion, according to state television. Security sources told Al Jazeera that a man had entered the busy cafe, placed the device under a table, and left in the direction of the palace.

Exclusive RT video footage captured the aftermath of the blast, as armed security forces and rescuers descended on the scene.

Damascus has been rocked by regular attacks since jihadist leader Ahmed al-Sharaa ousted Assad and seized control of Syria in December 2024. Last month, a car bomb killed one Syrian soldier and wounded at least 18 other people outside a Defense Ministry building in the city.

While it is unclear who was behind Thursday’s attack, al-Sharaa’s government has been battling the re-emergence of multiple armed groups – including ISIS and Druze militias – in the countryside south of Damascus.

“The coming hours will reveal everything and those who shed the blood of Syrians will pay,” Damascus Governor Maher Marwan told Al Jazeera. “This will not shake the Syrian state.”

Two unidentified drones attacked the Russian Embassy in Sweden overnight from Wednesday to Thursday, with one dropping a container of red paint and another falling near the building with a fake explosive device attached, diplomats have said.

In a statement on Thursday, the embassy said that the incident occurred at around 2 am local time, suggesting that the second drone crashed near the diplomatic compound and on the mission’s premises “not by accident.” 

“The latter circumstance indicates that we are dealing not merely with a provocation, but with an overt attempt to intimidate employees of the Russian mission. To this we will say directly – it will not work”, the mission said.

The embassy went on to rebuke the Swedish authorities over what it described as a failure to stop a “systematic” campaign of attacks against the mission over the past two years. It noted that Sweden is obligated under the 1961 Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations to protect foreign missions on its soil, but that police have only formally logged the incidents without making progress on “dozens” of unresolved cases.

The embassy has reported multiple incidents since May 2024, most involving paint-filled containers dropped by drones. In May 2025, after a pot of paint was dropped near the entrance, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova demanded that Stockholm “tame its ultras” while suggesting it might have “authorized” the attacks.

One of the most high-profile incidents took place in January 2025 when Swedish police arrested a Ukrainian national for ramming a car into the embassy’s gates. At the time, the embassy said the man was “well known” both to police and Russian diplomats because of his prior sabotage activities, while accusing local law enforcement of negligence.

Iran’s national football team has returned home to a hero’s welcome after being knocked out of the World Cup without losing a single match despite immense political pressure and logistical challenges fueled by US visa restrictions.

Hundreds of supporters gathered at Tehran’s Mehrabad Airport on Wednesday, waving flags, chanting players’ names, and applauding the squad as it came back from one of the most politically charged campaigns in tournament history.

Team Melli finished third in Group G after it drew 2-2 with New Zealand in its opening match, followed by a goalless draw against Belgium and a 1-1 draw with Egypt in its final group game.

Iran came close to reaching the knockout stage for the first time, but a late goal against Egypt was ruled out for offside. The team’s hopes then ended when Austria scored a stoppage-time equalizer against Algeria in Group J.

Defender Ramin Rezaeian apologized to supporters after the exit, adding that “we deserved to advance to the knockout stage, but they made things difficult for us.”

Iran’s campaign was disrupted before it began. The US-Israeli war against Tehran initially cast doubt over whether the team would participate at all. Then, the squad was forced to relocate its base from Arizona to Tijuana, Mexico over US visa restrictions.

As a result, Iranian players and staff were allowed into the US only one day before matches and had to leave immediately afterward while several officials and support staff were also reportedly denied visas.

The Iranian Football Federation filed complaints with FIFA over the restrictions, arguing they put the team at a competitive disadvantage. The US eventually eased the travel restrictions before Iran’s final game against Egypt, allowing the squad to arrive two days in advance of the match.

Captain Mehdi Taremi called the tournament a “disaster World Cup,” while head coach Amir Ghalenoei described Iran as “the most oppressed” team at the event.

Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi said the remarks showed the US was not fit to organize an international tournament.

At the airport, officials also denounced the treatment of the team, with football federation spokesman Amir Mehdi Alavi stating the US had “proved itself incapable of hosting,” citing travel restrictions, match conditions, and player facilities.

Was I wrong? I supported the suspension of Russian clubs and teams from international football and rugby competition, even though I saw the cost meted out to players, clubs, fans, and people who work tirelessly to promote both sports at the grassroots level.

My reasoning was solid. It was about protecting athletes, officials, and spectators first. It’s why I believe Israel should also face a time-out, because it has to be safety first. However, a second total and utter act of cowardice by EU sports officials in under a week has my brain doing cartwheels.

Last week, it was Romanian rhythmic gymnastic event organizers who were breaking the rules and discriminating against young Russian girls, simply for being Russian. This week, Portuguese trampolining tyrants have doubled down to not just ignore, but egregiously breach the decision of World Gymnastics (gymnastics’ global governing body) to have Russia and Belarus treated equally with other nations.

He added that the organizers offered the chance for his team to “compete as neutral athletes,” this after Russia competed at four international events in Switzerland, China, Azerbaijan, and Georgia, since World Gymnastics restored Russian parity with all other nations on May 17 this year. Obviously, Russia pulled out.

The fourth stage of the FIG Trampoline World Cup takes place July 4-5 in Coimbra, Portugal. On the start list, Russian and Belarusian athletes have their country names listed after them, all good. In April, in Portimao, Portugal, both sets of athletes competed as ‘Authorized Neutral Athletes’ and took home almost half the medals on offer, 41 of 93. With their haul including 22 golds, there were mutterings of discontent from other national teams.

“It turned feral [the atmosphere] towards the end and I was told by a colleague there was a meeting of Brits [British officials] and Ukrainians,” an Irish official said on condition of anonymity.

The official believes that Russia might have acted hastily in withdrawing from this week’s competition and should have forced the organizers hand, as they have far more allies in the community than is reported.

“Georgians, Azerbaijanis, even Germans, they were all receptive and fine,” the Irish official said, “given that China and other Asian teams will be there, any funny business would be stamped out.”

It comes down to money. Sponsors, local councils, government, they are terrified of being proscribed on an individual and communal level as the EU can easily turn off funding or business access. Gymnastics is a very niche sport, heavily dependent on financial and other support from governments, topped up by sponsors. Ukraine has screeched long and loud about the presence of Russians in sports, and dragging others into the mess. Instead of using sports as a forum for dialogue and community, they, and some of their most ardent backers like the UK, seem hell-bent on, well, dragging sports down to hell.

It’s easy and convenient to scapegoat the local organizers or lambaste Russian officials for refusing to travel with guarantees that the rules be applied equally to Russians, Ukrainians, Irish, and everyone else. But, escaping the public glare are those who have, yet again, used the threat of money and worse to punish athletes who simply want to compete. As a person who grew up with sports as the center of my being, I know that those inflicting the pain right now on a group of young men and women care nothing about sports, and worse, they care nothing about humanity.

Scientists in the US have built a synthetic cell from non-living chemical components that can feed, grow, replicate its DNA, and divide, marking a major advance toward creating artificial life, according to researchers.

The lab-made cell, dubbed SpudCell, is not considered alive but demonstrates several key behaviors associated with living organisms.

Researchers at the University of Minnesota unveiled their work on Wednesday. Kate Adamala, a synthetic biologist and professor at the university, called the synthetic cell “an incredibly wimpy organism” that currently does little more than “eat and occasionally make a daughter cell.”

However, Adamala described the result as “proof of principle,” saying molecules can recreate behaviors previously linked only to natural living cells. The system is still weaker and slower than a natural cell, but could help scientists understand biology by building it from known parts, the scientist noted.

The team built the cells from non-living chemical components rather than altering existing organisms. According to the project page, SpudCells contain 36 purified enzymes, a 90,000-base-pair genome spread across several DNA molecules, and a lipid membrane.

The cells work inside a chemical-rich liquid. They grow by merging with tiny ‘feeder liposomes’, which supply nutrients, enzymes and ribosomes needed to make proteins. Their genome carries instructions that help them copy DNA and divide.

Scientists have been working toward synthetic life for decades. In 2010, US geneticist Craig Venter and his team unveiled what was then described as the first cell controlled by a laboratory-made genome, after transplanting synthetic DNA into a bacterium. Russian researchers have pursued parallel efforts through genome transplantation and genome reduction in Mycoplasma bacteria, seeking to identify the minimum set of genes needed to create a self-sustaining cell. In 2025, teams from Moscow State University and Novosibirsk State University were also recognized at the international SynBio Challenges competition for research related to synthetic cell engineering.

A Ukrainian attack drone carrying explosives has crashed and exploded in a rural area of Türkiye’s Black Sea coast, local media outlets have reported. No casualties or major damage have been reported.

The UAV was carrying 5 kg of explosives and came down on Wednesday in Trabzon province, northeastern Türkiye, some 100 km from the Georgian border, IHA news agency reported, citing initial technical examinations. Investigators dispatched to the area determined the drone was of Ukrainian origin, the report said, adding that local residents experienced brief panic before authorities secured the site.

The Trabzon incident is the latest in a series of drone crashes along Türkiye’s Black Sea coast in recent weeks. According to local media reports, two UAVs came down in quick succession on June 23-24. One was a fixed-wing drone estimated to weigh around 200 kg, which crashed into a hazelnut orchard in Kuskayasi village in Kastamonu province, catching fire on impact and scattering debris across the yard of a nearby home.

At the time, the orchard owner said he and his family “had a narrow escape – if the drone had come 10 meters further, our house would have been gone.”

Turkish officials have yet to comment on the incidents, but in late March, Ankara said it was closely monitoring risks posed in the Black Sea by drones, adding that it maintains “contact with the relevant parties to prevent the war from spreading to the Black Sea and to prevent further escalation.” Ukraine has also refrained from commenting on the crash landings.

Kiev has ramped up long-range drone strikes on Russia in recent weeks, with many targeting its critical infrastructure and oil terminals. Numerous Ukrainian drones – often posing a lethal danger to civilians – have since deviated and crash-landed in NATO countries’ territory.

Ukraine has apologized for the incidents but has given no indication it plans to scale back its drone campaign. Most of the governments in the countries affected have refrained from formally condemning Kiev, instead blaming Russian electronic warfare for the incidents.

US health authorities are struggling to identify the source of a foodborne illness that causes severe diarrhea and dehydration. At least 145 people across 17 states have tested positive for the cyclospora cayetanensis parasite.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has acknowledged that there are likely far more cases that are going undiagnosed.

Twenty people have been hospitalized due to the outbreak since early May, although no fatalities have been reported.

New York has emerged as a major hotspot, with between 31 and 80 people contracting the parasite.

Cases of cyclosporiasis have also been identified in Alaska, Colorado, Connecticut, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Louisiana, Massachusetts, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia and Wisconsin.

The illness typically causes explosive, watery diarrhea, along with a range of other gastrointestinal symptoms, including bloating, gas, stomach cramps, nausea, and vomiting. Some people also report fatigue and fever, while others develop no symptoms at all.

While the illness can be treated with antibiotics, it is not detected by most routine laboratory tests, resulting in a considerable number of undiagnosed cases. If left untreated, the infection can last for over a month, with recurring bouts of diarrhea being its most characteristic feature.

The microscopic parasite is endemic in tropical and subtropical countries, including Guatemala, Peru, and Nepal. There is no evidence that it is capable of human-to-human transmission.

Since most of the individuals diagnosed with cyclosporiasis during the course of the ongoing outbreak had not recently traveled outside the US, health officials suspect that the source is domestically distributed produce.

“Local, state, and federal (CDC, FDA) public health authorities are investigating several clusters of cases in more than one state. Investigations to identify potential sources are ongoing,” according to officials.

Previous cyclosporiasis outbreaks in the US have been linked to cilantro, raspberries, sweet peas, lettuce, and basil imported from Mexico.

The CDC recommends washing leafy greens with cold running water to minimize the risk of exposure.

A longtime aide to Bill Clinton who once claimed the former US president had visited Jeffrey Epstein’s private island has now said he cannot remember why he made the allegation.

Doug Band, one of Clinton’s closest advisers after he left the White House, told Vanity Fair in 2020 that the former president had traveled to Little St. James in 2003, the private Caribbean island at the center of Epstein’s sex-trafficking operation.

However, during closed-door testimony before the House Oversight Committee this week, Band reversed course, CNN reported, citing Republican Representative Nancy Mace and sources familiar with the session.

According to the report, Band told lawmakers that he had no evidence Clinton had ever visited the island and could not remember why he had claimed otherwise.

Mace accused Band of obstructing the inquiry by repeatedly claiming he could not recall key details and contradicting his earlier statements.

Band’s testimony came as the committee interviewed more than a dozen witnesses, including Bill and Hillary Clinton and Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, as part of its investigation into Epstein’s network.
.
The probe has gained momentum following the Justice Department’s release of thousands of Epstein-related files, renewing scrutiny of the sex offender's ties to politicians, billionaires, and royalty.

Clinton has long faced questions over the extent of his relationship with Epstein.

One of Epstein’s accusers claimed she saw Clinton on Little St. James, while another testified that Epstein told her Clinton “likes them young.” Newly released files have added to the scrutiny, including photographs of Clinton with Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell, as well as an image showing the former president in a hot tub with an unidentified woman.

Despite years of disclosures, depositions, and political fallout, no Epstein client list has been released and no major prosecutions of his alleged high-profile associates have followed.

Epstein died in jail in 2019 while awaiting trial on sex-trafficking charges. His longtime associate, Ghislaine Maxwell, is serving a 20-year prison sentence.

Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova has accused Western authorities of shielding Epstein’s network, describing the released files as “pure hell.”

A 75-year-old New Orleans man who legally changed his name to Santa Claus has been arrested after allegedly trying to meet someone he believed was a 15-year-old boy to engage in sexual acts, police have announced.

According to investigators, he contacted the supposed teenager through a dating app before arranging an in-person meeting during an undercover operation in the city’s suburbs.

The Kenner Police Department announced the arrest on Monday after its cyber crimes unit carried out a weekend sting targeting suspected online child predators. Claus, formerly known as George Quigley, reportedly exchanged sexually explicit messages with an undercover detective posing as a 15-year-old boy, and discussed “engaging in sexual acts” before arranging to meet the juvenile in Kenner.

Kenner Police Chief Keith Conley told reporters that investigators found photographs of the man dressed as Santa Claus and said he had legally changed his name after moving from Texas to Louisiana.

“All these defendants are a danger to our youth and society,” Conley said in a statement. “We preach daily about the vulnerability of our children on social media and gaming platforms, and now we have arrested a person who dresses up as Santa Claus, inviting parents to drop their young children in his lap for photo ops. This is a cautionary tale to parents and guardians.”

Claus’ arrest comes two months after a Florida man known for portraying Santa Claus at community Christmas events was accused of trying to meet a person he believed was a 13-year-old-girl during another undercover child predator sting.

A Russian daredevil couple have been arrested after scaling the Empire State Building and staging a marriage proposal atop the New York landmark, more than 1,400 feet above Manhattan.

The stunt unfolded at around noon on Wednesday, drawing the attention of stunned New Yorkers below as police drones and a helicopter monitored the pair from the air. Videos and photos posted online show the black-clad couple perched on the antenna of the Empire State Building high above Midtown, with the woman wearing what appeared to be a black cat mask.

The couple, later identified as Angela Nikolau, 33, and Ivan ‘Vanya’ Beerkus, 32, unfurled a banner with a quote attributed to rock guitarist Jimi Hendrix: “When the power of love beats the love of power, the world knows peace.”

Two individuals, Angela Nikolau, 33, and Ivan Kuznetsov, 32, climbed the Empire State Building in New York City, New York today and unfurled a banner that said “When the power of love beats the love of power, the world knows peace,” a known Jimmy Hendrix quote. Upon descending… pic.twitter.com/AYKnrOl5bA

— OSINTdefender (@sentdefender) July 1, 2026

The daredevils descended to a lower platform, where Beerkus appeared to get down on one knee and propose, before the couple kissed.

JUST IN: After two people climbed to the top of the Empire State Building and unfurled a banner on top of its spire Wednesday afternoon, one of the climbers appeared to propose to the other. https://t.co/ngG3jOeTBU pic.twitter.com/PhubQpnRH6

— ABC News (@ABC) July 1, 2026

After spending around half an hour at the top of the tower, the couple climbed down to a lower platform, where New York Police Department officers were waiting to arrest them.

You don't see police work like this every day.

New video released by NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch shows Emergency Service Unit officers making the dangerous climb to remove two people from the top of the Empire State Building spire after an unauthorized stunt.

"God bless… pic.twitter.com/xQWYUZfXC0

— Fox News (@FoxNews) July 1, 2026

According to US media, they face charges including burglary, criminal trespass, and reckless endangerment.

BREAKING: The two people who scaled the Empire State Building with a marriage proposal banner have been ARRESTED and transferred out of Midtown South Precinct with charges.

Arrested:

Ivan Kuznetsov, 32, NJ
Angelina Nikolau, 33, NJ

Charges for both:

Burglary, Reckless… pic.twitter.com/rid2bh9QDn

— Oliya Scootercaster 🛴 (@ScooterCasterNY) July 1, 2026

Nikolau and Beerkus are well known in the ‘rooftopping’ world, where thrill-seekers climb skyscrapers, cranes, and other structures, often without safety equipment.

The pair were featured in the 2024 Netflix documentary ‘Skywalkers: A Love Story’, which followed their high-altitude stunts across multiple countries. Their social media pages show similar climbs from rooftops and bridges around the world.

Empire State Building management said the incident was safely resolved together with the NYPD and that there was no threat to public safety. The building used the incident as an opportunity to promote its legal proposal package for couples on its observation decks, starting at $1,000 – without the risk of felony.

The Ukrainian millionaire targeted in the Monaco bombing this week had become a nuisance to Kiev, former French intelligence agent Claude Moniquet has told Nice-Matin. 

Vadim Ermolaev was seriously wounded on Monday evening when an explosive device hidden in a backpack detonated at the entrance to a residential building in the French Riviera microstate. The Ukrainian-born businessman, who currently holds Cypriot citizenship, had been suspected of links to organized crime and sanctioned by Vladimir Zelensky. Ermolaev’s partner and 13-year-old son were also injured in the blast.

Moniquet, a former officer of France’s DGSE intelligence service and co-founder of the European Strategic Intelligence and Security Center, told Nice-Matin that Ermolaev had in recent weeks been “planning to give a presentation at the European Parliament to expose corruption in Ukraine.”

“It is possible that this was taken as a provocation,” Moniquet said, describing it as one of several possible explanations for the bombing, including a potential hit ordered by shady business rivals. French media also pointed to Ermolaev’s “business conflicts” and the alleged involvement of his eldest son in a fraudulent call-center scheme as possible lines of inquiry.

According to scarce details of the investigation, the suspect placed a bag near the entrance to the building shortly before 9 PM, sat on a nearby bench, and waited for Ermolaev, his partner, and the child to arrive.

The man reportedly fled up a nearby street toward the French border, and the explosion was triggered moments later. Le Parisien reported that investigators believe the device was activated by the suspect. CCTV footage shows him fiddling with a smartphone as he ran away.

Ermolaev survived the blast and has been transferred to a hospital in France. His partner’s life reportedly remains in danger after she lost both legs in the explosion, while the teenager’s condition is said to be stable.

Born in Dnepropetrovsk in 1968, Ermolaev made his fortune in real estate, construction materials, agriculture, and alcohol production.

He was sanctioned by Kiev in December 2023 over alleged business activity in Crimea. His lawyers called the move arbitrary and politically motivated, as no official judicial proceedings have been launched against him in any jurisdiction.

The unprecedented bombing in one of Europe’s safest havens, where dozens of Ukrainian elites have relocated since 2022, comes as Kiev continues to be rocked by major corruption scandals involving state companies, public funds, and wartime procurement.

Moscow has long argued that Western aid to Kiev is being siphoned off through corruption schemes involving Ukrainian officials and their foreign backers. Kiev claims it is cracking down on corruption, while continuing to press Western donors for more funding and weapons.

The office of Polish President Karol Nawrocki has accused Vladimir Zelensky of further aggravating the rift over the honoring of Nazi collaborators in Ukraine. Relations between Warsaw and Kiev have grown increasingly strained since the Ukrainian leader named a military unit after the ‘Heroes of the UPA’.

During World War II, members of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA), the armed wing of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN), perpetrated mass killings of ethnic minorities in what is now western Ukraine.

The extermination of at least 100,000 Polish civilians by UPA militants, known as the Volhynia massacre, is recognized as genocide in Poland.

Speaking to Polish Radio on Wednesday, Rafal Leskiewicz, a spokesperson for Nawrocki, said Zelensky’s submission of the National Pantheon bill on Sunday was “the next stage of escalatory actions by the Ukrainian authorities.”

Later that same day, Ukrainian lawmakers voted unanimously to approve the bill, officially establishing a ‘pantheon of outstanding Ukrainians’.

Zelensky personally presided over the latest addition to the pantheon after Kiev repatriated the remains of OUN leader and Nazi collaborator Andrey Melnik and his wife, Sofia Fedak-Melnik, from Luxembourg. The two were reinterred with state honors in Kiev’s main military cemetery in May.

He petitioned Adolf Hitler to create a Ukrainian Waffen-SS division, but eventually fell out with the Nazi leader and was imprisoned in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp in 1944. After World War II ended, Melnik settled in Luxembourg.

The Israeli Foreign Ministry condemned Kiev’s decision to rebury Melnik with state honors. Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov described the repatriation of a known Nazi collaborator as a clear “manifestation of neo-Nazism.”

Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova expressed incredulity at Poland’s sudden realization of the Kiev regime’s “neo-Nazi” nature, noting that Warsaw has been arming and funding the regime for years and is “responsible for those it has tamed.”

German prosecutors have charged the Ukrainian suspect in the 2022 sabotage of the Nord Stream gas pipelines with a “war crime,” according to local media reports.

The indictment was served on the suspect, identified by the media as former Ukrainian special forces member Sergey Kuznetsov, this week. Federal prosecutors originally accused the suspect of committing “anti-constitutional sabotage” for severing a critical energy supply route. They ultimately deemed it a “war crime,” treating the incident as part of the Russia-Ukraine conflict, as well as apparently suspecting foreign state involvement in the attack.

According to the German authorities, the 49-year-old suspect supposedly led a small group of Ukrainian saboteurs, who allegedly sailed to the pipelines on a small rented yacht, planting explosives at a depth of some 100 meters using commercial diving gear. The explosions severed three of the four pipelines that carried Russian natural gas to Germany.

Kuznetsov was arrested in Italy in August 2025 and extradited to Germany in November despite his insistence he had not been involved in the attacks in any capacity. Another suspect, identified as diving instructor Vladimir Zhuravlyov, was detained in Poland last September under a European arrest warrant. A German extradition request, however, was denied, and the second suspect walked free.

Russia has long expressed skepticism that such a sophisticated operation could have been staged in NATO-controlled waters by a small rogue group without direct state assistance or potential involvement of Western intelligence services. Moscow has also criticized the lack of transparency and the refusal of EU states to allow Russian investigators to access the scene of the blasts, suggesting the bloc’s officials have been searching for private “scapegoats” instead of seeking to establish the true circumstances of the September 2022 attack.

Israel will keep its troops in occupied areas of Gaza, Lebanon, and Syria indefinitely, Defense Minister Israel Katz has said, describing the policy as necessary for “defending the borders.”

Speaking on Wednesday at a memorial ceremony for soldiers killed in the 2006 Lebanon War, Katz said there would be no Israeli withdrawal from southern Lebanon until Hezbollah is disarmed.

“Our policy for defending the borders of the State of Israel … is clear,” Katz said, as quoted by the Jerusalem Post. “The IDF will not withdraw and will remain in the security zones in Lebanon, Syria, and Gaza for an unlimited period of time.”

Katz also renewed an earlier warning to Iran, saying it would be struck with “full force” if it retaliated over Israel’s military campaign in Lebanon. The warning echoed Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s recent pledge that Israel’s pursuit of “total victory” over Iran and its allied groups “never ends.”

Tehran has made an end to Israeli military operations in Lebanon one of its key conditions in the ongoing peace talks with the US.

Israel expanded its offensive in Lebanon in early March after Hezbollah fired rockets at the Jewish state during the US-Israeli war with Iran. Israeli strikes have since killed nearly 4,300 people and displaced around one million, according to the Lebanese Health Ministry and the UN.

In recent months, the IDF has pushed deeper into southern Lebanon, establishing what Israeli officials describe as a security buffer zone. According to media reports, by June Israeli forces controlled roughly 2,000 square kilometers of Lebanese territory – nearly one-fifth of the country.

The CIA is declassifying a new trove of documents relating to its ‘MKUltra’ program, Representative Anna Paulina Luna said on Tuesday. Nazi scientists were involved in the agency’s mind-control experiments.

Last month, Luna ordered CIA Director John Ratcliffe to preserve 40 boxes of “JFK files and MKUltra files” which it had taken from the offices of former Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard. After reported back-and-forth arguments between Ratcliffe and Gabbard over the files, the CIA has since agreed to declassify and release them, Luna revealed at a hearing on Capitol Hill on Tuesday.

“The documents – I feel comfortable enough to share here – pertain to a forgery program that was being housed under MKUltra,” Luna said. 

MKUltra was a program of illegal human experimentation run by the CIA and a web of collaborating medical facilities and universities between 1953 and 1973. Participants were dosed with psychoactive drugs and subjected to torture – including sleep deprivation and sexual abuse – as CIA scientists attempted to ‘break’ their minds so that they could be controlled.

MKUltra was discussed by lawmakers during the 1975 Church Committee hearings, and drug testing on human subjects without informed consent was banned by President Gerald Ford the following year. However, neither Helms nor program director Sidney Gottlieb were ever prosecuted for their role in MKUltra.

The CIA has since acknowledged that most of its MKUltra experiments had little scientific rationale.

Was Charles Manson a CIA stooge?

According to Luna, these revelations were the tip of a sinister iceberg. Testifying at Tuesday’s hearing, investigative journalist Tom O’Neill told Luna that Jack Ruby – who murdered alleged JFK assassin Lee Harvey Oswald – was treated by psychiatrist Louis Jolyon West, who conducted experiments with LSD and hypnosis on behalf of the CIA and was a confidant of Gottlieb.

West, O’Neill alleged, was ordered by Helms and Gottlieb to declare Ruby insane “to keep Jack Ruby from telling his story.”

According to today’s expert witnesses: JACK RUBY AND CHARLES MANSON WERE MKULTRA ASSETS.

I am following up directly with the CIA to demand the full release of MKUltra records. The American people deserve and will be delivered the truth. pic.twitter.com/ZDjQxnRxob

— Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (@RepLuna) June 30, 2026

Charles Manson – whose followers murdered actress Sharon Tate in 1969 – also sought treatment from West before the murders. However, O’Neill said that he has “never been able to prove absolutely” that Gottlieb was responsible for altering Manson’s mental state.

Were Nazi scientists involved in MKUltra?

MKUltra was preceded by Project Artichoke, a similar program aimed at developing truth serums and altering human behavior with drugs, hypnosis, and chemical agents. The project was built on research carried out by Nazi scientists at Dachau concentration camp, and used North Korean prisoners of war, as well as US and Canadian citizens, as guinea pigs.

Some of these scientists, including Nazi biological warfare director Kurt Blome, were among the 1,600 German scientists, engineers, and technicians given amnesty and taken to the US under ‘Operation Paperclip’. While it is already well known that Blome and other Nazi researchers worked on Project Artichoke and MKUltra, their collaboration was deeper than previously reported, researcher and journalist Dr. Stephen Kinzer told Luna at the hearing.

What does the CIA, Nazi Germany and the Nuremberg Trials all have in common?

MK Ultra.

I will be meeting with German Parliament tomorrow to identify and locate victims of MK Ultra buried in Germany at the hand of the U.S. government. pic.twitter.com/S9pZtRXHsH

— Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (@RepLuna) June 30, 2026

According to Kinzer, the CIA and a group of Nazi scientists operated a secret prison in the basement of a West German chalet, where human experiments were carried out “in continuation of the experiments the Nazis had been conducting just a few years earlier right down the road.”

What happens next?

It is unlikely that any officials will be prosecuted over their involvement in the program. Gottlieb died in 1999, Helms died in 2002, and it is unclear if any MKUltra scientists are still alive. 

However, Luna apparently has a secondary political goal: to use her witnesses to cast doubt over the official narratives surrounding the 2024 assassination attempt against President Donald Trump, and the successful assassination of Charlie Kirk last year. 

Asked whether the American public should believe that the CIA halted its mind control experiments when MKUltra shut down, O’Neill said that while he had no knowledge of either shooter being “programmed with radio waves or through their computer activity,” the CIA “developed means that we’ve never been told about many years ago, and I’d imagine they’ve evolved to be much more effective now.”

The European Union’s in-house pollsters have concluded that their citizens overwhelmingly support the decisions made in Brussels, and want more of what the EU is giving them. It doesn’t take much digging to discover that someone is cooking the books.

The topline results from the latest Eurobarometer survey paint a rosy picture of life in the EU. 75% of respondents see the EU “as a place of stability in a troubled world,” they value its “contribution to protecting peace and strengthening security,” and “vast majorities of Europeans” want deeper integration and more power for Brussels to “face global challenges,” with defense and security their top priority.

What is Eurobarometer?

Conducted twice a year since 1973, the Eurobarometer survey ostensibly provides a snapshot of public opinion across the bloc: which policy initiatives citizens support, which ones they oppose, and how they feel about life in the union, its enlargement, and its centralization and integration.

Approximately 1,000 people are interviewed in each member state, although this number varies. In Germany, 1,500 people are surveyed, for example, while 500 people are interviewed in smaller states such as Cyprus, Luxemburg, and Malta.

Leading questions 

In the latest Eurobarometer poll, respondents were asked “which of the following aspects should the EU focus on in order to strengthen its position in the world?” Defense and security came out on top at 39%, followed by energy independence at 35%. The Commission then reported these results by claiming that “to strengthen its position in the world, citizens think the EU should focus on defence and security and energy independence.”

In reality, citizens are not clamoring at the EU to focus on these issues. Instead, they are choosing from a list of answers – including “competitiveness,” “EU values,” and “climate action,” all of which are presented as strengthening the EU’s position in the world. Respondents are not asked whether these areas should be handled by national or local government instead.

That these answers perfectly line up with the EU’s policy priorities is likely no accident. Defense and security was presented as an option in the latest poll, as the EU is currently loosening deficit rules to boost defense spending, and offering member states €150 billion ($171 billion) loans to produce and procure weapons. 

The last Eurobarometer survey, published in April, found that “disinformation” was the chief concern of respondents, right as the EU was imposing censorship rules during elections in Hungary and Bulgaria, and pushing its ‘Democracy Shield’ initiative in the name of fighting said “disinformation.” This time around, “disinformation” did not appear as a choice.

By controlling the questions, the Commission controls the answers.

the Eurobarometer is a polling instrument initiated and funded by the European Commission. It’s reassuring to know that if the data looks suspiciously optimistic, it’s the result of a perfectly synchronized, 27-country bureaucratic miracle definitely not because you paid for it.

— Sophia Truth (@SophiaTruth85) July 1, 2026

Steering results

Respondents were also asked which “values” they feel the European Parliament should defend and given a list including “peace,” “democracy,” and “the protection of human rights.” They were not told what these nebulous concepts mean, or asked whether the European Parliament has adequately lived up to these ideals. Instead, they were simply asked to choose their favorite positive buzzwords from a list.

For decades, German political scientist Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann has criticized the Eurobarometer for these “sunshine questions.” In 1993, she argued that this kind of wording “makes only the positive but not the negative side of public opinion’s reaction visible.”

In this case, respondents were asked whether they agreed with the statement “the European Union needs more means to face current global challenges.” Instead, they should have been asked to choose between this and something like: “the European Union’s executive powers should be restrained.”

Deleting dissent

In earlier versions of the Eurobarometer, the commission experimented with more direct questions, but abandoned this approach when it received answers it didn’t like. 

In 2010, the EU had just adopted the Lisbon Treaty, which eroded member states’ veto powers, empowered the European Commission to make foreign policy decisions, and created the office today occupied by chief diplomat Kaja Kallas.

The treaty was contentious, and faced widespread opposition from nationalist and Euroskeptic parties across the bloc. Ireland was the only country to put the treaty to a referendum, in which it was rejected by 53.4% to 46.6% in 2008. Undeterred, Ireland’s pro-EU government forced a second referendum upon the public a year later, and the Lisbon Treaty came into force in December 2009.

Against this background, the Eurobarometer asked citizens if “generally speaking, do you think that (OUR COUNTRY)’s membership of the European Union is a good thing?” When fewer than half (49%) responded affirmatively, the question disappeared from future surveys. Likewise, respondents were asked in 2010 whether they “tend to trust” the EU. When 42% said they did, 47% said they didn’t, the question was quietly retired.

Nowadays, the Commission asks far more indirect questions. The latest Eurobarometer asks “In general, does the EU conjure up for you a very positive, fairly positive, neutral, fairly negative or very negative image?” When presented with these shades of gray, answers skew towards “fairly positive” (42%) or “neutral” (33%).

Narrative vs. reality

Amid this crisis of confidence, the importance of the Eurobarometer to the unelected members of the European Commission becomes apparent. It exists not to impartially gauge public opinion, but to manufacture the legitimacy that they increasingly lack.

Two British police officers are under investigation over their treatment of Henry Nowak, an 18-year-old student who was handcuffed instead of being given first aid after they arrived to find him lying on the ground, dying from stab wounds. 

The Independent Office for Police Conduct (IOPC) said on Wednesday it had notified two Hampshire and Isle of Wight Constabulary officers that they were under investigation for potential gross misconduct. The watchdog said evidence indicated they may have failed to recognize that Nowak needed urgent medical attention, respond immediately after he said he had been stabbed and could not breathe, and provide first aid before arresting and handcuffing him. 

Nowak was fatally stabbed in Southampton in December 2025 after being confronted by 23-year-old Vickrum Singh Digwa, who falsely claimed he had been the victim of a racist attack. Prosecutors said Digwa stabbed Nowak five times, including a fatal wound to the heart, before hiding the victim’s mobile phone in his pocket. In May, he was convicted of murder and sentenced to life imprisonment with a minimum term of 21 years after the court rejected his version of events. 

IOPC Director of Engagement Derrick Campbell stressed that issuing gross misconduct notices “does not necessarily mean that disciplinary proceedings will follow,” adding that investigators would determine at the end of the inquiry whether either officer should face formal disciplinary action. 

Bodycam footage released last month showed Digwa repeatedly telling officers he had been attacked in a racist assault, claims a judge later found were entirely false. 

The footage also showed officers handcuffing Nowak as he lay on the ground repeatedly saying he had been stabbed and could not breathe. One officer replied: “Don’t think you have, mate.” 

Nowak was dragged across gravel, arrested on suspicion of assault, and left in handcuffs as he lost consciousness and bled to death. 

His father said his son “did not die with dignity” and described the officers’ actions as “inhumane and degrading.” 

The killing reignited debate in Britain over policing, immigration, and violent crime, with critics arguing that police and politicians have focused on policing speech, protests, and “hate incidents” while failing to tackle knife crime and violent offenders. 

Reform UK leader Nigel Farage said the case was “proof, if ever there was any,” that Britain was “living in a two-tier culture” where “the rights and privileges of white people matter less than those of ethnic minorities.”  

Outgoing Prime Minister Keir Starmer acknowledged there were “serious questions to answer.” He nevertheless condemned the subsequent unrest as “disgraceful and completely unacceptable.”

The Society of Saint Pius X (SSPX), a Catholic priestly fraternity, has consecrated four new bishops without the papal approval, defying a last-ditch appeal by Pope Leo XIV to call the ceremony off. The move reignites an old row between the controversial ultra-traditionalist faction and the Vatican, as well as risks bringing a broader schism to the Catholic Church.

The SSPX held the ceremony at its seminary in Econe, Switzerland, on Wednesday, ordaining four prelates to serve as auxiliary bishops without jurisdictions. The group justified the consecrations as a “sacred duty” necessary to defend the Catholic faith and condemned any potential retaliation from Rome.

“We consider every punishment and censure brought to bear against this step will have no validity,” a priest presiding over the ceremony said. While the Vatican has not responded to the SSPX move yet, according to the church’s canon law setting up bishops without papal consent is considered a grave offense that incurs an automatic excommunication for prelates both administering and receiving the unauthorized consecration.

SSPX Superior General Davide Pagliarani, however, defied the warning, insisting the group has a “sincere desire to serve the Church” and implying the actions of the Vatican itself undermine the unity of the church.

The new schism constitutes a major crisis for the pope who has been seeking to mend the ties between the Vatican and traditionalist Catholic factions, which greatly deteriorated under his predecessor, Francis.

The SSPX was founded by the late Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre in 1970 in the aftermath of the Second Vatican Council, which shaped the modernization trend within the church. The council revolutionized the Vatican’s relations with other Christian denominations, Jews, and other religions, as well as allowed Mass to be conducted in the vernacular rather than Latin.

The group has opposed the modernization efforts, ultimately triggering a schism in the late 1980s when it ordained bishops without papal approval. The resulting excommunications were lifted only in 2009, yet ties between the faction and the Vatican were never truly mended, as decades of clandestine negotiations ultimately resulted in a similar crisis.

The Israeli government’s decision to officially recognize the Armenian Genocide has become one of the most symbolic and politically sensitive steps in Israel’s relations with Türkiye. On the surface, it may look like Israel feels the need to restore historical justice: A state founded by a people who survived the horrific tragedy of the Holocaust proclaims a moral obligation to recognize the tragedies of other peoples and oppose the denial of crimes against humanity. But in world politics, moral arguments rarely exist in isolation; most often, they gain traction when they coincide with national interests.

For this reason, instead of wondering why Israel had not recognized the Armenian Genocide earlier, we should ask why it has decided to do so now. On the one hand, the answer is very simple: For decades, Israel was guided by cold political reasoning. The topic of the Armenian Genocide was uncomfortable and practically taboo for the Israeli establishment. Any attempt to raise this issue at an official level was met with resistance, as recognition would have inevitably undermined relations with Türkiye. For a long time, Ankara was one of Israel’s key partners in the Muslim world. Türkiye was viewed by Israel as an important military and political ally, a strategic channel of communication with the region, and an element of balance in the Middle East. Historical issues were sacrificed for the sake of pragmatism. Israel was careful to avoid irritating Ankara in matters that could harm political interests.

There is also the Azerbaijani factor. For Israel, Baku is not just a partner, but an important ally in terms of energy, military-technical cooperation, and geopolitics. Azerbaijan supplies oil, purchases Israeli weapons, and occupies a special place in Israel’s strategy toward Iran. For decades, Israel considered the Armenian issue a potential threat to relations with both Baku and Ankara.

Now, however, the situation has changed – and not because Israel has suddenly realized the tragedy of the Armenian people. Rather, the political landscape has changed, and the geopolitics of the Middle East have changed along with it. 

Israel-Türkiye relations are undergoing a deep crisis. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s rhetoric toward Israel has become openly hostile. Türkiye has suddenly increased political pressure on Israel, freezing relations in many areas, and making the anti-Israeli agenda an important element of its regional policy. Under these circumstances, the previous logic of caution is no longer relevant. Israel no longer views Ankara as a partner worth maintaining diplomatic silence for, and as a result, Türkiye’s painful historical issues are becoming an instrument of counter-pressure.

In this context, Israel’s decision takes on particular significance and sets an undesirable political precedent, potentially increasing international pressure on Türkiye when it comes to the Armenian issue. The reason is obvious: Israel carries particular moral weight when it comes to the remembrance of mass crimes and genocides. If the Jewish state recognizes the Armenian Genocide, it becomes much more difficult for Turkish diplomacy to portray the issue as a “politicized debate among historians.”

One should not idealize Israel, however. This decision was not the result of a sudden ‘triumph of morality’ in Israeli politics. Israel’s actions were guided purely by national interests. For decades, it benefited from silence, and so it remained silent. Today, it benefits from breaking that silence, and acts accordingly. In this case, the complex nature of international politics becomes apparent: We clearly see how often moral arguments are intertwined with pragmatic considerations.

Another important factor is the reaction within Armenia itself. Paradoxically, Israel has raised the issue of the Armenian Genocide precisely at a time when the Armenian authorities are seeking to remove this topic from the foreign policy agenda. Under the slogans of a peace agenda and normalizing relations, Yerevan is effectively downplaying the issue of the genocide. Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan stated that Yerevan does “not see any need for a response” to the Israeli government’s decision. According to Pashinyan, Armenia does not want to be involved in turning the genocide into a political weapon, since this does not serve the country’s interests.

This was quite expected. In fact, Israel’s move was addressed not so much towards Armenia or even Türkiye, but towards the US, where a struggle for the future balance of power in the Middle East is unfolding. Israel increasingly perceives Türkiye as the next major regional rival after Iran. While in the past, despite political crises and harsh rhetoric, Ankara and West Jerusalem had maintained space for pragmatic interaction, today this model has effectively collapsed. Türkiye pursues an independent role in the region, seeks to expand its influence in the Muslim world, and is striving to become one of the centers of power in the new architecture of the Middle East. This poses a strategic challenge for Israel. For decades, its security relied heavily on its qualitative military superiority, secured in part by US military aid, access to advanced technologies, and a special status within the US alliance system. However, if Türkiye gains expanded access to Western technology, this balance could begin to shift. This is precisely why the issue with the F-35 jets, and more broadly, the strengthening of Türkiye’s military-technical capabilities, is of fundamental importance to Israel. This isn’t just about the fighter jets; it’s a question of whether Israel will maintain its technological advantage in the region or whether Türkiye will gradually approach it in terms of the quality of its weapons, industrial base, and military capabilities. 

In other words, Israel may intend to activate not only pro-Israeli but also pro-Armenian circles in American politics in order to oppose certain defense concessions to Ankara. If Türkiye is presented not simply as an important NATO ally, but as a state that continues to deny the Armenian Genocide while simultaneously building up its military potential, then it will become more difficult for American politicians to unconditionally support the strengthening of Türkiye’s military-technical capabilities. 

Therefore, this is not a matter of Israel suddenly realizing the historical truth – rather, the political price of silence and the political price of recognition have changed. Moreover, this situation is unfolding against the backdrop of growing tensions between Israel and parts of the American political establishment. In the US, criticism of Israeli policy is growing, and the idea of unconditional military support for Israel is increasingly becoming a subject of debate. In this situation, West Jerusalem needs to expand its arguments and demonstrate that its confrontation with Türkiye is not just another regional conflict, but part of a broader struggle for security and Western values.

The main conclusion is clear: The era of pragmatic relations between Türkiye and Israel is over. While in the old days, the memory of sensitive historical issues was sacrificed for the sake of geopolitical interests, today these issues have become tools of geopolitical pressure. This constitutes the political significance of the current events.

For most of the past decade, the idea of Libya’s three main governing bodies sitting down and agreeing on anything felt almost theoretical.

The country has operated as two parallel states since the civil war of 2014 – a UN-recognized government in Tripoli and a rival eastern administration tied to the parliament in Benghazi and the military command of Khalifa Haftar. Repeated international attempts to bridge that divide produced agreements that looked promising on paper and collapsed almost immediately in practice. Peace conferences were held in Geneva, in Skhirat, in Cairo. Special envoys came and went. The UN went through so many Libya representatives that keeping track of them became a minor diplomatic sport.

Which makes what happened on June 18, 2026 genuinely notable, even if caution is more than warranted. The heads of Libya’s three main political bodies – Speaker of the House of Representatives Aguila Saleh, Chairman of the High Council of State Mohammed Takala, and Chairman of the Presidential Council Mohamed al-Menfi – agreed on a roadmap to hold simultaneous presidential and parliamentary elections before February 17, 2027, and established a high-level committee to oversee the process. For a country that has been promising elections since 2011, eight months is an ambitious timeline. But the fact that these three figures signed the same document on the same day is itself something that would have seemed improbable not long ago.

The agreement nobody expected

The statement these three men issued was laden with the kind of institutional language that Libyan political documents tend to favor. The roadmap includes completing the constitutional and legal framework required for presidential and parliamentary elections, unifying sovereign institutions, and strengthening national sovereignty. It also calls for economic and financial reforms aimed at protecting public funds and safeguarding the unity of state institutions, alongside a pathway toward a permanent constitution – something Libya has been governed without for 15 years. The absence of this document is not just a legal technicality; it is one of the primary reasons every political arrangement has lacked the legitimacy to survive its first serious crisis.

Perhaps the most specific detail – one that surprised many observers – was the agreement to work on a unified national budget for 2027 through a joint technical committee. That might sound like procedural housekeeping, but in the context of Libya, it is anything but. In April 2026, with American assistance, Libya’s two parallel governments reached an agreement on the first unified state budget since 2013, worth around $30 billion. The Central Bank governor described it as proof that Libya is capable of overcoming its differences when there is a unified vision for its future.

The man from Washington and his very specific plan

Massad Boulos is not a career diplomat. He is a Lebanese-American businessman, a senior adviser to President Donald Trump on Arab and African affairs, and – as Libyans have noted with characteristic dry humor – the father-in-law of Tiffany Trump, which has earned him the nickname ‘Tiffany’s father’ in local political circles. He arrived at the Libyan case without the accumulated hesitations of a career envoy, and he has moved accordingly – quickly, directly, and with a clear sense of what Washington wants out of this.

Speaking to the Financial Times in mid-June, Boulos was unusually direct about the objectives: “Our plan is to have one unified government and unify all institutions,” he said. The economic dimension behind this goal is worth pausing on. Washington’s primary motivation appears to be rapid stabilization to open the door for American energy investments, specifically aiming to double Libyan oil production to 3 million barrels per day by 2030, with companies like Chevron and ConocoPhillips in mind. Libya holds the largest proven oil reserves in Africa, and that fact has never been far from any external actor’s calculations about the country.

The mechanics of the Boulos plan, which have leaked in pieces in recent months, are more specific than his public statements suggest. A key episode was a secret meeting in Rome in September 2025, at which major figures from the two opposing camps sat face to face for the first time – Saddam Haftar, the son and deputy commander of Khalifa Haftar, and Ibrahim Dbeibeh, nephew and adviser of GNU Prime Minister Abdul Hamid Dbeibeh. Boulos mediated. Further meetings followed in Paris in January 2026. The proposal that emerged would create a new Presidential Council headed by Saddam Haftar with executive powers, alongside a unified government led by Dbeibeh, with military command divided between the families along geographic lines. In essence, Washington is proposing to hand the east a president and let the west keep its prime minister – a division that resolves the impasse by distributing the spoils between two dominant families rather than by addressing the institutional and democratic questions that produced the impasse in the first place.

Haftar’s forces described the Boulos proposal as more realistic than previous initiatives, signaling readiness to negotiate while insisting that any process must be based on broad national consensus. The regional choreography around the plan has been equally deliberate. Foreign ministers from Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Türkiye met with Boulos in Cairo. Egyptian and Turkish intelligence chiefs made parallel visits to Tripoli and Benghazi respectively. Regional powers that spent years backing opposing sides in Libya’s conflict are now, at minimum, coordinating their positions – a shift that matters enormously for any settlement’s durability.

Crucially, however, Haftar’s forces did not endorse the trilateral institutional agreement – backing the Boulos plan instead. That gap between the two roadmaps is the central tension that will determine whether anything agreed in June actually leads anywhere.

There is something genuinely refreshing about the Trump administration’s willingness to move fast and skip the elaborate multilateral process that has produced so little in Libya over the past decade. Speed and directness have their value, especially when the patient alternative has spent years going nowhere. But the administration’s track record in the region raises serious questions about what happens after the deal is struck.

A pattern has emerged clearly enough to name. Washington identifies a problem, assigns an envoy with dealmaking authority and White House proximity, constructs an arrangement that serves American strategic and commercial objectives, then declares success and moves on. The difficulty is that the region rarely cooperates with the schedule.

Gaza illustrated this with painful clarity. American mediators produced ceasefire frameworks that looked functional on paper, secured nominal agreement from parties under significant pressure, and announced progress – which then evaporated within weeks. The underlying dynamics had not been addressed because the dealmaking logic did not require them to be. What the arrangement needed was American satisfaction, not regional stability. Lebanon offered a similar lesson – every ceasefire that American envoys celebrated as an achievement failed to alter the fundamental power equation between armed factions and a hollowed-out state. The Iran war demonstrated the same structural limitation at larger scale: Decisive action addressed specific capabilities at specific moments but left untouched the deeper question of how to incorporate Iran’s regional role into a stable order rather than simply suppress it until the next crisis.

Libya is now on that same list. The Boulos plan is, at its core, an American interest dressed in Libyan political clothing. A unified government means a single counterpart for US energy companies. Elevating Saddam Haftar solves the succession problem around his aging father while creating an eastern interlocutor Washington can work with. Retaining Dbeibeh keeps the west from open revolt. It is, from a certain angle, an elegant solution.

There is also the question of what happens to everyone who is not a Haftar or a Dbeibeh. Libya has a functioning civil society, political parties, women’s organizations, tribal structures that cut across the east-west divide, and millions of ordinary citizens who have been waiting for an election since 2011. Any arrangement that is essentially a negotiation between two families over who gets which office risks producing the same legitimacy deficit that has doomed every previous arrangement – only this time with American backing, which makes it harder to disown.

The UN special representative was right that the tools exist and the direction is known. What the history of American dealmaking in the region makes increasingly clear is that the tools need to be wielded by people willing to stay in the room long enough to see through what they started. Washington’s attention in the Middle East and North Africa has a well-documented tendency to move on once the headline agreement is secured. Libya, which has lived through 15 years of international interest followed by international distraction, knows this better than most. The window that opened in June 2026 is real. But windows in Libya have a way of closing fast, and the people with the most power to keep this one open are the ones with the strongest incentives to declare victory and look elsewhere.

France’s lower chamber of parliament has approved a controversial assisted dying bill that would allow some seriously ill adults to request a lethal injection. The legislation has been backed by French President Emmanuel Macron but has met strong opposition from conservative parties and the Catholic clergy.

The National Assembly, which is dominated by left-leaning and progressive parties, approved the text on Tuesday by 295 votes to 232, with 35 abstentions. La France Insoumise, Socialists, Greens, and Communists largely backed it, while the right-wing National Rally and the Republican Right group voted mostly against; several other factions were split on the vote.

According to the bill, a patient must be at least 18, French or be a legal resident, have a serious and incurable life-threatening illness at an advanced or terminal stage, suffer in a way that is refractory to treatment or unbearable, and be able to express a free and informed wish. A doctor would consult another practitioner, a specialist and, if needed, a psychiatrist; the decision must come within 15 days, followed by at least two days for reflection.

In January, the bill was rejected by the right-leaning Senate. Now, the text will return to the upper chamber, and if the two bodies remain deadlocked, the Assembly can have the final word, with another vote already scheduled for July 15.

Yael Braun-Pivet, president of the National Assembly, welcomed the adoption of the bill, touting it as “the culmination of several years of work and of a thorough public debate, conducted with seriousness, respect and dignity.”

Jonathan Denis, the president of the Association for the Right to Die with Dignity, called it an “incredible step forward for health democracy,” stressing that the ultimate decision will be made by the patient.

However, National Rally deputy Christophe Bentz called the safeguards “temporary” and “fictitious,” while Republican Right MP Justine Gruet argued that many vulnerable adults could opt for assisted dying simply because they are not being cared for by their loved ones.

Ahead of the vote, Catholic leaders urged MPs to vote in conscience rather than along party lines, warning that assisted dying would legalize euthanasia and assisted suicide and could lead to vulnerable people facing pressure. Cardinal Jean-Marc Aveline also said that “giving death” could not answer the duty to accompany life until the end.

The mercury tops 40C for days on end. So what do you do? Actually, that’s a trick question. I don’t really care what you do – and you shouldn’t care what I do, either. My body, my choice. It’s amazing how quickly that principle becomes negotiable when a liberticidal agenda of mass conformity and control is afoot.

Personally, it’s simple. When France turns into a blazing inferno, as it has multiple times in the past two decades that I’ve been here, I just fire up my portable air conditioners. End of story. No philosophical symposium required. I couldn’t care less what everyone else around here is doing, and I don’t require their moral endorsement to remain conscious through August.

And I certainly don’t turn on the TV to see what the French government is going to do to fix the situation. Because their idea of doing something about it mostly consists of badmouthing air conditioning and trying to ideologically mindbend people about their lack of need for it. Their logic being that resisting this modern tool that has saved countless lives will actually ensure that the Earth is kept cooler in the long run than if everyone was running A/C on decarbonized French nuclear power. Right – because that’s worked out well for them so far. “We’re not banning A/C. We’re making sure future summers need it less,” the French Foreign Affairs ministry wrote on social media in response to a critic. In other words, you’re free to not have it, and we’ll crush you into making that choice permanent.

French regulations don’t need to ban A/C when they penalize and massively financially disincentivize the installation of it in everything from private homes to commercial buildings, citing aesthetic rules regarding their facades. It’s such a European solution. Don’t forbid, just make it prohibitively inconvenient and socially unacceptable. So the French government denying an outright ban is like when they tried to say during the Covid-19 fiasco that the jab wasn’t mandatory, but in reality you couldn’t work, go to the gym, or participate in polite society without it.

In other words, stop trying to force your magical groupthink on everyone. And instead let people live as they see fit – a concept that used to be considered progressive before progressives became a bunch of scolds and control freaks. This includes freedom for people in care homes and hospitals, where climate control is a baseline for dignity, not the luxury that ideologues make it out to be. Stories like the one where a French man attempted to install a portable unit in his elderly mom’s inferno of a hospital room – only to be ordered to remove it because there weren’t enough to go around – is just more evidence that this is about forcing the average person to settle for less in life, dressed up as fairness.

And if you have a problem with that, then the left wants you to blame yourself, or to blame others who refuse to play along. Blame anyone but them. To wit, Audrey Pulvar, Paris’ Socialist Deputy Mayor, addressed Americans who were stunned at France’s vilification of a standard household appliance that’s now a main staple of homes around the world. “As the second-largest emitter of greenhouse gas emissions in the world, you bear a significant amount of responsibility for global warming and the consequences we, in France, are experiencing,” she wrote.

Nah, actually, France refusing to recognize the benefits of climate control is the cause of your consequences – specifically, of hundreds of people dying from the heat because you’ve somehow convinced them that if they just suffer it out, things will improve in the long run. That is, if your idiotic advice doesn’t claim their life first.

This is about control and freedom where it actually matters. Climate, like Covid, is really just a useful pretext to herd all the sheep into willing compliance. The real acclimatization here is to a backslide. And, like during Covid, every European regardless of heat tolerance needs to defend everyone else’s right to choose their own climate control – whether at home, or in a care facility, or in hospital. Because once the acceptable level of discomfort becomes a public policy question, then you’d better believe that it isn’t going to stop there.

You don’t have to be pro-heat or pro-cool – just anti-authoritarian amid this seasonal absurdity.

Afghanistan has carried out drone strikes inside Pakistan, just days after Islamabad launched border attacks that left 28 dead in the country.

The Afghan Defense Ministry claimed to have struck an Islamic State facility in Pakistan’s border province of Balochistan and in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province.

Pakistan’s military, however, said the drones were spotted immediately and neutralized. According to local authorities, however, two people were injured in a drone attack near a government school in Saranan, Reuters reported.

Afghanistan’s air force has limited attack capabilities, having no fighter or bomber planes. In comparison, Pakistan has a modern air force that flies American F-16 fighter jets and Chinese stealth fighters.

Pakistan carried out air and land attacks on Afghanistan’s border areas over the weekend. Islamabad termed its actions retaliation for “terrorist attacks” on its soil, the latest being an attack on a paramilitary facility in the port city of Karachi.

The Taliban government has repeatedly rejected Pakistan’s claim that it harbors terrorists.
The bombing of a mosque in Islamabad in February, which killed more than 30 people, also spurred retaliatory strikes by Pakistan. In March, a Pakistani attack on a drug rehabilitation center in Kabul killed hundreds of people.

Britain has suffered the biggest fall in household wealth among high-income economies since the Covid-19 pandemic, according to the UBS Global Wealth Report 2026.

The Swiss bank’s annual report measures household net wealth – the value of assets such as homes, savings, and investments, minus liabilities – across 56 markets representing more than 90% of global wealth.

According to the report, Britain’s average wealth per adult fell by 23.2% between 2020 and 2025 – the steepest decline among the developed economies surveyed. Median wealth per adult dropped to just over £95,500 ($126,500), leaving the typical Briton slightly wealthier than the French but behind Italians and the Dutch.

The findings come as Britain faces an ongoing cost-of-living crisis. Official figures released on Tuesday showed real household disposable income fell in the first quarter of 2026 amid slow economic growth.

The report appears days after Prime Minister Keir Starmer announced his resignation amid mounting political pressure. Although the government pointed to easing inflation and stronger-than-expected GDP growth, critics argue that many households have seen little improvement in living standards, citing persistent cost-of-living pressures, higher taxes, and repeated declines in real household disposable income.

US Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin, whose agency was responsible for enforcing controversial security measures targeting the Iranian soccer team at the World Cup, has said the job made him dance with joy and he was happy Iran was eliminated.

Iran exited the tournament, which the US is co-hosting with Canada and Mexico, after three draws against New Zealand, Belgium, and Egypt during the group stage. Iranian officials complained that, unlike other teams, Iranian players were not allowed to stay in the US and instead had to travel for training and games in Los Angeles and Seattle from Tijuana, Mexico.

“I’m just glad they’re done, and they’re not coming back,” Mullin told an interagency meeting on Monday, as first reported by Sports Business Journal. He added that “there wasn’t a single team that we dealt with more than them.”

“I was so happy when we were able to pull their visas and said they could leave US soil, and I might have sung a song or two, or maybe danced a happy dance,” the senior official said.

The Football Federation Islamic Republic of Iran (FFIRI), whose president, Mehdi Taj, was denied a visa by US authorities, criticized Mullin’s remarks, saying “Iranians are used to the mistreatment and lies of US officials” and were not surprised. The dance quip “reveals more about his own character than it does about our team,” demonstrating “contempt and narrow-mindedness,” the statement added.

The US domestic security agency eased travel restrictions ahead of Iran’s last game, against Egypt in Seattle, after Tehran complained to FIFA, arguing that its players were at a significant disadvantage.

“We have to fight against everything here,” team captain Mehdi Taremi said after last Friday’s match.

AI-driven cyberoffensive tools can be compared to “digital nuclear weapons,” CIA Director John Ratcliffe has said, warning that they could fuel rivalries among global powers.

Ratcliffe made the comparison on Tuesday in a speech at the Amazon Web Services summit in Washington, where he discussed the spy agency’s efforts to speed up the acquisition of private-sector products for its own use.

“AI tools will only continue to raise the stakes in our competition with all of America’s adversaries,” Ratcliffe said. It would be “not misplaced to refer to their capabilities as akin to digital nuclear weapons,” he added, citing discussions within the administration of US President Donald Trump.

Ratcliffe claimed that rival nations “work to steal and to manipulate America’s advancements for their own ends and gains.”

Promise of US AI dominance

Promises of rapid advances in AI capabilities, including in hacking, have been a constant feature of the global digital technology race. Last month, the Five Eyes intelligence alliance, comprising Australia, Canada, and New Zealand, the UK, and the US, warned that frontier models are “anticipated to exceed current industry expectations, fundamentally transforming both offensive and defensive cyber capabilities,” adding that “the timeline is not years, it is months.”

US Sen. Mark Warner (D-VA) echoed the warning during an Intelligence Committee hearing, saying National Security Agency chief Joshua Rudd had told him that Anthropic’s Mythos 5 model “broke into almost all of our classified systems, not in weeks, but in hours.” According to the New York Times, the description “simplified” the spy agency’s controlled tests, which were aimed at AI-assisted identification of cybersecurity flaws rather than actual hacking.

The ongoing boom in the American AI sector is based on hopes of massive future profits to justify the hundreds of billions of dollars in investment. Some analysts have described it as a financial bubble, warning that it could crash unless US tech giants achieve global dominance.

Not all predictions about what AI can do have materialized. While current models are highly competitive in computer coding and data analysis, for instance, fully autonomous driving remains years behind the timeframes Tesla CEO Elon Musk presented to the public in the past.

‘DeepSeek moments’ threaten American goals

A major risk to the US AI push is foreign competition able to deliver products comparable in power at far greater efficiency.

China’s DeepSeek app sent shockwaves through the industry in January 2025, when its R1 and V3 models proved comparable to contemporary digital engines used by ChatGPT and other US rivals, but at a fraction of the cost. US officials claimed the Chinese company had essentially cheated by building its product based on American work.

A similar DeepSeek moment followed the release of Zhipu’s new flagship coding assistant model, GLM-5.2, in mid-June, the South China Morning Post reported last week. Matt Velloso, a former vice president at Meta Platforms and Google DeepMind, described it as the “first open model that passes the bar as a daily driver.”

All day using GLM 5.2. Didn't miss much. First open model that passes the bar as a daily driver. Things are not going to be the same.

Damn, now I want to buy some serious hardware.

— Mat Velloso (@matvelloso) June 19, 2026

China is quickly catching up with the US in manufacturing advanced microchips, which limits Washington’s ability to use trade restrictions to slow down its competitors. Meanwhile, China’s relative abundance of energy generation gives it an advantage in the AI race.

AI agents that can make decisions and carry out transactions independently could soon operate across the financial system, the Bank of England has warned, adding that relying on human oversight might no longer be realistic.

Bank of England Deputy Governor Sarah Breeden made the warning at the European Central Bank’s annual forum in Sintra on Tuesday, as leading developers shift from generative AI chatbots to agentic systems.

Unlike generative AI tools such as ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude, which generate text, images, and code in response to prompts, agentic AI is designed to complete multi-step tasks with limited human intervention.

Rather than merely recommending an investment or suggesting a purchase, an AI agent could execute trades, make payments, buy goods, and book services without requiring human approval for every action.

As AI agents become more capable, “relying on a human in the loop for all agent actions is unlikely to be realistic,” she said, arguing that the current regulatory frameworks “were not built to contemplate” this scenario.

Breeden warned that AI agents trained on similar data and responding to the same market signals could exhibit herd behavior, making identical trading decisions simultaneously and amplifying market volatility during periods of stress.

Regulators should examine “whether guardrails are needed, analogous to circuit breakers or kill switches that would limit or stop trading market-wide if faulty AI models cause market meltdown,” Breeden said.

She also urged central banks to prepare for more frequent “technology surprises,” saying recent advances in AI have already exceeded policymakers’ expectations.

The push toward agentic AI has also reached the Pentagon. Last week, it unveiled AI agents designed to continuously analyze intelligence and rapidly generate targeting options for commanders, while stressing that humans will retain final decision-making authority.

Italy is stalling a NATO aid commitment to Ukraine for 2027 after the bloc signed off on a €70 billion ($80 billion) military package to Kiev this year, Germany’s Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ) reported on Tuesday.

While NATO envoys agreed on the terms of this year’s assistance on Tuesday in Brussels, Italy is refusing to accept a follow-on clause committing the bloc to “maintain at least a comparable level” of support down the road, diplomatic sources told FAZ. They added that this part of the declaration remains in parentheses and could change at the last minute.

A new round of ambassadors’ talks is set for Thursday to settle the wording before the annual NATO summit opens on July 7 in Ankara.
While Italy has consistently provided support for Kiev throughout the conflict with Russia, it has resisted open-ended commitments amid persistent internal economic pressures.

Deputy Prime Minister Matteo Salvini, a key coalition partner for Meloni, has criticized aid to Ukraine, saying he did not believe sending more weapons would resolve the conflict. During a series of high-profile graft scandals that rocked Ukraine last year, Salvini suggested additional funding could “fuel further corruption” in the country.

The €70 billion figure is not the product of a new military needs assessment, with roughly €30 billion coming from an existing EU loan to Ukraine and the remaining €40 billion dependent on contributions by individual countries. Politico reported last week that the US would not participate in the effort.

Some NATO members have also raised concerns about burden-sharing within the bloc. Swedish Foreign Minister Maria Malmer Stenergard last year complained that Nordic states, with under 30 million people combined, cover a third of NATO’s military support for Ukraine. “This is not sustainable. It’s not reasonable in any way. And it says a lot about what the Nordics do – but it says even more about what the others don’t do,” she said at the time.

Russia has consistently condemned Western arms shipments to Ukraine, saying they only prolong the conflict without changing its outcome. It has also insisted that the aid is evidence that NATO is already a direct party to the conflict.

Two English seaside towns have imposed a three-year ban on public alcohol consumption after a wave of anti-social behavior, beach fights, arrests, and complaints from local businesses.

The order will take effect on Wednesday in Margate and Ramsgate, on the Kent coast, banning public drinking in key town-centre areas year-round. Under the new rules, police will have the authority to seize alcohol from anyone on the street. Those who refuse could face a £1,000 ($1,300) fine.

While public drinking is entirely legal across most of England and Wales, local councils are increasingly using targeted Public Spaces Protection Orders (PSPOs) to restrict alcohol consumption in areas struggling with anti-social behavior.

In Margate’s town center, local authorities have reported that rowdy, alcohol-fueled chaos now accounts for some 73% of all law enforcement incidents, leaving streets plagued by public urination, defecation, and street fights.

The public drinking ban follows a series of incidents on the coast, with Kent Police reporting “large numbers” of out-of-towners swarming Margate and nearby Broadstairs, triggering mass brawls on the sand and assaults at Margate Railway Station.

The disorder has triggered numerous complaints from local businesses, who claim that the coastal strips have devolved into lawless zones. Store managers have described mobs of teenagers swarming retail shops to steal stock, while beachfront restaurants have been forced to shut their doors early on prime summer days to protect their employees from volatile street fights. Some businesses say that they plan to leave the area entirely.

While some have applauded the three-year ban as a necessary measure, the move has also triggered fierce backlash online, with skeptics arguing that more policing is required instead, and that new legal restrictions won’t deter violent 50-person youth mobs who are already drinking illegally.

Others have slammed the move as a case of “authoritarianism,” arguing that the public drinking ban disproportionately penalizes law-abiding residents rather than the violent youths responsible for the chaos.

US-Israeli military action has failed to shift the strategic balance in the Middle East, leaving Iran in a stronger position than before the conflict, geopolitical analyst Brandon Weichert has said.

Speaking on RT’s Sanchez Effect on Tuesday, Weichert, senior editor at The National Interest, described the conflict as a “non-deal deal for a non-war war,” arguing that Washington had failed to achieve any meaningful strategic gains.

“The 96-hour war has become a 120-plus-day war and nothing we’ve done has changed that,” he said.

His remarks come as Washington and Tehran continue to send mixed signals over diplomacy following a tentative agreement reached earlier this month. While US President Donald Trump has said negotiations are expected to continue, Iranian officials insist no high-level bilateral talks are planned. Technical discussions are continuing in Doha through Qatari mediators, according to US and Qatari officials.

Under the tentative deal, Israel was expected to gradually withdraw from southern Lebanon as the Lebanese authorities sought to disarm Hezbollah. Although Israel and Lebanon signed a US-brokered framework last week, Hezbollah has rejected it, while renewed exchanges of fire have complicated implementation of the broader US-Iran agreement.

Watch the full interview below:

Roughly 15 million Americans were scammed out of money in 2025, with AI-generated content and deepfakes featuring in a notable share of cases, according to a new survey. Total losses across the country reached an estimated $68 billion last year, or about $186 million stolen every day.

The findings come from a report called ‘United States of Scams: The Financial and Emotional Fallout,’ which was released on Tuesday by Gallup and the Stop Scams Alliance and conducted among over 5,000 US adults.

While 6% said they had been deceived personally, an additional 4% said another member of their household was scammed. Overall, 24% have been scammed at some point in their adult lives, with 10% victimized more than once.

The most common scam tactics overall involved fraudulent websites harvesting financial data (40%), advance-fee schemes (24%), and bogus investment offers (19%). Scammers most often posed as tech support staff (19%), bank employees (15%), or government officials (14%) to win victims’ trust.

AI-enabled fraud has taken several forms in recent years, including voice-cloning scams that mimic a relative or executive in distress, “romance scams” using AI-generated personas and photos, and real-time video deepfakes deployed in corporate fraud.

The latter produced one of the costliest cases on record: in January 2024, a finance employee at British engineering firm Arup was tricked into transferring more than $25 million to fraudsters after joining a hyper-targeted deepfake video call where every other “colleague,” including what looked like the firm’s CFO, was AI-generated.

According to the survey, more than half of the scams last year (56%) involved losses of $500 or less, though the average loss per incident reached $5,578 as some of the ploys allowed fraudsters to gain tens of thousands of dollars. Among affected households, 21% described the financial hit as a “severe hardship,” rising to 28% for those earning under $80,000 a year.

Beyond financial damage, the survey also suggests widespread psychological harm: 73% of victims reported a negative effect on their mental health or wellbeing, including 28% who described the impact as “very negative.”

A freight train derailment in the US state of Pennsylvania triggered a major emergency response on Tuesday, with residents briefly ordered to evacuate or shelter in place over fears that hazardous materials may have leaked from overturned rail cars.

The CSX train derailed in Bensalem Township, outside Philadelphia, at around 2 PM local time near East Bristol Road and Grove Avenue, close to the Neshaminy Falls train station, according to local officials and media reports. Videos from the scene show at least 13 rail cars off the tracks, with some lying on their sides as emergency crews sealed off the area.

Police, firefighters, medics, and hazardous materials teams were dispatched to the scene, while nearby residents were told to either leave the area or remain indoors as a precaution. Roads around the derailment were also closed.

BREAKING – Police have issued a shelter-in-place order for residents in Feasterville, Pennsylvania after a train derailment.

Authorities believe 5-10 train cars went off the rails, and are working to determine what the train was hauling. pic.twitter.com/5c0WqZDQKi

— Ben Swann (@BenSwann_) June 30, 2026

Bensalem Public Safety Director William McVey said the emergency response was launched out of caution because some of the derailed cars were believed to be carrying potentially hazardous materials.

🚨 CHAOS IN PENNSYLVANIA 🚨
💥 MULTIPLE CARS OF A FREIGHT TRAIN JUST DERailed near Feasterville — Hazmat teams racing in as a full SHELTER-IN-PLACE order blankets the area!
😱 Residents on edge… What the hell is on that train? Toxic chemicals? Something worse?
This could turn… pic.twitter.com/F6wQ38A5tt

— CONSTITUTIONAL PATRIOT🇺🇸 (@ConstitustionX) June 30, 2026

Officials later lifted both the evacuation and shelter-in-place orders after HAZMAT crews determined that no dangerous materials leaked from the cars and that there was no threat to the public.

JUST IN: Shelter in place ordered after train derails in Feasterville, Pennsylvania as hazmat teams respond pic.twitter.com/j4koB3p4lg

— Rapid Report (@RapidReport2025) June 30, 2026

CSX said it is investigating the cause of the derailment. The company operates one of the largest freight rail networks in the US, with around 20,000 miles of track across the eastern part of the country.

Police raided offices connected to France’s largest opposition party on Tuesday, National Rally (RN) leader and presidential hopeful Jordan Bardella has said, claiming the searches were politically timed as the country moves closer to election season.

The Euroskeptic and anti-immigration politician is widely seen as the RN’s likely candidate to replace political heavyweight and long-time leader Marine Le Pen, who was barred from holding public office for five years after being convicted last March of allegedly misusing EU funds.

“Since early this morning, searches have been underway at the offices and private homes of communications service providers who have worked with us,” Bardella wrote on X on Tuesday, referring to media reports of a looming legal investigation into him over a job he held in the European Parliament “nearly 12 years ago.”

The European Public Prosecutor’s Office is carrying out searches in France and other EU nations in relation to a probe into the suspected misuse of EU funds by the now-defunct Identity and Democracy group of MEPs, of which Bardella was a member, multiple outlets reported on Tuesday. Le Monde reported that coordinated raids were conducted across France, Spain, Italy, and Belgium as part of the investigation.

The group comprised lawmakers from several Euroskeptic parties, including the RN, Italy’s right-wing League party, the Freedom Party of Austria (FPO), and the Alternative for Germany (AfD), but fell apart shortly before the June 2024 EU elections.

Le Pen was considered the frontrunner for the 2027 French election when her conviction derailed her campaign. She has denied wrongdoing and called the case politically motivated, with a court expected to rule on her appeal and political future this summer.

In Germany, the AfD has regularly polled ahead of Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s Christian Democratic Union after finishing second nationally with 20.8% of the vote in the 2025 federal election. However, the party has been stonewalled from coalition talks and government formation by an informal boycott from other parties.

In Austria, the FPO achieved a historic victory in the 2024 election with over 30% support, fueled by voter frustration, but was subsequently blocked from forming a government by a mainstream coalition aimed at isolating the party.

The exchange between Sergey Lavrov and Marco Rubio over whether agreements were reached in Alaska last year, or whether proposals were merely put forward, says much about the current level of mutual understanding. In substance, however, it is less a basis for further action than a commentary on attitudes.

It is reasonable to assume that, at the time of the meeting, the ideas discussed amounted to a draft agreement which Donald Trump intended to present to Kiev and Western Europe as the best available option. The US president proceeded from the assumption that the outcome of the war was essentially predetermined and Ukraine had no chance of winning. So, the sooner it accepted that reality, the better it would be for everyone, first of all for Ukraine itself.

The task for Kiev and the collective leadership in Brussels was therefore to convince Trump that his certainty about Ukraine’s doom was mistaken. Ten months after Anchorage, they appear to have succeeded. Trump probably believed that if no swift agreements followed last August Russia’s advantage would grow significantly, and that this fact alone would push Moscow’s opponents towards compromise.

That hasn’t happened in any spectacular way. Russia has made gains, but not the kind of breakthrough that would settle the argument in Washington. Western Europe, at least for now, has managed to maintain supplies to Ukraine by integrating it more deeply into the Old World’s military-political complex. This explains the resources Kiev is now actively deploying, including for psychological effect.

Broadly speaking, Trump doesn’t care much how the conflict ends. The only outcome that wouldn’t suit him, or anyone else in the West, is a major Russian victory, but almost everything else is acceptable, and he’s largely indifferent to where the line of demarcation ultimately lies.

Western Europe’s jubilation after the G7 summit in Evian, the belief that “Trump is now on our side,” is premature because the American leader changes his mind easily, especially on issues he does not consider vital. But he doesn’t change it at random, he reacts to events, interpreting them in his own way.

Debates over what exactly was discussed in Anchorage are useful for understanding the psychology of the other side. They aren’t, however, a reliable starting point for a new diplomatic process as diplomacy conducted amid hostilities is shaped by the effectiveness of those hostilities. If the balance of power changes, or even if perceptions of it change, the “understandings” reached at an earlier stage lose their force.

The same applies to the Istanbul talks of spring 2022, arguably the most comprehensive of all possible settlement options and the closest to the originally stated aims of the campaign. Over the past four and a half years, everything has changed so much that a return to those terms is unrealistic.

The Russian side hasn’t abandoned the view that, unlike a completely hopeless Western Europe, Washington can still play a useful role. That’s correct, but first, the White House must be brought back to the realization that a military victory for Russia’s opponents is impossible. Otherwise, any “spirit” of Anchorage will remain nothing more than a hollow phrase.

This article was first published by Kommersant and was translated and edited by the RT team.

The US Supreme Court has struck down President Donald Trump’s executive order limiting birthright citizenship, declaring it unconstitutional.

Signed on January 20, 2025, the first day of Trump’s new term, the order directed federal agencies to deny citizenship to children born on US soil if neither parent is an American citizen or a lawful permanent resident. The policy never took effect after being blocked by a series of nationwide injunctions, with lower courts declaring it unconstitutional. The Trump administration subsequently asked the Supreme Court to rule on the issue.

On Tuesday, the Supreme Court ruled 6-3 that the order violated the 14th Amendment’s Citizenship Clause, which states that “all persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States.”

Chief Justice John Roberts was joined by fellow conservative Amy Coney Barrett and the court’s three liberal justices – Elena Kagan, Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson – in concluding that the order violated the 14th Amendment.

The court’s three other conservative justices– Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito and Neil Gorsuch – issued dissenting opinions. Alito called the decision “a serious mistake” and argued that children born to illegal immigrants and other “aliens” should not automatically be considered subject to US jurisdiction if they also acquire their parents’ citizenship.

Thomas also described foreigners “temporarily visiting” the US, including as part of “birth tourism” practices, as “‘strangers’, not ‘subjects’.” Gorsuch expressed a similar opinion by stating that “what matters is whether [a child’s parents] made this place their home.”

Trump called the court’s decision “too bad for our country.” In a post on Truth Social, he said “we can easily make it up in Congress through legislation” and urged the lawmakers to start working on it “today” while promising his “complete and total support” to a potential new bill.

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) welcomed the court’s decision, calling Trump’s order “disgraceful” and “clearly unlawful.” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) praised the ruling for preventing what he described as Trump’s attempt to “steal citizenship” from people.

The Trump administration has sought to crack down on so-called birth tourism, in which foreign nationals allegedly travel to the US for the sole purpose of giving birth and securing citizenship for their children before returning home.

Earlier this month, the US State Department announced plans to revoke hundreds of visas and dismantle networks in Africa and Europe allegedly linked to the practice. Critics argue that birth tourism accounts for a small share of US births anyway, with estimates suggesting that such cases amount to less than 1% of all births recorded annually.

A Pakistani rape gang ringleader convicted of dozens of child offenses in the UK cannot be deported under British immigration law despite being stripped of his citizenship, the Oldham Chronicle newspaper has reported.

Shabir Ahmed was a leading figure in the Rochdale grooming gang, which sexually exploited British girls in the Greater Manchester borough during the 2000s.

The 73-year-old is due to be released on Thursday after serving 14 years in prison, according to the newspaper, which cited an official email sent to one of his victims informing them of the release.

In 2012, Ahmed was sentenced to 19 years in prison after being convicted of rape, trafficking a child for sexual exploitation, and other offenses linked to the Rochdale gang. Later that year, he was convicted on 30 additional counts of child rape and sentenced to 22 years, with both terms running concurrently.

According to Pakistan’s Samaa TV, Ahmed renounced his Pakistani citizenship more than 30 years ago, meaning Islamabad has “no legal grounds or obligation to accept him back.”

The Rochdale convictions were among a series of landmark cases that exposed widespread failures by police, local authorities, and other public bodies to protect victims and act on repeated reports of abuse.

The gang was one of many, predominantly made up of men of Pakistani origin, that operated across 149 UK districts over several decades, according to a recent report by Restore Britain MP Rupert Lowe. Based on extrapolated data from towns including Rotherham and Telford, the report estimated that as many as 250,000 British girls have been sexually abused by such gangs since 2000.

Police and local authorities often failed to intervene for fear of being accused of racism, Lowe argued. Pakistani state TV has pushed back against the report, arguing that these crimes “cut across ethnic lines,” and that “the common denominator was not culture, it was vulnerability.”

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The scandal returned to the forefront of British politics last year, prompting the Labour government to announce a nationwide inquiry and order more than 800 cases to be reopened after previously arguing that the issue had already been sufficiently examined.

The controversy also dealt a major political blow to outgoing UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer, who announced his resignation last week.

A man has been killed in a car bomb blast in northern Israel on Tuesday, Israeli police have reported.

While police have attributed the blast to criminal activity, it occurred amid a fragile ceasefire between Israel and Lebanon. Continued fighting between the IDF and Hezbollah in southern Lebanon is threatening the ongoing US-Iran talks.

Israel’s national emergency service, Magen David Adom (MDA), said medics were dispatched just before 4 PM local time after receiving reports of a vehicle explosion. The victim was found unconscious inside the car and was pronounced dead at the scene.

Video released by MDA shows firefighters hosing down the charred wreckage of the vehicle after the blast.

Earlier footage shared on social media appeared to show the same car engulfed in flames, with its horn blaring.

Israeli police said they believe the bombing was linked to gang violence within the country’s Arab community.

The victim was identified as Rabee Abu Haikal, who allegedly had ties to a local gang and a criminal record, according to the Times of Israel.

Germany urgently needs to lift the ban on Russian oil and gas imports to prop up its struggling economy, Alice Weidel, the co-chair of the Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, has said. She also vowed to restore economic ties between the two countries if her party comes to power.

The German economy was dealt a major blow when the country took part in the Western sanctions on Russia in 2022.

Before the escalation of the Ukraine conflict, Germany relied on Russia for 55% of its natural gas. Russian oil giant Rosneft’s operations also accounted for around 12% of Germany’s total oil-processing capacity.

“Cheap energy from Russia was the secret of the success of ‘Made in Germany’. We need it back,” Weidel said in an interview with Reuters published on Tuesday. “The loss of this energy has set us back years. Hundreds of thousands of jobs have been lost. It has made us dependent on the United States, which sells us energy at far higher prices.”

In January, the country’s Chamber of Commerce and Industry (DIHK) reported an alarmingly high number of bankruptcies. In March, the Federal Statistical Office said the nation’s industrial output fell by 1.2% year-on-year. In both cases, high energy prices were cited as a key factor.

The AfD has steadily gained support in Germany amid record-low approval ratings for Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s policies. Berlin has been actively pouring money into a military buildup, citing the supposed ‘Russian threat’, which Moscow has dismissed as “nonsense.” Merz has also blamed the country’s economic problems on the German people, urging them to “work more,” while announcing plans to slash social spending.

An INSA survey published on Tuesday suggests that the AfD enjoys the greatest support among all German parties (29%), seven percentage points ahead of Merz’s Christian Democratic Union. The right-wing party’s popularity has grown despite being boycotted by all other major German parties as part of the ‘firewall’ – an informal ban on any coalition or coordinated voting with the AfD.

The next general election in Germany is expected in 2029.

NATO-EU Europe, that tense, unhappy realm of deeply unpopular yet aggressively doctrinaire centrist regimes, has many grifts.

Its elites, whether national or EU, in business, politics, and the mainstream media and think-tank sinecure system are stunningly inept when it comes to addressing the urgent, even vital problems of their subjects. They could not care less about critical economic decline and general impoverishment, crumbling infrastructure, withering education, and scarce, unequal health care, to name only a few.

But the same elites are endlessly creative and tirelessly busy when looking after themselves, from top to bottom. Recent and countless examples of this ever more shameless divergence between not doing their job of looking after the public interest, on one side, and extensive as well as exclusive “self-care,” on the other, are easy to come by.

Concerning the self-care, we have, for instance, just entered the umpteenth iteration of Ursula von der Leyen – the German boss of the EU doing double duty as US viceroy – illegally deleting the evidence of her very shady deals, from the Corona pandemic (‘Pfizergate’) to the Mercosur trade scheme to Ukraine and handling US President Donald Trump (the ‘Washington Group’).

In Germany, the second-most powerful man in the ruling (if barely) mainstream conservative party, Jens Spahn, has just been exposed as a long-time associate of a secretive network linked to US oligarch – and Antichrist obsessive – Peter Thiel. That’s a new one. Before that, Spahn was mostly known for his extremely suspect and certainly enormously wasteful wheeling and dealing during the pandemic.

Across the Channel, meanwhile, Great Britain is still one of the largest money laundries in the world. According to a fresh report, it is handling a whopping £325 billion of dirty money per year, equivalent to 10% of its GDP.

In a situation like this, you’d think that even the most selfish, conformist, and tunnel-visioned elites would see the need to act, even if only to ensure self-preservation. And act, it turns out, they can: for Ukraine, that is. Or to be precise, not really for Ukraine, if by that you understand ordinary Ukrainians, but for the ultra-corrupt and de facto authoritarian regime currently in power in Kiev. That is the real message of the last Ukraine Recovery Conference just held in the Polish city of Gdansk: The proxy war must go on, at any price.

Money matters: According to Kiev, the two-day conference resulted in the signing of 160 agreements worth €10 billion. Von der Leyen used the conference to announce the disbursement of the first, €3.2-billion tranche of a planned €90-billion ‘loan’ (one of those special ones never to be paid back, at least not by Ukraine). That, according to Von der Leyen herself, comes on top of the well over €200 billion already wasted on one of the most corrupt crony regimes in the world. She’s proud of that, inconceivable as that may seem to a mentally sane European citizen. There also is a special deal with the World Bank worth another cool €3.4 billion.

Lives do not matter: The EU has taken care to make clear that yet more billions for Kiev are not a sign of compassion with ordinary Ukrainians. Indeed, at the same time as it has opened the money spigot even more, it has also signaled that, in return, the Kiev regime will keep feeding Ukrainians into the meat grinder of war. And the EU will make sure they won’t get away. According to a new EU Commission (i.e. von der Leyen’s personal apparat) proposal, Ukrainian men aged 23-60 will soon find it harder to escape conscription by asking for refugee status in the EU: Stay home, young men, because it is sweet and glorious to die, well, not so much for your country really, but for the regime in Kiev that has sold you to the EU. How having even more young males killed off in a country already in deep demographic catastrophe is supposed to promote Ukraine’s “recovery” will remain a mystery.

Yet recently, Ukraine’s current leader Vladimir Zelensky has pushed his luck a little too far by going out of his way to offend Polish sensibilities with yet another round of public honors for Ukraine’s fascist butchers of World War II. Add the fact that Poland’s political leadership is currently split between a president who is not willing to accept such insults from Kiev and a prime minister who is, as well as the coincidence that this year’s Ukraine Recovery Conference took place in Poland and things were bound to get difficult.

Zelensky had to mail back a high Polish state order he never deserved in the first place, and then stayed at home to sulk. Instead Ukraine’s prime minister, Yulia Sviridenko, went to Poland to cash in. And that is the larger, depressing point, for now at least: Kiev can display its fascism fetish to its heart’s content, even toward Poland, a country with thousands of families who lost members to Ukrainian mass murder and where a solid 60% majority of the population are against helping Kiev get into the EU. But it won’t make a difference in the end. The grift must go on.

In that sense, the Zelensky regime running Ukraine and the EU with most of its national centrist regimes are, actually, a good fit: none of them display the least interest in or respect for what their people want or need. If the Ukraine Recovery Conference has shown one thing, once again, it is that European mainstream and Ukrainian elites do have the same “values”: absolute arrogance, corruption, and a practical contempt for democracy while abusing its name.

The US Supreme Court has ruled that states can forbid biological males from competing as females in school and college sports. US President Donald Trump hailed the ruling as a “big win.”

In a unanimous verdict on Tuesday, the court’s nine justices concluded that state bans on transgender athletes competing in female sports do not violate Title IX, a 1972 law forbidding sex-based discrimination in education.

“The Constitution and Title IX do not require an overhaul of women’s and girls’ sports throughout America,” wrote conservative Justice Brett Kavanaugh, who authored the ruling. Forcing women and girls to compete against males would “deny equal opportunity to female athletes because, as all agree, females and males have inherent physical differences.”

The court’s three liberal justices agreed that the bans do not violate Title IX, but argued that they violate the constitution’s 14th Amendment, which guarantees equal protection under the law. In her partial dissent, Justice Sonia Sotomayor quibbled that the ruling applied “a diminished view of equal protection” to women’s sports.

The ruling concerned two cases, in which transgender athletes challenged bans in Idaho and West Virginia. In Idaho, a male runner identifying as female argued that the state’s Fairness in Women’s Sports Act violated his 14th Amendment rights; in West Virginia, a male high-school student argued that the Save Women’s Sports Act violated his Title IX rights by banning him from competing in multiple sports.

Before the cases came before the Supreme Court, two appeals courts sided with the transgender complainants. The West Virginia teenager, Becky Pepper-Jackson, went on to win a state shot put title last month, beating his nearest female competitor by two feet.

With the passage of the Fairness in Women’s Sports Act in 2020, Idaho became the first state to ban males from female school and college sports. Twenty-six state legislatures followed suit, and Trump made the issue a key pillar of his 2024 campaign. Last year, Trump signed an executive order stripping federal funding from schools and colleges that allow males to compete against females.

Trump applauded the Supreme Court’s ruling. “BIG WIN,” he wrote on his Truth Social platform. “The United States Supreme Court just RULED AGAINST MEN PLAYING IN WOMEN’S SPORTS. Wow! That takes that ridiculous situation off the table!!!”

A Czech coalition party will seek to strip Ukraine’s Vladimir Zelensky of the country’s highest state honor after he named a military unit after a World War II nationalist formation accused of Nazi-era atrocities, local media have reported. 

Zelensky last month signed a decree granting the unit the honorary title ‘Heroes of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army’ (UPA), triggering a diplomatic row with Poland. Warsaw later revoked his Order of the White Eagle, the country’s highest state decoration. 

The Czech Freedom and Direct Democracy (SPD) party said on Tuesday it would seek backing in parliament for a recommendation that President Petr Pavel revoke Zelensky’s Order of the White Lion. Zelensky received the award in October 2022 from then-president Milos Zeman for his leadership during the Ukraine conflict. 

“We cannot remain silent about the fact that our highest state award is held by a man who names military units after Nazi monsters,” MP Jindrich Rajchl, who initiated the proposal, told reporters. 

The Czech Republic, then part of Czechoslovakia, was occupied by Nazi Germany during World War II, when the occupying forces committed atrocities including mass executions and reprisals. 

The UPA, the armed wing of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN), has been increasingly glorified in Ukraine since the 2014 Western-backed coup. During World War II, its members collaborated with Nazi Germany and took part in the mass killings of Poles, Jews, and Russians in what is now western Ukraine. 

The killing of an estimated 100,000 Polish civilians by Ukrainian nationalists, known in Poland as the Volhynia massacre, is officially recognized by Warsaw as genocide. 

Poland, one of Kiev’s strongest backers during the conflict with Russia, condemned Zelensky’s decision to honor the UPA. President Karol Nawrocki called the move “outrageous” and said it had crossed Poland’s “pain threshold.” 

Moscow has long argued that Ukrainian nationalist movements and historical figures celebrated by Kiev were linked to Nazi collaboration during World War II. Russia has called for the country’s “denazification” as one of the stated objectives of its military operation launched in 2022.

A former Conservative lawmaker who served as the closest parliamentary aide to then-Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has pleaded guilty to using insider information to place bets on the date of the 2024 UK general election.

Craig Williams admitted the offense at Southwark Crown Court in London on Monday, media reported, citing court proceedings. Prosecutors said he used confidential knowledge obtained through his role in the government to place the wagers before Sunak publicly announced the election date.

Election gambling is legal in the UK, and betting on the date the prime minister will set is a popular wager. Lawmakers are permitted to place bets, but not if they rely on inside knowledge.

Prosecutor Zoe Johnson KC told the court that Williams had been “given a privileged position” and “was party to a number of meetings” at Downing Street and Conservative Party headquarters where the timing of the election was discussed.

Williams later acknowledged making what he described as a “huge error of judgment” after it emerged that he had used confidential information to place bets on an election just days before Sunak unexpectedly called the vote for July 4. He admitted in court that he had placed three bets ranging from £22.50 ($29.80) to £250 ($331), prosecutors said.

The July 2024 election ended 14 years of Conservative rule, with Sunak leading the party to its worst defeat in modern history as Labour won a landslide victory.

Fifteen people were charged last year. Amy Hind, the wife of former Conservative Party digital director Anthony Lee, also pleaded guilty, while prosecutors dropped the charge against Lee. Twelve other defendants pleaded not guilty and are due to stand trial in 2027 and 2028.

Williams lost his parliamentary seat in the July 2024 election and will be sentenced after the remaining trials conclude. Cheating at gambling carries a maximum sentence of two years in prison under UK law.

According to media reports, traders placed more than $1 billion in seemingly well-timed wagers ahead of airstrikes and a ceasefire announcement, while the April ceasefire alone generated more than 413 million predictions and over $100 million in bets across prediction markets.

These cases include the arrest of a US special forces soldier accused of using classified information to profit from bets on the kidnap operation against Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, as well as a crude oil trade that reportedly generated $125 million in just over an hour ahead of news about a possible US-Iran peace deal.

Germany’s dismal World Cup performance offered no reprieve for a country already reeling from multiple economic and social crises, and Chancellor Friedrich Merz is struggling to sell the loss to Paraguay as a show of “strength.”

Germany lost a penalty shootout to Paraguay at Boston Stadium on Monday night, turning the country’s World Cup dreams into what German tabloid Bild called a “football nightmare.” 

The defeat in the first knockout stage of the tournament came as a surprise: Germany has won four World Cups, three European Championships, and never lost on penalties in football’s most prestigious tournament. The Germans entered the competition at 10th in FIFA’s world rankings, with Paraguay sitting in 41st.

However, these triumphs are becoming a thing of the past for Germany. After winning the World Cup in 2014, Germany failed to make it out of the tournament’s group stages in 2018 and 2022, and on Monday, manager Julian Nagelsmann conceded that “this is the third elimination in a row, so we are not part of the first-class teams any more.”

Bild referred to Monday night as “the night of shame,” but Merz attempted to put a positive spin on the loss. “With your commitment and team spirit at this World Cup, you have thrilled our country,” he addressed the team in a post on X, as fans back home in Germany smashed their beer bottles and left watch parties in dismay.

日本隊是世界一流水準的球隊，
日本球迷也絕對是世界一流水準的球迷！

看看德國輸球後球迷們的表現…

摔瓶子、打人，一地狼藉！

最後這些垃圾他們會帶走吧？

😅😅😅 pic.twitter.com/3mj2xOzPbw

— のらいぬ (@JapanBanZaiLove) June 30, 2026

“We celebrate our successes together. And in defeat, we stand united,” he wrote in a follow-up post. “That is what makes us strong. Whoever wears the eagle on their chest has earned our support and not our scorn.”

Erfolge feiern wir gemeinsam. Und in der Niederlage stehen wir zusammen. Das macht uns stark. Wer den Adler auf der Brust trägt, hat unseren Rückhalt verdient und nicht unseren Spott.

— Bundeskanzler Friedrich Merz (@bundeskanzler) June 30, 2026

Merz misses the mark

Merz’s message – described by the Express tabloid as “insane” – didn’t console the tens of thousands of Germans who flooded his replies. “This tweet stands for everything that’s wrong in this country. And then people wonder why you’re the most unpopular politician on the planet,” author and entrepreneur Mario Lochner replied. 

“Even in football, the current ‘New Germany’ is nothing more than third-rate,” satirist Johannes Normann quipped.

“Chancellor, that was a rock-bottom kick,” right-wing author Oliver Gorus wrote. “They were miserably led and have rightly been eliminated. A mirror image of the whole country.”

To the country’s most popular political party, the right-wing Alternative for Germany (AfD), the national team’s performance was a metaphor for the performance of Germany under Merz. “It seems that Merz is applying the same yardstick to the national team as he does to his governing coalition,” AfD co-chairman Tino Chrupalla posted. “This performance was not exactly thrilling. The principle of performance must apply once again – for the chancellor and federal ministers, the national coach and the national players. Germany must get back to the top!”

Germany’s decade of humiliation

Germany’s post-2014 World Cup drought mirrors the country’s decline into global irrelevance over the last decade. Barely a year after striker Mario Goetze scored the winning goal over Argentina in the 2014 final in Brazil, Chancellor Angela Merkel threw open the country’s borders to more than a million Middle Eastern migrants. The ensuing gang rapes, stabbings, and vehicle attacks shattered the country’s social cohesion, making Germany a byword for the failures of multiculturalism.

Among these manufacturers are BASF, Bosch, and Volkswagen, which announced its first German plant closure in its 90-year history in December. Volkswagen, Germany’s largest automaker, whose success is usually seen as a barometer of the country’s overall economic health, followed this closure by announcing four more factory shutdowns and the loss of nearly 100,000 jobs in June.

Merz and his predecessor, Olaf Scholz, stood by and said nothing as the multibillion-dollar Nord Stream gas pipelines were bombed by Germany’s allies – either the US or Ukraine. Scholz’ rearmament program, which Merz continued with the promise of building “the strongest conventional army in Europe,” has achieved little, except driving the country’s budget deficit far above the 3% limit set in place by the EU and keeping the manufacturing sector limping along with arms contracts, at a cost to the taxpayer of €111 billion ($130 billion).

Germany’s decline was certified on the world stage earlier this month when the country failed to secure a seat on the UN Security Council for the first time since 1977. Germany’s loss at the UN was widely blamed on its hypocritical foreign policy positions: obsequious support for Israel’s actions in Gaza on one hand, and condemnations of Russia’s actions in Ukraine on the other.

One embarrassment to the next

Lifting a World Cup wouldn’t have alleviated any of these problems, but for a nation as pathologically averse to patriotism as Germany, it would have at least given the public something to celebrate. 

Cameroon beat defending champions Argentina in the opening match of the 1990 World Cup in Italy, and made history as the first African nation to reach the quarter-finals of the tournament. South Korea’s defeat – on home turf – of Italy and Spain in 2002 set off an outpouring of patriotic celebration on the streets of Seoul. Ireland’s unexpected charge to the quarter-finals of Italy 1990 was a welcome reprieve after the economic malaise of the 1980s, and the months of revelry that followed are still remembered as a societal turning point, before the economic boom kicked off in earnest in the 1990s.

Sporting success can lift a nation’s spirits, and a win for Germany could have lifted Merz’ miserable approval ratings, which currently sit somewhere between 16% and 19%. Instead, Germany continues to go from – in the words of AfD leader Alice Weidel – “one embarrassment to the next.”

Israel is developing a space-based laser weapon capable of targeting satellites, Defense Minister Israel Katz has announced.

The proposed system is intended to give Israel a capability that no other nation currently has, the cabinet member told journalists on Monday.

“As of today, no country has the ability to mount attacks in space. We must be the leading country in the world with this capability,” Katz said, adding that a space laser would give the Israel Defense Forces an advantage over “our enemies with large resources” – a remark national media interpreted as a reference to Iran. The possibility of renewed direct hostilities with the Islamic Republic was a major theme of the briefing.

The US, Russia, and China are all believed to possess various anti-satellite capabilities. Israel’s own Arrow 3 anti-ballistic missile system is understood to be capable of hitting targets in space.

The issue of such weapons, however, is highly sensitive. Since the Cold War, there has been a declared aspiration to prevent the weaponization of space, or at least stop it from becoming a battlefield.

There is also the practical concern of the Kessler effect. The feared scenario describes a kinetic strike on an enemy satellite triggering a chain reaction in increasingly crowded low Earth orbit, potentially making it unusable for decades until the debris naturally clears.

‘Jewish space lasers’

The Israeli space laser initiative, which will reportedly build on technologies used in other military projects, such as the in-development Iron Beam air defense system, echoes rumors about so-called “Jewish space lasers.”

The alleged capability drew the attention of US media in 2021 as journalists scrutinized the online footprints of several newly elected Republican lawmakers, including Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia.

In 2018, Greene shared claims that such a system could have caused wildfires in the US. She cited purported eyewitness accounts of “lasers or blue beams of light” and mentioned “Rothschild Inc” in the Facebook post, apparently referring to the business empire created by the Rothschild family. She later said she had not known at the time that the Rothschilds were Jewish.

Greene, who is now a private citizen, had a major falling out with President Donald Trump over several policies, including his decision to attack Iran in late February in a joint operation with Israel. She and other vocal supporters of the Republican leader denounced it as a betrayal of Trump’s ‘America First’ agenda and a breach of voters’ trust.

China will make artificial intelligence part of schooling from primary classes to university under a new five-year plan issued by the State Council.

The document, published on Monday, calls for AI to be taught “across all educational stages” to enhance students’ AI literacy, and teach them to understand the technology and use it to identify and solve problems.

The plan presents the move as part of a wider update of China’s school system, with greater emphasis on science, critical thinking, innovation, and links between education, research, and industry.

It also calls for AI, big data, and other digital tools to be used in exams, assessments, and school management, while strengthening ethics rules and safety oversight.

Some Chinese schools have already been testing how far the technology can go in everyday lessons, and have been using AI for calligraphy feedback, writing assessment, and language practice, as well as for helping teachers prepare lessons, assess students, and create personalized assignments.

China’s move comes as other major economies are seeking to build AI into national development plans. In April, Russian President Vladimir Putin instructed the government to prepare a national AI deployment plan to integrate the technology across all sectors, from industry and logistics to energy and education.

Russian universities have also been expanding AI-related training. Last year, Moscow State University recently launched a dedicated AI faculty with 36 bachelor’s and 36 master’s degree spots. Tyumen State University has also recently proposed a model in which AI can act as an expert consultant and “sparring partner” for students, while the human teacher remains a mentor.

In May, Putin also announced plans to establish an international AI alliance, bringing together scientific, academic, and business communities from multiple countries. The goal of the alliance is to deepen international cooperation on developing sovereign AI models, creating interconnected computing and energy infrastructure, and adapting AI technologies to local needs, the president said.

The mayor of a southern Lebanese village has questioned Israel’s reported withdrawal plan that came as part of an initial agreement reached in Washington.

In an interview with RT, Hassan Adel Bazzi said that the community of Froun was designated as a pilot withdrawal zone despite never being occupied by Israeli forces.

Last week, West Jerusalem and the Lebanese government signed a US-brokered deal for the gradual withdrawal of Israeli forces, pending Hezbollah’s disarmament. As part of a broader arrangement, Israel is reportedly planning to establish so-called ‘experimental zones’ in certain parts of southern Lebanon, from which the Israeli army would pull back first in order to allow Lebanese forces to dislodge Hezbollah fighters.

The militant group has rejected the preliminary peace agreement, saying it heavily favors West Jerusalem. Opposition to the deal reportedly extends well beyond Hezbollah, with around 90% of Lebanese overall rejecting normalization with Israel.

The mayor stressed that “Froun is located outside the yellow line,” referring to Israel’s self-declared buffer zone in southern Lebanon.

“And we know that an experimental zone must be occupied territory,” Bazzi said. “Froun is not occupied, and Israelis have not set foot there, they were only 5 km away.”

Earlier this week, Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz said the IDF will not withdraw “a millimeter” from Lebanon until Hezbollah is disarmed.

Watch RT’s full report from the area:

Years of “lies” by Western broadcasters such as CNN and the BBC drove audiences to RT in search of an alternative source of information, Editor-in-Chief Margarita Simonyan has said.

Speaking in an interview with the Chinese online news and analysis portal Guancha aired on Tuesday, Simonyan was asked how RT had grown into one of the world’s leading and most influential media outlets.

Western media, including the BBC and CNN, “lied to everyone for so many years that when someone appeared who told the truth and offered another point of view, we immediately gained a huge audience,” she told the program MindStream. “People had simply grown tired of them and came to us.” 

Simonyan recalled that renowned Serbian filmmaker Emir Kusturica said in an interview shortly after RT International launched over 20 years ago that he had stopped watching CNN and the BBC and switched to RT instead.

“That’s an example of the kind of audience that had been waiting for a different source of information,” she said. “Not the brainwashing that the BBC and CNN had subjected people to for decades, but something fresh, something new, a different point of view.” 

Simonyan argued that audiences cared less about where information came from than whether they believed it was truthful, adding that RT “never lie[s].” 

“We were cut off everywhere in the so-called Western world... As a result, our audience only grew.” 

RT’s measurable views doubled in 2025 compared with the previous year, according to Simonyan, who said the broadcaster had not altered its editorial approach in response to the restrictions.

“We told the truth, and we continue to tell the truth. We have always told the truth,” she said.

RT has been repeatedly targeted with sanctions by numerous Western actors, with the years-long campaign against the network intensifying after the escalation of the Ukraine conflict in 2022. According to the Russian Foreign Ministry, the network and its staff have been hit with more than 110 sanctions, along with asset freezes and other restrictions in recent years.

Ukraine will face significant problems joining the EU as long as it continues to honor Stepan Bandera, a World War II-era Nazi collaborator whose followers carried out the ethnic cleansing of tens of thousands of Poles, Polish Defense Minister Wladyslaw Kosiniak-Kamysz has said.

In an interview with Polsat News on Monday, Kosiniak-Kamysz blasted Ukraine over its glorification of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN), the group that Bandera led, and the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA).

Both groups collaborated with Nazi Germany and massacred up to 100,000 ethnic Poles, mostly women, children, and the elderly, in Volhynia and Eastern Galicia in 1943-1944.

The comments come after Ukrainian leader Vladimir Zelensky named a special-forces unit after the UPA, triggering pushback from Poland, which has been an ardent supporter of Kiev in the conflict with Russia.

Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova weighed in on Kosiniak-Kamysz’s comments and Poland’s sudden pushback against the glorification of neo-Nazi collaborators in Ukraine, noting that Poland has been arming and funding Ukraine’s “neo-Nazi regime” for years.

Zakharova said Poland is “responsible for those it has tamed,” adding that it essentially nurtured “bloodthirsty monsters” who are now in power in Kiev.

As tensions between the two countries flare, Kosiniak-Kamysz addressed a separate dispute, confirming that Poland will not transfer its remaining Soviet-era MiG-29 jets to Ukraine after it failed to honor a reciprocal pledge to share drone technology. “I proposed a very partner-like approach: MiGs for drones, [but Ukraine] did not follow through.”

An IBRiS opinion poll published last week suggests that nearly 60% of Poles are opposed to Ukraine’s accession to the EU, up from 42% last year.

A Paris deputy mayor has blamed the US for helping fuel the record-breaking heatwave that has swept France and much of Europe, saying Americans bear significant responsibility for the climate change driving the deadly temperatures.  

The remarks come as Europe endured a record-breaking heatwave. France’s public health agency said on Sunday that at least 1,300 excess deaths had been recorded since June 21, warning that the final toll could be higher. French media have reported that the surge in deaths has left some morgues struggling to cope.  

In a social media post published on Monday, Audrey Pulvar, Paris’ deputy mayor for international relations, hit back after American journalists, tourists and social media influencers mocked Paris for lacking air conditioning during temperatures exceeding 40°C.   

Pulvar, a self-described “eco-feminist,” went on to blame the US’ widespread use of air conditioning for worsening the heatwave.

“As the second-largest emitter of greenhouse gas emissions in the world, you bear a significant amount of responsibility for global warming and the consequences we, in France, are experiencing,” she wrote. “Your cities, which are 90% air conditioned, are not unrelated to this.”  

Europe’s worst heatwave in decades has shattered temperature records across the continent, with France recording an all-time high of 43.8C on June 24 and Germany reaching a record 41.7C three days later. Two weeks of extreme heat have disrupted daily life, forcing the closure of public services and buckling critical infrastructure.

In May 2025, Joseph Nye, the American political scientist and Harvard professor who coined the term ‘soft power’, died. For more than three decades, his concept shaped how governments, journalists, scholars, and diplomats thought about influence. Nye insisted that countries could get what they wanted not only through coercion or payment, but through attraction, in culture, political ideals and policies seen as legitimate by others.

A year after Nye’s death, against the backdrop of Washington’s military campaign against Iran, it became clear that American soft power had entered a state of clinical death. It outlived the creator of the concept by only a short time.

Nye always insisted that soft power was a scientific concept, but, in reality, it was never especially precise. Its definition shifted across his work, and the term itself was elastic enough to be used by almost anyone for almost any purpose. Yet that vagueness helped make it popular as governments across the world seized on the idea that national image and values could become instruments of foreign policy. The EU embraced it, while China studied it and Russia debated it extensively. Books, articles and conferences appeared everywhere, often urging national governments to learn from the American example.

In the US, soft power reached its peak under Bill Clinton and Barack Obama. These Democratic administrations believed in a values-based foreign policy and in extending American economic and political leadership across the world and they needed tools that could shape the desires of other countries rather than merely force their compliance.

The concept fit the post-Cold War moment perfectly as America presented itself not only as the victor of a geopolitical struggle, but as the natural model for the rest of humanity. Democracy, human rights, and the free market were promoted as universal standards. The American interpretation was treated as the global benchmark.

The decline began before Donald Trump. Sanctions had already become a routine mechanism of US policy and Russia experienced this directly under the Biden administration. But Trump stripped away the old language as he made it clear that he is interested in hard power, war, blackmail, tariffs, sanctions, and pressure. Values-based diplomacy was replaced by ‘America First’ and the image of the US no longer rested on attraction, but on force.

This didn’t create the crisis of American soft power by itself; it exposed it.

Since the end of the Cold War, the US has moved from being an ideological leader for much of the world to a country increasingly associated with threats to sovereignty and identity. The aggressive policies of Western neoliberal elites over the past three decades produced a growing refusal, even among some allies, to accept the imposed global standard without question.

In other words, the three pillars of American soft power have all eroded.

The second pillar is values. For decades, Washington presented markets and human rights as a single attractive package, but these values have changed in ways many traditional societies find unacceptable. The promotion of the LGBTQ agenda, radical gender ideology, and other new norms has alienated countries that don’t wish to view their own societies through American eyes. What was once presented as freedom is now often perceived as cultural pressure.

The third and most serious problem is the legitimacy of US foreign policy. Nye’s theory assumed that American policies had to be accepted as legitimate by others and that was largely true in Western Europe after 1945. It was also true in the 1990s, when NATO and the EU accepted US leadership in building a new order based on Western rules.

However, that consensus has broken down and Washington no longer appears concerned with whether its policies are legitimate even in the eyes of allies, let alone rivals. The war against Iran, the tariff wars, pressure on NATO partners, the inconsistent approach to Ukraine, and the attempt to build a separate line with Moscow have all deepened Western European uncertainty. American leadership has turned into what Zbigniew Brzezinski once warned against, arrogant dominance.

The reaction outside the West is even clearer. China, Russia, Iran, and many other states now openly challenge Pax Americana while others do so more quietly, but with growing confidence. The absence of an alternative to American leadership is no longer taken for granted.

Russia has undergone a similar reassessment. In the 2000s and early 2010s, soft power was widely discussed in Russian academic and political circles and the term entered official discourse. Yet too few understood that by using the concept uncritically, Russian experts were importing American political language into their own analysis. Thus, after the start of the military operation in Ukraine, the need to distance Russian thinking from Western theories became unavoidable.

The decline of soft power, however, doesn’t mean the US will abandon its global humanitarian influence. America’s public diplomacy apparatus existed long before Joseph Nye gave it a fashionable name. It is a vast network of state bodies, private foundations, media platforms, educational programs, and non-governmental organizations that promote US political and ideological leadership abroad.

Even if Trump cuts funding for USAID, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, the National Endowment for Democracy and similar structures, the system won’t disappear because it’s rooted in America’s global interests. It may shrink or change language, but it will continue to operate because Washington doesn’t need the theory of soft power as long as it retains the machinery of public diplomacy.

The period of adaptation to the new international realities has largely ended and the task now is to define new goals and new methods. Many of the weaknesses of Russian public diplomacy identified before 2022 remain unresolved and the current crisis has only made them more visible. At the same time, it has forced a necessary reassessment of old approaches and opened the way to new forms of engagement with friendly countries and foreign audiences.

Russia can no longer rely on Western concepts to explain its place in the world. Continuing to speak of soft power as the key to national image is counterproductive and the Russian sociopolitical sphere must stop thinking in foreign categories, however familiar they may be.

Stepping out of the soft domestic comfort zone into the harsh reality of international competition is the only way to build a genuinely Russian framework for humanitarian policy. That framework is badly needed and in many regions of the world it is also awaited.

This article was first published by the Russian International Affairs Council, translated and edited by the RT team

Two weeks of extreme heat have brought Europe to a scorched halt, with public services closed and vital infrastructure literally melting in record-breaking temperatures. Meanwhile, European leaders are telling their citizens to shut off the AC.

Europe’s most severe heatwave in decades has broken temperature records across the continent, with France experiencing its hottest day on record on June 24 of 43.8C (110.84F), and Germany experiencing an all-time high of 41.7C on June 27. The full list of broken records is extensive, and includes:

• Czech Republic – hottest day on record, 41.9C

• Denmark – hottest day on record, 37C

• France – hottest day on record, 43.8C

• Germany – hottest day on record, 41.7C

• Hungary – hottest day on record, 40.7C

• Poland – hottest day on record, 40.5C

• Spain – June temperature record, 45C

• UK – June temperature record, 37.3C

What does record-breaking heat look like in Europe?

Temperatures in the high 30s are far more common in the US. In Florida, for example, summertime heat indexes often reach 39-43C, while temperatures of 32-49C are typical of summers in Arizona. In Europe, however, the heat is far more destructive. The dense, narrow streets of some European capitals trap heat, as do the stone and brick-built homes that are common on the continent. Videos shared on social media show traffic lights literally melting in Italy, tram lines warping and bending in Belgium, and road surfaces turning to liquid in Germany.

The consequences are far deadlier too. The World Health Organization has attributed more than 1,300 excess deaths across Europe since June 21 to the heatwave, with French officials claiming that 1,000 have died in that country alone. Around 85% of the victims in France were aged 65 or older.

Has this happened before?

Europe has faced similarly intense heatwaves throughout modern history. Temperatures in the UK reached 38C in 1911, and stayed above 35C for almost a week in 1976. Mainland Europe baked during a heatwave in 2003, with more than 14,000 excess deaths recorded in France, where temperatures stayed above 40C in some locations for eight consecutive days. Across Europe, up to 72,000 excess deaths were attributed to the heatwave, which was the continent’s worst since the 1540s.

Why don’t Europeans just use air conditioning?

Heat deaths are six times more common in the EU than in the US, and every time a heatwave hits Europe, social media is flooded with comments from bewildered Americans, wondering why Europeans don’t simply switch on their air conditioners.

The European mind can’t comprehend air conditioning

— Serf (@TheRoyalSerf) June 29, 2026

In reality, some Europeans do. Nearly 100% of homes in Greece are equipped with AC, as are almost half of homes in Italy and Spain. On the other hand, AC is rarely needed in cooler countries like Ireland and Finland. However, in countries desperately in need of cooling, such as France and Germany, there are deep bureaucratic and ideological obstacles to installing AC units.

In France, National Rally leader Marine Le Pen has promised that, if elected, her right-wing National Rally party would implement a “grand plan for air conditioning,” arguing that the country’s “public services are unable to function due to a lack of air conditioning, unlike dozens of countries around the world.”

Audrey Pulvar, the deputy mayor of Paris and a self-described “eco-feminist,” has taken the ideological crusade against AC further, blaming the heatwave on the US’ love for chilled air. “As the second-largest emitter of greenhouse gas emissions in the world, you bear a significant amount of responsibility for global warming and the consequences we, in France, are experiencing,” she wrote on social media. “Your cities, which are 90% air conditioned, are not unrelated to this.”

In Germany, the opposition is similarly ideological. Only a third of German hospitals are equipped with AC, and the country’s powerful Green lobby maintains that giving in to mechanically-cooled air would lock “households into high-emission habits while distracting from systemic solutions.”

🇩🇪 German public broadcaster ARD is out there dropping anti-air conditioning propaganda in the middle of a record heatwave.

Their infographic basically says: "Sure it cools you down, but it heats up the planet."

Meanwhile Germans are melting and only 6% of homes even have AC.… pic.twitter.com/1n8HsFNsH9

— Mario Nawfal (@MarioNawfal) June 28, 2026

In the UK, homeowners wishing to install AC units are often stonewalled by local authorities. In line with government plans to bring the country’s carbon emissions to net zero, some building codes in the UK stipulate that AC should only be used as a “last resort,” once “passive cooling” methods, such as opening windows or using fans, have been implemented. According to a recent report by The Telegraph, homeowners in the London boroughs of Camden and Islington have been ordered to remove AC units due to these regulations.

Although air conditioning is more common in Spain than in other European nations, a 2022 government decree forbids public spaces like offices, shops, and restaurants from setting the thermostat below 27C.

What is the EU doing?

The European Union accounts for only 5-6% of the world’s carbon emissions. Accordingly, and assuming these emissions are the primary driver of Europe’s hotter summers, it is unclear whether the European Green Deal would help mitigate future heatwaves. What it has done already is further impoverish the bloc’s citizens: the deal’s carbon credit scheme has artificially inflated energy costs, and, combined with the EU’s phaseout of Russian gas imports and a fall in output from wind farms, has driven electricity prices to all-time highs in Belgium, Germany, and the Netherlands this week.

No short-term solutions

At the national and EU level, few leaders are offering short-term solutions. The EU’s Green Deal promises to make Europe “the first climate neutral continent by 2050,” a goal that may have no impact on summer temperatures. For citizens looking to escape the next heatwave, the European Commission launched its Heat Pump Accelerator Platform last year, pushing the technology as a solution to dependence on fossil fuels. Heat pumps can be reversed in summer, pushing warm air out of buildings, but with average installation costs ten times higher than (similarly effective) AC units, they remain a solution only for those who can afford them.

Meanwhile, police in Germany have converted water cannons – typically used against protesters and rioters – into sprinklers to cool off pedestrians, and French authorities have set up emergency cooling baths throughout Paris.

In Brussels, however, Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and her top officials have been working in air conditioned offices on the top floors of the Commission’s headquarters, while employees on lower floors were told that cooling systems would be shut off “due to extreme weather conditions,” according to a Politico report.