Top World News

President Donald Trump appeared to threaten Iranian peace negotiators with assassination Sunday in a “bonkers” phone call with Fox News’ Trey Yingst, the details of which Yingst revealed on air just moments later.Last week, Trump officially agreed to a tentative peace deal with Iran, giving the two parties 60 days to finalize a more permanent agreement to end hostilities. Vice President JD Vance arrived in Switzerland Sunday to meet with an Iranian delegation of negotiators led by Speaker Mahammad Bagher Ghalibaf and Foreign Minister Abbas Araghci.However, after Iranian military officials announced on Saturday that they would, again, close the Strait of Hormuz due to violations of the tentative peace deal, Trump suggested, Yingst said, that the Iranian negotiators may not “make it back” to their home country.“President Trump tells Fox News he spoke with Iranian officials overnight and said ‘you close it and you won’t have a country,’” Yingst said, recalling his phone call with Trump held moments earlier. “He went on to tell these officials, ‘you won’t even make it back to your f---ing country.’”Whether Trump’s remarks suggested he may order the Iranian negotiators assassinated before their return home remains unclear, though multiple Iranian negotiators have been assassinated throughout the duration of the U.S. war against Iran, such as Ali Larijani, the former speaker of the Iranian Parliament who was killed in March in an Israeli airstrike."We'll take over the rest of your country ... I'll blow the shit out of them" -- here is Trey Yingst's entire segment about the bonkers phone call he says he had with Trump this morning that apparently included threats to assassinate Iran's leadership, impose draconian US tolls… pic.twitter.com/RLi9bos14Q— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) June 21, 2026

JD Vance's path to the presidency may run through Tehran, and not in a way that helps him. That is the striking implication of a new analysis by Iran expert Karim Sadjadpour, who argues in The Atlantic that the vice president's political future now depends heavily on whether hardline Iranian officials decide to play along with Donald Trump's latest gamble.Sadjadpour, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, lays out how Trump handed Vance responsibility for an enormous and unlikely task: not merely striking a new nuclear deal, but engineering a wholesale transformation of US-Iran relations after a war that Sadjadpour says ended in humiliation for the president. The memorandum that paused the fighting, he writes, is so lopsided that it reads as if Tehran drafted it, with 13 of its 14 provisions amounting to boilerplate or favoring Iran outright.That is the project Vance has been told to deliver, and Trump has been remarkably candid about who absorbs the blame if it fails. "If it works out, I'm going to take the credit," the president said, according to the piece. "If it doesn't work out, I'm blaming J.D."The expert's sharpest observation is about where that leaves the vice president. Vance's prospects, Sadjadpour writes, "may rest as much on Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps officers as on Republican-primary voters." In other words, a man eyeing the 2028 nomination has tied his standing to the cooperation of the very military and clerical figures who built their careers on resistance to the United States.Vance is reportedly pinning hopes on Mohammad Baqer Qalibaf, a former IRGC general and current speaker of Iran's Parliament, with whom he spent more than 20 hours in Islamabad and supposedly developed a rapport. Sadjadpour is skeptical that private warmth means anything. He notes that Qalibaf's public appearances, where he mocks America, praises Hezbollah, threatens Israel, and celebrates partnership with China, are a far more reliable guide to Tehran's intentions than any backroom assurances.The broader picture Sadjadpour paints is of an Iranian regime that thrives on isolation and treats sabotaging American presidents as a point of pride. He traces that pattern back to the 1979 revolution and the hostage crisis that helped sink Jimmy Carter's reelection. This time, he suggests, Tehran stands to claim an unusually rich prize. The Islamic Republic, he writes, may get "a two-for-one": the presidency of Donald Trump, and the presidential ambitions of JD Vance.If Sadjadpour is right, Vance has accepted a mission whose success is largely outside his control, with a boss already rehearsing the line that will pin any failure on him. The clerics and generals in Tehran, not the voters in Iowa, may end up deciding how that story turns out.

Authoritarianism scholar Ruth Ben-Ghiat is predicting that President Donald Trump's praise for China's Xi Jinping will end the same way his Iran standoff did: with the president backing down to a strongman he admires.Her forecast came in response to an Axios clip in which Trump gushed about the Chinese leader on "The Axios Show." Asked about Xi, Trump described him in the language of physical admiration he often reserves for fellow autocrats, calling him tall, "6-foot-2," and praising his "great stature," "great confidence," and intelligence. For Ben-Ghiat, a historian of fascism and author who has spent years studying how leaders flatter and accommodate dictators, the fawning was a tell rather than a throwaway line."He will cave to Xi in the end just as he capitulated to Iran," Ben-Ghiat wrote, situating the comment within what she sees as a consistent pattern across Trump's foreign policy. She tied the prediction to a larger argument about whose interests the president ultimately serves, describing Iran as "an ally of China" and noting that Trump "has consistently acted to help Russia," which she also called a Chinese ally. Her conclusion was blunt: in her telling, Trump "is in office to make the strongmen leaders he admires do well."The framing reflects the through-line of Ben-Ghiat's broader work, which holds that authoritarian-minded leaders are drawn to one another and that public displays of admiration often precede real concessions. Her reference to Iran points to the recent memorandum of understanding that ended Trump's war, a deal numerous analysts described as lopsided in Tehran's favor. By her logic, the same dynamic of tough talk giving way to accommodation is poised to repeat itself with Beijing.Ben-Ghiat's argument lands at a moment when Trump's critics are increasingly scrutinizing the gap between his strongman rhetoric and his actual outcomes. Her point is that the admiring description of Xi's height and confidence is not idle praise but a window into how the president approaches the world's most powerful authoritarians, and that the flattery, in her view, tends to be a preview of where the policy is heading.

Rob Jetten acknowledges grief and pain of Moluccan families as crowdfunded monument unveiled in RotterdamThe Dutch prime minister, Rob Jetten, has formally apologised for the “heartless” mistreatment of thousands of Moluccan soldiers who fought for the Dutch colonial army during Indonesia’s struggle for independence.About 12,500 people – men who had served in the Royal Dutch East Indies and their families – came from a group of Indonesian islands to the Netherlands in 1951, many having been given no choice. They thought it would be a temporary evacuation after Indonesia had won independence. Continue reading...

Vice President JD Vance will have to stay home instead of traveling to Switzerland to finalize the memorandum of understanding the Trump administration struck with the Iranian regime last weekend, according to a White House spokesperson.On Sunday, Trump announced his administration had struck a deal with the regime that would immediately reopen the Strait of Hormuz and provide a pathway to ending the conflict. The final agreement was initially scheduled to be signed on Friday in Switzerland. CNN journalist Kristen Holmes reported on Thursday that a White House spokesperson told her, "The Vice President is not departing tonight." The spokesperson added that "as the Vice President said at his press conference, the plans for the upcoming technical talks have not been finalized," referring to the deal to end the Iran war."The U.S. delegation has been prepared to depart at the first available opportunity," the White House spokesperson told Holmes. "But the logistics of these negotiations have never been simple or predictable."

President Donald Trump has already revealed the next big lie that he plans to sell to Americans, a foreign policy analyst said.Robert Kagan, a contributing writer for The Atlantic and a foreign policy analyst, said during an appearance on CNN that Trump will try to frame his deal to end the Iran war as "regime change" and "unconditional surrender."He added that Trump will deny that the money going to Iran is "reparations" for the war."He's all about the big lie," Kagan said. "And this is going to be his big lie. I just don't think that even he, who is one of the great con artists of all time, can sell the American people on this being anything other than an American surrender."Kagan also pointed out, "The one thing we're confident is happening is that Iran is going to get billions of dollars, tens of billions, and probably hundreds of billions of dollars in return for nothing," and described it as "an easy tell" that gives away Trump's lie."Now, that's called reparations, and if you look at history, reparations are paid by the loser to the winner," Kagan explained. "In World War I, Germany paid reparations to Britain and France. If Germany had won the war, Britain and France would have paid the reparations, so that's how you know what happened in this war."In other words, "Trump essentially paid the Iranians to give him a fig leaf that would allow him to come home and tell the Americans that everything is fine," Kagan summed up.

Number of people infected now tops 1,000 though health officials say the global risk remains lowSign up for the Breaking News US newsletter email The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) will tap $107m in emergency funding for Ebola outbreak response in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) and Uganda, officials said on Thursday.The continued Ebola outbreak in the DRC comes as Canada, Mexico and the US jointly host the Fifa World Cup, attracting visitors from around the world. The officials said the outbreak, now the third largest on record, required “strong immediate support”, but that the global risk remained low. Continue reading...

Directive aimed at government workers, but reports of wider implementation spark warnings of future Afghanistan-wide prohibitionThe Taliban have ordered a sweeping ban on the use of smartphones by government officials – in what some analysts say could foreshadow broader, population-level restrictions.In a directive issued by the Taliban’s military courts and reviewed by the Guardian, the ban was to take effect this week and prohibits “high rank, low rank, general mujahideen, or service staff” from using mobile phones. Continue reading...