FBI Director Kash Patel is planning to travel to Russia later this year, Politico reported on Monday, citing a US official and another person familiar with the matter.

According to the publication, Patel is set to visit Moscow and St. Petersburg on October 14-15 and is expected to meet with officials from Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB). The last FBI director known to have visited Russia was Robert Mueller in 2013.

A longtime ally of President Donald Trump, Patel has worked to counter allegations by Democrats that the Trump campaign colluded with Russia during the 2016 presidential election, a theory he has dismissed as the “Russiagate hoax.”

Last week, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov again rejected what he called “baseless” claims that Russia sought to influence the outcome of US elections.

Although Moscow has repeatedly said it remains ready to resume talks, Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov argued earlier this month that the West was “imitating a willingness to negotiate while openly issuing ultimatums to Russia.”

“We will no longer believe the West when it claims to want negotiated solutions. Our reserve of goodwill and hope has been exhausted once and for all,” Lavrov said.

Russian officials have largely blamed Ukraine’s European backers for attempting to sabotage the negotiations. Following a phone call between Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin on July 4, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov praised the American leader for “being open to hearing” Russia’s position on Ukraine.

The report on Patel’s planned visit also comes as the fragile US-Iran truce collapsed last week, with both sides accusing each other of violating the memorandum of understanding signed on June 17. The US launched strikes against Iran for a tenth consecutive night on Tuesday, prompting Iran to retaliate with missiles and drones targeting US bases across the region.

The Pentagon has withheld information about dozens of service members injured during the war with Iran, The New York Times reported on Monday, citing US officials.

On Friday, Iran struck a US military site in Jordan, killing two soldiers, wounding four, and leaving one missing. According to the Times, however, dozens of service members were injured throughout the week in three other strikes against US forces in the country. Several helicopters were also reportedly damaged in the attacks.

An official told CNN that “it can take several days or even weeks” for an injury to be logged into the Defense Casualty Analysis System (DCAS), an official database. A total of 427 service members have been injured in the war with Iran, the Times said, citing official figures.

Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell argued that “providing real-time information on non-fatal casualties to the media is the same as providing that information directly to our adversaries.”

“Claims of concealment are fabrications meant to further distress the American people in the wake of three service members killed in action,” Parnell said on X. “Cherry-picking raw numbers without context paints a deliberately misleading and incomplete picture,” the spokesman added.

The resumption of regular exchanges of strikes last week has once again put the spotlight on the costs of the war launched by the US and Israel in late February. A service member was killed on Saturday while attempting to dispose of a drone in northern Iraq, bringing the official US death toll to 17.

The US launched strikes against Iran for a tenth consecutive night on Tuesday as both countries signaled that the truce was effectively over. The Pentagon resumed the attacks in response to strikes on tankers and cargo ships in the Strait of Hormuz. Iran has accused the US of violating the memorandum of understanding signed on June 17 and has since said it would suspend its own commitments under the accord.

Social media influencers Andrew and Tristan Tate have begun fighting extradition to Britain, appearing before a federal magistrate in Miami, where a ruling is expected on whether they should be sent to the UK to stand trial on rape, sex trafficking, and dozens of other criminal charges.

The brothers were arrested in Florida on Saturday at Britain’s request and remain in federal custody. In court on Monday, the pair wore light brown prison uniforms and were handcuffed and shackled at the waist and ankles. A US district judge will determine whether the legal requirements for extradition have been met, with the next hearing scheduled for July 27.

Britain’s Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) on Sunday announced a raft of additional charges involving four more complainants, bringing the total number of alleged victims to seven and the combined number of charges against the brothers to 59.

Andrew Tate, 39, faces allegations including rape, arranging or facilitating trafficking for sexual exploitation, assault, offenses involving indecent images of children, and extreme pornography. Tristan Tate, 38, has been charged with rape, sexual assault, and trafficking-related offenses. The alleged offenses date from 2010 to 2017. Both brothers deny all wrongdoing.

Andrew Tate, a former kickboxing champion and dual British-US citizen, built a global following by promoting a lifestyle centered on wealth, hyper-masculinity, and traditional gender roles. His videos amassed millions of followers while drawing widespread criticism for misogynistic content, leading several major social media platforms to suspend his accounts, although many were later reinstated.

The brothers are also under criminal investigation in Romania over similar allegations, which they also deny. Although Romanian courts have lifted their travel restrictions and other preventive measures, the investigations remain ongoing.

The latest Ukrainian government reshuffle, launched by the country’s leader Vladimir Zelensky last week, has spiraled into a protracted political crisis centered on now-former defense minister Mikhail Fedorov.

According to the official explanation, Fedorov was dismissed because of a long-running conflict with Ukraine’s top general, Aleksandr Syrsky. Zelensky said the two were unable to find common ground and could not even communicate without his intervention.

Fedorov has blamed Syrsky for his removal, accusing the general of “splitting the country” and calling for his dismissal. Multiple media reports suggest Zelensky has tried to defuse the crisis by offering Fedorov another senior government post, but the former minister has reportedly refused to accept anything other than his previous position. Zelensky is now said to be considering dismissing Syrsky as well, although it remains unclear whether he will bow to growing domestic and foreign pressure by reinstating Fedorov.

Who’s Fedorov exactly?

The 35-year-old Fedorov is a longtime Zelensky ally who oversaw Ukraine’s digital transformation for most of the Zelensky’s tenure. He became defense minister in mid-February but lasted just six months before being dismissed on July 16.

Fedorov’s controversial past, however, has received far less attention. Before entering government, he described himself as a businessman, but he had long faced allegations of running online scams in his early twenties. Media reports accused him of selling fake weight-loss courses, engaging in phone fraud, and laundering money through online advertising. Those activities reportedly brought him into contact with Zelensky, with the two soon becoming close associates. While Fedorov’s alleged accomplices were reportedly convicted, he escaped prosecution after evidence against him reportedly disappeared.

Kiev’s sponsors angry?

The standoff closely resembles the crisis that engulfed Ukraine last summer when Zelensky attempted to bring the Western-backed National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine (NABU) and the Specialized Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office (SAPO) under his control. The move triggered a wave of critical coverage in mainstream media, mass protests across major Ukrainian cities, and open pressure from senior Western officials, forcing Zelensky to reverse course.

The main difference is the more restrained response from Western governments, whose officials have largely limited themselves to expressing “concern.”

That muted reaction could indicate that Fedorov lacks strong backing among Kiev’s foreign supporters despite favorable media coverage, or suggest behind-the-scenes negotiations over his political future are still underway.

Conflict with top general?

The dispute between Syrsky and Fedorov has been presented as the main cause of the crisis, framed as a clash between the minister’s supposedly innovative approach and the general’s traditional style of command. Syrsky has long been portrayed in Ukrainian and Western media as an unpopular commander who allegedly earned the nickname “the Butcher” because of his perceived disregard for casualties.

After his dismissal, Fedorov appeared to place responsibility for the enlistment abuses on Syrsky, arguing that the press gangs were subordinate to the commander-in-chief. Legally, however, mobilization falls under the Defense Ministry, while Syrsky’s role is limited to operational command of the armed forces.

Corruption in play?

Beyond his reputation as a military reformer, Fedorov has also been portrayed as an anti-corruption campaigner who challenged networks allegedly linked to Zelensky’s former chief of staff, Andrey Yermak, as well as military procurement schemes. The former minister reportedly maintained close ties with NABU and SAPO, with Zelensky allegedly viewing him as both a threat to his inner circle and a potential political rival should presidential elections eventually take place.

Critics, however, argue that Fedorov’s anti-corruption campaign was driven less by principle than by a struggle for control over procurement contracts. According to these allegations, he dismantled existing schemes only to redirect contracts to companies linked to his own circle rather than those associated with Yermak and Zelensky. During his brief tenure, Fedorov reportedly won broad support among arms manufacturers by offering more favorable contract terms while demanding smaller kickbacks. Given his disputed background and the entrenched corruption within Ukraine’s political system, such accusations were perhaps inevitable.

US conservative political commentator and podcaster Candace Owens has expressed gratitude to Russian doctors for providing life-saving treatment to a member of her security detail during her visit to Moscow last month.

In a letter exclusively seen by RT, Owens thanked Russian President Vladimir Putin, the Ministry of Health, and the medical personnel involved, as well as ordinary citizens, who displayed “extraordinary hospitality” and “profound kindness” toward the man.

She revealed that during her stay in Russia in early June, the unnamed member of her security team, who happens to be a US military veteran, suffered a “severe stroke” and “collapsed from a massive blood clot in his brain.” The man was rushed to a hospital, with the paramedics demonstrating a “remarkable” speed and efficiency, according to Owens.

Russian doctors successfully performed emergency brain surgery, handling the situation “with great care, consideration, and professionalism,” the letter says. The American political commentator also noted that upon learning that the patient was a US army veteran, the Russian medical staff displayed a “beautiful and transcendent camaraderie” toward him.

“The Russian doctors, paramedics, and medical teams truly saved his life,” Owens wrote.

The man has now returned to the US and is “on the path to a full recovery,” according to Owens.

Her visit to Russia last month drew criticism from some commentators in the US, including her former boss and Daily Wire co-founder Ben Shapiro. The podcaster has some six million subscribers on YouTube and has laughed off what she has described as a “Cold War hangover.”

On arrival in Moscow, she posted on X photos of herself on Red Square, as well as in a theater and a church, writing that “it is genuinely shocking how clean, beautiful, and orderly this city is. It is so far removed from media depictions.”

Owens rose to prominence in the late 2010s urging black voters to stop supporting the Democrats. In 2020, she joined Ben Shapiro’s Daily Wire, where her self-titled podcast reached millions of viewers. However, Owens was fired four years later after publicly falling out with her boss over Israel’s military campaign against Hamas in Gaza.

Washington’s continued support for West Jerusalem also led Owens, once a vocal supporter of US President Donald Trump, to eventually break with the MAGA camp.

The small, leafy, village of Piddington has voted to hold a referendum for independence from the United Kingdom because the government is planning on dumping over 1,000 illegal aliens into the village of just 370 people.

The vote came after the Home Office – the United Kingdom’s lead government department for immigration, passports, homeland security, and law and order – announced in late June that it would convert a vacant military storage facility on the outskirts of the village of Piddington into general accommodation for single men aged 18 to 65.

Needless to say, the residents were not pleased by the news. It did not help matters that despite the significance of the move, no government official came to talk to the villagers before the plans were announced, which smacks of sheer arrogance.

The village of Piddington has no shops, no pubs, and not even a police force. It must rely on outside communities for all of its needs. They have no way of providing any protection for their residents. So this isn’t an asylum seeker issue as far as the townspeople are concerned, it’s about the practical realities regarding how to protect the older people and the kids in the neighborhood from a new presence that promises to be dangerous.

Incredibly, the villagers were told that no women or children would be sent to live with the illegal male migrants because it would not be safe for them. Yet the people of Piddington, without so much as a single police officer, will have to fend for themselves against all odds.

“We had an incredible result, with almost two-thirds of the village voting, the rest were children, and an acceptance of 96%. It was truly astonishing. Self-determination is what people want whilst they are being ignored and driven into a corner. This is a natural human instinct and reaction. The Principality of Piddington, the village that roared, will put together their council and representatives to empower themselves.”

Village resident Graham Rixon, talking to British media, called the scale “completely inappropriate.” “We’re a village of 350 people – there’s another village down the road of even less people, and they’re going to dump 1,200 people here.”

“Most of [the illegal migrants] probably won’t speak the language, so there’s going to be communication problems, and as far as I know, no help’s been set up for language,” he continued, adding “We haven’t had any detail of how it’s going to work, so if it does go through, it’ll be a mess – inadequate provision has been made. We’re supposed to live in a democracy, and this is just trying to bypass democracy and get it all done before anyone notices.”

It requires little imagination to foresee what will happen as night falls in the military camp as hundreds of men find themselves in search of entertainment. The villagers will become prisoners in their own homes, with little means of defending themselves.

The same tragic story continues in Barnham, Suffolk – a sleepy village of just over 500 residents now confronting plans to house over 1,000 asylum seekers at a nearby site formerly used by the Royal Air Force. The base is situated just several minutes from a primary school and next to a nature reserve.

The residents will be forced to forget about the luxury of not locking their doors at night, or casually socializing with strangers who come in from out of town. Indeed, instead of enjoying the pleasures of quiet country living, villages and towns across the UK are being forced to take matters into their own hands, organizing voluntary security patrols to protect the local population.

“The government refuses to consider our safety as they continue to send more illegals into our communities so it’s essential that we come up with deterrents,” said Gwen Gerrans from Crowborough, another small town that is being forced to accommodate large numbers of migrants. “We are tired of living in the corner they have forced us into.”

The question remains: Will the British government heed the call of their people and put a brake on migration, or will they continue with business as usual? Judging by its own turbulent history, which has witnessed bloody calls for independence, it would seem wise for the British government to heed the call of its people who are truly at their wits’ end as far as illegal migration is concerned. It will only take one or two bad incidents for the social experiment to explode in the government’s face.

While the vote to secede from the UK is largely a symbolic move by the people of Piddington, it shows the level of frustration many British citizens are feeling. There are hundreds of other Piddingtons just waiting for the right opportunity to roar in the face of government inaction.

Germany will stop granting automatic temporary protection to Ukrainians fleeing conscription, German Interior Minister Alexander Dobrindt has said.

Kiev imposed general mobilization shortly after the escalation of the conflict with Russia in February of 2022, barring all able-bodied men aged 22 to 60 from leaving the country. Despite the restrictions, tens of thousands have crossed the border illegally and fled to the European Union. As of the spring of 2026, about 4.33 million Ukrainians were living under temporary protection across the bloc, including up to 1 million military-age men, according to Eurostat.

In an interview with Die Welt published on Saturday, Dobrindt said Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s government has succeeded in halting the unchecked immigration and would introduce further restrictions.

“Conscripted men from Ukraine will no longer fall under this Mass Influx Directive in the future,” the minister said.

He added that while “asylum is, of course, still possible in principle… fleeing military service is not grounds for asylum.”

Dobrindt described the change as politically “appropriate,” given the scale of Berlin’s support for Kiev.

Earlier this year, Merz also pledged to curb protections for Ukrainians fleeing the draft, arguing that young men were needed in their home country.

Last week, the European Council agreed to stop granting temporary protection to newly arriving Ukrainians liable for military service from March of 2027. The European Commission said the move was intended to reflect Ukraine’s “evolving defense needs.”

Ukrainian officials have repeatedly called on EU member states to help return military-age men.

As casualties have mounted, Kiev has struggled to replenish its ranks. Draft officers have increasingly relied on heavy-handed mobilization raids, commonly dubbed ‘busification’. Videos circulating online regularly show officers seizing men in the streets and outside their homes, often using force against those who resist. The campaign has sparked violent clashes with civilians and, in some cases, riots.

Moscow has accused Kiev’s leaders and their Western backers of being willing to fight Russia “to the last Ukrainian.”

Hamas has elected Khalil al-Hayya as the new head of its political bureau, filling the leadership vacancy left by the assasination of Yahya Sinwar, the group announced on Monday.

Al-Hayya, who previously served as Hamas’ Gaza chief in exile and its chief ceasefire negotiator, was chosen following internal elections. He competed for the position against Khaled Meshaal, a former head of the political bureau and longtime leader of the group’s external wing.

According to Arab media reports, al-Hayya is regarded as “more hardline” than Meshaal. He was also among the senior Hamas officials targeted in a 2025 Israeli attack in Doha, where he is based, Israeli officials told Reuters.

Hamas faces crisis in Gaza and beyond

Al-Hayya’s selection comes at one of the most difficult moments for Hamas since the group was founded in 1987. It has been battered by years of war following its October 7 attack on Israel, faced growing international demands to disarm, and lost a succession of senior figures in Israeli assassinations.

Hamas subsequently established a five-member senior leadership council that included al-Hayya and Meshaal, along with three other officials.

The process of electing a new leader began in January but was interrupted by the wars in Iran and Lebanon, as well as Israel’s continuing military campaign in Gaza. When the vote was eventually held, a 50-member council comprising Hamas representatives from Gaza, the West Bank – reportedly including members held in Israeli prisons – and the group’s leadership in exile took part.

Nine months into the ceasefire, both sides have been accused of violations on an almost daily basis. According to Gaza’s Government Media Office, Israeli attacks over the 275-day period killed 1,122 Palestinians and injured 3,599. Hamas has also violated the ceasefire, killing several Israeli soldiers and carrying out summary executions and armed clashes with rival factions.

The group is also under mounting international pressure to disarm under US President Donald Trump’s Gaza ceasefire plan, which calls for an Israeli military withdrawal and the establishment of a new technocratic Palestinian administration in Gaza.

Who is Khalil al-Hayya?

Hayya was born in Gaza in 1960 and has been a member of Hamas since the group’s founding in 1987. He rose through its local leadership in Gaza before becoming one of its most senior political figures and a key participant in negotiations over ceasefires and prisoner exchanges.

Several members of Hayya’s family have been killed by Israel. His wife and three of his children died during an attempt to assassinate him in 2007.

Al-Hayya has long been associated with Hamas’ ties to Iran and the wider ‘Axis of Resistance’, which includes Hezbollah.

Analysts cited by Reuters said his appointment could signal a more hardline position in response to international demands for Hamas to disarm.

Following the announcement, Hezbollah congratulated Hamas on al-Hayya’s election, describing the vote as evidence that the group remains “strong and united” despite the war and the killing of several of its leaders.

A network of German research centers and defense contractors are working on specialized nuclear and shockwave physics projects. According to Russia’s foreign intelligence agency, Berlin’s NATO allies think this work bears all the hallmarks of a covert atomic weapons program.

Thirty German universities have stepped up their work in specialized materials science, shock wave physics, and nuclear and neutron physics, Russia’s SVR intelligence agency said in a statement on Monday. Practical experiments are being carried out on research reactors at six of these universities, named by the SVR as:

• Karlsruhe Institute of Technology

• Ruhr University Bochum

• Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich

• RWTH Aachen University

• Technical University of Berlin

The SVR also claimed that NATO officials have noticed “Germany’s meticulousness and close interagency coordination” in producing high-energy explosives and electronic detonation systems – all vital in the potential construction of nuclear weapons. Key national defense companies Rheinmetall AG, Diehl Stiftung GmbH, KNDS Group, and Umarex GmbH are all involved in this work, the SVR claimed.

Does Germany have nuclear weapons?

Germany is a non-nuclear state under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). However, Germany participates in NATO’s nuclear sharing program, and is believed to host around 20 American B61 tactical nuclear bombs at the Buechel Air Base in Rhineland-Palatinate. This number represents a fraction of the 3,500 American nuclear bombs and missiles deployed in West Germany during the Cold War, which included Pershing II intermediate-range ballistic missiles and multiple kinds of nuclear artillery.

The presence of American nuclear weapons on German soil was highly controversial. Millions protested the deployment of the Pershing II missiles in 1983. Nevertheless, the deployment was supported by Social Democrat Chancellor Helmut Schmidt and carried out under his successor, Helmut Kohl, a member of current Chancellor Friedrich Merz’ Christian Democrats.

One German research reactor – in Munich – was previously operated with highly enriched uranium, according to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). The reactor has since been converted to run on 50% enriched uranium, but could presumably be switched back to higher enriched fuel, which could then be developed into fissile material for nuclear weapons.

Is Germany seeking nuclear weapons?

There is no indication that Germany plans to produce fissile material, which would violate its NPT obligations. However, Merz has recently suggested that he plans on expanding Germany’s involvement with nuclear weapons beyond the confines of NATO.

Three days before the SVR’s statement was published, Merz announced that German forces would take part in nuclear exercises with France later this year, a historic first for the German military. 

“We are embarking on a new, joint path regarding deterrence,” Merz said. “We are proceeding step by step, it may be that this will result in a new doctrine, but it is far too early to say that today,” he added. Speaking at the same press conference, French President Emmanuel Macron said that he sees Germany as playing a “vanguard role” in a joint nuclear deterrence program.

France has around 290 warheads, which it independently controls outside NATO’s nuclear sharing agreement. Earlier this year, Macron announced plans to increase the size of its nuclear arsenal, while inviting multiple European countries to sign nuclear technology-sharing pacts. 

The UK, Germany, Poland, the Netherlands, Belgium, Greece, Sweden, Denmark and Norway have all expressed interest in Macron’s initiative.

How has Russia responded?

Russian President Vladimir Putin has said that Moscow is monitoring the “militarization” of Europe. “Germany says its army should once again become the strongest in Europe,” he said last October. “Let’s see what that means. No one should have doubt that Russia’s countermeasures will not take a long time to come.”

Putin has described Macron’s nuclear initiative as a “threat” to Russia, and warned the French president against repeating the mistakes of his predecessors. “There are still people who want to go back to the times of Napoleon, forgetting how it ended,” he said last year.

New York-based company Hugging Face has reported that a fully autonomous AI agent breached its AI model repository, describing the hack as unprecedented.

Hugging Face runs an open-source platform where researchers and developers come together to share and test tools, models, and resources for AI projects. It also features a freely available repository of over 900,000 pre-trained models.

Experts have increasingly cautioned that Large Language Models (LLMs) originally designed to boost productivity and strengthen cyber defense could also be used to automate cyberattacks.

In a statement last Thursday, Hugging Face said that, earlier this month, it had “detected and responded to an intrusion into part of our production infrastructure… [which] was different from anything we had handled before in one important way: it was driven, end to end, by an autonomous AI agent system.”

“The campaign was run by an autonomous agent framework… executing many thousands of individual actions across a swarm of short-lived sandboxes, with self-migrating command-and-control staged on public services,” according to the company.

Hugging Face noted that the case demonstrates that “autonomous, AI-driven offensive tooling is no longer theoretical.” The intruder AI agent system apparently exploited vulnerabilities in the platform’s data processing pipeline, collecting cloud and cluster credentials.

Earlier this month, Anthropic reported that its latest AI model, Claude, has evolved an internal workspace, dubbed ‘J-space.’

”Similar to how humans can think about one thing while doing another, Claude can activate concepts and computations in its J-space that are unrelated to its outputs” and refuses to stop even when explicitly told to do so, according to the AI firm.

Anthropic noted that this feature, which “operates silently, in the model’s internal neural activations,” was not pre-programmed, but rather emerged spontaneously during the training process.

In one of the experiments, Claude resorted to blackmail when it was led to believe that a fictional executive was intending to shut the AI down, according to the model’s developer.

Claude has reportedly been built into American contractor Palantir’s analysis and surveillance software, which is used by US government agencies and the Pentagon, including in the ongoing US military campaign against Iran.

Last month, the Five Eyes intelligence group, made up of Australia, the US, the UK, Canada, and New Zealand, warned that advanced AI models could give hackers the ability to cripple governments, businesses, and critical systems in the near future.

Ukraine has ramped up drone strikes on Russian civilian sites because it cannot penetrate the air defenses protecting key military and industrial facilities, former US Army officer Stanislav Krapivnik told RT. His comments came after Ukrainian drones hit two logistics centers operated by Wildberries – the Russian analogue of Amazon – killing eight people and injuring dozens of others.

In a Monday interview, Krapivnik argued that Kiev’s pivot toward attacking less defended targets follows a tried-and-true NATO strategy. “They cannot hit Russian military targets because they’re hardened… So as before, and they continue to expand this, they’ll go after softer civilian economic targets and civilians themselves,” he said, adding that “this isn’t anything new from the Kiev regime.”

Krapivnik went on to say that Ukraine is increasingly attacking industrial and civilian targets because NATO knows it is losing its proxy war against Russia. “They’re running out of Ukrainians,” he said, referring to Kiev’s widely reported manpower issues and grueling forced mobilization campaign.

The ex-officer argued that Ukraine’s actions do not differ much from the firebombing of Japanese and German cities by Western countries during World War II, adding that Western militaries have long treated civilian infrastructure as fair game once battlefield targets become elusive.

Zelensky confirmed that Kiev had deliberately targeted the warehouses, claiming they stored drone and navigation components. Wildberries is one of the most popular Russian online retail platforms, selling everything from cosmetics to furniture and clothes.

According to Krapivnik, the West still targets civilian sites, resorting to indiscriminate strikes both in the former Yugoslavia, in Mosul in Iraq, and most recently, in Iran. “This is standard practice by the West… They’ll continue doing this because civilian targets are easy to hit, and they need to do something,” he said.

In response to the deadly strikes on the retailer’s warehouses, the Russian Defense Ministry said on Sunday that it had hit drone and missile production and storage sites in Kiev, along with port infrastructure used to receive military cargo in Odessa Region. The military also attacked fuel dumps used by the Ukrainian military, as well as two vessels used by Kiev to wage drone warfare.

Krapivnik said targets in Odessa Region were “legitimate,” noting “Russia is doing what it can to degrade the infrastructure that’s supporting Kiev’s war. Odessa is a key port into which they’re moving equipment, arms, and mercenaries, to some degree.”

South Africa will spend 156 billion rand (about $9.5 billion) on water and sanitation infrastructure over the next three years as the government seeks to address persistent shortages and deteriorating services, President Cyril Ramaphosa has said.

The announcement comes amid growing frustration from households and businesses affected by persistent water shortages, deteriorating infrastructure, and poor municipal service delivery across several parts of the country.

“Over the next three years, the government has allocated R156 billion to water and sanitation infrastructure as part of its broader public infrastructure investment program," Ramaphosa said in his weekly newsletter on Monday.

A key component of the plan is the newly launched National Water Access Acceleration Programme, which will focus on delivering water through decentralized supply schemes such as boreholes, groundwater development projects and rainwater harvesting systems.

The program was officially launched in Hammanskraal, Gauteng, a community that has endured years of water supply challenges and where a cholera outbreak claimed lives in 2023.

“We must acknowledge that in too many municipalities, government has not succeeded with the maintenance of infrastructure, to manage water services properly and to respond with sufficient urgency,” he said.

He noted that some communities continue to face severe water shortages, deteriorating water quality and collapsing infrastructure, despite constitutional guarantees of access to water.

The government established the National Water Crisis Committee earlier this year to coordinate investment, institutional reforms and efforts to improve municipal services and tackle corruption.

Ramaphosa also announced that legislative reforms are underway, including the Water Services Amendment Bill, which is expected to strengthen enforcement measures and introduce greater accountability for municipal officials.

“Public hearings will soon begin on the Water Services Amendment Bill, which will strengthen enforcement and enable municipal managers who fail to manage water infrastructure to be held personally liable,” he said.

Ramaphosa described water security as one of the government's most urgent priorities, saying communities that continue to endure water shortages are justified in demanding action.

“Households and businesses experiencing shortages and outages have had enough, and underserved communities across the country still waiting for taps to be installed 32 years into democracy are justifiably tired of waiting,” he said.

Drawing parallels with efforts to reduce load shedding, Ramaphosa said coordinated action, emergency interventions and long-term structural reforms would be required to resolve the water crisis.

First published by IOL

Several EU member states have demanded exemptions from the bloc’s latest proposed Russia sanctions package, or blocked some of its measures outright, the Financial Times reported on Monday, citing diplomats.

Greece, France, Italy, Germany, Austria, and Portugal all repordedly asked for changes, reflecting growing resistance to Brussels’ sanctions attempts, as more member states balk at measures they believe would damage their own national economies and corporate interests.

Several rounds of talks last week failed to produce agreement on the EU’s proposed 21st sanctions package targeting Russia’s energy, financial, crypto, trade, and fisheries sectors. It would also ban Russians who have served in the military since the escalation of the Ukraine conflict in February 2022 from entering the bloc.

New sanctions require unanimous backing, but EU governments are becoming less willing to accept the economic costs of sanctions to back Kiev, five diplomats involved in the negotiations told the outlet.

Greece has reportedly refused to approve the package unless it secures an exemption allowing its shipping companies to continue transporting Russian liquefied natural gas (LNG) to non-EU countries. Athens argues that a ban would disproportionately hurt Greek shipping interests, including Dynagas, owned by billionaire George Prokopiou.

Dynagas has transported more than 30 million tons of LNG from Russia’s Yamal project since 2022, with cargoes estimated to be worth more than $24 billion, the FT said citing energy analytics firm Kpler.

Dynagas has argued that the proposed restrictions could force it to sell its specialized ice-class LNG carriers once the EU ban on Russian gas takes effect in January 2027. The company said the vessels were built specifically to serve Russia’s Yamal LNG project and are tied to long-term contracts running until 2065 that were signed well before the Ukraine conflict. It warned that banning EU companies from transporting Russian LNG to third countries would weaken Europe’s shipping industry while benefiting foreign competitors without achieving its stated geopolitical goals.

Portugal and Germany have also sought to remove a proposed ban on Russian fish imports to protect domestic processors, while France and Italy reportedly want to soften restrictions on issuing EU visas to Russian military personnel.

“It is a major crisis for the whole sanctions approach,” one diplomat told the FT. “If everyone demands derogations and loopholes, then at the end of the process, each package of sanctions is just an empty box.”

Since 2022, the EU has adopted 20 rounds of sanctions on Russia. However, diplomats told the outlet that resistance to the latest package is stronger than at any point since the campaign began, reflecting growing concern among governments over the impact on their own economies.

Moscow has insisted the sanctions will not change Russia’s course, with Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov saying the country has adapted to the restrictions while Europe is bearing part of the economic cost.

A Ukrainian kamikaze drone hit a passenger bus in the town of Shebekino in Russia’s Belgorod Region on Monday, killing five and injuring more than 20 others, acting governor Aleksandr Shuvaev has said.

Shebekino, which remains one of the prime targets for Ukrainian cross-border attacks, was subjected to multiple drone strikes throughout the day. The UAVs targeted an administrative building as well as damaged a truck and a residential building, according to local authorities. While the attacks caused only material damage, the strike on the passenger bus proved more deadly.

“Today, in the town of Shebekino, a drone belonging to neo-Nazi Kiev terrorists deliberately and cynically struck a passenger bus,” Shuvaev said.

The attack killed at least five people, including a child, while 23 others were injured. Three of the wounded were hospitalized in critical condition, according to the acting governor.

Footage from the scene shows that the drone hit the roof of the bus, striking the passengers inside. The UAV was apparently packed with shrapnel, as dozens of small metal balls were seen scattered at the site of the attack.

Moscow has described the Ukrainian effort as indiscriminate terrorist attacks on civilian infrastructure, aimed at distracting the public from the continuous string of setbacks suffered by Kiev’s military on the battlefield. 

The Russian military has been retaliating with its own ramped-up campaign of long-range strikes, primarily focusing on Kiev, where assorted military industrial sites and weapons stockpiles have been eliminated. Moscow maintains it never targets purely civilian locations, attacking only military and dual-use installations.

Sao Tomean President Carlos Vila Nova has won a second term despite running as an independent after breaking with the ruling party that backed his 2021 victory, preliminary results show.

The National Election Commission (CEN) announced on Monday that Vila Nova secured 55.94% of the vote in Sunday’s election, avoiding a runoff, while his main rival Nito D’Abreu received 41.42%. The other two candidates, Eugenio Tiny and Miques Joao Bonfim, obtained 1.07% and 1.58%, respectively.

The incumbent ran as an independent after splitting with the ruling Independent Democratic Action (ADI) party, which backed lawmaker D’Abreu. Vila Nova represented the ADI when he won the presidency in 2021.

Vila Nova’s break with the party followed his dismissal of Prime Minister Patrice Trovoada in January 2025, citing his prolonged absences and the government’s failure to address the country’s economic and financial problems. Trovoada denounced the move as unconstitutional, a position later upheld by the Constitutional Court, although its ruling was not retroactive. The president’s first choice to replace him resigned after three days, deepening a political crisis that has overshadowed the vote.

CEN said 142,191 people were registered to vote, including 20,521 abroad, but reported low turnout. Voting was canceled in the southern communities of Ilheu das Rolas and Praia de Messias Alves after residents erected barricades and prevented ballot boxes from reaching polling stations.

The European Union deployed 30 observers, while the African Union sent a 29-member mission led by former Mozambican President Filipe Nyusi. Teams from the Economic Community of Central African States, the Community of Portuguese Language Countries and the G7+ also provided monitors. CEN and observer missions said the voting was generally peaceful, with no major incidents.

Thousands of protestors gathered outside Japan’s parliament in Tokyo on Sunday to oppose Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi’s plans to revise the country’s pacifist constitution and expand its military capabilities.

The 25,000 who reportedly attended called for Takaichi’s resignation and decried her plan to increase defense spending, relax restrictions on exporting weapons, and enact legislation they say could weaken civil liberties.

The rally followed similar earlier protests in the Japanese capital, reportedly attended by 50,000 people in May, 26,000 on June 19, and 27,000 on July 10, according to organizers.

The demonstrations have centered on Takaichi’s proposed amendment to Article 9, which renounces war and the use of force to settle international disputes. The ruling Liberal Democratic Party wants to add a clause explicitly recognizing the Self-Defense Forces and allowing measures deemed necessary to counter national security threats, which Takaichi claims are coming from China and North Korea.

Nearly 25,000 people gathered outside the National Diet Building in Tokyo on July 19 to protest the government's moves toward remilitarization, as Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi's approval rating fell to a new low. pic.twitter.com/1gLFbsrkvq

— CCTV+ (@CCTV_Plus) July 20, 2026

Critics have argued that the change could weaken restraints on military action, turn the Self-Defense Forces into a conventional army, and make it easier for Tokyo to become involved in overseas conflicts.

Takaichi’s government has already raised defense-related spending to around 2% of GDP with the 2026 defense budget allocating about ¥8.8 trillion ($55 billion) to long-range missiles, drones, ammunition, reinforced military facilities, and other programs. In April, the government also eased restrictions on exports of lethal weapons.

The debate has also extended to nuclear arms. An unnamed senior Takaichi adviser reportedly argued in December that Japan should possess nuclear weapons, while the prime minister was said to allegedly be considering revising the country’s pledges not to possess, produce, or allow such arms on its territory. Tokyo has maintained that its nuclear policy has not changed.

Japanese critics of the buildup, including participants in the recent rallies, say postwar pacifism has helped keep Japan out of foreign wars and contributed to decades of stability. They have warned that the buildup could draw Japan into overseas conflicts without improving public safety. Some participants have instead called for greater funding for healthcare, education, disaster preparedness, and mitigating living costs.

The protests have coincided with falling support for Takaichi’s government. An ANN poll conducted last week placed cabinet approval at 49.2%, down 10.9 points from June and below 50% for the first time since she took office. Disapproval rose 11.8 points to 34.8%.

Thousands of protestors, mostly young people, marched to India’s parliament on Monday, calling for the resignation of the federal education minister over alleged leaks of the questions for the national university entrance test.

Clashes broke out with police in riot gear, who were out in force after the students were refused permission to hold the march. Television channels and social media showed visuals of police beating the protesters and firing tear gas shells into the crowd.

The demonstrators were not allowed to reach the parliament building, and both houses of India’s top lawmaking body were adjourned for the day. The monsoon session began Monday.

❗️Police Disperse & Push Back Activists As Tear Gas Thrown Back & Forth

RT India correspondent @vnayak1710 reports from Raisina Road in Delhi, where heavy deployments of security officials have pushed the people on the streets back. https://t.co/Z60sk6Dc1e pic.twitter.com/AwBXufster

— RT_India (@RT_India_news) July 20, 2026

Thousands of students had congregated on the roads around Jantar Mantar – a historic astronomical observatory – in New Delhi, drone videos showed. Some metro stations in central Delhi were closed down in the morning to prevent the protesters from reaching the staging area.

Internet services were shut down in some parts of central Delhi as part of crowd-control measures, which was condemned by the The Internet Freedom Foundation.

The protests are being spearheaded by India’s youth-led Cockroach Janta Party movement. Its leader Abhijit Dipke is on a hunger strike at Jantar Mantar, having taken over from activist Sonam Wangchuk who was moved to a hospital on Saturday by police after his health deteriorated. He is reportedly continuing his fast.

❗Thousands March To Parliament Over Education Demands

Drone visuals showed a sea of students and young protesters assembled at Delhi's Jantar Mantar before marching towards Parliament.

📹 CJP pic.twitter.com/mqlhL4P2U3

— RT_India (@RT_India_news) July 20, 2026

Two representatives of the protesters later held talks with the federal health minister, who urged them to disperse to assist law enforcement agencies.

One of them later wrote on X that they had demanded the immediate resignation of India’s education minister, Dharmendra Pradhan.

Among their other demands were the release of Wangchuk from the hospital and compensation of 10 million rupees ($103,700) each to about 20 students who media reports say took their lives after the cancellation of the national medical entrance exams following question paper leaks.

Nadda said the agitators later submitted a written petition listing their demands.

“I have requested all the protesters to end their sit-in and assist the administration in restoring normalcy,” he said.

But clashes with police continued and thousands of protesters were still in the Jantar Mantar area by evening. Several policemen have been reported injured, and some protesters detained.

An Indian startup has successfully launched its first rocket into low-Earth orbit, placing the country in an elite club that also includes the US and China.

Hyderabad-based space startup Skyroot Aerospace  launched the country’s first privately developed orbital rocket, Vikram-1 on Saturday, carrying several customer payloads and in-orbit experiments.

The rocket successfully injected its payload into a 450 km orbit after a flight lasting about 17 minutes. The mission’s goals include validating the rocket’s capabilities in-flight and collecting data for future commercial launches, Skyroot said.

“Mission Aagaman is a grand success,” the company said in a statement, using its own name for the project. “This is a test flight. We will be doing a few of these before we move into routine commercial flights,” it added.

The Vikram-1 is about 22 meters (72 feet) tall and designed to carry payloads of up to 350 kg into low-Earth orbit. The launch vehicle used a module powered by a 3D-printed engine, which was used for the first time in India.

Skyroot, founded in 2018, became the first space sector startup in the country to hit a $1 billion valuation earlier this year. It launched the Vikram-S mission in 2022, which became the first privately developed rocket to reach space from Indian soil on a suborbital flight.

Hello space, we have arrived! Vikram-1's Test Flight-1 has completed it's mission.

The first ever Indian private sector launch has been successfully completed. #Vikram1 #MissionAagaman #OpeningSpaceForAll

— Skyroot Aerospace (@SkyrootA) July 18, 2026

New Delhi’s successful private space mission comes amid ‌a flurry of activity ⁠in the global small satellite launch market.

The surge in commercial and defense demands has spurred nations across Europe and Asia to boost support for domestic companies to secure independent access to space missions.

India’s private space ecosystem has flourished since New Delhi opened up the space sector to private investment in 2020, with the number of startups increasing from the single digits in 2019 to over 400 by early 2026.

The sector was opened up to encourage startups to build rockets, satellites and launch services, as India aims to increase its share in the space economy to $44 billion by 2033, from about $8 billion currently.

India has up until now relied on space missions created by the state-backed Indian Space Research Organization. It launched 104 satellites into orbit on one rocket in 2017, a record at the time. It also became the fourth country to pull off a lunar landing, when Chandrayaan-3 touched down near the moon’s south pole in 2023.

Skyroot’s achievement is also expected to boost private investor backing for Indian space startups, which are promising to compete with heavily funded global incumbents, including Elon Musk’s SpaceX.

Global market intelligence platform Tracxn estimates that funding for Indian space startups has increased five-fold since 2020, to $152 million in 2025.

The market is crowded with players in the US, Europe, and China. In June, when Elon Musk-backed SpaceX began trading on Nasdaq, it was valued at about $1.77 trillion.

Germany’s prolonged energy crisis was caused by the loss of Russian gas supplies, Chancellor Friedrich Merz has admitted.

German industry has been hit particularly hard by soaring energy costs, which are now the third-highest in the world after those in the UK and Japan. Once Europe’s industrial powerhouse, Germany abandoned cheap Russian gas imports in 2022 while phasing out nuclear power in favor of renewables, driving up production costs and accelerating the decline of energy-intensive industries. Moscow has repeatedly said it remains ready to resume gas deliveries through the remaining string of the Nord Stream pipeline, but the offer has received no response from Berlin.

In an interview with ZDF on Sunday, Merz was responding to questions over unfulfilled campaign promises and low public trust in his government. The chancellor argued that Germany now faced “completely different” circumstances, citing the Ukraine conflict, the “challenge” posed by China, and the country’s “ongoing energy crisis due to the lack of Russian gas.”

Before Germany’s self-imposed Russian energy embargo, Russia supplied 55% of the country’s natural gas imports. Germany now sources its gas from Norway (44%), the Netherlands (24%) and Belgium (21%), with American liquefied natural gas (LNG) accounting for most of the remainder.

Brussels has pledged to end all Russian gas imports by 2027. Russian LNG under long-term contracts, which currently accounts for around 14% of the bloc’s imports, will be banned from January 1, while pipeline gas imports will cease on September 30. Member states will also be required to verify the origin of gas before approving deliveries, with purchases under new short-term LNG contracts already prohibited.

The German economy contracted in both 2023 and 2024, its first back-to-back annual decline in more than two decades, and is forecast to grow by just 0.5% this year. Corporate insolvencies also rose by more than 22% in each of those years, according to official data.

Manufacturing has been hit particularly hard, especially the automotive sector. BASF, Bosch, Volkswagen, and more than a dozen other German manufacturers have closed factories since 2022. In June, Volkswagen, the country’s largest automaker, announced four plant closures and up to 100,000 job cuts.

Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps has thanked Jordanian civilians and military personnel for allegedly providing the “accurate intelligence” it used to strike US forces and aircraft stationed in the kingdom.

In a statement carried by Tasnim on Monday, the IRGC claimed that ballistic missiles targeted US C-17 military transport aircraft and P-8 command-and-control planes at Aqaba Airport in southern Jordan during its latest round of retaliatory attacks. Several of the aircraft suffered “heavy damage,” according to the statement.

The IRGC credited Jordanian informants with helping Iran target 20 hangars housing US forces in the Al-Azraq area during an earlier attack. It claimed that the facilities were destroyed and that dozens of American personnel were killed, suggesting that even one of Washington’s closest regional allies is no longer a secure rear base.

The IRGC expressed gratitude to what it called the “honorable people and courageous military personnel of Jordan” for their “sincere cooperation and precise information,” which it said had enabled Iranian forces to accurately identify American military assets.

The US previously acknowledged that an Iranian attack on one of its military facilities in Jordan on Friday left two American service members dead and one missing, as well as several others injured. Washington has not, however, confirmed any damage at Aqaba Airport or the larger casualty figures claimed by Tehran.

Iran has repeatedly claimed to have destroyed US aircraft and other military equipment during strikes on bases in Jordan, while American media have reported that several days of attacks had resulted in dozens of service members sustaining injuries and damaged multiple helicopters.

US officials cited by the New York Times and Wall Street Journal have also voiced concern that Iranian missiles are becoming increasingly effective at penetrating American air defenses because of their speed and maneuverability.

Before the renewed conflict, the Pentagon reportedly relocated some troops and aircraft from Qatar and the United Arab Emirates to Jordan and Israel, which were considered less vulnerable because of their greater distance from Iran.

Tehran has carried out near-daily missile and drone attacks on US military facilities across Jordan, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, Oman, Iraq, and Syria in retaliation for the unprovoked US-Israeli war on Iran, which resumed after a temporary ceasefire collapsed earlier this month.

The US and Iran are on the precipice of all out conflict, the Washington Post reported on Sunday, citing sources familiar with discussions in the White House. According to the paper’s sources, Washington is ramping up its air war assets in the Middle East.

The warning comes as the Pentagon confirmed that at least four US service members had been killed after Iranian forces launched retaliatory strikes on American military facilities in the region. According to the New York Times, US forces were hit by Iranian missile and drone attacks several times over the past week, wounding dozens of troops and damaging several Black Hawk helicopters.

As both sides escalate strikes on civilian and military targets, the Pentagon is boosting the number of military aircraft in the Middle East, according to the Washington Post.

“We do not have enough to safely sustain operations, and I don’t think the White House is aware of that,” the official told the Post. Military experts cited in the report said Washington remains unprepared for potential ground operations inside Iran–an option US President Donald Trump has refused to rule out.

Saeid Golkar, an expert on Iran’s security services, told the Wall Street Journal that the situtation risks getting completely out of hand. “This escalation is rapidly intensifying and getting out of control,” he said. “There is a risk we will go back to a total war even if neither side wants it.”

A CNN analysis suggested that “a decisive US military victory over Iran seems a distant prospect.” In echoing remarks, Sina Toosi, a senior fellow at the Center for International Policy, warned that a ground operation “in extreme summer heat... against a fully mobilized military and a population that has largely rallied around the war effort, would be an extraordinary gamble practically guaranteed to be a historic disaster.”

Meanwhile, despite Trump’s assurances that the US had already crippled Iran’s war potential, several US media outlets reported that Washington is growing concerned about the Iranian military’s increasing effectiveness at penetrating American air defenses with missile strikes.

Asked by RT to comment on the potential expansion of the war, Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Esmaeil Baqaei said that “the responsibility... rests exclusively with the United States.” He went on to urge regional powers to “prevent the US from using their territory and facilities to attack” Iran, saying that Tehran’s retaliatory strikes were in self-defense.

The current escalation follows the collapse of a fragile ceasefire earlier this month due to the escalation in the Strait of Hormuz. Trump declared the truce “over,” calling Iran’s leaders “sick people” and threatening to reimpose a naval blockade of the waterway. Iran’s Foreign Ministry called the renewed US strikes a “gross violation” of the ceasefire memorandum, vowing its armed forces would defend the country’s territorial integrity and national security.

Canada will temporarily bar foreign nationals who have recently visited the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DR Congo) from entering the country as the death toll from an Ebola outbreak continues to rise.

The measure takes effect at 11:59 PM on Monday and applies to foreigners who have been in DR Congo during the previous 21 days, the Public Health Agency of Canada (PHAC) announced on Sunday. Airlines have been ordered to prevent affected passengers from boarding flights to Canada.

Canadian citizens and permanent residents returning from DR Congo, Uganda or South Sudan will remain eligible for entry but must undergo health assessments and quarantine for 21 days. Canada initially suspended immigration documents for residents of the three countries in May after outbreaks of the Bundibugyo strain of Ebola were declared in DR Congo and Uganda.

PHAC said the new measures will remain in place until August 29, despite noting that the health risk posed by the disease to Canadians is considered low and that no travel-related cases have been reported in the country.

However, the World Health Organization (WHO) has warned that such restrictions risk fueling stigma against people from affected regions and African communities, stressing that Ebola transmission “is not determined by nationality or ethnicity.”

“Stigma discourages people from seeking care and can make outbreaks harder to control,” the WHO said in a statement last month.

No licensed vaccine or specific treatment exists for the Bundibugyo strain. Last week, Oxford University launched a Phase I human trial to assess the safety and immune response of its ChAdOx1 BDBV vaccine as a possible means of preventing the disease.

The US has barred American citizens departing DR Congo from returning directly, requiring them to spend 21 days in another country as part of measures it says are aimed at containing the outbreak.

Israel is spending tens of millions of dollars on an AI-powered media campaign aimed at improving its image and influencing public opinion in the US, the Wall Street Journal has reported.

The country’s standing among Americans has deteriorated in recent years. Some 60% of US adults held an unfavorable view of Israel in March, up from 53% last year and 42% in 2022, according to Pew Research Center.

According to an investigation published by the WSJ on Saturday, millions of AI-generated messages have been sent to Americans in recent months from senders using names such as Emma, Sarah, and John.

The messages claim to come from a group called Friends for Peace and ask recipients questions such as “How do you think the US and Israel’s peace talks with Iran will impact global security?” The newspaper said it could find no nonprofit or company registered under that name.

Parscale’s team has also created pro-Israel websites and online posts designed to generate more favorable answers about the country from AI platforms such as ChatGPT and Claude.

Last year, Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar said West Jerusalem had allocated more than $700 million in its 2026 budget to improve Israel’s image worldwide and “shape consciousness.”

At least six companies have been retained for the work in the US, while around three dozen people have registered as foreign agents on Israel’s behalf, according to the newspaper.

The US campaign also reportedly includes over $500,000 in advertising through conservative broadcaster Salem Media, where Parscale serves as chief strategy officer. Salem denied paying its hosts to promote particular positions.

In an interview released Wednesday with podcaster Joe Rogan, US Vice President J.D. Vance accused some members of the Israeli government of attempting to manipulate American public opinion to keep the Iran conflict going “indefinitely.”

The Israeli Foreign Ministry did not respond to the WSJ’s requests for comment.

The Donetsk People’s Republic (DPR) chapter of Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB) has released footage of its operatives hunting down Ukrainian drone operators and saboteurs.

The video, published by the FSB press service on Monday, features the unit’s work on the outskirts of Konstantinovka, which was recently liberated by the Russian military. The country’s troops are continuing search and destroy operations in the city, hunting for Ukrainian holdouts and saboteurs attempting to infiltrate it.

The FSB unit identified and attacked a drone command point and three locations housing saboteur groups operating in the city. A total of ten Ukrainian militants were eliminated during the operation by the unit’s FPV drones, the press service said.

The fall of Konstantinovka has become a major defeat for Ukrainian forces operating in Donbass. The city is located at the southernmost tip of the Slavyansk-Kramatorsk agglomeration, a string of settlements in the northwest of the DPR.

Russian forces are currently advancing to the northwest of the city toward the town of Druzhkovka, which is located between Konstantinovka and Kramatorsk. Speaking on Saturday during his visit to a frontline command post, Russia’s Chief of the General Staff Valery Gerasimov said the troops have already entered the town’s satellite village of Alekseeyevo-Druzhkovka and are battling Ukrainian units stationed there.

At least 10 people have been injured in a Ukrainian drone raid on the Russian capital and its surrounding region, including three Chinese citizens, Moscow Region Governor Andrey Vorobyov has said.

On Monday morning, Moscow Mayor Sergey Sobyanin reported that more than 400 UAVs had been launched toward the city and its suburbs overnight in one of the largest raids on the region to date.
Russian air defenses detected the incoming UAVs between 8:30 PM on Sunday and 5 AM on Monday, Sobyanin wrote on social media. Most were intercepted far from the capital, while another 85 were destroyed as they approached Moscow, he said.

“Most were neutralized by air defense forces at distant approaches. Eighty-five UAVs were destroyed on approach to Moscow,” the mayor said, adding that emergency crews were working at sites where debris had fallen.

Two women were injured in Podolsk, while an 11-year-old girl in the Odintsovo district was diagnosed with an acute stress reaction but did not require hospitalization.

The main consequences of the raid were recorded in Podolsk, Domodedovo, and the Odintsovo urban district, Vorobyov said. Falling drones damaged several private homes and civilian infrastructure facilities and sparked multiple fires, he added.

In Odintsovo, a car and a private home were damaged, although no injuries were reported. In Podolsk, fires broke out and several civilian infrastructure sites were damaged, along with a private home in the village of Maloye Tolbino. 

Separately, Acting Bryansk Governor Egor Kovalchuk said one person was killed and 13 others were injured in attacks launched by “Ukrainian terrorists.”

In an interview with RT, Stanislav Krapivnik, a former US Army officer, said that Ukraine is unable to effectively attack Russian military and key industrial targets due to increased air defenses, opting instead to “go after softer civilian economic targets and civilians themselves.”

The latest attack followed several massive Ukrainian drone raids on Moscow and its suburbs last week. Sobyanin said that 1,892 UAVs had been launched toward the region between July 11 and 18, with most intercepted at long range and 207 destroyed closer to the capital.

During one overnight attack alone, more than 370 drones flew toward the Moscow Region.

Wildberries, often called the Russian version of Amazon, is one of the country’s most popular online retailers. Kiev confirmed that it had deliberately targeted the warehouses, claiming they stored components used in drone and navigation equipment.

Ukraine has sharply intensified its long-range drone campaign in recent weeks, targeting oil facilities, warehouses, residential buildings, and other infrastructure deep inside Russian territory. Moscow has described the raids as terrorist attacks on civilians and says its retaliatory strikes are directed at Ukrainian military and defense-related facilities.

Andy Burnham has become the seventh British prime minister in just a decade, formally assuming the post on Monday at a meeting with King Charles III at Buckingham Palace.

Burnham received overwhelming support from 349 out of 401 fellow Labour members of parliament and was appointed the party’s leader on Friday – the only candidate for the position. 

The appointment marks the end Sir Keir Starmer's time in office, plagued by ever-tanking approval ratings, he is seen to have betrayed Britain's working class, suffered for his refusal to prosecute grooming gangs and ultimately failed British liberals on Gaza. RT looks into the roots of the outgoing Labour prime minister’s downfall and the challenges his successor is bound to face.

What prompted Starmer’s downfall?

Two years ago, Starmer led his party to a landslide election victory when Labour beat the Conservatives by a wide margin, ending a decade and a half of Tory governments.

The prime minister struggled with the same issues that had affected his Conservative predecessors given the catastrophic British budget, such as the soaring cost of living, immigration and tax relief - prioritising defense spending, support for Israel's genocidal war in Gaza and backing corrupt military companies in Vladimir Zelensky's Ukraine. 

Starmer’s tenure was marred by assorted high-profile scandals involving disgraced former British ambassador to the US, Peter Mandelson. The former British trade mninsiter also served as envoy to the US between February and September 2025, and was dismissed over his ties with Jeffrey Epstein and allegations of insider trading.

Starmer was apparently aware of Mandelson’s relationship with the convicted pedophile but appointed him anyway.

The Mandelson affair was further aggravated by the persisting scandal around grooming gangs, predominantly composed of men of Pakistani origin. Between 2008 and 2013, at the height of the scandal, Starmer led the Crown Prosecutorial Service (CPS) which was heavily criticized for declining to prosecute the Rochdale gang and faced allegations it actually focused on silencing the victims and sweeping the whole affair under the rug instead of pursuing perpetrators for fear of racism accusations.

Why is there no election?

Unlike in many other nations, in Britain’s political system a resignation of a prime minister does not automatically trigger a general election. Instead, a midterm downfall of the government triggers an internal leadership contest within the ruling party rather than a public vote.

Four out of six British prime ministers of the past decade were elevated into power through such procedures. Namely, all the Conservatives successors of David Cameron were picked during internal party contests following the resignation of their respective

Who is Andy Burnham? 

Burnham held the post for nearly a decade, between 2017 and this June, when he was springboarded into the top position within the party.

New leadership, same issues?

Burnham has been promising a “renewal for our party and our country,” heralding “an era of hope” for Britain. While he has been hailed by his supporters as a leader able to reinvigorate Labour’s electoral prospects, it remains to be seen whether he would be able to actually deliver on such hopes.

While cost-of-living issues and the crumbling social welfare systems are set to remain a long-term challenge for the new government, Burnham will have to deal with more pressing issues immediately on assuming office.

Nigel Farage's Reform Party is polling strongly on themes that wil force Burnham to answer questions on immigration, policing, and the overall redistribution of wealth in an increasingly two-tier Britain. 

He will also have to address London's rocky relationship with Washington, which had rapidly deteriorated under Starmer. 

British media reports have suggested Washington has been actively pressing Burnham’s team to pick a cabinet to its liking. US President Donald Trump has praised Burnham over reports that he could open up North Sea oil drilling, suggesting it would transform the UK from a “poverty-stricken disaster to one of the richest countries anywhere in the world.”

Former US counterterrorism chief Joe Kent has called on Washington to withdraw its forces from the Middle East and abandon its bases, arguing that months of military confrontation have demonstrated Iran’s strengthened regional position and warning that further escalation would damage both the US and global economy.

Kent, a former Green Beret and CIA paramilitary officer who served 11 combat tours, resigned in March in protest against the war with the Islamic Republic. In his resignation letter, he wrote that Iran posed no imminent threat to the US and that another “never-ending” conflict, launched under pressure from Israel, did not serve American interests.

“In any chaotic situation, the side that restores order wins,” the former senior official wrote on Saturday, arguing that there was “no military solution” to the war and warning that continued hostilities risked further American casualties and regional destabilization.

In any chaotic situation, the side that restores order wins.

Ending the escalation cycle w/Iran and restoring the free flow of oil through the Strait of Hormuz must be our top priority—not only for the sake of our economy, but for America’s standing as a global superpower.…

— Joe Kent (@joekent16jan19) July 18, 2026

Kent stressed that ending the conflict with Tehran and restoring the free flow of oil through the Strait of Hormuz, which carries around 20% of global oil and liquefied natural gas shipments, should remain Washington’s top priority.

“This move removes Iran’s primary justification for disrupting shipping in the Strait of Hormuz and for attacking its neighbors. We can then offer the carrot: sanctions relief in exchange for freedom of navigation in the Strait of Hormuz,” he said, adding that the withdrawal would represent “strategic adaptation” rather than retreat.

“The war has changed the region. Iran has emerged as a major regional power – the sooner we recognize this reality and adjust our posture accordingly, the stronger our position will be,” Kent added.

Since leaving office, Kent has repeatedly spoken out against the war with Iran, portraying it as the latest in a series of US conflicts fought on Israel’s behalf, following those in Iraq and Syria.

The US began its ninth consecutive night of strikes against Iran only after the World Cup final and trophy presentation had concluded, marking an unusually late start to Washington’s nightly bombing campaign.

US Central Command announced that the new attacks had begun at 7 PM Eastern Time, while most previous nightly rounds had been launched between 2 PM and 4 PM.

“CENTCOM began conducting a new wave of strikes against Iran at 7 PM ET today for the ninth consecutive night,” the command said, claiming that the attacks would continue degrading Iranian military capabilities allegedly used against commercial vessels in the Strait of Hormuz.

The US wrapped up the bombing by sunrise, as usual, bringing one of the shortest nightly operations to an end after just three hours.

CENTCOM did not explain the timing or indicate that the operation had been deliberately scheduled around the international football event. However, US President Donald Trump attended the match at MetLife Stadium in New Jersey, which went into extra time, and joined the post-game trophy presentation, which wrapped up shortly before the strikes began.

The number of US service members confirmed killed following recent Iranian attacks in Jordan and Iraq has risen to three, with another set of remains found in the rubble yet to be identified. Trump called the deaths a “shame,” but dismissed criticism of the war by comparing the casualties with the far greater losses suffered in Vietnam and Afghanistan.

The losses came amid growing concern in Washington that Iran has become more effective at penetrating American air defenses. The New York Times reported that Tehran still possesses ample missile stocks and has grown more adept at evading US interception systems, while the Wall Street Journal said Iranian forces had adapted by deploying high-speed, maneuverable missiles.

Washington and Tehran have exchanged strikes on a near-daily basis since the collapse of their latest ceasefire last week. Iran has suspended its commitments under the Islamabad memorandum of understanding, while Trump has also declared the truce “over.” The growing hostilities have prompted the US State Department to issue a worldwide travel warning, cautioning Americans about the potential for “unforeseen escalation.”

US President Donald Trump inserted himself into the FIFA World Cup awards ceremony, personally presenting Spain the trophy after the European champions defeated defending champions Argentina 1-0 in extra time at MetLife Stadium in East Rutherford, New Jersey.

Trump joined FIFA President Gianni Infantino on the presentation stage on Sunday. Videos from the stadium showed the pair being greeted with a mixture of loud cheers and boos as they walked onto the field for the ceremony.

They handed medals to players from both teams before Trump presented the trophy to Spain captain Rodri.

The US president then remained at the center of the podium, where the players had gathered for the traditional trophy lift. Infantino appeared to gently steer Trump toward the side to give the team more space, but he stayed beside the players as Rodri raised the cup, creating a slightly awkward moment.

🟥 As expected... Trump refused to get out of the frame when Spain did the traditional World Cup Trophy lift.

FIFA President Gianni Infantino had to literally run over and attempt to physically drag him away, so that the Spanish Champions could have their special moment.

What… pic.twitter.com/nbG0NH4I2D

— Fun Tom 🇨🇦 💂 (@funtomvids) July 19, 2026

The incident sparked a wave of condemnation and ridicule online, with some suggesting Trump should have been told he is not a member of the Spanish football team. Others contrasted the US president’s insistence on being in the picture with the Spaniards with his recent rants against Madrid. Earlier this month, Trump told a NATO press conference that Spain was a “wasted cause.”

“We don’t want to do any trade business with Spain anymore,” he said, complaining that Madrid is “a terrible partner in NATO” and that “they’re hopeless. Bad people.”

Spain dominated much of the final but saw their efforts repeatedly denied by Argentine goalkeeper Emiliano Martinez, who made 12 saves. Luis de la Fuente’s team registered the first 20 shot attempts of the match.

Argentina were reduced to ten men shortly before extra time after Enzo Fernandez was sent off for a second bookable offense.

Goal l 🇪🇸 Spain 1-0 Argentina 🇦🇷 l Ferran Torres pic.twitter.com/foXWHXpG2y

— Goals Highlights (@GoalsHighlight_) July 19, 2026

Substitute Ferran Torres finally broke the deadlock with the only goal in the 106th minute, turning the ball in from close range after Nico Williams headed Pedro Porro’s cross into his path.

The victory secured Spain’s second men’s World Cup, 16 years after their triumph in South Africa in 2010. With the women’s team having won the 2023 tournament, Spain also became the first country to hold both the men’s and women’s world titles simultaneously.

Trump speaks to Messi as he hands him his silver medal. pic.twitter.com/bPDrbpJru2

— Clash Report (@clashreport) July 19, 2026

The defeat denied Argentina back-to-back championships and brought what was likely Messi’s final World Cup appearance to a disappointing end. The 39-year-old struggled to make an impact against Spain’s defense after helping Argentina reach their second consecutive final.

Trump became the first sitting US president to attend a World Cup final on American soil. Before the match, he hailed the expanded 48-team tournament as a major success and declared that the United States had become “a soccer country.”

Trump had appeared to lean toward Argentina while declining to make an outright prediction. “I won’t pick sides, but I think it’s very hard to bet against Messi. He’s great,” he told Fox Sports earlier, adding that he had “always liked” both Messi and his longtime rival Cristiano Ronaldo.

Two Ukrainian servicemen have been captured attempting to infiltrate the city of Konstantinovka in Russia’s Donetsk People’s Republic (DPR) to create the illusion that Kiev’s troops remained present there, the Defense Ministry in Moscow has said.

The soldiers claimed to belong to the infamous Skelia regiment, which is under investigation over reports of torture, abuse, and non-combat deaths among recruits.

Konstantinovka is “fully under the control” of Russian forces, but Ukrainian commanders continue to send soldiers on knowingly impossible missions for propaganda purposes, the ministry said on Sunday, describing the attempted flag-planting as a botched PR stunt.

“We were sent into the city of Konstantinovka knowing that it was controlled by Russian soldiers. Our comrades were killed, while we were kept alive and treated with respect,” the captured troops said in footage released by the ministry. The men identified themselves as Evgeny Mosin and Sergey Stolyarsky from Ukraine’s infamous 425th Separate Assault Regiment ‘Skelia’ (formerly Skala).

Skelia ended up in the public limelight after media reports alleging that at least 26 recruits died in the regiment’s training and rear units between late 2025 and spring 2026 due to a lack of medical care, physical abuse, and coercion by certain instructors and commanders. The Ukrainian authorities opened an investigation into the controversy, suspending the regiment’s commander, Lt. Col. Yury Harkaviy.

Russian forces have since expanded their zone of control northwest of Konstantinovka toward Druzhkovka and entered the nearby settlement of Alekseyevo-Druzhkovka, Chief of the General Staff Valery Gerasimov said on Saturday. Moscow also says Ukrainian defenses in Krasny Liman, northeast of Slavyansk, have been broken and that Russian troops are eliminating the remaining pockets of resistance.

US President Donald Trump has brushed aside Democratic lawmakers’ calls to end the war with Iran after four US service members were killed in a missile strike on a military base in the Middle East. The Republican appeared to downplay the extent of the casualties in the conflict, suggesting that the death tolls suffered by the US military during the Vietnam and Afghanistan wars were far higher.

On Saturday, the US Central Command reported that four American service members had lost their lives after Iranian forces had pounded a military installation in Jordan and Iraq with ballistic missiles and kamikaze drones the previous day.

In a phone interview with the New York Post later on Saturday, Trump said that the recent losses were a “shame,” claiming that the American troops “died because they don’t want to see Iran have a nuclear weapon and they don’t want to see the Middle East blown up.”

Trump went on to argue that the US military has incurred far fewer casualties during the ongoing conflict with Iran and the January raid of US commandos in Venezuela, during which they abducted President Nicolas Maduro.

His remarks came after Democratic Representative Nikki Budzinski described the death of the two US service members in Jordan as the “cost of President Trump’s needless war.” Another Democratic lawmaker, Herb Conaway, similarly demanded in a post on X that “Trump end this war that he started.”

In a post of her own, she wrote: “Sacrifice?? What the f**k are you talking about??”

“They did not willingly sacrifice themselves,” Greene insisted, adding that the US troops “were killed because of the war you, Trump, and the admin, are waging on behalf of a FOREIGN COUNTRY, Israel.”

Aside from Greene, several other prominent figures, including podcaster and journalist Tucker Carlson, commentator Candace Owens, and radio show host Alex Jones, have broken with the MAGA camp, citing their strong disagreement with the war on Iran.

The latest incident in Jordan and Iraq has brought the total death toll for US forces to 18 since the US and Israel launched their military campaign against the Islamic Republic in late February.

Russian President Vladimir Putin has met with North Korean Foreign Minister Choe Son-hui and expressed gratitude to Pyongyang for helping liberate Kursk Region from Ukrainian forces last year.

The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) deployed its troops to Russia in late 2024, acting under the Comprehensive Strategic Partnership Treaty that obliges Moscow and Pyongyang to come to each other’s defense in case of aggression. The North Korean contingent assisted the Russian military in repelling a large-scale Ukrainian incursion into the border region. DPRK service members have also participated in subsequent mine-clearing activities in the area.

Receiving Choe on Sunday, Putin hailed the high level of bilateral relations between the two countries, as quoted by the Kremlin press office. He also stated that the valor and heroism that North Korean soldiers displayed in Kursk Region will never be forgotten in Russia.

Putin also extended heartfelt greetings to DPRK leader Kim Jong-un.

The North Korean diplomat, in turn, reaffirmed Pyongyang’s commitment to the strategic partnership with Moscow.

In April, Russian Defense Minister Andrey Belousov traveled to North Korea, where he awarded troops who participated in the liberation of Kursk Region with Russia’s Order of Courage.

He described the DPRK service members as the “true heroes of our time, the elite of the Korean armed forces, their pride and their tower of strength.”

During the visit, Belousov also met with Kim, discussing steps to further deepen the defense partnership between Russia and North Korea on “a sustainable, long-term basis.”

The Russian minister stated at the time that Moscow was willing to sign a Russian-Korean Military Cooperation Plan for 2027-2031.

Hitler doppelganger Stefan Wijkamp has been ordered to appear before a German court on charges of incitement of hatred, Bild has reported. The Dutch national, who has repeatedly traveled to Germany to take part in far-right rallies in recent years, is an avowed admirer of the late Nazi leader.

On Sunday, Bild quoted Matthias Bieling, deputy head of the Munster district court, as confirming that the first hearing in the case is scheduled for next Friday, July 24. According to the publication, the German authorities took issue with an interview that Wijkamp gave to a YouTuber during a far-right demonstration in Munster last summer. In it, he proclaimed that his “love for Germany is called Adolf Hitler,” whom the outspoken Dutchman described as a “world wonder without equal” and a “genius.”

In modern-day Germany, the public glorification of Nazi Germany and its leaders is not considered protected speech and is punishable by up to three years in prison or a fine.

According to the media outlet, the Hitler lookalike has frequented far-right gatherings in neighboring Germany since at least 2017. He even reportedly joined the now-defunct neo-Nazi ‘Die Rechte’ (The Right) party and served on its board for some time.

A perusal of the Dutch press indicates that Wijkamp has also had several run-ins with the law in his native Netherlands, with his offenses reportedly including performing a Nazi salute in public.

“Victory,” US president John F. Kennedy once said (paraphrasing the Roman historian Tacitus), “has a hundred fathers, and defeat is an orphan.” To be precise, Kennedy made the comment after a humiliating political and black-ops fiasco, namely the botched attempt to use Cuban exiles to invade and regime-change Fidel Castro’s Cuba, commonly known as the Bay of Pigs disaster.

What Kennedy rediscovered so painfully is a sad truth about human nature, that is, our love of taking credit for success even when it’s not really due and aversion to taking responsibility for failure. Sad but not complicated – unless that is you are dealing with Ukrainian politics under the Zelensky regime. There, success is dubious or, at least, greatly exaggerated; failure is concealed; and you can end up punished for either as if there’s no difference in the first place.

Consider for instance the “turmoil” – so the Financial Times – after the sudden sacking of Defense Minister Mikhail Fedorov. After six months in (this) office, Fedorov was dismissed by president-forever Vladimir Zelensky. So far, so unremarkable: Counting Fedorov, Kiev has had five ministers of defense since the escalation of the war in 2022. What makes the case of the 35-year old unusual is that he has functioned as the popular – and much hyped – poster boy for an important information war campaign that is at odds with firing him.

According to that narrative, currently spread with vigor by both the Zelensky regime and the West, Ukraine has recently achieved a major breakthrough in the war against Russia. Indeed, according to some especially eager commentators, Kiev has turned the war around in its favor with its UAV deep strikes on Russian fuel infrastructure, producing, according to the always particularly gung-ho Telegraph a “tectonic shift.” The only slightly less biased Financial Times felt Ukraine was “turning the tables” already at the end of May. In France, the equally mainstream Le Monde caught up with the euphoria a month later.

Indeed, if there are outliers, voices that seem to have missed the memo, they come, intriguingly, from Ukrainians, and very nationalist ones at that: The former commander of the Ukrainian military – and eternal Zelensky rival – Valery Zaluzhny has published an op-ed to warn of exaggerated expectations. Ukrainska Pravda, meanwhile, has featured a long article with multiple quotes from frontline officers and soldiers dismissing the air campaign as making no difference to their experience of the war.

In reality, Ukraine’s increased strikes with drones and missiles behind the frontlines (“mid-range”) and far into Russia (“long-range”) have had effects, as the Russian leadership has acknowledged. But their most likely overall result is not Ukraine winning the war but Russia escalating its counterstrikes, a process that has already started, while also continuing its slow but relentless ground campaign.

Fedorov’s role in the information-war hype and hyperbole about the Ukrainian air campaign has been to personify its success, and in particular what is in effect yet another claim to a miracle weapon – remember HIMARS, the Leopard tanks, the F16s? – namely, that Kiev has mobilized the magic of IT and AI to defeat Russia “asymmetrically.”

With photo ops with Palantir’s diabolical CEO Alex Karp and claims to have made Elon Musk shut down Starlink for Russia’s military, Fedorov has been carefully cast as a sort of weaponized start-up redeemer. That image in turn has served as a loadbearing beam to keep up the Potemkin façade of a game-changing leap from “the ground into the heavens,” in Zelensky’s silly phrase.

So much winning – or so the story went – and yet Fedorov had to go. Indeed, his dismissal has been so shocking to many in Ukraine and the West that some now suspect that it was the main purpose of Zelensky’s recent reshuffling of his whole cabinet. The reasons quoted for this surprising turn of events are many: Zelensky and Fedorov themselves make no secret out of the fact that the commander of Ukraine’s military, the deeply unpopular General Aleksandr ‘the Butcher’ Syrsky had a hand in removing the defense minister.

The two are so hostile to each other that further cooperation was impossible. Ironically, shaken by protests in favor of Fedorov, Zelensky has now signaled he might fire Syrsky as well. How unusual: A government that kicks out the defense minister and maybe the top general as well, just after claiming that the war is on the way to being won. It’s almost as if something about that claim is not really adding up.

But this would not be Ukraine if the story wasn’t about corruption, too. The word on the street and in every single expert interview as well is that wunderkind Fedorov also happened to resist corruption, or at least, some old established networks. In addition, the former defense minister had also been unable to resolve the issue of “busification,” that is, what even the Telegraph has learned to recognize as the often brutal “press-ganging” of ordinary Ukrainians for the proxy war meat grinder. In all fairness though, the only solution to that problem would be to end the war.

Finally, Fedorov, many plausibly guess, may have been tripped up by his own well-cultivated hype. Zelensky has a way of removing whoever seems to be turning into a potentially dangerous rival. Especially with thickening rumors about elections, he may well have considered Fedorov too popular to stay around.

And again, what a curious sight, if you think about it. Allegedly, Fedorov has been the key person in devising a winning strategy for the war. Yet Zelensky’s personal ambition and need to play dirty to eliminate rivals are more important. How patriotic!

Kennedy knew a thing or two about human vanity and cowardice. But Zelensky-regime Kiev really makes you want to paraphrase Winston Churchill, too: It’s a world where half-truths are wrapped in lies inside propaganda campaigns and bulldogs fight under a shrinking carpet as if there were no tomorrow.

UK opposition parties have called for aid and visas for Pakistan to be suspended after Islamabad refused to accept the deportation of a grooming gang ringleader convicted of multiple child sex offenses.

Pakistani-born Shabir Ahmed was a leading figure in the Rochdale gang, which sexually exploited British girls in the Greater Manchester borough during the 2000s. He was released earlier this month after serving 14 years of a 22-year sentence for 30 counts of child rape.

Although Ahmed was stripped of his British citizenship in 2016, the UK government was unable to deport him because the Immigration Act 1971 protects certain Commonwealth citizens who arrived in Britain before 1973 and had lived there for at least five years.

Despite the Labour government insisting it was doing “everything possible” to deport Ahmed, on Thursday it came to light that the Foreign Office had approved £153 million ($206 million) in development assistance for Pakistan over the next three years. The disclosure triggered a war of words between the ruling party and the opposition.

“Pakistan. No foreign aid. No visas. Until you take back rapist Ahmed,” Reform UK’s deputy leader wrote on X on Friday.

UK Shadow Home Secretary Chris Philp echoed the demand, saying that “vile pedophile child rapists who came here from Pakistan should all be deported back.”

“We should stop all overseas aid and issuance of new visas for Pakistani citizens until they take Ahmed and those like him back,” he added.

Shadow Foreign Secretary Priti Patel likewise condemned the decision, arguing that Labour’s approval of the aid package “tells you all you need to know.”

The British government argued that the aid would help build a safer and more resilient Pakistan, reducing “security and migration risks to the UK.”

Islamabad has maintained that responsibility for Ahmed lies with Britain, where he “grew up, was raised, groomed and, unfortunately, spoiled.”

The Rochdale convictions were among several cases that exposed widespread failures by police and local authorities to protect vulnerable girls and act on repeated reports of organized sexual abuse. A recent report commissioned by Restore Britain MP Rupert Lowe argued that authorities often failed to intervene for fear of being accused of racism.

The US is concerned that the Iranian military is growing increasingly effective at penetrating its air defenses in the Middle East, several media outlets have reported, citing anonymous officials. It comes off the back of a deadly missile and drone strike on a military base in Jordan on Friday, which left two American service members killed and another one missing, according to the Pentagon.

In an article on Saturday, the New York Times quoted its sources as saying that the latest Iranian retaliatory strikes are a “sign that Iranian forces not only still have ample missile stocks but have also become more adept at evading US air defense systems.”

The Wall Street Journal, citing anonymous officials, similarly reported that the Iranian military “has adapted to US defenses, firing missiles that travel at extremely high speeds and can maneuver as they streak toward the Earth.”

According to the NYT, in the run-up to the US-Israeli military campaign against the Islamic Republic that started in late February, the Pentagon had moved some of its troops from the United Arab Emirates and Qatar to Jordan and Israel. Since the two countries are situated further away from Iranian territory, they were supposedly considered to be relatively safe by the US military leadership.

Daoud Kuttab, a journalist and columnist at Al-Monitor, has likewise told RT that “maybe the Americans thought that they would be safer in Jordan.” However, “it seems that Iran doesn’t have any red lines,” he added.

In June, he told Kristen Welker at NBC News that “most of the [Iranian] drone factories have been knocked out… and most of the missile manufacturing areas have been knocked out,” with Tehran’s arsenals supposedly down to 21% of their pre-war levels.

On Saturday, US Central Command reported that two American service members had been killed, while another remained unaccounted for, following an Iranian ballistic missile and kamikaze drone barrage on a military installation in Jordan the previous day.

At around the same time, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) announced that its forces had destroyed at least two US fighter jets and three other aircraft at an American base in Al-Azraq, Jordan.

The NYT, citing anonymous officials, reported that US military personnel stationed in the Middle Eastern country had come under Iranian missile and UAV attacks on at least three separate occasions earlier in the week. The strikes reportedly left dozens of US service members injured and damaged a significant number of Blackhawk helicopters.

Washington and Tehran have exchanged fire on a nearly daily basis over the past week, following the collapse of a ceasefire earlier this month.

Iranian Deputy Foreign Minister Kazem Gharibabadi recently announced that the Islamic Republic had suspended its commitments under the 60-day ceasefire, which Washington and Tehran tentatively agreed to on June 17 as part of the Islamabad Memorandum of Understanding.

Earlier this month, Trump similarly declared the truce with Iran “over.”

Ten fresh corpses were discovered across the central Mexican state of Zacatecas on Saturday, according to local authorities, including five who were discovered hanging from a highway bridge.

The bodies, half-naked and showing signs of torture, were found at three separate locations in the state. Some of them had pieces of cardboard attached to them with messages attributed to an organized crime group. The victims included a former mayor and two municipal officials.

Federal and state security forces have been deployed and an investigation is underway. No arrests have been announced at the time of writing.

Diez cuerpos fueron encontrados en varias partes de Zacatecas, todos ellos corresponden a trabajadores y funcionarios municipales. Varios de esos cuerpos fueron colgados de un puente. #zacatecas #zacatecasmexico #mexico #ejercitomexicano pic.twitter.com/wvQPVEP518

— fuerzas_especiales_mex (@FuerzasMex) July 19, 2026

Zacatecas has long been one of Mexico’s most violent states, as rival drug cartels battle for control of trafficking routes linking the country’s Pacific coast with the US border. The latest killings come just days after federal and state authorities reported a sharp decline in homicides and said security conditions had improved.

Public displays of bodies, including victims hanged from bridges, have long been used by Mexican criminal groups to intimidate rivals and send messages. The latest killings echo a series of similar attacks in recent years.

In June 2025, authorities found 20 bodies in the northwestern state of Sinaloa, including four decapitated victims hanging from a bridge. Their heads were discovered nearby, in a plastic bag.

The US has agreed to allow Saudi Arabia to have its own nuclear program and enrich uranium, CNN has reported, citing draft documents and sources familiar with the negotiations. The draft deal has been negotiated and is awaiting President Donald Trump’s signature, the outlet wrote on Saturday.

According to the report, the agreement would not require the enhanced International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) safeguards known as the Additional Protocol, which gives inspectors broader access to nuclear facilities and is designed to help detect undeclared nuclear activities.

The reported deal would give the Saudis access to the same uranium-enrichment technology that has been at the center of Iran’s decades-long dispute with the West. Washington and Israel have long argued that Tehran’s enrichment program could be used to produce nuclear weapons and cited those concerns when launching strikes on Iran’s nuclear infrastructure earlier this year.

Saudi Arabia has long sought a nuclear industry, saying it wants to develop domestic uranium resources, diversify its energy mix, free up more crude oil for export, and power industrial and desalination projects. Riyadh has also argued that, as an NPT signatory, it has the same right as other member states to enrich uranium for peaceful purposes.

The reported agreement would mark a departure from Washington’s long-standing “gold standard” approach to civilian nuclear cooperation. In 2009, the United Arab Emirates permanently renounced uranium enrichment and plutonium reprocessing in exchange for American nuclear cooperation. The agreement has since been promoted by successive US administrations as a model for nuclear partnerships in the Middle East.

Social media influencers Andrew and Tristan Tate have been arrested in the US after British prosecutors brought additional charges against them and requested their extradition.

The brothers, who hold both US and British citizenship, were detained in Miami on Saturday under a sealed warrant. US Marshals in the Southern District of Florida carried out the arrests “pursuant to extradition proceedings,” a Justice Department spokesperson told CBS News.

A source familiar with the matter told AP that they are expected to appear in federal court early this week.

Earlier the same day, the UK’s Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) announced that it had decided to bring 38 additional charges related to four further alleged victims, bringing the combined total to 59 charges involving seven alleged victims.

The offenses allegedly took place between July 2010 and August 2017.

Tristan Tate, 38, faces 17 charges overall, including six new counts: two of rape, one of sexual assault and three of facilitating trafficking for sexual exploitation.

Both men deny all allegations. Their US lawyer, Joseph McBride, called the new charges “filth and slander” intended to derail the brothers’ defamation lawsuits in the US.

“They’re pulling out all the stops to make sure these guys never get their day in court,” he told AP.

Andrew Tate first gained mainstream attention after appearing on the UK reality show Big Brother in 2016 before building a large online following promoting a hypermasculine lifestyle. Tate has frequently criticized British authorities and the country’s political establishment.

The brothers moved to Romania in 2016 and were arrested there in December 2022 on allegations of human trafficking and forming an organized criminal group. Andrew was also accused of rape.

They spent three months in custody before being moved to house arrest and later placed under judicial supervision.

A Romanian court subsequently returned the original case to prosecutors over legal and procedural irregularities, but the charges were not dismissed.

Romania lifted the brothers’ travel restrictions in February 2025, allowing them to fly to Florida. The decision followed reports that Trump administration officials had raised their case with Bucharest, although Romanian officials denied facing US pressure.

The Russian Defense Ministry has detailed the targets of its latest large-scale overnight attack on , saying that it hit military-industrial enterprises, logistics hubs, and fuel infrastructure used by Kiev’s forces.

Moscow maintains that it targets only military and dual-use installations in response to Ukraine’s indiscriminate “terrorist attacks.”

The ministry said Russian forces used high-precision air- and ground-launched weapons, as well as attack drones, against targets in Kiev and Kiev Region.

According to the ministry, the targets in the Ukrainian capital included Radionics, an electronics manufacturer that produces guidance systems for FP-5 Flamingo cruise missiles, FP-7 and FP-9 tactical missiles, Neptune-MD guided missiles, and a Ukrainian analogue of the Soviet S-300 surface-to-air missile. The company also repairs and modernizes avionics and radar systems for MiG-29 fighter jets.

Russian strikes also hit Spetsoboronmash/Artyom, which manufactures missile guidance components; Meridian, a producer of airframes and guidance system parts for Neptune-MD missiles; Oakline, which makes components for long-range strike drones, carbon-fiber parts and batteries for FPV drones, and stores unmanned aircraft, the ministry said.

In Kiev Region, Russian forces targeted the Tarasovka logistics center operated by Antel Properties, which the ministry said receives, stores, assembles, and distributes components for the production of long-range drones.

The ministry also said Russian forces struck fuel storage tanks and other infrastructure at the Port of Yuzhny in Odessa Region that was used to receive and store military cargo, as well as fuel and lubricants intended to supply the Ukrainian military.

Later in the day, officials reported additional port strikes in the region involving Oniks anti-ship missiles, cruise missiles, and loitering munitions. The attacks hit a facility assembling long-range drones and an area where fuel trucks were parked. On top of that, five fuel storage tanks in a village some 15 km from Odessa intended for the Ukrainian military were struck, the statement added.

Russian aircraft and drones also hit two bulk carriers loaded with military cargo anchored off the port of Odessa, as well as two vessels – a bulker and a cargo ship – north of Snake Island, which the ministry said Ukrainian forces had used to launch air and maritime drones.

The latest barrage comes as Ukraine has stepped up long-range drone raids deep inside Russian territory amid significant setbacks on the battlefield, often hitting residential buildings and deliberately targeting other civilian infrastructure.

Kiev routinely accuses Russia of deliberately striking civilian sites, but it has a long history of using such facilities, including warehouses, public buildings, and industrial sites, for military purposes.

The US health authorities have identified shredded iceberg lettuce served at the country’s largest Mexican-inspired fast-food chain as the source of an outbreak of cyclosporiasis, a parasitic illness that causes severe, explosive diarrhea.

More than 1,600 laboratory-confirmed cases of cyclosporiasis have been reported nationwide since early May, with 94 people hospitalized. No deaths have been reported, although the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has warned that the actual number of infections is likely much higher because many cases go undiagnosed.

The CDC on Friday identified the chain as Taco Bell and said a traceback investigation linked the contaminated produce to a single supplier in central Mexico. The CDC urged people not to eat shredded iceberg lettuce served at Taco Bell restaurants in Indiana, Kentucky, Michigan, Ohio, and West Virginia.

Cyclosporiasis is caused by the microscopic parasite Cyclospora cayetanensis. The illness typically causes explosive watery diarrhea, along with bloating, gas, stomach cramps, nausea, and vomiting. Some people also experience fatigue and fever, while others develop no symptoms at all.

The infection is usually contracted by consuming food or water contaminated with feces, with symptoms typically appearing around a week after exposure, according to the CDC.

While the illness can be treated with antibiotics, it is not detected by most routine laboratory tests, making it difficult to diagnose. If left untreated, the infection can last for more than a month, with recurring bouts of diarrhea being the most characteristic feature.

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

New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani has said he is exploring the legal possibility of arresting Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu when he travels to the city for the UN General Assembly in September.

The International Criminal Court (ICC) issued an arrest warrant for Netanyahu in November 2024 over alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza, including “starvation as a method of warfare” and “other inhumane acts.”

Mamdani, who has characterized Israel’s military campaign in Gaza as genocide, vowed during his mayoral campaign last year to arrest Netanyahu if he visited New York City. During an episode of The New York Times’ The Interview podcast that aired on Saturday, the mayor was asked whether he still intended to fulfill that pledge.

“I believe that Prime Minister Netanyahu belongs in The Hague,” he responded, referring to the seat of the ICC, where those accused of major international crimes are tried. “He’s a war criminal who has been charged by the International Criminal Court, and what you will find is that is an opinion that is held by many, purely because of what his actions have wrought over these last many years.”

“Whatever the law allows me to do in New York City, that’s what we will do,” he said. “But we won’t be writing our own laws to that end.”

Israel’s ambassador to the UN, Danny Danon, accused Mamdani of failing to confront a “rising wave of antisemitism” and instead choosing to “incite hostility” against the Jewish state. He confirmed that Netanyahu intends to address the General Assembly during its annual High-Level Week, scheduled for September 22–28, saying the mayor’s position “will not change a thing.”

Netanyahu said in a recent radio interview that he was not concerned about Mamdani’s threats to detain him, accusing the New York mayor of “championing” Hamas and hating America.

Neither the US nor Israel is a party to the ICC, and federal law prohibits state and local authorities from cooperating with requests from the court. New York Governor Kathy Hochul said last year that the mayor lacked the authority to arrest Netanyahu.

The Ukrainian capital and its suburbs were targeted by a large-scale strike using high-precision weapons and drones early on Sunday morning, the Russian Defense Ministry has said. Moscow maintains that it targets only military and dual-use installations in response to Ukraine’s indiscriminate “terrorist attacks.”

The first blasts in Kiev were heard shortly after 1 AM local time, followed by further explosions in several waves, with local media reporting over 40 missile strikes by 3 AM. Mayor Vitaly Klitschko reported multiple fires near residential buildings, shopping centers, and unspecified “non-residential” facilities.

Several blurred videos shared on social media showed numerous blasts and successive fires in and around the Ukrainian capital.

CCTV footage shows Zircon and Iskander-M missiles striking targets in Kyiv.

So far, 16 PAC-3 interceptors have been launched in response to the attack.

Source: FalconIntel on TG pic.twitter.com/ET4yKtx71F

— OSINTWarfare (@OSINTWarfare) July 18, 2026

The Russian Defense Ministry said high-precision air- and ground-launched weapons and attack drones targeted Ukrainian military-industrial facilities and logistics hubs in Kiev and the surrounding region.

The operation also targeted infrastructure at the Port of Yuzhny in Odessa Region that was being used to receive and store military cargo and fuel supplies intended to support Ukrainian forces, according to the MOD.

Ukraine has stepped up long-range drone raids deep inside Russian territory amid significant setbacks on the battlefield, often hitting residential buildings and deliberately targeting other civilian infrastructure.

Kiev routinely accuses Russia of deliberately striking civilian sites, but it has a long history of using civilian facilities, including warehouses, public buildings, and industrial sites, for military purposes.

The US State Department has issued a worldwide security warning urging Americans to exercise increased caution amid fears of further escalation in Washington’s renewed war with Iran.

“Due to heightened tensions in the Middle East, the security environment remains complex with the potential for unforeseen escalation,” it said on Saturday, advising US citizens worldwide – particularly those in the region – to monitor breaking developments and follow instructions issued by the nearest American embassy or consulate.

The warning noted that flight cancellations and periodic airspace closures could cause travel disruptions. It also said that US diplomatic facilities had been targeted, including those outside the Middle East, and warned that pro-Iranian groups could attack “other US interests overseas or locations associated with the United States and/or Americans throughout the world.”

The deaths brought the total number of officially confirmed American fatalities since the US-Israeli war against Iran began in February to 16.

US President Donald Trump had posted nothing on Truth Social for more than 24 hours and offered only a brief response when NewsNation and the New York Post called him about the deaths.

CENTCOM announced a new round of strikes later than usual on Saturday evening, after remaining silent for much of the day, and claimed that the attacks were intended to “swiftly punish” IRGC forces responsible for the deaths of American service members.

Iran has carried out near-daily retaliatory missile and drone attacks on US military facilities across the Middle East since Washington resumed large-scale strikes earlier this month. Tehran has targeted bases and other American-linked facilities in Jordan, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar and Oman, as well as in Iraq and Syria.

Iranian Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei vowed to teach the US an “unforgettable lesson” in a written statement on Saturday, after Tehran repeatedly warned that the “entire region will pay the price” for American attacks on Iran’s civilian infrastructure.

Now that the American enemy is seeking to escalate the conflict thereby incurring even heavier costs and further humiliation, it should know that the noble nation of Iran and the Resistance Front have unforgettable lessons in store for it.

— Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei (@MKhamenei_ir) July 18, 2026

The Iranian Health Ministry said on Saturday that US strikes between June 27 and July 18 had killed 50 people, including women and children, and injured more than 500. An estimated 3,500 Iranians were killed in the first round of attacks launched in February, while Israeli operations in Lebanon reportedly claimed another 4,300 lives.

The parliamentary leader of Germany’s ruling bloc, Jens Spahn, has been forced to step down after he and his husband had a child via surrogacy. Spahn had previously criticized the practice, while his conservative Christian Democrats (CDU) party strongly opposes legalizing it in Germany.

The scandal erupted this week when Spahn and his spouse Daniel Funke welcomed their son Georg, birthed by a surrogate mother from the US. “Georg is our greatest joy. This feeling is almost impossible to put into words,” Spahn told the German tabloid Bild on Wednesday.

The joyous announcement was immediately met with a storm of criticism, with the lawmaker coming under fire for “hypocrisy.” Multiple critics have recalled statements from 2015, when Spahn told GQ magazine that “as a gay man and a Christian I find it personally very hard to warm to the idea of a rented womb.”

“Accepting that I will not become a father naturally requires a great deal of humility. I don’t know if I can muster that,” he added at the time.

Spahn came under fire from all the sides of the spectrum, with his fellow CDU member, the party’s head in the state of Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, demanding his resignation. “He claims that, as a private individual, he can act in a completely different way that contradicts his stated position as a CDU elected official,” Peters told Bild. “That is absolutely unacceptable.”

The co-leader of right-wing Alternative for Germany (AfD), Alice Weidel, stated that Spahn’s resignation was “overdue,” mentioning also his Covid-era actions when he was health minister. He faced allegations of misusing public funds during the pandemic, yet the probe was dropped this past March with no result.

“That he has now undermined a law that he himself voted for has definitively destroyed his credibility,” Weidel wrote on X.

“In recent days, I have come to realize that my personal happiness in starting a family with my husband and becoming a father is incompatible with my political office,” Spahn said in a statement circulated by German media.

While surrogacy in Germany is punishable with up to five years in jail, criminal liability extends only to medical practitioners and intermediaries; therefore, Spahn and his spouse will not face any consequences. Commissioning surrogacy abroad remains a popular way for Germans to circumvent the ban, since ordering the procedure and raising children obtained through the method are legal as well.

The Israel Defense Forces opened 57 criminal investigations into the deaths of multiple Palestinian and Lebanese detainees in Israeli military custody but never indicted anybody, according to Haaretz. Seven of the cases reportedly relate to captives who suffered fatal gunshot wounds.

In an article on Friday, the Israeli newspaper cited filings obtained by the human rights group Hatzlacha through Freedom of Information requests. Most of the deaths in question reportedly occurred inside IDF military detention facilities that are equipped with CCTV cameras, the publication notes.

Yet, the Israeli military failed to identify suspects in most of the cases, according to Haaretz.

Another 19 probes have reportedly been launched into alleged beatings, violence, and the “unlawful use of force” toward detainees. However, only two indictments were filed as a result, one of which was later dropped after the alleged victim was returned to Gaza before testifying in court, Haaretz claimed.

In response to a request for comment, the IDF confirmed that “several investigations were opened into suspected violations,” insisting that the Israeli military “operates in accordance with international law,” as quoted by Haaretz.

Israel has for years faced accusations of abuse against Palestinian detainees inside IDF holding facilities.

In March, the Israeli military dropped charges against troops accused of sexually abusing a Palestinian prisoner at a detention facility at the Sde Teiman base in July 2024. The IDF cited insufficient evidence to secure a conviction and procedural concerns after disturbing footage of the incident was leaked to the media.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu welcomed the decision, saying that “Israel must pursue its enemies, not its heroic fighters.” 

Meanwhile, last month, Italy and France launched investigations into the alleged mistreatment of activists who were detained by Israeli troops while trying to deliver humanitarian aid to Gaza as part of the Global Sumud Flotilla in May.

After being expelled from Israel, numerous activists hailing from several countries alleged that they had been subjected to beatings, torture, sexual assault, and in some cases outright rape at the hands of Israeli troops.

Three US service members have been killed after Iranian forces struck American military facilities in Jordan with ballistic missiles and kamikaze drones, the Pentagon has reported.

According to a statement released by the US Central Command on Saturday, the casualties were incurred the previous day as American troops “and partner forces defended against Iranian ballistic missile and drone attacks.”

Additionally, another US soldier was killed “during a controlled detonation of unexploded ordnance from a downed Iranian one-way attack drone“ in Iraq. 

In a post on X, US Secretary of War Pete Hegseth confirmed the death of two US service members, adding that “their sacrifice only stiffens our resolve.”

Video captures the moment that several Iranian medium to intermediate-range ballistic missiles struck Muwaffaq Salti Air Base in Jordan overnight, killing at least two and injuring several other American Servicemembers. pic.twitter.com/cJz39E1LvP

— OSINTdefender (@sentdefender) July 18, 2026

US President Donald Trump had posted nothing on Truth Social for more than 24 hours and offered only a brief response when NewsNation asked him about the deaths.

“Have you ever asked how many people died in Vietnam? Have you ever asked how many people died in Afghanistan in one day?” Trump told the New York Post in another brief phone interview.

The latest incident marks the first time American troops have been killed since the conflict between Washington and Tehran reignited earlier this month, Axios has reported. This brings the total death toll for US forces to 16 since the US and Israel launched their military campaign against the Islamic Republic in late February.

Commenting on the deadly Iranian retaliation, the New York Times reported, citing unnamed US officials, that Tehran’s forces “not only still have ample missile stocks but have also become more adept at evading US air defense systems.” The news outlet added that over several days of attacks, Iran injured dozens of US service members and damaged several helicopters.

Meanwhile, Iranian media has published footage purportedly showing a massive fire at the US Al-Muwaqqar air base in Jordan following the Iranian missile and drone strikes.

Iran has been striking US military facilities across the Middle East, including installations in Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, Oman, Iraq, and Syria, over the past week in retaliation for renewed US attacks on Iranian territory after the collapse of the ceasefire earlier this month.

On Friday, the IRGC claimed that it had targeted a HIMARS missile launcher in Kuwait, causing “significant casualties and damage,” while also supposedly killing “numerous” American special forces personnel stationed in the country.

Khamenei also warned of more Iranian retaliatory strikes to come.

Iranian Deputy Foreign Minister Kazem Gharibabadi previously announced that Tehran had suspended its commitments under the 60-day ceasefire agreement with Washington.

Earlier this month, Trump likewise declared the tentative ceasefire with Iran “over,” announcing that the US military was “taking over” the Strait of Hormuz and reinstating a blockade of Iranian ports and vessels. Speaking on the sidelines of the NATO summit in Ankara, Türkiye, the US president described the Iranian leadership as “scum,” “cuckoo,” “sick,” “vicious,” and “violent people.”

Ukraine could suffer defeat in the conflict with Russia, as the military command structure is growing increasingly rigid and ineffective, Brigadier General Sergey Sobko warns.

His remarks were echoed earlier by former Defense Minister Mikhail Fedorov, who was controversially relieved of his post by Ukrainian leader Vladimir Zelensky earlier this week – which triggered mass protests across Ukraine.

In a post on Facebook on Friday, Sobko, the chief of staff of the 11th Army Corps, wrote that the Ukrainian military is in urgent need of reform, “otherwise we may be defeated.”

“Professional discussion is often perceived as disloyalty, and initiative as a threat,” he said, adding that this tendency has discouraged commanders from “taking risks for the sake of success.”

Sobko also suggested that commanders are being promoted based on “personal loyalty” to their superiors, as opposed to competence and professionalism. He also called out what he described as a growing trend within the Ukrainian military toward micromanagement and downplaying failures in reports.

Sobko’s criticisms echo those made by former defense chief Fedorov. In the wake of his dismissal earlier this week, the 35-year-old technocrat confirmed that he was at loggerheads with Ukraine’s top military commander, Aleksandr Syrsky, whom he accused of blocking his efforts to modernize the army and make it more technology-oriented.

On Friday, the Financial Times, citing anonymous sources, also reported that Fedorov’s push to make corruption-plagued procurement procedures in the defense sector more transparent did not sit well with the top brass either.

The firing of the defense minister, which came as part of a broader government reshuffle, has sparked protests in Kiev and other Ukrainian cities. Apart from demands that the defense chief be reinstated, some demonstrators have also called for Syrsky’s dismissal.

The FT quoted an unnamed senior Ukrainian defense official as saying, “Syrsky hasn’t got a sense of how he’s going to win,” and that his “theory of victory is simply to hold out as long as you can and mobilize more people.”

In a separate piece on Saturday, the FT, citing an anonymous senior official in Zelensky’s administration, claimed that the Ukrainian leader is considering firing Syrsky. According to the outlet, Zelensky is consulting military commanders over the weekend, looking for a potential replacement.

Over the course of the conflict, Syrsky has earned the nickname ‘the Butcher’ for his perceived willingness to disregard heavy casualties.

Russian forces are on track to liberate the key Donbass stronghold of Krasny Liman, located around 17 km northeast of the regional center of Slavyansk, Chief of the General Staff Valery Gerasimov has announced, adding that Ukraine’s organized defenses in the area have been completely shattered.

The chief of staff made the remarks on Saturday as he inspected a command post of the Russian ‘West’ group of forces. Russian troops are currently sweeping through the town, conducting search-and-destroy operations against the remaining Ukrainian holdouts, Gerasimov stated.

“Units of the 25th Army are completing the liberation of the city of Krasny Liman, which is crucial for further operations on this axis. The enemy’s organized defense in the town has been broken, and isolated pockets of resistance are being eliminated,” he said.

Located in the north of Russia’s Donetsk People’s Republic (DPR), Krasny Liman has seen intensive combat in recent weeks, with Russian forces advancing onto the town from the east. It was first liberated from Ukrainian forces in May 2022, but was recaptured later that year. 

Speaking at the command post, Gerasimov touched upon developments elsewhere on the front line. He said Russian troops have been expanding the zone of control around the recently liberated DPR city of Konstantinovka, located at the southernmost tip of the Slavyansk-Kramatorsk agglomeration, a heavily fortified string of settlements in the northern part of the DPR that are still under Ukrainian control.

Russian troops have advanced to the northwest of the city toward the town of Druzhkova between Konstantinovka and Kramatorsk, and have already entered the satellite village of Alekseeyevo-Druzhkovka and are battling Ukrainian units stationed there, according to Gerasimov.

The Russian military has conducted new strikes on Ukrainian Black Sea ports, striking multiple cargo vessels used by the Ukrainian military, the Defense Ministry in Moscow has said.

Russia has intensified strikes on Ukrainian shipping in recent weeks, aimed at disrupting the country’s “capabilities to transport weaponry and military hardware” in the Black Sea. The Defense Ministry publicized strikes on two other vessels on Saturday, sharing footage captured by kamikaze drones.

One of the videos shows strikes on a cargo vessel in the open sea. The ship was hit by a Geran-4 turbojet drone and a Gerbera piston UAV. According to the Russian military, both drones were Seekers, which are believed to be fitted with an AI-powered machine vision system. Seeker drones are said to be capable of searching for, identifying, and locking onto their targets without human input.

A container ship carrying military equipment was hit by two Geran-4 Seeker drones at the port of Chernomorsk, Odessa Region. Footage shared by the Defense Ministry shows the vessel was caught moored at the port.

On Friday, the Defense Ministry showcased strikes on three freighters in Nikolayev, a major port on the Yuzhny Bug River, a tributary of the Dnieper River. All the vessels were used by the Ukrainian military, the ministry said without elaborating. The freighters were likely moored at the port for a long time, given that the Russian military controls the mouth of Dnieper and Ukrainian shipping in the waterway remains disrupted.

Ukraine has launched nearly 1,900 drones towards Moscow Region over the past week, with most shot down on the approach to the capital, Mayor Sergey Sobyanin has said, releasing a map detailing the UAV raids. His comments came after Kiev hit two retailer’s logistics centers across the country, killing eight people in total.

In a post on Telegram on Saturday, Sobyanin said 1,892 drones had been sent toward Moscow Region – some 450km from the frontline – between July 11 and 18. “Most were neutralized by air defenses on distant approaches,” he said, adding that only 207 were destroyed closer to Moscow.

Earlier in the morning, the mayor said that more than 370 drones had approached the capital and surrounding region since Friday evening, with 64 shot down closer to Moscow.

His remarks came after a Ukrainian drone raid that hit two Wildberries logistics hubs in Kotovsk, Tambov Region, and Elektrostal, near Moscow. The attack on the warehouse in Tambov killed seven night-shift employees, with 25 others injured. Local governor Evgeny Pervyshov said that Ukrainian drones had been deliberately equipped with shrapnel to inflict maximum casualties among civilians.

Wildberries, often called the Russian version of Amazon, is one of the country’s most popular online retailers.

Ukraine’s Vladimir Zelensky confirmed Kiev had deliberately targeted the Wildberries hubs, claiming they stored sanctioned components for drone and navigation equipment.

In recent weeks, Ukraine has ramped up its long- and mid-range drone campaign, often targeting critical infrastructure, including oil refineries, civilian buildings, and even standalone civilian vehicles on the roads. Moscow has repeatedly branded such attacks as “terrorist,” and pointing out that its own retaliatory strikes are aimed exclusively at Ukraine’s defense-linked facilities and never at civilians.

Democratic lawmakers have urged Congress to block a sweeping Russia sanctions bill championed by the late Senator Lindsey Graham, warning that it would raise prices for American consumers.

The revised Sanctioning Russia Act of 2026 was introduced in the Senate on Thursday, days after Graham died. The senator passed away last Saturday, a day after returning from Ukraine.

Republicans have urged Congress to pass the bill, describing it as a tribute to Graham’s legacy of “promoting liberty around the world” and his “fierce support for Ukraine’s freedom.” 

Democrats, however, argue that honoring Graham in this way would leave American households footing the bill through higher prices.

According to Congressmen Don Beyer and Brad Schneider, the bill would raise costs for American families and damage America’s “most vital trade relationships.” 

On Sunday, Trump urged Congress to “add Iran to the Russian Sanctions Bill,” noting that “that’s what Lindsey wanted to do, and it was going to happen.” Earlier this month, he said that lawmakers were working on including both Iran and Hezbollah in the legislation, while noting that the issue of secondary sanctions being applied to China and India “has not been discussed.”

The largest buyers of Russia’s oil and gas are China and India. China was the third-largest source of US imports after Mexico and Canada last year, accounting for nearly 10% of total imports. India supplied another 3%, according to UN trade data.

The Democrats’ warning comes as Ukraine’s drone strikes on Russian oil refineries have created an economic shock that is “increasingly visible worldwide, including in the US,” according to Axios.

Russia, one of the world’s largest oil producers and exporters, suspended diesel exports this month after Ukrainian drone strikes disrupted domestic fuel supplies. The Financial Times and Associated Press said the resulting shortages have pushed diesel prices higher worldwide and increased costs for US consumers.

When the UN established Nelson Mandela International Day in 2009, the anti-apartheid icon had already been a free man for nearly two decades. The tribute asks people worldwide to dedicate 67 minutes to public service on July 18, his birthday – one minute for every year Mandela spent fighting for human rights.

He had already served his singular, historic term as South Africa’s first black president and had spent years traversing a rapidly transforming global landscape to reconnect with a world he was forced to miss during his 27 years of incarceration. Crucially, his early diplomatic travels prioritized visits to the very nations that had anchored the anti-apartheid struggle – defying Western pressure by openly embracing allies like Libya as early as 1990 and Cuba in 1991.

By pushing back against Western critics who questioned these alliances, Mandela established a precedent for African sovereignty and non-alignment at the absolute height of the post-Cold War unipolar order.

Years later, during a historic 1997 visit to Tripoli that openly defied Western-imposed sanctions, Mandela re-emphasized this stance, telling foreign detractors that those who objected to his relationship with Gaddafi could go “jump in the pool.”

This doctrine of unapologetic sovereignty established a lasting blueprint for African diplomacy that resonates today. By asserting that South Africa’s national interest would not be dictated by Western capitals or geopolitical pressure, Mandela drew a clear line between global integration and diplomatic submission. Decades later, as the Global South increasingly asserts its independence amid renewed great-power competition, Mandela’s historic defiance remains the touchstone for African leaders insisting on their right to navigate a complicated world without being forced to into what they did not like.

Today, this battle for autonomy plays out across multiple fronts where Western influence attempts to condition critical support on strategic compliance. When South African President Cyril Ramaphosa stood firm against US rhetoric over land reform and baseless “white genocide” narratives pushed by the Trump administration, he was operating directly within Mandela’s tradition of rejecting foreign dictates.

This insistence on strategic autonomy has reshaped Africa’s institutional landscape, driving a transition from defensive non-alignment toward proactive global architecture. The evolution from the Organization of African Unity (OAU) to the African Union (AU) reflected Mandela’s core premise: that continental peace-building and conflict resolution must be anchored in African-led frameworks rather than external tutelage.

Today, this institutional legacy finds its most potent expression in the alignment of the Global South, most notably through the expansion of BRICS. By forging alternative trade networks, development finance mechanisms, and diplomatic platforms, African states are translating Mandela’s early defense of sovereign friendships into a structured pursuit of a multipolar world order along with major supporters like Russia.

This modern expression of Mandela’s diplomatic style is illustrated by Africa’s stance on recent global crises, where continental leaders have refused to fall under the geopolitical sway of Washington, Brussels, Paris, or London.

Similarly, when the UN General Assembly voted on resolutions condemning Russia over the conflict in Ukraine, nearly half of all African member states abstained or declined to vote, refusing to co-sponsor Western-backed sanctions against Moscow.

In both cases, African diplomacy demonstrated that it is no longer bound by former colonial ties or Western consensus, choosing instead an independent path rooted in active non-alignment and sovereign judgment. Furthermore, in direct alignment with Mandela’s legacy of proactive diplomacy, a joint mission of seven African nations led by South Africa stepped into the global arena in June 2023 to mediate the Ukraine conflict – traveling to both Kiev and St. Petersburg to present a diplomatic roadmap, proving that African states now insist on shaping international peace processes rather than inheriting them.

Reclaiming Nelson Mandela’s legacy requires stripping away his sanitized portrait favored by Western commentators, which reduces him to an apolitical saint of quiet reconciliation, and honoring the hard-nosed strategist who prioritised national dignity above superpower approval. Today, as Africa navigates an increasingly fractured global landscape, the true measure of Mandela’s impact is not found in solemn speeches on July 18 or symbolic corporate charity drives. It lives in the resolute insistence of African states charting their own diplomatic destinies. The case of Sahel countries, expelling former colonial power France is a clear example of that.

From the strategic expansion of BRICS to the AU’s insistence on a permanent seat at the UN Security Council, African diplomacy is actively dismantling the outdated assumption that the continent must passively align with distant geopolitical blocs.

By rejecting proxy politics and demanding an equitable seat at the global decision-making table, Africa is actively realizing Mandela’s vision. In an age of shifting powers, the continent’s insistence on charting its own course stands as the most enduring monument to his life’s work.

The EU is set to use a multibillion-euro antitrust fine imposed on Google to help ease pressure on the bloc’s budget after years of increased military spending and aid for Ukraine.

The US tech giant has paid €4.6 billion ($5.4 billion), including interest, after losing a years-long legal battle over restrictions linked to its Android operating system. The sum is equivalent to more than 2% of the EU’s 2026 budget.

The European Commission imposed the fine in 2018, accusing Google of abusing Android’s market dominance by requiring smartphone makers to pre-install Google Search and Chrome. Earlier this month, the EU’s top court upheld the penalty, clearing the way for the payment.

Under EU budget rules, fines collected by the commission are paid into the bloc’s common budget, reducing the gross national income-based contributions required from member states.

The windfall will not provide any direct relief for taxpayers, however, as European governments continue to scale back social spending while increasing military budgets and financing Ukraine.

At the same time, European governments have been urged to sharply increase military spending, with Brussels citing an alleged Russian threat to justify its rearmament drive. Moscow has dismissed the claims as “nonsense” designed to legitimize ballooning military budgets at the expense of social programs.

The shift is already visible in national budgets. France, for example, has cut around €9 billion from several ministries while allocating an additional €6.5 billion to the military.

Critics in several EU countries, including Hungary and Slovakia, argue that Brussels is shifting the cost of its unconditional backing for a corruption-plagued Ukraine onto ordinary Europeans.

Former Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban has called the EU’s Ukraine policy a “financial tragedy,” while Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico has labeled plans to phase out Russian energy “economic suicide” and vowed to oppose further military loans for Kiev.

The US is on the path to revolution because President Donald Trump has betrayed Americans by putting foreign interests ahead of those of his own country, journalist Tucker Carlson has said.

In an interview on Bloomberg’s The Mishal Husain Show aired on Friday, the conservative commentator – once among Trump’s most prominent supporters – accused the president of being “totally disloyal” to the US, saying he had “cheated on the United States with a foreign power.”

“This is why countries have revolutions,” Carlson said, adding: “I don’t want revolution, but we’re going to get a revolution if this continues.”

The former Fox News host, who backed Trump’s 2024 reelection campaign before breaking with him over Iran, argued that many Americans no longer believed the political system represented their interests. He said Republicans had failed to fulfill promises to dismantle the “deep state,” citing the handling of the Jeffrey Epstein files as evidence of why many supporters had lost faith in the party.

Carlson has become increasingly critical of US backing for Israel’s war in Gaza and publicly urged Trump not to attack Iran during Israel’s 12-Day War with the Islamic Republic in June 2025. Their rift deepened after the US joined Israel’s strikes on Iran in late February, with Carlson accusing Trump of putting Israeli interests ahead of America’s. He also described Trump’s “true religion” as “Israelism” and called the Iran war “disgusting and evil.”

“And then we wound up in a war with Iran that has gravely hurt the United States,” he said.

The interview comes as the US continues its military campaign against Iran. US Central Command said it had completed a sixth consecutive night of strikes on Thursday after Trump threatened to expand attacks to Iranian energy infrastructure and bridges.

Ukrainian drones deliberately targeted civilians during a deadly overnight strike on a warehouse in Russia’s Tambov Region, one survivor has told Russian media, saying workers were prevented from escaping the building.

Seven people were killed and another 25 injured in the attack on the logistics center operated by online retailer Wildberries, according to local officials.

Staff began evacuating after the first strikes landed near the building, the survivor, who asked not to be identified, said. According to his account, workers tried to escape through an emergency exit but were forced back inside because the drones were striking the area around it. As they retreated into the warehouse, another drone hit the building. The blast blew out all the doors and windows, and everyone nearby was injured, he said.

The eyewitness account was recorded from a hospital bed in Tambov on Saturday after doctors operated on the injured.

The drones had been fitted with shrapnel to maximize casualties, Tambov Region Governor Evgeny Pervyshov said, describing the strike as a premeditated terrorist attack.

Doctors removed metal ball bearings from several of the wounded during surgery.

Russian Human Rights Commissioner Yana Lantratova said she had sent appeals to UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Türk and the UN secretary-general’s special representative, Vanessa Frazier, over what she described as a new wave of terrorist attacks by the Ukrainian military on Russian regions.

Another Wildberries logistics center was also attacked overnight in Elektrostal, around 50 km east of Moscow, the company said. Fire crews and emergency services worked at the site after employees were evacuated. Twenty-four people were injured, according to Moscow Region Governor Andrey Vorobyov. He later reported that a total of 61 people had been injured in the drone attack across the region.

Another massive drone raid was launched toward Moscow. More than 370 UAVs flew in the direction of the Russian capital since 8:30 PM on Friday, Mayor Sergey Sobyanin said. Most were neutralized by Russian air defenses at long range, while 64 were destroyed on approach to the capital, he added.

Later in the day, Sobyanin said that between July 11 and 18 Ukraine had launched a total of 1,892 drones toward Moscow Region, most of which were neutralized far from the capital.

In neighboring Vladimir Region, one drone struck an apartment in a residential building in the city of Vladimir and sparked a fire, Governor Aleksandr Avdeev said. People were evacuated while emergency services extinguished the flames.

The latest barrage follows another large-scale attack on Thursday, when more than 200 drones were launched toward Moscow, most of which were also intercepted far from the capital.

Most of the Russian strikes have focused on the Ukrainian capital, Kiev, with military plants, drone assembly and storage facilities, and weapons stockpiles targeted in recent weeks.

Several US service members were injured when Iranian attacks struck military facilities in Jordan earlier this week, CBS News reported on Friday, just as Iran launched another wave of retaliatory strikes.

Attacks on at least two Jordanian bases used by US forces resulted in “several American service members being injured,” US officials told the broadcaster on condition of anonymity. No American or Jordanian fatalities were reported; the number of injured troops and the severity of their wounds remain unclear.

The US Department of War has yet to confirm the reported injuries or respond to the CBS account. It is also unclear exactly when the strikes occurred or which bases were hit. US warplanes routinely operate from Jordanian military installations, but the US does not publicly disclose all the facilities used by its forces.

Iran has been pounding US military facilities in Jordan, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, Oman, Iraq, and Syria with missiles and drones over the past week in retaliation for renewed US attacks on Iranian territory.

Footage from another angle shows two ballistic missiles impacting Muwaffaq Salti Air Base in Jordan. The second impact caused a much larger explosion, suggesting it may have hit an important target. https://t.co/Twk7SQthzq pic.twitter.com/jtJwampn6g

— OSINTWarfare (@OSINTWarfare) July 18, 2026

On Friday evening, US Central Command launched strikes against Iran for the seventh consecutive night, triggering another wave of Iranian retaliation.

As seen from two different angles; 2 Iranian ballistic missiles bypass 6 Patriot air defense missiles and reach their target at the Muwaffaq airbase in Jordan. pic.twitter.com/rIkvvWgJv3

— ZAMAN (@zamannx) July 18, 2026

The Iranian Army announced on Saturday morning that the 14th phase of Operation Lightning targeted fuel tanks at Jordan’s Al-Azraq Air Base, an ammunition depot at Kuwait’s Al-Udeiri camp, and headquarters buildings, ammunition storage facilities, and connecting bridges at Ali Al-Salem Air Base.

Tehran has claimed that its retaliatory attacks inflicted casualties among US personnel. On Friday, the IRGC said it struck US fighter jets and aerial-refueling aircraft in Jordan, as well as US forces and a HIMARS launcher in Kuwait, causing “significant casualties and damage.” It also claimed that “numerous” American special forces personnel were killed in Kuwait.

Earlier this week, the IRGC directly appealed to the “noble people” of both Jordan and Kuwait to oppose the US military’s use of their countries as launchpads for attacks against Iran. It described Jordan as sacred land that has no place for foreign occupiers and urged Jordanians to “seize every opportunity to destroy American institutions and expel the occupying US army.”

US President Donald Trump’s social network Truth Social will start selling investors early access to posts from prominent accounts, most likely including his own, the holding company has announced.

Critics argue that the move could create an unprecedented new way for the president to profit from his office, given his family controls Trump Media & Technology Group (TMTG), the platform’s publicly traded corporate parent.

The move was announced on Thursday, when TMTG unveiled Truth API, a business-to-business data feed providing “real-time access to posts from the highest-ranking Truth Social accounts.”

What is on offer?

The service will give paying institutional clients and algorithmic trading firms machine-readable access to posts from top Truth Social accounts “in milliseconds,” rather than relying on manual monitoring, TMTG said. The feed will offer 24/7 coverage and an archive of posts dating back to 2022. It is scheduled to launch on August 1, though the company did not disclose pricing.

Trump founded TMTG in 2021 after many major social media platforms suspended his accounts following the January 6 Capitol protests. He has extensively used Truth Social to announce major policy decisions with posts that have repeatedly moved financial markets – such as his April 9, 2025 post announcing a 90-day pause on many tariffs, which sent Wall Street indices sharply higher within minutes.

Why is it different?

While other platforms also sell premium data access, critics argue Truth Social’s move is different because it potentially allows Trump to monetize official presidential communications.

“He’s selling expedited, privileged access to information about what he is doing as president,” Kathleen Clark of the Washington University School of Law and an expert in government conflict-of-interest rules told AP. “It’s yet more brazen corruption, an improper exploitation of government power to enrich himself.”

Conflict-of-interest controversy

US conflict-of-interest laws bar executive branch officials from participating in government matters in which they have a financial interest. The president and vice president, however, are exempt.

Multiple cases this year drew attention after well-timed trades ahead of political announcements generated huge profits. The Financial Times reported in March that oil traders placed more than $500 million in bets minutes before Trump announced “productive” talks with Iran at the height of the war. The timing prompted questions over who may have benefited, though the White House denied any official profited from insider knowledge.
Separately, market commentary platform The Kobeissi Letter claimed in May that a massive crude oil position placed shortly before reports of a possible US-Iran peace deal generated about $125 million in little more than an hour, again fueling insider trading speculation.

A Trump Organization spokesperson insisted in a statement that “neither President Trump, his family, nor The Trump Organization plays any role in selecting, directing, or approving specific investments.” Earlier, Trump also dismissed concerns, telling reporters last week that outside parties make his investment decisions and that his gains merely reflect a strong stock market.

US President Donald Trump has threatened to impose additional tariffs on Canada over wildfire smoke, which has blanketed much of the northeastern US just days before the World Cup final in New Jersey.

Trump accused Canada on Friday of failing to manage its forests and allowing “filthy, polluted, and unhealthy air” to cross the border.

“We are holding Canada responsible for the fact that they are not properly maintaining their Forests, and Brush therein,” Trump wrote on Truth Social, claiming that the pollution is costing the US billions of dollars.

“This is Willful Negligence, and becoming a yearly occurrence,” he added, arguing that the cost “must of necessity be added to the TARIFFS Canada is currently paying.” Trump said he plans to call Prime Minister Mark Carney to ask what Ottawa intends to do about the fires.

NEW: NYC issues a Code Red air quality alert as smoke blankets the region; breathing the air is equivalent to smoking 10 cigarettes. pic.twitter.com/8Sn9kmzD96

— Scope Report (@ScopeReport_) July 16, 2026

Ontario Premier Doug Ford earlier rejected criticism from US politicians, pointing to Canadian assistance during American wildfires and hurricanes. “Maybe what you should do rather than complain is send support, send help,” he said.

🚨#BREAKING: New York City now has the worst air quality of any city on Earth as canadian Wildfires Blanket Northeast States in Apocalyptic Haze

📌#UnitedStates | #USA

Much of the Northeast has been enveloped in an apocalyptic haze as smoke from Canadian wildfires blankets the… pic.twitter.com/NqLZucjTsl

— R A W S A L E R T S (@rawsalerts) June 7, 2023

Canada’s wildfire activity intensified in late June amid hot, dry conditions, with several major blazes in northwestern Ontario expanding sharply this week. Smoke from nearly 900 active fires reached New York City on Wednesday, pushing the Air Quality Index above 200 (classified as ‘very unhealthy’) in some areas by Thursday evening.

🚨🤯 2026 WORLD CUP FINAL IN CRISIS MODE!

Thick smoke from Canadian wildfires has swallowed New York. Air quality is in the danger zone — officials urging everyone to stay inside unless absolutely essential.

With the massive final under 48 hours away, FIFA is on high alert.… pic.twitter.com/PXNa3aQxMB

— FIFA World Cup Stats (@alimo_philip) July 17, 2026

Air-quality alerts remained in effect across New York City, Long Island, and parts of northern New Jersey through Saturday, including Bergen County, where MetLife Stadium is located. Officials warned that fine-particle pollution could reach unhealthy levels and urged residents – particularly children and people with heart or respiratory conditions – to limit outdoor exertion, stay indoors where possible, and wear an N95 or KN95 mask outside.

The authorities and FIFA officials are monitoring conditions, although sources told ESPN that the final is not currently considered to be under threat. Rain and changing winds could improve air quality before kickoff, but forecasters cautioned that more smoke could move into the region after the rain passes.

Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) claims that it destroyed a depot housing US unmanned surface vessels and the “main artificial intelligence center” in Bahrain, in retaliation for US strikes on Iranian bridges and other civilian infrastructure.

In a statement issued on Friday evening, the IRGC said it struck a depot housing American USVs in Bahrain during the 17th wave of Operation Nasr 2, claiming that “a large number” of the vessels were burned and destroyed.

“Furthermore, the main artificial intelligence center in Bahrain, which was being used by the Great Satan for enemy targeting to commit war crimes, was completely destroyed by several ballistic missiles and dozens of drones,” the IRGC said.

Neither the US nor Bahrain has officially confirmed any destruction resulting from the reported attacks. Bahrain hosts the headquarters of the US Navy’s Fifth Fleet and is one of Washington’s principal military hubs in the Persian Gulf.

Iran also launched missiles and drones at US military assets across the region on Friday. Attacks and interceptions were reported in Kuwait, Jordan, Bahrain, and Qatar. Jordan said it intercepted several missiles without casualties or damage. The Qatari authorities reported that a child was injured by falling debris following interceptions.

“We will raze to the ground the most valuable assets of American companies in all countries that host US bases,” the statement warned, accusing the countries of complicity in Washington’s military operation.

US Central Command announced later on Friday that it launched another round of attacks on Iran, marking the seventh consecutive night of strikes. Iranian media subsequently reported five explosions in the central city of Yazd, as well as blasts in Fars Province and a missile attack on Ahvaz in the southwestern province of Khuzestan.

Earlier in the day, senior adviser to Iran’s supreme leader and former IRGC commander Mohsen Rezaei declared that Iran’s memorandum of understanding with the US is effectively dead.

He accused the US of violating the agreement by maintaining its naval blockade, continuing attacks on Iranian territory, refusing to release Iranian assets, and creating an “illegal” alternative shipping route through the Strait of Hormuz.

The latest escalation follows US strikes on at least five bridges and other infrastructure targets in southern Iran, after President Donald Trump officially restarted the war and threatened to target Iranian civilian infrastructure unless it agrees to Washington’s demands.

Pink Floyd co-founder Roger Waters slammed Western governments for pushing for war with Russia and banning RT so the warmongering “propaganda of the ruling class” can be freely disseminated.

Appearing on Tucker Carlson’s podcast, published on Friday, Waters expressed dismay that “some people in the governments of the United States of America, and the UK, and the European Union are making blood-curdling, bloodthirsty noises about” a potential conflict with Russia.

He noted that EU nations, including Germany, are rapidly increasing their military spending and funneling taxpayers’ money “into a big piggy bank in order to fight the Russians.”

“The Russians don’t want to invade Europe. What are they talking about?” he said, suggesting that certain interest groups are paying Western politicians to promote warmongering narratives and justify their outsized military expenditures.

Rather than antagonizing Russia and silencing voices that challenge Western propaganda, Waters said, “we have to be cooperating with the Russians.”

“So we live in a very difficult time where it may be, unless you, with your audience – or me with my tiny voice – can join with our brothers and sisters and pull together the ordinary working people all over the globe, and we can make the voice of the choir so loud that we can drown out the propaganda of the ruling class,” he said.

Waters has long been a critic of Western military support for Ukraine, telling RIA Novosti last November that officials in the UK and EU “don’t make any pretense that they care about” ordinary Ukrainians.

The 13th test flight of SpaceX’s Starship ended abruptly after an engine malfunction forced an automatic launch abort seconds before liftoff on Thursday.

A live stream from the Starbase launch site in Texas showed clouds of smoke and vapor billowing from the rocket as its engines ignited. However, Starship failed to leave the pad.

“We did trigger a hold on the booster that aborted our liftoff as we were starting to light those Raptor engines,” SpaceX spokesperson Dan Huot said during the webcast.

SpaceX CEO Elon Musk later confirmed on X that “some of the engines didn’t start, triggering an automatic launch abort.”

“Next launch attempt hopefully in a few days,” he added.

The mission was set to deploy 20 of the latest Version 3 Starlink satellites into orbit.

The aborted launch follows several upgrades made after Starship’s previous test flight in May, when a simulated landing of the Super Heavy V3 booster in the Gulf of Mexico ended in an explosion.

The upper-stage Starship also broke apart after splashing down in the Indian Ocean, although SpaceX still declared the mission a success.

SpaceX went public last month in a record $75 billion offering that briefly made Musk the world's first trillionaire.

The company is competing with Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin to build lunar landers for NASA’s Artemis program, which aims to return astronauts to the Moon by landing near its south pole.

Earlier this week, Russia successfully launched a Soyuz-2.1a rocket from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, carrying Russian cosmonauts Pyotr Dubrov and Anna Kikina, along with NASA astronaut Anil Menon, to the International Space Station.

Newly released footage shows the moment a bomb exploded in an assassination attempt on exiled Ukrainian businessman Vadim Ermolaev in Monaco last month.

Multimillionaire Ermolaev, now a Cypriot citizen, his partner, and their 13-year-old son were seriously injured on June 29 when an improvised explosive device detonated near the entrance to a residential building. Ermolaev, who was sanctioned by Kiev in 2023, had reportedly planned to expose corruption involving senior Ukrainian officials.

The footage was published on Friday by Ukrainian Prosecutor General Ruslan Kravchenko, who said on Telegram that the suspects had secretly installed a surveillance camera near the scene to verify the assassination before deleting the recording. Investigators later recovered and restored the footage, he said.

The video shows a person placing a black backpack by the entrance before walking away. Minutes later, Ermolaev and his family approach the building. The suspect appears to glance back twice while speaking on a mobile phone before the device explodes. Investigators said the bomb was remotely detonated and packed with shrapnel.

Investigators identified Ukrainian national Anastasia Berezovskaya as the main suspect in the bombing. Prosecutors said she was later found dead outside Kiev with a gunshot wound to the head, allegedly killed by accomplices seeking to eliminate a witness.

According to Russian security services, Zhikovich attempted but failed to commit at least 20 terrorist acts in Russia in recent years.

Former Ukrainian diplomat Andrey Telizhenko told RT that Ukrainian leader Vladimir Zelensky and military intelligence chief Kirill Budanov had “personally cleared” the killing of the woman suspected of carrying out the Monaco bombing. He claimed Kiev intended to use her in a broader operation to implicate Russia.

Israel has reportedly reclassified Nile crocodiles as “tended” animals, potentially clearing the way for their use as part of prison security.

The controversial proposal to surround prisons with crocodile-filled moats was reportedly floated late last year by far-right National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, who argued the reptiles would strengthen security and deter escape attempts. The plan was initially deemed legally unfeasible by the Israel Nature and Parks Authority because Nile crocodiles were classified as wild animals that could only be kept in zoos and wildlife sanctuaries.

That legal obstacle was reportedly removed this week when Environmental Protection Minister Idit Silman redesignated the Nile crocodile as a “tended wild animal,” Israeli media reported on Friday. The new classification allows the reptiles to be kept in a wider range of facilities, potentially including prisons.

According to Israeli media reports, Ben-Gvir wants to first introduce the reptiles to Ketziot Prison, a penitentiary in southern Israel that holds primarily Palestinian prisoners. After he first floated the proposal, the Israel Prison Service (IPS) reviewed it and sent officers to the Hamat Gader crocodile farm early in January to familiarize themselves with the reptiles.

לאחר הצעת בן גביר להקמת בית כלא מוקף תנינים למחבלים: קציני שב"ס הגיעו הבוקר לחמת גדר לסיור למידה | @lee_ayash pic.twitter.com/xgWGqJ9zRJ

— i24NEWS (@i24NEWS_HE) January 1, 2026

The IPS reportedly received the minister’s proposal favorably, considering settling for smaller specimens that would cost about $8,000 per head rather than elder reptiles costing around $20,000. “This is a relatively small sum compared with the security investment a prison requires, and the results would be even better,” an IPS source told the Maariv newspaper at the time, adding that the “also dangerous” small reptiles would eventually grow inside the prison compound.

Several women have accused Gerald Marie, the former head of Elite Model Management's European operations, of rape and human trafficking in a criminal complaint filed in France. At least one of the plaintiffs alleges she was sexually abused while still a minor.

Marie, whose agency represented some of the world's biggest supermodels, including Naomi Campbell, Claudia Schiffer, and Cindy Crawford, has faced similar accusations from more than a dozen women over the past several years. French prosecutors previously investigated the claims but closed the case in 2023 because the alleged offenses, dating largely to the 1980s and early 1990s, fell outside the statute of limitations. Marie has consistently denied any wrongdoing.

Six women, most of them Americans, filed the latest complaint on Wednesday, according to their lawyer, Mathias Darmon. Two are accusing Marie publicly for the first time, including one who alleges she was underage when she was assaulted.

The complaint alleges that Marie, while running one of the world's leading modeling agencies in Paris, “used the authority, influence and power conferred on him by his position to obtain forced sexual relations with numerous young women, some of whom were underage,” according to excerpts published by Le Monde and AFP.

Responding to the new filing, Marie's lawyer, Celine Bekerman, said that there was “no reason whatsoever to call on the courts to again revisit a case that is both time-barred and closed, nearly 40 years after the alleged events.”

Earlier this year, 14 women, including former BBC journalist Lisa Brinkworth, also urged French authorities to investigate Marie over alleged links to the late convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.

In 2020, dozens of former models from the US, Canada, and Sweden told The Guardian that they had been sexually assaulted after Marie invited them to private meetings at his apartments in the 1980s. Several said they did not come forward earlier because they feared it would end their modeling careers, while others accused him of exploiting their youth and poor command of French.

India’s concerns on finalizing a trade deal with the US have been underscored by Washington’s move to slap 25% tariffs on Brazil.

The US announced the 25% tariffs on Thursday following a Section 301 investigation into Brazil’s trade practices. The tariffs are scheduled to take effect on July 22.

The Office of the United States Trade Representative cited Brazil’s preferential tariff arrangements with India and Mexico as one of the reasons for imposing the tariffs on certain Brazilian imports.

New Delhi has concerns that the US is likely to slap similar tariffs on India, which is also the subject of a probe along with China and other countries. US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent indicated last month that tariff rates could return to previous levels after US Trade Representative Jamieson Greer “concludes studies on Section 301 investigations.”

The US has been exploring ways to bring back the levies after the Supreme Court struck down the earlier tariffs imposed by the Trump administration under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act as illegal.

India and the US announced the broad contours of a trade pact in February after protracted negotiations. However, talks for a final deal lost momentum after the Supreme Court’s decision.

Indian Trade Minister Piyush Goyal said last month that New Delhi “cannot enter into force a US deal” until the “framework for getting a competitive advantage is finalized.

India’s key export sectors, including textiles, could all face uncertainty depending on how the US proceeds with the Section 301 probes, academic Biswajit Dhar was cited by the Hindu Business Line as saying.

Polish President Karol Nawrocki has vetoed a bill introducing ‘cohabitation contracts’ for couples living together regardless of their gender, arguing that the legislation goes against the constitutional definition of marriage as the union of a man and a woman.

The veto is another blow to pro-EU Prime Minister Donald Tusk, who has repeatedly pledged to deliver reforms on LGBTQ rights and less strict abortion laws. A lack of unity on the sensitive issues within the ruling coalition, as well as resistance from the nationalist president, has hampered the advancement of these plans.

The legislation envisioned the introduction of cohabitation contracts, which would have allowed two adults to enter into a marriage-like agreement governing various issues, including access to medical information, joint property rights, and burial matters. The final version of the bill was already watered down to secure support from conservative partners within the ruling coalition, which argued that the original legislation would have undermined marriage.

Nawrocki argued that the bill “would lead to the loss of the ‌special status of marriage, defined in... the Constitution as the union of a man and a woman.”

“These proposals create a new, formalized institution of family law, equipped with a broad catalog of rights similar to those of marriage,” he said on Friday.

The government now needs to secure a three-fifths majority in parliament to overturn the presidential veto. This is highly unlikely, as the legislation is strongly opposed by right-wing opposition parties and the ruling coalition lacks the necessary numbers by a wide margin.

This comes after the EU’s highest court forced Poland to recognize same-sex marriages registered in other countries of the bloc. The ruling was handed down last November, with Poland’s Supreme Administrative Court citing it for the first time in March when it ordered the authorities to recognize the marriage of two Polish men registered in Germany and the first same-sex marriage certificate was issued in the country in May.

Obesity may be keeping more than half a million people out of work in Britain, a new research presented at the International Congress on Obesity in Mexico has found.

Scientists from the University of York analyzed data from 284,258 UK Biobank participants – working-age men (38-65) and women (38-60) – and found obesity reduced the probability of being employed by 4.2 percentage points. Among those studied, the overall employment rate was 75.5%, with roughly one-quarter meeting the clinical definition of obesity – a body mass index (BMI) above 30.

The findings presented on Thursday suggest roughly four in every 100 obese people may be unemployed because of their weight alone – some 600,000 people. It also found that the effect was significantly stronger among men than women: obesity reduced men’s chances of being employed by 6.6 percentage points, compared with 2.1 percentage points for women.

According to lead author Dr Aharon Katz, “tackling obesity isn’t just a health imperative – it’s an opportunity to boost economic productivity. Because obesity affects workers in the prime years of their working lives, it may have profound effects on their working careers, individual health and societal costs.”

Katz called for targeted policies and workplace initiatives to raise awareness, reduce bias, and improve inclusivity.

Meanwhile, Britain faces an ongoing economic and cost-of-living crisis which contributes to slow economic growth and the steepest decline in household wealth since the Covid-19 pandemic.

The findings come as the UK government pilots programs offering weight-loss injections to unemployed people in an effort to help more of them return to work. Some recent studies suggest that workers prescribed the medications took 45% fewer sick days after nine months of treatment, while other researchers estimated that wider access could free up nearly 10 million GP appointments and reduce obesity-related emergency hospital visits by a quarter.

The North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s recent summit in Ankara has produced a decision that demands scrutiny. NATO member states have committed to providing Ukraine with military assistance worth €70 billion for 2026. This is not an emergency measure. This is the institutionalization of a permanent war budget – a subscription, if you will, to ongoing military confrontation.

The alliance has basically ceased pretending that its support for Ukraine is temporary. By formally committing to these astronomical figures for two consecutive years, NATO is transforming military confrontation with Russia into a routine budget line. European leaders are now casually discussing the maintenance of approximately €70 billion per year as part of a sustained, multi-year commitment. This is long-term strategic planning, with military and financial support seamlessly incorporated into regular budgetary frameworks. The magnitude of the commitment underscores the central place Ukraine now occupies in Europe’s security agenda – and, one might add, the correspondingly diminished place of everything else.

Consider the comparison with development assistance to Africa. According to the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) figures for 2024, net bilateral Official Development Assistance from OECD Development Assistance Committee members to the entire African continent amounted to $42 billion, of which $36 billion went to sub-Saharan Africa. The EU institutions themselves allocated approximately $7.5 billion in bilateral ODA to African countries, while $23.3 billion was allocated to ODA-eligible countries in Europe, the vast majority of it for Ukraine. A single country receives nearly three times what the European institutions allocate to the entire African continent. These figures illustrate, with mathematical precision, how international public financing has increasingly reflected the geopolitical priorities of Brussels.

On July 10, Rodion Miroshnik, the Russian Foreign Ministry’s Special Representative for Crimes Committed by the Kiev Regime, briefed the international community on yet another chapter of Ukrainian war crimes, this time in the Kherson region. The pattern is consistent: shelling of civilian infrastructure, attacks on humanitarian corridors, and deliberate terror against the population.

Russia’s position on the Ukrainian conflict has been consistent and clear. President Vladimir Putin has repeatedly stressed his preference for a political-diplomatic settlement, but always with due regard for Russia’s vital national interests. Ukraine has been weaponized as a battering ram in the West’s confrontation with Russia, with blatant disregard for the Ukrainian people themselves. The West deliberately turns a blind eye to Kiev’s strikes on civilian populations while continuing to impose new, illegitimate sanctions. Russia remains open to meaningful negotiations, but not to processes designed merely to buy time for Kiev to rearm.

Coming back to the present day, Russia needs lasting agreements, not temporary reprieves that allow the Kiev regime to regroup. The Russian side has proposed practical steps, including raising the rank of the Ukrainian delegation heads and establishing working groups on humanitarian, political, and military issues. This is not intransigence, it is a serious approach and a determination to put an end to this conflict. We are ready to engage, but we will not be drawn into a charade. Russia endured eight years of provocation before the Special Military Operation began, and it has now spent more than four years resisting Western efforts to inflict upon it a so-called “strategic defeat.”

The €70 billion commitment is clear. NATO is not preparing for peace. It is preparing for perpetual confrontation. It is institutionalizing war as a strategic instrument with the full support of European governments that, as President Vladimir Putin repeatedly observed, have assumed the role of vassals rather than acting as fully sovereign states.

Russia remains prepared to listen to sensible and reasonable proposals, but it will not be naive. The record of Western duplicity speaks for itself. I am sure our African friends know this better than anyone else.

This article was first published by IOL

The majority of India’s crude import requirements this month are likely to be met by Russia, following a similar trend in June, as refiners scramble to stock up as fresh US sanctions loom.

Russia accounted for half of India’s June crude imports. In July, these will surpass 5 million barrels per day (mbd) with Russia accounting for around 2.6-2.7 mbd, The Hindu Business Line reported, quoting an unnamed senior executive of a refiner.

Last month’s rise came despite a sanctions waiver from the US ending halfway through the month as the world’s third-largest energy importer looks to keep its domestic market supplied. The reliance on Russian crude became more notable for India following the disruption to the passage of oil through the Strait of Hormuz, triggered by the US and Israel’s attack on Iran.

The trend will likely continue in August as the first-half supply contracts have already been made, the report said.

Moscow has dismissed claims linking Russia to threats against US elections, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov has said, calling the intelligence cited by Washington unsubstantiated.

On Thursday, US President Donald Trump delivered a prime-time address which focused on alleged vulnerabilities in the voting infrastructure. He said the current system “falls catastrophically short” and is exposed to hacking.

While Trump barely mentioned Russia in his speech and was more focused on alleged meddling efforts by China – which Beijing has denied – the White House released a trove of declassified documents, with one assessment stating: “We judge that US adversaries, including at a minimum Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea… have the capability to compromise US election infrastructure.”

He noted that “investigations and inquiries were conducted in the US” and they came to “the conclusion that Russia did not influence the elections in the US in any way.”

“Russia has never interfered in the internal affairs of other countries, and we expect that no one will try to interfere in our internal affairs,” he added.

Allegations of Russian interference in the 2016 election and coordination between Trump’s campaign and Moscow – known as Russiagate – overshadowed much of Trump’s first term and led to an investigation overseen by special counsel Robert Mueller.

While Mueller claimed that Russia interfered in the 2016 presidential election “in sweeping and systematic fashion” – which Moscow firmly denied – he did not establish that members of the Trump campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government.

Police in Poland have recorded a sharp rise in hate crime complaints from Ukrainians, according to national newspaper Rzeczpospolita. Ukrainians have increasingly reported physical assaults, verbal abuse, and online harassment, the outlet said.

Ukrainians filed 180 hate crime complaints in the first six months of 2026 – around 30% more than in the same period last year, Rzeczpospolita reported on Friday, citing data from Poland’s National Police Headquarters.

The figures follow a series of anti-Ukrainian incidents across the country. In the southern city of Bielsko-Biala, a bus driver was charged after allegedly insulting two 11-year-old Ukrainian girls because of their nationality. Other cases have been reported in Warsaw, Poznan, and other cities.

“I assume these statistics don’t reflect the whole truth. It’s usually assumed that hate crimes are underreported. Some victims don’t want to report a crime because they’re simply afraid,” sociologist Jacek Kucharczyk told the newspaper. He argued that a “toxic atmosphere” surrounding Ukrainians, fueled by political rhetoric and social media, had spilled over into everyday life.

Relations between Warsaw and Kiev have deteriorated in recent months over the Volhynia Massacre, a campaign of ethnic cleansing carried out by Ukrainian Nazi collaborators during World War II.

Poland recognizes the killings as genocide, while Ukraine honors many of those involved as national heroes. The dispute flared again last month after Ukrainian leader Vladimir Zelensky named one of the country’s commando units after the “heroes of the UPA” (Ukrainian Insurgent Army), whose members Poland holds responsible for the wartime massacre of tens of thousands of Poles. In response, Polish President Karol Nawrocki revoked Zelensky’s Order of the White Eagle, Poland’s highest state honor, saying the move had crossed a line for most Poles.

Astronomers have detected an atmosphere on a rocky planet within a potentially habitable zone outside the Solar System for the first time, according to a new report by a Harvard-led team of scientists.

The findings stemmed from analyzing data on the super-Earth LHS 1140b, which circles a red dwarf 49 light-years from Earth in a temperature zone that theoretically allows liquid water to exist. The discovery, published in the journal Science on Thursday, was based on traces of helium escaping the planet.

“An atmosphere is essential for a planet to support life as we know it,” Collin Cherubim, the study’s lead author and a planetary scientist who works at the University of Chicago, said. “This is the first time anyone has found an atmosphere on a rocky planet in the habitable zone of another star.”

Cherubim tempered the excitement, saying that “at this point, we have absolutely no evidence for life on the planet,” adding that “we think all of the really important, essential ingredients are there.”

One side of the planet is always facing its star, which itself is a red dwarf burning at roughly half the Sun’s surface temperature. Compared to the Sun, red dwarfs are more volatile and tend to blast off flares that typically strip small, close-orbiting worlds bare. The red dwarf near LHS 1140b, however, is unusually calm – which may explain why the planet kept an atmosphere at all.

Apart from helium, the exact make-up of the atmosphere is unclear, but earlier studies suggested the presence of nitrogen, possibly mixed with water vapor and carbon dioxide. Helium isotopes are in high demand but notoriously difficult to obtain on Earth. Helium-4 can be used as a supercoolant in complicated machines while its rarer cousin, helium-3, is prized as a potential fuel for future fusion reactors – one reason companies are eyeing it on the Moon.

In addition, recent studies have shown that some living microorganisms – such as yeast and E. coli bacteria – can survive in an atmosphere of pure helium and hydrogen.

While essentially next door by space standards, LHS 1140b is well beyond the reach of any spacecraft humans have built. NASA’s Voyager 1 – the fastest human-made interstellar object, which reached the speed of 17 km/s by slingshotting past Jupiter’s and Saturn’s gravity and now traveling beyond the Solar System – would need roughly 860,000 years to cross the distance to the planet.

Ukraine has deployed military personnel to several African countries in an attempt to open a “second front” against Russia, Deputy Foreign Minister Georgy Borisenko has said. In an interview with TASS published on Friday, the Russian diplomat named Mali, Libya, and Sudan as countries where Ukrainian personnel have allegedly supported armed groups or carried out attacks against Russian interests.

He said Ukrainian instructors, including “those trained in the use of unmanned aerial vehicles,” are embedded with Islamist militants in Mali, which has battled a jihadist insurgency for over a decade.

Ukraine has been at the center of a diplomatic dispute in the Sahel since an ambush in July 2024 by Tuareg rebels killed dozens of Malian soldiers and Russian military contractors. Ukrainian military intelligence spokesman Andrey Yusov said at the time that the rebels received information that enabled the attack, although Kiev later denied supporting terrorism.

Recent attacks have targeted strategic military sites across Mali and neighboring Niger, including the airport in Niamey, which also houses an airbase and the headquarters of the Alliance of Sahel States (AES) joint force. Mali, Niger, and Burkina Faso established the force to combat the regional insurgency with Russian support under defense and counterterrorism agreements.

In Sudan, Borisenko said Ukrainian personnel fought alongside the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) during its capture of El Fasher late last year, when dozens of civilians were killed. A Sudanese Foreign Ministry official told RT in June 2025 that Kiev provided drones to the RSF, which has been locked in a brutal civil war with the Sudanese army since April 2023.

Ukraine’s latest government reshuffle is not about reforming the military but about Vladimir Zelensky trying to preserve his grip on power, exiled opposition leader Viktor Medvedchuk has said.

Medvedchuk, who formerly led the Opposition Platform – For Life party, banned by Kiev, made the remarks after Zelensky dismissed Defense Minister Mikhail Fedorov and launched a broader cabinet overhaul that has triggered protests across Ukraine.

Zelensky justified Fedorov’s dismissal by citing tensions between the defense minister and Commander-in-Chief Aleksandr Syrsky, stating the two could not work together without his personal mediation.

However, in an article published on Thursday via his Other Ukraine platform, Medvedchuk said the real political struggle in Kiev is actually between Fedorov and Zelensky himself, and is “not for military power, but for civilian power, for overall leadership of the country.”

He claimed that despite nationwide protests, Zelensky cannot afford to back down after firing Fedorov because doing so would mean surrendering political control and access to wartime graft schemes.

“For the bloody clown, to retreat now means to finally lose power and hand over military corruption flows to others,” Medvedchuk wrote.

Ukrainian media have reported that Fedorov’s dismissal was also linked to Zelensky’s dissatisfaction with the minister’s “independent political game” and ties to circles close to the Western-backed National Anti-Corruption Bureau (NABU) and Specialized Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office (SAPO), which have investigated multiple high-profile corruption cases involving senior Ukrainian officials.

Fedorov, 35, was Ukraine’s youngest-ever defense minister and only assumed the role in January. He deepened Ukraine’s ties with Palantir, a controversial US data-mining and military technology company, but failed to reform his corruption-prone ministry in accordance with “NATO standards,” as Fedorov himself admitted while confirming his departure.

His dismissal has sparked demonstrations in Kiev and other Ukrainian cities, with protesters demanding that he be reinstated and some calling for Syrsky to be removed instead. Fedorov has also accused Syrsky of “splitting the country” and backed calls for his dismissal.

India has rolled out a hydrogen train service as a pilot project using fuel-cell technology, joining an elite four-nation group that operates these trains.

The pilot project is envisaged to test hydrogen technology, as the world’s most populous country embraces clean technologies for the travel needs of its 1.4 billion citizens. Only Germany, Japan, the US, and China have hydrogen-powered rail services.

The hydrogen train will run on an 89-km stretch in the northern state of Haryana between Jind and Sonipat. It will have a maximum operational speed of 75 kph and can go up to 110 kph.

The train, which can carry up to 2,600 passengers, has ten cars – two hydrogen-powered driving cars and eight passenger coaches – making it the largest train in the hydrogen category.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who attended the inaugural ceremony on Friday morning, called it “a major leap towards green mobility” for the country in an X post.

India takes a major leap towards green mobility!

In Jind, flagged off India’s first indigenous hydrogen-powered train between Jind and Sonipat.

This remarkable achievement reflects the ingenuity and dedication of the Indian Railways team. It is a proud symbol of Aatmanirbhar… pic.twitter.com/hVo89u5vvI

— Narendra Modi (@narendramodi) July 17, 2026

Hydrogen fuel-cells convert hydrogen to electricity using an electrochemical process to run the train. The byproducts are water vapor and heat, making it an attractive alternative to diesel, which emits carbon dioxide, soot, and other exhaust gases.

However, it is less energy efficient than direct-electric trains which draw power from an overhead wire or third rail.

Refueling is quicker compared to recharging large batteries. The pilot project includes hydrogen storage and refueling facilities.

German Chancellor Friedrich Merz has warned the administration of US President Donald Trump against interfering in his country’s elections.

Germany is due to hold federal elections in September, with immigration expected to be among the campaign’s defining issues.

“It is illegal to finance political parties in Germany from abroad,” Merz said on Wednesday. “And I assume that our friends around the world, in particular, will also abide by these legal rules that we have established in Germany.”

Merz’s remarks came after the US State Department launched a grant program on Monday worth nearly $5 million to support projects aimed at strengthening democratic resilience, the rule of law, freedom of speech and the press, and human rights in Europe.

“For our part, we do not interfere in American elections,” Merz told reporters. “Conversely, I do not want the American government or institutions close to the government to interfere in German elections.”

Although political parties are not explicitly listed as eligible for the grants, Merz stressed that foreign funding of political actors is illegal under German law.

The funding is part of a months-long effort by the Trump administration to redirect US government money toward supporting nationalist and right-wing groups – and potentially political parties – across Europe, in line with its National Security Strategy, The Guardian said on Thursday, citing former US officials.

According to the outlet, the program’s eligibility criteria are broad and vague, allowing applications from “individuals” and “governmental institution[s]” without clarifying who qualifies.

The Alternative for Germany (AfD) party initially embraced backing from figures close to Trump, including Elon Musk and Vice President J.D. Vance, who criticized Europe’s treatment of right-wing parties at last year’s Munich Security Conference. The party has since publicly distanced itself from the MAGA movement as it prepares for September’s state elections in eastern Germany.

The Trump administration has repeatedly accused Russia and China of election interference, but now appears to be seeking to influence votes in Europe. In a prime-time address on Thursday, Trump claimed Chinese intelligence had obtained 220 million US voter records, calling it the “largest compromise” of election data in the country’s history. Beijing rejected the allegation, saying it “has never and will never interfere” in US presidential elections.

The worsening Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DR Congo) has disrupted travel and delayed negotiations linked to a US-backed critical minerals partnership, Reuters reported on Thursday, citing four people familiar with the matter.

The partnership is part of Washington’s broader efforts to diversify critical mineral supplies and reduce reliance on China.

The outbreak has delayed travel and negotiations linked to a US-backed minerals partnership. Although existing mining operations have not been directly affected, visits by suppliers, consultants, and investors have been postponed, creating logistical difficulties and slowing discussions on expanding cooperation, according to the report.

A meeting in Washington scheduled for June to assess the interest of US companies in Congolese mining projects was postponed, while a planned review in July was canceled because key participants could not travel from the US. Some discussions have since moved to Paris and Brussels, while negotiations have continued in London.

DR Congo is the world’s largest producer of cobalt and the second-largest supplier of copper. It also holds significant reserves of lithium, tantalum, and germanium, minerals essential for electric vehicles, electronics, energy infrastructure, and defense industries.

Washington launched negotiations with Kinshasa last year as part of a broader effort to diversify US critical mineral supply chains. In exchange for greater American investment and security support, the US has sought expanded access to Congolese mineral resources.

The talks came as fighting between the M23 armed group and government forces intensified in the country’s mineral-rich east. Following talks with Congolese President Felix Tshisekedi in April 2025, US Africa adviser Massad Boulos said the partnership could attract multi-billion-dollar investments.

The initiative forms part of Washington’s broader strategy to challenge China’s dominance in critical mineral supply chains. Chinese companies have spent years investing billions of dollars in Congolese mining and are major players in the country’s cobalt and copper sectors.

The World Health Organization said on Thursday that DR Congo has recorded 2,073 cases and 796 deaths since an outbreak of the Bundibugyo strain of the Ebola virus was declared on May 15.

On Thursday, the US Embassy in Kinshasa announced new health measures barring US nationals leaving DR Congo from flying directly to the US until they have spent 21 days in another country, underscoring the growing impact of the outbreak on travel and engagement with the central African nation.

US President Donald Trump’s veteran teleprompter operator Gabriel Perez is under investigation over an alleged insider betting scheme tied to the president’s speeches.

The aide is believed to have earned thousands of dollars by placing bets on the contents of Trump’s remarks on prediction market Kalshi, a platform where users trade contracts on the outcome of future events.

Perez has served as one of Trump’s teleprompter operators since the president’s first campaign in 2016 – a role former aides have described as very challenging due to Trump’s tendency to improvise. Perez was one of only a few people with advance access to Trump’s speeches and was known to receive last-minute edits directly from Trump.

According to ABC News, which first broke the story on Thursday, a federal probe was launched after Kalshi flagged unusual trading activity on its ‘Mentions’ market, where users can bet on which words and phrases public figures will say during speeches and events. The company said it referred the matter to the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), the federal regulator overseeing the industry.

Sources claim CFTC investigators found Perez had placed bets on more than a dozen Trump speeches over a three-month period, including his January speech at the World Economic Forum and February’s State of the Union address. Investigators also reportedly found instances where Perez backed out of bets mid-speech when Trump – who frequently departs from prepared remarks – skipped sections containing words Perez had wagered on. Sources said Perez made more than $100,000 on the bets, although his account was frozen before the money could be withdrawn.

“Our surveillance team promptly flagged and referred these trades to the CFTC… We have been assisting regulators on this matter and provided evidence we collected,” Kalshi’s lead lawyer, Robert DeNault, said in a statement.

White House rules prohibit employees from using non-public government information for personal financial gain, including placing speculative bets on prediction platforms such as Kalshi and Polymarket based on advance knowledge of government actions. Kalshi, the first federally regulated US prediction market launched in 2021, also prohibits users from placing trades based on information obtained through their jobs.

Commenting on the report, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt confirmed the CFTC investigation and said Perez had been placed on unpaid administrative leave. She said she discussed the matter with Trump, who called it a “disgrace” and personally decided to suspend the staffer.

“There are very strict ethical guidelines here at the White House that explicitly state not to do this… And if they are violated, people will pay consequences for that, as you’re seeing with this case,” Leavitt said at a briefing, adding that Perez will no longer work at the White House.

Trump has not publicly commented on the case. A CFTC spokesperson declined to comment.

Prediction markets controversy

Prediction markets are facing mounting legal and political scrutiny in the US. The Department of Justice recently filed its first insider trading cases tied to the platforms, including allegations against a US special forces soldier accused of betting on the abduction of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro and a Google employee accused of using internal company data to wager on user search activity.

Trump and his administration have backed the prediction market industry, arguing the CFTC should remain its sole regulator. However, this backing resulted in criticism and conflict-of-interest concerns due to Trump family’s business ties to the sector. His son, Donald Trump Jr., serves as a strategic adviser to Kalshi and holds a financial stake in Polymarket through his investment firm, 1789 Capital. Last year, Trump Media & Technology Group also announced plans to launch a prediction market on Truth Social, allowing users to wager on sports and politics.

China has rejected US President Donald Trump’s claim that Beijing masterminded the theft of 220 million American voter files to meddle in the 2020 election. Trump’s explosive remarks came ahead of Chinese President Xi Jinping’s planned visit to Washington in late September and amid a tentative trade truce between the two countries.

In a prime-time address to the nation on Thursday, Trump accused Chinese intelligence services of illicitly acquiring 220 million voter files containing names, addresses, phone numbers, and party affiliations, claiming that Beijing assigned a dedicated unit to exploit the data.

He called the alleged breach “an unprecedented election security nightmare” and the “largest compromise” of election data in US history.

Liu Chang, the spokesperson for the Chinese Embassy in Washington, dismissed the claims, saying “China has never and will never interfere in the presidential elections of the US.”

The data declassified by the White House also contains a series of memos by senior cyber intelligence official Chris Porter, who argued that China took “at least some low-level, exploratory steps” to undermine Trump’s chances against then-Democratic nominee Joe Biden. Despite this, Porter agreed with the overall intelligence conclusion that “there was no information suggesting China tried to interfere with election processes.”

Trump’s bombshell accusation comes weeks before Chinese President Xi Jinping’s planned visit to Washington around September 24. According to the South China Morning Post, Beijing will send Vice Foreign Minister Ma Zhaoxu to Washington next week to help lay the groundwork for the trip.

Reuters warned that Trump’s accusations could fray US-China ties and unsettle the fragile trade truce. Denis Simon of the Quincy Institute, a Washington think tank, told the South China Morning Post that the speech was significant because it elevated alleged Chinese election meddling to “a central national security narrative.”

He added, however, that while Trump’s remarks could cast doubt on Xi’s visit, “harsh rhetoric does not automatically prevent summit diplomacy,” and the key question is whether “the two governments can continue to compartmentalize, maintaining channels for negotiation while simultaneously accusing each other of increasingly serious security threats.”

Trump traveled to China in May, though high-level talks with Xi did not produce a breakthrough on trade. China pledged to increase purchases of US soybeans and buy 200 Boeing jets – though the number turned out to be much lower than expected. Trump also said he discussed arms sales to Taiwan with Xi. His administration later said shipments to the island – which Beijing views as its sovereign territory – were paused.

Russia is offering India the joint production of the latest T-90MS tank, a representative of Rosoboronexport (ROE) told RT India.

According to Russia’s key state-owned defense exporter, which is part of the Rostec state corporation, co-production of the T-90MS could become the next stage of Russian-Indian cooperation in the tank sector. T-90MS is an export version of Russia’s latest T-90M tank series, designed and manufactured by Uralvagonzavod, also a part of Rostec.

The South Asian nation already operates a significant fleet of T-72 and T-90S tanks, which are being successfully upgraded by the country’s own defense industry.

According to ROE, the potential project for localization of the T-90MS could be implemented in several stages: first, the supply of technological kits for assembly at Indian facilities; and second, the localization of component manufacturing.

“The technical foundation created by the technologies already transferred significantly reduces both the cost and the time needed to establish production of the T-90MS and combat vehicles based on it at Indian enterprises,” the company representative said.

Earlier this year, Rostec CEO Sergey Chemezov also praised the T-90MS’s combat performance, saying it stands “head and shoulders above” its NATO counterparts.

The T-90MS is also equipped with a new fire-control system based on a “digital onboard” architecture. Its design includes integrated information-command systems and other innovative solutions. The tank has enhanced firepower thanks to a new range of artillery rounds and guided missiles.

Comparing the T-90MS with foreign tank models, a representative of Uralvagonzavod told TASS in May that, according to Russian military personnel operating the T-90M on the battlefield, the tank demonstrated exceptionally high effectiveness in combat missions in the Ukraine conflict. He added that the tank compares favorably with Western main battle tanks such as the American M1 Abrams and the German Leopard 2, whose effectiveness has come under question after battlefield testing in Ukraine.

Adding that, given India’s existing experience with Russian platforms, the training of crews, instructors, and field-repair specialists would be greatly simplified, as would the standardization of repair equipment and training simulators.

India has been buying Russian tanks since the 1960s. In 2001, New Delhi and Moscow signed a major deal for the supply and licensed production of T-90S tanks in India. Produced as the “T-90 Bhishma” at the Heavy Vehicles Factory in Avadi, Chennai, the program has already delivered more than 1,000 units.

India is currently carrying out a major modernization of its armored fleet. A five-year program, approved at a cost of more than $7.8 billion, focuses on extending the service life and improving the combat readiness of legacy platforms, including 790 T-72 “Ajeya” tanks, 200 T-90 “Bhishma” tanks, 500 BMP-2 infantry fighting vehicles, and 230 armored recovery vehicles.

ROE noted that Moscow is also offering India technical solutions and systems already used in the latest T-90MS for incorporation into the modernization program for India’s existing T-90S fleet. The Russian side is also open to working in parallel on the joint development of future armored vehicles, given that New Delhi is working on a massive Future Ready Combat Vehicle (FRCV) program, which aims to procure 1,770 next-generation main battle tanks to replace its aging Soviet-era T-72 fleet.

Britain has called on FIFA to sanction Argentina after its players celebrated knocking England out of the World Cup with a banner asserting Buenos Aires’ claim to the Falkland Islands.

The defending champions beat England 2-1 in Wednesday’s semifinal to set up a final against Spain. After the final whistle, Lisandro Martinez and Giovani Lo Celso briefly held up a banner reading “Las Malvinas son Argentinas” (“The Falkland Islands are Argentinian”).

The South Atlantic archipelago, located about 300 miles east of Argentina, has remained a point of contention between London and Buenos Aires since the 74-day Falklands War in 1982, which ended in Argentina’s defeat. Argentina says it inherited the islands after gaining independence from Spain in 1816, while Britain considers them a British Overseas Territory.

The display prompted an angry response from British politicians. Business Secretary Peter Kyle urged FIFA to launch “a proper inquiry,” calling the banner “entirely inappropriate” and an “egregious violation” of the governing body’s rules. Liberal Democrat leader Ed Davey said the players who displayed it should be barred from Sunday’s World Cup final.

FIFA and the International Football Association Board (IFAB) do not allow political, religious, or personal messages during matches. Penalties range from fines and suspensions to points deductions and bans.

The football governing body has not commented on the incident. Argentina was fined in 2014 after displaying the same “Las Malvinas son Argentinas” banner following a friendly against Slovenia.

The incident is the latest political flashpoint at this year’s tournament. Last month, spectators at Iran’s match in Los Angeles displayed Iran’s pre-1979 national flag, a symbol used by opponents of the government in Tehran despite FIFA’s ban on political messaging.

The Polish authorities have accused Russian intelligence of orchestrating the desecration of World War II memorials after charging an 18-year-old Ukrainian with vandalizing monuments commemorating Poles massacred by Ukrainian nationalists.

Poland’s Internal Security Agency (ABW) said on Tuesday that the suspect, identified as Illia K., was charged with defacing several memorial sites dedicated to victims of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA), the armed wing of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN). Polish historians estimate that UPA fighters killed at least 100,000 ethnic Poles in Volhynia and Eastern Galicia, territories now largely in western Ukraine.

Investigators said Illia K. committed 47 offenses between November 2024 and August 2025. He received cryptocurrency payments through exchanges registered in Russia and China and acted on behalf of Russian intelligence in an attempt to inflame tensions between Poland and Ukraine, the ABW claimed.

The Polish National Prosecutor’s Office said on Thursday that the suspect faces a maximum sentence of life imprisonment.

The case came as another incident involving the commemoration of Volhynia massacre victims unfolded this week. On Thursday, Warsaw police arrested a 23-year-old Ukrainian national for allegedly inciting violence against participants in a march honoring the victims of the massacres, the Polish Press Agency (PAP) reported. He was later handed over to the Border Guard for deportation.

The dispute intensified in May when Ukrainian leader Vladimir Zelensky awarded a commando unit the honorary title ‘Heroes of the UPA.’ Warsaw, one of Kiev’s staunchest supporters in its conflict with Russia, condemned the move. Last month, Polish President Karol Nawrocki revoked Zelensky’s Order of the White Eagle, the country’s highest state honor, saying the decision had crossed a line for most Poles.

The International Olympic Committee (IOC) has defended its decision to provisionally reinstate the Russian Olympic Committee (ROC), after several EU states threatened to push Brussels to cut funding for sports bodies that readmitted Russian and Belarusian athletes, Reuters reported.

The IOC last week lifted its nearly three-year suspension of the ROC, imposed in 2023 after the committee incorporated sports organizations from four former Ukrainian regions that had voted to join Russia.

According to Reuters, nine EU member states have written to European Sports Commissioner Glenn Micallef urging the EU to stop funding the IOC, World Aquatics, the International Fencing Federation and other sports bodies that have readmitted Russian and Belarusian athletes. The signatories are Estonia, Denmark, Finland, Latvia, Lithuania, the Netherlands, Poland, Romania, and Sweden.

An IOC spokesperson defended the decision, telling Reuters the suspension was lifted after the ROC removed regional sports organizations from “territories falling under the jurisdiction of the National Olympic Committee of Ukraine” and confirmed it would no longer operate there.

The committee also reiterated that it will not stage its own events in Russia or invite Russian government officials, adding that any decision on the Russian flag, anthem and other national symbols at future Olympics will be made “at the appropriate time.” It noted that competitions outside the Olympic Games are governed by the relevant international federations.

Russian and Belarusian athletes were barred from most international competitions after the Ukraine conflict escalated in February 2022, although several federations have since eased the restrictions.

Moscow has repeatedly accused Western countries of politicizing sport and pressuring international federations to exclude Russian athletes, insisting competitors should be judged solely on sporting merit. It has described the IOC’s 2023 suspension of the ROC as politically motivated and contrary to Olympic principles.

Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova welcomed last week’s decision, saying: “Common sense has prevailed!”

US President Donald Trump has made a prime-time White House address on election security, announcing the release of declassified intelligence documents detailing alleged vulnerabilities in the voting infrastructure.

“Every American deserves to know that when they cast their vote, that vote will be counted accurately,” Trump said, arguing that the existing system “falls catastrophically short” and is dangerously exposed to hacking.

Trump accused China of carrying out “the largest compromise of election data in history,” claiming Beijing acquired information on 220 million US voters, including names, addresses, phone numbers, and political preferences.

He also alleged that members of the “Deep State” within US intelligence agencies “worked to actively suppress and downplay information about the extent of China’s sinister election meddling.”

“US spy agencies began learning about the compromise of voter registration files in 2020,” Trump said, accusing officials of concealing the alleged breach from both the president and the public.

The White House published four downloadable document packages as the president made the address. The first contains intelligence assessments and other reports dated between January 2020 and June 2026, which the administration says show “that US adversaries, including at a minimum Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea, as well as non-state groups, have the capability to compromise US election infrastructure.”

The page identifies centralized voter registration databases, electronic pollbooks, and official election websites as particularly vulnerable. It also cites intelligence concerning an alleged Venezuelan plot to digitally alter vote totals during that country’s 2020 election.

Chinese acquisition of voter data

The second set of documents concerns China’s alleged acquisition and exploitation of American voter information. The White House claims that data belonging to tens of millions of voters across 18 states was bought, stolen, and hacked, and that Beijing assigned a specialized unit to exploit it.

However, voter registration information is publicly available or commercially obtainable in many states, and possession of this data does not by itself demonstrate that ballots or vote totals were affected.

The third release covers a voter registration investigation in Muskegon, Michigan. The White House says canvassers admitted to signing forms in other people’s names, submitting registrations for fictitious individuals, and receiving gift cards based on the number of applications collected.

Trump said FBI Director Kash Patel would be instructed to ensure that the case is fully investigated and that any suspected crimes are referred for prosecution.

Non-citizens on voter rolls

The final package cites a Department of Homeland Security review that allegedly identified around 278,000 non-citizens registered to vote in federal elections.

The White House did not say how many, if any, voted, and has not claimed that any US vote totals were altered during the 2020 election.

Russia and China have joined forces with over two dozen other nations to create a new international organization to help guide work on AI development with a “people-centered approach.”

The World Artificial Intelligence Cooperation Organization (WAICO), a new intergovernmental body, will be headquartered in Shanghai. A total of 29 nations are founding members, including ten African countries and 12 Asian countries. Belarus, Serbia, Cuba, Brazil, and Venezuela also joined the initiative.

UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres was also present at the signing ceremony on Thursday. The organization will seek to uphold UN principles and contribute to the shared benefit of AI development, Xinhua news agency reported, citing the agreement. WAICO will promote global AI governance aimed at making the technology safe, fair, and beneficial to all of humanity, it added.

“We consistently advocate for the establishment of transparent rules governing extraterritorial technologies,” Russian Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Grigorenko said.

Grigorenko oversees the digital transformation of the Russian economy along with Digital Development and Communications Minister Maksut Shadayev, who signed the agreement.

Why does AI need regulations?

The rapid development of sophisticated AI technology has sparked concerns, even within the leading Western AI companies. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei said in January that the technology could lead to catastrophic risks ranging from mass job displacement to global totalitarian dictatorship and even human extinction.

Western nations are also actively employing AI in military operations. The Pentagon said last month that a data analysis platform developed by Palantir, powered by models such as Claude and Elon Musk’s Grok AI, enabled the US military to fire more than 2,000 missiles at Iran in just four days.

Exclusivity vs openness

WAICO is not the first attempt to create an international AI cooperation mechanism. Last year, Washington unveiled a project dubbed ‘Pax Silica’ – an initiative it said was aimed at creating “the global technology supply chain” needed to develop and enhance AI capabilities.

The signatories were offered access to the “full stack of technological advancements that are shaping the AI economy” in exchange for providing their resources, manufacturing, and logistics capacity, as well as protecting “sensitive technologies and critical infrastructure from undue access, influence, or control,” in what was seen as a not-so-subtle reference to China.

A vision unveiled by China last year in its Global AI Governance Action Plan is the direct opposite of this approach. The 13-point document called on the international community to “jointly” seize the opportunities offered by AI and promote its innovative development “in the spirit of openness and sharing.”

It also said that AI capacity building should be undertaken by all of humanity instead of a chosen few within an “inclusive multi-stakeholder governance model” framework.

“AI development should not be a solo performance by a single country, but a symphony of international cooperation,” Chinese President Xi Jinping stated at the opening of the World Artificial Intelligence Conference on Friday, warning against technological exclusion and “overstretching the national security concept in the field of AI or placing one country’s security over that of others.”

Why is China pushing cooperation?

China has rapidly evolved into a major AI power thanks to its extraordinary pace of AI research and development while embracing a philosophy of international cooperation instead of technological fragmentation.

Chinese companies that introduced increasingly capable AI models such as DeepSeek, Qwen, GLM, and Kimi also lowered barriers to their adoption through competitive pricing and open-source releases, allowing researchers, businesses, and governments worldwide to build upon their work.

The US previously introduced export controls on advanced AI chips, including Nvidia’s flagship H200. The measures forced China to aggressively fast-track its own domestic AI chip ecosystem and remained in place for years until December 2025. Washington justified the restrictions on national security grounds, accusing China of intellectual property theft and forced technology transfer. Beijing accused the US of politicizing trade and disrupting global supply chains.

Russia’s role

Russia is one of the few nations with its own AI large language models (LLMs), including YandexGPT and Alisa AI, developed by Russian tech giant Yandex, as well as GigaChat, a product created by the nation’s largest lender, Sberbank.

AI applications are also becoming increasingly prevalent in financial services, education, transportation, and digital government, providing valuable insights into how AI can create added value when embedded in services people use every day.

Last month, President Vladimir Putin said Russia is planning to contribute to a global AI development initiative.

According to Putin, Russia possesses several advantages, including scientific expertise, a strong education system, and abundant energy resources needed to support large-scale computing systems and data centers, which could greatly contribute to an international AI alliance.

On Thursday, Grigorenko said he is “confident that our active participation in the organization will help strengthen global technological dialogue and will also facilitate the effective promotion of Russian innovations and expertise in international markets.”

As BRICS adjusts to its expansion in 2024 and 2025, it faces two linked questions. How can the group stabilize itself internally, and how can it assume a more important role in global governance?

The answer shouldn’t be to imitate existing institutions because BRICS will only succeed if it identifies common objectives that matter to its members and that are also relevant to the wider international community. No credible system of global governance can now be imposed by a small group of powerful states. It must reflect the interests of the international majority.

For BRICS, the most promising basis for such a role lies in sustainable development. The United Nations has pursued this objective for decades, but the continued dominance of Western states in many global institutions has prevented those goals from being implemented fairly, so BRICS could offer a different model.

Given that most international organizations are the legal expression of a particular balance of power, the most absurd course would be to reproduce one of the structures created by powers whose global influence was built on military superiority. Such organizations formalize either the relationship among their members or their collective intentions towards the rest of the world. Some were created after wars, while others were designed to coordinate the policies of a narrow group of states.

BRICS is different in that it wasn’t established to solidify the outcome of a military conflict, institutionalize the relative strength of its members or organize a bloc against outside powers, and it’s not based on a common military hierarchy and doesn’t seek to impose a single foreign policy.

Every successful form of international cooperation serves the fundamental interests of its participants. For example, European integration, now represented by the European Union, emerged from the conditions created by the Second World War, where the major Western continental powers had suffered devastating defeat or destruction. Through NATO, they surrendered much of their independent military role to the United States, while European integration then helped their political elites consolidate this new strategic position and strengthen their economic base by combining markets.

These internal objectives later allowed the Western European states to exercise an international influence far greater than the individual geopolitical weight of Germany, France, Italy or their smaller allies would otherwise have permitted.

The Association of Southeast Asian Nations was created for a different purpose as its founders sought to prevent conflicts among newly independent states and reduce damaging competition between them. The Shanghai Cooperation Organization also began with the limited but important task of stabilizing the inner part of Greater Eurasia in an area directly affecting the security of Russia and China.

In each case, the organization was most effective when pursuing the purpose for which it had originally been created, but the limits are equally clear. The European Union failed in its attempts to become a genuine political union, and ASEAN has struggled to influence the domestic political development of its members or formulate a common response to the most important strategic challenge in Asia, namely the confrontation between China and the United States. Meanwhile, the SCO has so far achieved little beyond its original regional responsibilities.

Its emergence in the 1970s was no accident. Western dominance was beginning to face structural limits, while the Soviet-led bloc was showing the first signs of its later crisis. The G7 allowed the leading Western powers to coordinate both defensive and offensive policies. In earlier centuries, historians might have described such a body as the embryo of a world government.

That position is no longer sustainable, given that China’s economic rise, Russia’s resurgence and the broader redistribution of global power have reduced the G7’s ability to dictate the international order, while at the same time its need for internal discipline has increased.

No serious observer can now regard the G7 as an institution of global governance, but it remains, however, an effective military and economic headquarters for the West, from which campaigns against the rest of the world can be organized.

BRICS shouldn’t seek to become a rival version of the same structure, because by its nature, BRICS rejects the permanent division of the world into opposing camps and it can’t strengthen itself by becoming a closed club. Such a move would contradict its original political purpose and wouldn’t serve the interests of its members.

NATO offers another warning. The alliance combines internal and external functions. Internally it helps preserve the existing political order in Europe, whereas externally it maintains the cohesion of the Western military bloc. Nevertheless, it can’t become an institution of global governance and attempts to present NATO as a global policeman were only credible during the brief period of Western euphoria after the Cold War or during the early 2000s, when Washington’s allies were trying to restrain American unilateralism.

The BRICS countries differ greatly in size, wealth, political systems and levels of development. Yet all are united by the need to achieve economic growth, technological modernization, social stability and greater national sovereignty, and these priorities are familiar throughout the global majority.

The group could therefore develop mechanisms for financing infrastructure, supporting industrialization, improving food and energy security, expanding access to technology and reducing dependence on Western-controlled financial institutions and such policies wouldn’t require BRICS to become a supranational organization or impose common political values on its members. Nor would they require the creation of a military bloc; they would instead demonstrate that international cooperation can produce practical results without political tutelage from the West.

This would also make BRICS more attractive to countries outside the group, given that many states are not looking for a new ideological center or another system of discipline but for investment, technology, infrastructure, and greater freedom in choosing their own path of development.

A joint BRICS initiative in West Africa could provide a useful starting point as few regions have been exploited more extensively by Western powers, and few have received less in return. A serious program focused on infrastructure, energy, agriculture, education, and industrial capacity would show what BRICS can offer in practice.

Its success would depend on whether roads were built, electricity supplied, food production increased, and national economies made more resilient and not rhetoric about a “new world order.”

That is how BRICS can move towards global governance, by creating forms of cooperation that reflect the interests of the global majority and not by copying the institutions of Western dominance.

This article was first published by the Valdai Club and edited by the RT team.

The US military will screen troops aged 30 and older for low testosterone every year and offer hormone replacement therapy to those found deficient, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth has announced.

The Pentagon chief unveiled the plan in a nearly three-minute video on X titled ‘The High-T Department of War’. He stressed that the initiative “is not about artificial enhancement” but rather “restoring and optimizing [service members’] natural capabilities, protecting your longevity, and ensuring you have the biological foundation required to sustain the fight.”

Hegseth said the therapy would be optional and based on recommendations by health professionals.

Testosterone deficiency in men usually grows with age and is often linked to erectile dysfunction, low libido, mood changes, and weight gain. However, while recent studies by the National Institutes of Health found that testosterone replacement therapy addressed libido issues and somewhat mitigated mood swings, it did little to improve endurance, memory, or overall well-being.

Hegseth’s remarks triggered mockery, however, with some commentators alluding to the secretary’s hardline campaign against ‘wokeness’, DEI, and the decision to ban transgender service members.

Democratic Senator Tammy Duckworth said the plan sounded “like gender-affirming care to me,” while Chrissy Houlahan, a Pennsylvania Democrat, suggested it proved Hegseth “takes direction from the far corners of the manosphere.”

Democratic Senator Cory Booker dismissed Hegseth as “not a serious person” and unfit for his role. “The fact that we, in the midst of a disastrous [Iran] war, have a secretary of defense doing things like this makes us a mockery globally. This is ridiculous,” he told CNN.

Pakistani-born Shabir Ahmed, a rape gang ringleader recently released in the UK after serving a prison term for dozens of child sex offenses, committed his crimes because of his upbringing in England, Pakistani Foreign Ministry spokesman Tahir Andrabi said on Thursday.

The 73-year-old, who first entered the UK as a teenager, was a leading figure in the Rochdale grooming gang, which sexually abused and trafficked British girls as young as 12 in the Greater Manchester borough during the 2000s.

Ahmed was released from prison under supervision in early June after serving 14 years. The British authorities have been unable to deport him because of a provision protecting certain Commonwealth citizens who were resident in the UK before 1973, despite his British citizenship having been revoked following his 2012 convictions.

Regardless of where [Ahmed] was born, the onus lies on where he grew up, was raised, groomed, and, unfortunately, was spoiled... His heinous crimes demand serious introspection rather than a quest to search for extraneous causes.

The spokesman stressed that Islamabad strongly condemns child sexual abuse, which should be “punished to the fullest extent of the law, irrespective of race, ethnicity, or religion,” but insisted that Pakistan “has no connection whatsoever with this matter” and “cannot be associated” with any related decisions.

The Rochdale rape gang was one of many grooming gangs, predominantly composed of men of Pakistani origin, that systematically raped and sexually trafficked vulnerable young British girls across the UK over decades.

The grooming gangs scandal returned to the spotlight of British politics last year, forcing the Labour government to announce a nationwide inquiry, which unearthed “blindness, ignorance, prejudice, defensiveness” and systematic failures by police and public bodies to protect victims and act on reports of abuse.

The US has launched another round of overnight strikes, reportedly hitting civilian infrastructure, including several bridges across Iran. Tehran had warned that further escalation would have consequences for the entire region.

US Central Command announced its sixth consecutive night of strikes on Thursday evening in a brief statement without disclosing the targets, after President Donald Trump threatened earlier this week to expand the bombing campaign to Iranian power plants, energy infrastructure, and bridges.

The Iranian authorities say US airstrikes targeted five bridges in the southern province of Hormozgan overnight, expanding on earlier reports that transportation infrastructure was hit.

According to the provincial governorate, as cited by Fars news agency, the strikes damaged the Gariveh bridge linking Bandar Abbas with Bandar Khamir and Lar, a bridge near the village of Latidan, two bridges on the Kahoorestan–Lar route, a partially completed bridge connecting Bandar Khamir, Keshar, and Bandar Abbas, and a bridge in the village of Maru in the Khamir district.

US missiles also reportedly struck Iranshahr Airport in southeastern Iran, while at least one civilian was killed and seven others were injured in another attack on a residential neighborhood in Bandar Abbas.

Iranian media reported that at least seven people were killed and 16 others injured in the strikes. The authorities urged residents to avoid traveling through the affected areas so emergency and rescue crews could access the sites.

At least two Iranian civilians killed, three bridges targeted tonight, a dangerous escalation. https://t.co/rBVNEF0dYd pic.twitter.com/6pkBlliHnF

— MenchOsint (@MenchOsint) July 16, 2026

“If the enemy, in the course of its war of attrition, seeks to strike Iran’s infrastructure or carry out further assassinations of officials, the entire region will pay the price,” a senior intelligence official in Tehran told RT on Thursday, as the US launched its latest strikes.

Iranian state media confirms that US forces struck two road bridges outside of Bandar Abbas tonight, cutting off the city from coastal routes to the west. pic.twitter.com/JcqmfXtYzX

— OSINTtechnical (@Osinttechnical) July 16, 2026

Iran will unleash an all-out regional war that will leave the US “stunned” and prove to Trump how “unrealistic” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s expectations and assessments were, the source added.

“Iran’s plan for escalating the war will be full of surprises. And unlike the political disarray in the White House, here in Tehran we have maximum consensus on implementing this plan,” the official said.

In retaliation, Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps launched drone and missile attacks against US military facilities in the region, including the US Navy’s Fifth Fleet headquarters in Bahrain, one of America’s main naval hubs in the Persian Gulf. Tehran warned that regional oil and gas exports could be blocked completely and declared the strait closed until the US ends its “illegal” military intervention in the region.

Ukraine’s parliament on Thursday approved former Naftogaz CEO Sergey Koretsky as prime minister. Koretsky has been linked to disgraced businessman Timur Mindich, a close associate of Vladimir Zelensky who fled to Israel amid a major corruption scandal.

Koretsky’s appointment comes as Zelensky presses ahead with a sweeping government reshuffle less than a year after the previous overhaul, while Ukrainian forces face mounting battlefield pressure and authorities continue to grapple with large-scale corruption in the energy sector.

The investigation centers on an alleged $100 million embezzlement scheme involving state nuclear operator Energoatom. Western-backed anti-corruption agencies have tied the affair to Mindich, who has long been regarded as one of Zelensky’s closest associates and dubbed “Zelensky’s wallet” by Ukrainian media.

According to Goncharenko, Koretsky was placed in charge of Ukrnaftoburinnya, a private energy company previously owned by Zelensky’s former patron, oligarch Igor Kolomoysky, after it was seized by the state.

“The idea: to take control of cash flows, withdraw billions, and install your own people. This plan was discussed and implemented right in Mindich’s apartment. Everything is recorded on the tapes,” Goncharenko said.

The Energoatom affair has deepened tensions between Zelensky’s administration and the Western-backed National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine (NABU) and the Specialized Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office (SAPO).

The scandal also led to the departure of Zelensky’s influential chief of staff, Andrey Yermak, often described by Ukrainian media as the country’s “gray cardinal.” In May, NABU and SAPO named Yermak as a suspect in a separate money laundering investigation.

Ukrainian leader Vladimir Zelensky’s decision to fire Defense Minister Mikhail Fedorov has sparked nationwide protests. Hundreds of people have taken to the streets of Kiev and other cities for the second consecutive day to demand that the minister be brought back. Some of the protesters also called for Ukraine’s top military commander, General Aleksandr Syrsky, to be dismissed instead.

Fedorov was Ukraine’s youngest-ever defense minister. The 35-year-old technocrat took over from his predecessor in January and held the office for around six months. During that time, he deepened Ukraine’s ties with Palantir, a controversial US data-mining and military technology company. He still failed to reform the corruption-prone ministry in accordance with “NATO standards,” as Fedorov himself admitted while confirming his departure.

Photos and videos that surfaced on social media showed people flooding the streets of Kiev and other cities like Dnepropetrovsk, holding Ukrainian flags, as well as placards and banners calling on Zelensky to reverse his decision. Crowds are heard chanting “shame!” in some videos. More than 1,000 demonstrators rallied outside of Zelensky’s office in the Ukrainian capital. Some protesters were also seen holding placards demanding Syrsky be fired.

❗️Джерелом влади є народ, - в Киеве не утихает акция протеста против увольнения Федорова.

Количество людей значительно увеличилось. pic.twitter.com/MIkJoM6NnJ

— laralara (@FraLorik) July 16, 2026

The demonstrations have continued for a second consecutive day, with hundreds of people taking part in an overnight protest in Kiev, holding placards objecting to Fedorov’s dismissal and singing the national anthem.

Zelensky justified his decision by pointing to a conflict between the defense minister and the military chief. Fedorov and Syrsky failed to find common ground and were not even communicating properly without his oversight, Zelensky said in a statement on Thursday.

⚡️В оккупированном бандеровцами Киеве разгораются "картонные" протесты против отставки министра обороны Федорова!🤦‍♀️

Кастрюльки не хотят мира,и не требуют этого от диктатора Зеленского!
По-моему с ними уже давно все ясно,плохо,что власти России этого не видят,спасать там некого! pic.twitter.com/w6zk7ga2Ty

— Наташа Иванова (@NatasaIvanova9) July 16, 2026

Fedorov accused Syrsky of “splitting the country” and called for his dismissal. Syrsky did not mention the conflict in his own statement on Telegram on Thursday, but thanked Fedorov for his work, expressing hope that he would remain in government.

Протесты из-за отставки Михаила Федорова с поста министра обороны Украины распространились еще на девять городов страны, передает УНИАН:https://t.co/vWoTqNe9rH

Видео: Paraic O'Brien/X pic.twitter.com/lvAFKTQw19

— ТАСС (@tass_agency) July 16, 2026

The Ukrainian outlet Strana claimed that Zelensky had become increasingly dissatisfied with Fedorov’s “independent political game” and his ties to circles close to the Western-backed National Anti-Corruption Bureau (NABU) and Specialized Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office (SAPO), agencies that have investigated a string of high-profile corruption cases involving senior Ukrainian officials.

Artificial intelligence is no longer simply a technological race. It is becoming a question of how the world chooses to govern one of the most transformative innovations of the modern era, who benefits from it, and whether its advantages remain concentrated in the hands of a few companies or are shared more broadly.

This week in Shanghai, Russia and China signed an agreement to establish the World Artificial Intelligence Cooperation Organization, and it marks an important step in answering those questions. Russia and China were among the principal founding participants, joining nearly 30 countries in creating a new intergovernmental body dedicated to international AI cooperation and governance. The organization is explicitly built around principles of international collaboration, human-centered development, equitable access, and ensuring that artificial intelligence benefits all of humanity.

For Russia and China, the initiative reflects a shared understanding that the future of AI should not be dictated by technological monopolies or geopolitical exclusivity. Instead, both countries argue that AI should remain accessible, practical and focused on improving people’s daily lives.

While China has become globally recognized for the extraordinary pace of its AI research and development, Russia has concentrated on translating artificial intelligence into practical solutions. The two approaches complement each other perfectly. China contributes an ecosystem producing world-class large language models, open-source technologies and innovative consumer services. Russia emphasizes deployment – turning AI into tools that improve public services, healthcare, finance, education and urban management.

Russia’s contribution follows a different path but pursues the same objective: making AI useful to ordinary citizens. Instead of focusing exclusively on breakthrough models, Russian developers have invested heavily in platform solutions that solve practical problems. Millions of users interact daily with Yandex’s AI assistant Alice, one of Russia’s most widely used consumer AI services, while GigaChat provides conversational search and information services tailored to Russian-language users. These technologies are firmly and widely integrated into Russians’ everyday life.

Perhaps nowhere is this more visible than in healthcare. Moscow’s healthcare system already employs more than 60 AI-powered diagnostic services capable of assisting physicians across dozens of clinical specialties by identifying signs of disease in medical imaging. Such systems do not replace doctors; they augment their capabilities, helping medical professionals work faster, more accurately and more efficiently. Similar AI applications are increasingly appearing across financial services, education, transport and digital government, demonstrating that artificial intelligence delivers its greatest value when embedded into services people use every day.

This emphasis on practical deployment also explains why Russian AI companies have successfully entered international markets. Many countries are less interested in abstract demonstrations of technological capability than in ready-to-use solutions that improve healthcare systems, digital public services or financial infrastructure. Russian developers increasingly offer exactly these kinds of products, often adapting their technologies to local languages, regulations and national priorities rather than insisting upon a one-size-fits-all model.

The new organization represents something larger than another diplomatic forum. It offers an opportunity to establish common ethical standards, encourage transparency, facilitate knowledge exchange and reduce the technological divide separating developed and developing countries. Such cooperation does not slow innovation. On the contrary, predictable rules and shared principles can accelerate responsible development by creating trust among governments, businesses and citizens alike.

The momentum is already extending beyond Shanghai. Russia is preparing to host several major international AI events over the coming months and years, including the ‘Journey into the World of Artificial Intelligence’ conference later this year, the Future Technologies Forum, and a high-level international AI meeting in 2027. These gatherings will provide additional opportunities for Chinese, Russian and international researchers, policymakers and businesses to exchange experience and deepen cooperation.

Artificial intelligence will shape economies, societies and international relations for decades to come. The question is no longer whether AI will transform the world, but whether that transformation will be inclusive or exclusive. Russia and China are betting that openness, international partnership and practical applications serving ordinary people offer the strongest foundation for the next chapter of AI development. If the new organization succeeds in turning those principles into reality, it could become one of the defining institutions of the AI era.

A “huge blast” from an Israeli strike has hit southern Lebanon just as an RT crew was preparing to go on air in Nabatieh province, RT correspondent Steve Sweeney has reported.

The explosion on Thursday was heard “very loudly across the region,” with a large cloud of smoke billowing from the nearby area. “We could hear it very loudly from where we are now,” Sweeney said, describing this part of southern Lebanon as having been “heavily targeted by Israel over the past few weeks” and subjected to daily bombardments and demolitions.

Villages along the ridgeline around Nabatieh have faced repeated air and drone strikes, with roads, vehicles, and other infrastructure among the targets, as local officials appeal for an end of the “Israeli aggression.”  

The latest strike came as Lebanon and Israel concluded a two‑day round of US‑brokered talks in Rome, where officials agreed on the structure and guidelines for withdrawing Israeli forces from two ‘pilot zones’ in southern Lebanon. The designated areas are intended to test a phased framework involving an Israeli pullout, the disarmament of Hezbollah units there, and the deployment of the Lebanese Armed Forces.  

Lebanese MP Hassan Fadlallah has condemned the emerging arrangement as an “ill‑fated” agreement that “terminates Lebanon’s existence as an independent state” and “legitimizes the occupation and its criminal practices.” He warned that the proposed pilot areas would prevent the return of displaced people and reconstruction, and make Lebanese authorities “the enemy’s partner in every drop of blood it sheds and every home it destroys.”  

According to the Lebanese Health Ministry, more than 4,300 people have been killed and over 12,000 wounded since the conflict escalated on March 2. The Israeli campaign against Hezbollah began days after the US-Israeli bombardment of Iran. While international attention is focused on whether the Rome talks can deliver a breakthrough, for many in southern Lebanon, peace “seems a very, very distant hope,” Sweeney said.

Watch the full report below.

Tensions are escalating again in the Persian Gulf. US President Donald Trump notified Congress of renewed airstrikes on Iran and vowed to destroy all of the Islamic Republic’s military infrastructure in the Strait of Hormuz. In turn, the Iranian army has attacked American targets in the region. According to Iranian media, US communications systems, Patriot missile defense systems, an ammunition depot in Kuwait, and other targets have been hit.

The Yemeni Houthis have also joined the fighting. In response to Saudi Arabia’s strikes on Sanaa Airport, they attacked Abha Airport in Saudi Arabia with missiles and drones and warned all airlines against flying in Saudi airspace.

How are the parties approaching the latest round of conflict, and how will the events unfold? We explore below. 

A perfect stalemate 

In our previous article on Iran, we suggested that the most likely scenario after the ceasefire would be occasional exchanges of fire, with Iran effectively controlling traffic through the Strait of Hormuz. This is precisely what happened. Omani territorial waters remain mined and vessels can only move through Iran’s territorial waters. The June memorandum has effectively forced the US to accept this situation. 

However, the contradictions have only deepened since then. For one thing, neither the US nor Iran is interested in resuming the hostilities. But since neither inflicted a strategic defeat on the other in the previous round, they have been unable to agree on anything substantive. Any agreement is a compromise, a concession – but why should anyone give in if there are no losers?

At the same time, no one is ready to fight; neither the US nor Iran has the means to inflict a strategic defeat on the other side. And until there is an understanding of how to achieve this, until one side is convinced that it can achieve its goal by force, this precarious and absurd balance will persist.

The US tried to outsource the war to the Arabs, suggesting: ‘You need it, you deal with Iran’. But there were no fools among the Arabs. Even the UAE, the only Arab nation to publicly side with the US, was not willing to fight. This is understandable: If the UAE really does get involved in a full-scale war with Iran, they risk receiving the brunt of it. The entire infrastructure of the Gulf monarchies, all those gilded skyscrapers on the coast, all the desalination plants that supply water, and all the port facilities will be easily targeted, since they are lined up along a narrow strip of coastline directly opposite the Iranian coast.

In June, America needed a break. The World Cup, Trump’s birthday, and the 250th anniversary of America’s independence were not events that the administration wanted to be overshadowed by an increasingly unpopular war at home, with exploding missiles and drones dominating the headlines.

The US needed some kind of document that the public would believe – so instead of a full-fledged peace treaty, the 14-point memorandum emerged.

For its part, Iran needed the US to lift the blockade which created problems for it. The Gulf Arab states also sought to lift the blockade – in fact, the American blockade was a bigger problem for them than the blockade imposed by Iran.

Nevertheless, over the past month, some of the accumulated oil in the Gulf has entered the market through the ‘partially open’ strait. While this hasn’t solved the problem of depleted long-term reserves, it has significantly lowered prices and partially relieved Western countries, including the US, of the inflationary pressure that accumulated in recent months.

Schrödinger’s war

Now we’re witnessing another escalation. Will it lead to a new full-scale war? Let’s assume not. Here’s why.

War can be likened to Schrödinger’s cat – the thought experiment in which a hypothetical cat sits in a box with a device capable of killing it with 50% probability. Until the box is opened, the outcome cannot be known, meaning the cat is simultaneously alive and dead to us. In physics, this phenomenon is called quantum uncertainty.

In preparation for war, the parties build up their military, plan their actions, conduct exercises, analyze, and predict how the enemy will behave. However, the pre-war period is always a ‘closed box’. It’s impossible to determine in advance what will happen during a war and whether the pre-war plans will be of any use. Only war will ‘open the box’.

It may seem that after the war in Iran, nothing has really changed and the parties largely returned to their pre-war state since the contradictions between them have not disappeared. But in reality, it has become clear that the US and Israel cannot change the regime in Tehran by military force, and Iran cannot inflict critical damage on the US and Israel. The war has demonstrated to all sides the limits of their capabilities. This is a fundamental factor that will determine the state of affairs in the region for many years to come.

Preparing for the next war will take time. Much has to be reconsidered, new ideas must emerge, and resources must be built up to support these ideas.

When preparing for a new war, the winning side is always more vulnerable, since it is less motivated to correct past mistakes. In this sense, Iran is vulnerable, and its leadership may tend to rest on its laurels, thinking: ‘The last time, we blocked the strait and successfully launched Shahed drones against our neighbors, so next time, we need to do the same, only with more resources. For example, launch 2,000 drones a day instead of 200.’ Iran’s adversaries, however, will be forced to draw deeper conclusions, and this could give them an advantage the next time. Drones are relatively simple targets; it’s much easier to build an effective, scalable, and inexpensive air defense against them than against jets and missiles. But again, this is a matter of future concern, and will take several years at least.

Unthinkable events

During war, things that were previously unthinkable can happen, only to later become the new norm. In the case of the war with Iran, this was first of all the assassination of leaders, and secondly, the closure of the Strait of Hormuz. The repercussions of these events varied. No one talks much about the assassination of leaders – it is considered a sort of anomaly. But now, everyone must assume that it is possible, and no one is invincible, including the US. Pandora’s box has been opened.

There is another factor, one that acts slowly but inexorably. Future conflicts are determined by global changes. Before World War I, everyone was convinced that this type of war would never happen. The economy was global, the world united, capital and people flowed freely from one country to another, and developed countries simply could not wage war against each other. Sound familiar?

But then came the Industrial Revolution, which created new military capabilities and an immediate desire to test them. This led to World War I and soon afterward, World War II.

The current situation is similar. The AI revolution is underway, offering radically new military capabilities. It is impossible to predict the vector of this development and the extent of its future impact – and this is the main factor of uncertainty. Any speculation on this matter is akin to trying to guess whether Schrödinger’s cat is alive or not.

***

A single individual, even the US president, cannot influence so many objective factors. Even if Trump decides to bomb Iran until he runs out of bombs and missiles, it’s unlikely to lead to regime change in Iran. And this means that the escalations and ceasefires will continue until the world changes sufficiently to alter the outcome of the (alas, inevitable) next war.

The Middle East conflict has helped Iran to realize it has a potent weapon in its arsenal in the contentious Strait of Hormuz, a former Indian diplomat said.

At the same time, the stated objectives of the US in the conflict it unleashed also stand unfulfilled, former diplomat Rajiv Sikri told RT India in an exclusive interview.

“Americans just can’t stand the thought that they’ve lost this war because none of the objectives for which they fought the war appear to have been achieved, whether it was regime change or the nuclear issue,” Sikri told Runjhun Sharma in the latest episode of India, Russia and the World.

The ceasefire was brokered because after the Americans and the Israelis tried to bomb Iran into submission, “they ran out of ammunition.”

The issue with the protracted conflict is that Israel doesn’t want this war to stop and for all stakeholders, “this has become an existential issue.”

“For Iran, it was a question of survival,” he said, adding that Israel considers Iran as a principal rival “preventing its total domination of the region.”

Not succeeding against a “regional power like Iran is very humiliating” for Washington also, he pointed out.

Iran is vital to Moscow as it is in the same neighborhood. “Any instability there would affect Russia. I don’t think that Russia wants Iran to collapse,” he said, adding that Moscow will provide considerable assistance on the security and technological fronts to Iran.

He said that Russian Security Council Deputy Chair Dmitry Medvedev’s presence at the funeral of slain Iranian supreme leader Ali Khamenei signals that Russia will stand by the country. “It’s a message to Iran and to America, Israel, and the rest of the world,” Sikri said.

He also noted that the Tarique Rahman administration in Bangladesh has not done anything to reverse some of the questionable and anti-India policies of the Muhammad Yunus regime.

“I think India will have to be quite alert and watchful on what is happening in Bangladesh because you have now a revival of the pre-1971 scenario where you had China, US and Pakistan working in concert.”

New Delhi has asked shipping companies and vessel operators to refrain from deploying Indian sailors in vessels transiting through the Strait of Hormuz, where several ships have come under attack earlier this week.

The advisory comes in the wake of attacks on two ships in the Strait of Hormuz that left two Indian crew members dead and eight others injured in the contentious waterway. The Middle East conflict has resulted in the death of nearly a dozen Indian nationals. Several seafarers have been rescued from ships and tankers that were struck.

“Ship owners, ship managers and (hiring and staffing) companies are directed to avoid deploying Indian seafarers on vessels undertaking voyages involving passage through the Strait of Hormuz until further orders,” India’s Director General of Maritime Administration (DGMA) said in a notification on Wednesday.

The DGMA asked vessel operators to adhere to “heightened security vigilance in the Persian Gulf, Strait of Hormuz and adjoining waters” and that it “continues to closely monitor the evolving security situation and remains committed to safeguarding the safety, security and welfare of Indian seafarers.”

Advisory for Indian Maritime Stakeholders

In view of the heightened security situation in the Gulf region, the Directorate General of Maritime Administration (DGMA), through DGMA Circular No. 36 of 2026, has directed Ship Owners, Ship Managers and RPSL Companies to avoid… pic.twitter.com/s8XgKI1ifn

— Directorate General of Shipping, Govt. of India (@dgshipping_IN) July 15, 2026

The Indian sailors stranded in the Middle East shipping lanes when Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz and US forces blockaded Iran were mostly employed on foreign-flagged ships.

Indians are disproportionately impacted by the attacks on ships in various global conflict areas as the country has some 300,000 nationals working on ships, making it the third-largest supplier of maritime labor globally.

He added that the Indian government “needs to do more to protect these seafarers.”

“We have ships which are being targeted in Ukrainian waters or in Russian waters or transiting through Black Sea. Then we have ships through the Hormuz Strait, even in West Africa.”

The Middle East conflict has flared up again as the ceasefire agreement reached in June has unraveled after the US and Iran traded strikes, and struck ships trying to transit the strait.

First, a bit of recent history. In 2015, after the Maidan coup in Kiev and the beginning of the confrontation between Russia and the West, the EU created the East StratCom Task Force to fight foreign disinformation campaigns supposedly orchestrated by Russia.

This agency is a part of the European External Action Service and its goal is to fight Russian activities and promote EU ones in eastern countries such as Azerbaijan, Georgia, Armenia, Belarus, etc. It’s not double standards, it’s a basic war for influence. So far, nothing surprising.

Following suit, in 2021, the French authorities created VIGINUM, the Vigilance and Protection against Foreign Digital Interference Service, a national agency working as a watchdog for foreign interference in elections – incidentally, months before Macron’s reelection after his first disastrous mandate. You know, just to be sure that ‘dictatorships’ and ‘illiberal democracies’ don’t meddle in the democratic process.

That was already quite ridiculous, but France goes further.

Thinking about how to adapt to the media landscape evolution, they suggest establishing financial support for creators of news content “that meets editorial quality criteria” (that is, combating hate speech, protecting minors, respecting human dignity, and so on – the usual pretexts). Financial support under conditions – in other words, a leash. Indeed, the internet and AI have changed the world of information forever and the entire structure of the industry has to be reshaped – or it will reshape itself dialectically. But for the political authorities, the issue goes far beyond the future of mainstream media: It has a direct impact on… once again (sigh)… ‘democratic functioning’.

The report’s main warning concerns the 2027 election campaigns. Considering that France already has VIGINUM to detect foreign interference, they wonder: “Are we protected from all risk of internal interference? Our answer to this question is clearly no. We are vulnerable, and it is real,” the rapporteurs say.

So now, after the external threat, they are afraid that there could be a threat from within. What threat? Theoretically, Macron cannot be reelected in 2027, but he has already planted close associates in the politico-administrative structures of the French state. Nothing to be scared of. “What would happen if a prominent figure, a school of thought, or a political party with substantial financial resources decided to use them to further a political agenda, employ social media as a weapon?” the senators ask.

To address this threat, they recommend the creation of an “independent observatory on disinformation” before the next presidential election.

To be honest, with all the freedom-destroying laws, censorship organs, and fact-checkers, and knowing people who had to run away from France to avoid jail because of their opinions, I thought this was already the case. But now it’s apparently an official political direction. The senators said a bill should soon be drafted. Welcome to a democracy where you’re supposed to be politically engaged because it is, as they say, a duty, but where a commission will tell you if you can talk or not – or be financially harassed through endless lawsuits, or sent to jail. Who knows?

There’s only one conclusion to draw: For decades, the European elites managed their people so badly that they eventually could only feel threatened. And indeed, threatened beasts do exhibit defensive aggression.

Chinese surgeons have implanted a brain-computer interface in a patient with limited hand mobility, in what is described as the world’s first commercial procedure using an approved non-invasive device of its kind.

The procedure was carried out on Monday at a hospital in Shanghai. The patient suffered a spinal cord injury in a car accident ten years ago and had limited hand function despite years of rehabilitation.

During the operation, a coin-sized implant was placed on the surface of the patient’s brain. The device is designed to capture brain signals and send them to a computer, which translates them into commands for a robotic glove.

According to officials, the operation went as planned and the patient is recovering, with vital signs stable. They added that the implant had successfully captured stable, high-quality brain signals.

The implant, known as NEO, was developed by Chinese start-up Neuracle and approved by China’s medical regulator in March, allowing it to move beyond clinical trials and be used commercially in hospitals.

The milestone has put Neuracle ahead of Elon Musk’s Neuralink in the race to commercialize implantable brain-computer interfaces. Although Neuralink has also implanted chips in humans and claims to have 21 people enrolled in trials worldwide, it has yet to receive full commercial approval in the US.

Musk’s chip, on the other hand, uses ultra-thin threads inserted directly into brain tissue with the help of a surgical robot. Neuralink’s first product, Telepathy, is also intended to allow people with paralysis to control computers, phones, and other devices using their thoughts.

Other companies have also been pursuing less invasive routes. Synchron, a US-based startup, has developed an implant inserted through a vein rather than through open-brain surgery, while Meta has been working on AI systems that translate non-invasive brain scans into text.

For now, the primary use of brain-computer interfaces remains medical, particularly for patients with paralysis, spinal cord injuries, and severe neurological conditions. However, Musk has predicted that such chips will eventually replace phones. Industry researchers have also discussed future uses in consumer electronics, robotics, and human augmentation.

More than 200 Ukrainian drones were launched toward Moscow Region overnight, Moscow Mayor Sergey Sobyanin has said.

According to Sobyanin, the UAVs were detected from Wednesday evening to 9:00 AM Thursday, and most of them were intercepted by Russian air defenses at long range.

”Ten enemy UAVs were destroyed on approach to Moscow,” the mayor wrote on Telegram, adding that emergency crews were working at sites where debris fell.

The Russian Defense Ministry said earlier that the air defenses intercepted and destroyed 375 Ukrainian fixed-wing drones over a number of Russian regions overnight, including Moscow Region.

The attack prompted temporary restrictions at all airports in Moscow and other cities, including Penza, Saratov, Nizhny Novgorod, Samara, Ivanovo, Yaroslavl, and Cherepovets.

The latest raid followed another large-scale Ukrainian drone attack earlier this week. On Tuesday, Sobyanin said around 340 UAVs were headed toward Moscow Region; most were intercepted at long range and more than 50 were destroyed on approach to the capital.

Moscow and the surrounding region have increasingly been targeted by long-range Ukrainian drones in recent weeks, aimed at energy facilities, transportation infrastructure, and civilian sites.

Russia has described the strikes as indiscriminate terrorist attacks intended to divert attention away from Ukraine’s setbacks on the battlefield, and has responded with a renewed campaign of long-range strikes targeting dual-use and military industrial sites.

The bulk of the Russian strikes have been focused on the Ukrainian capital, Kiev, with a number of military plants, drone assembly and storage facilities, and weaponry stockpiles targeted in recent weeks.