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The U.S. military announced Tuesday it had launched a series of strikes on Iran following attacks on commercial ships in the Strait of Hormuz.U.S. Central Command said Iran had violated the terms of the current ceasefire and announced the following in a post on X."U.S. Central Command forces have begun launching a series of powerful strikes against Iran to impose heavy costs for targeting and attacking commercial shipping crewed by innocent civilians in an international waterway. The U.S. strikes are in response to Iranian attacks on three commercial vessels that were transiting the Strait of Hormuz. Iran’s demonstrated aggression was unwarranted, dangerous, and a clear violation of the ceasefire."The counterattack was underway while President Donald Trump was at the NATO summit in Ankara, Turkey, CNN reported.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu became combative on CNN Tuesday when host Dana Bash put him on the spot about the “suffering" in Gaza.Towards the end of the nearly 30-minute interview, the CNN host admonished him by saying there were two sides in the conflict that have put Israel in the spotlight of becoming a pariah nation.“Mr. Prime Minister, I think all things can be true, all things can be true,” she pointed out before noting, “But are you saying that Israel and you personally bear no responsibility?”“Let's just talk about Gaza for one minute,” she proposed. “Currently, Hamas is continuing to refuse to disarm. The IDF is also carrying out nearly daily airstrikes in Gaza. You've taken over more territory there, and the Palestinian people are continuing to suffer; still displaced and dealing with intense heat, limited care, limited resources. Will you do more to help those suffering in Gaza? And will you concede that the images that people are seeing on their phones as part of social media is very much contributing to the, um, the turnaround and the diminishment of support of Israel and of you?”“Yeah. Look, I think that what you're raising is how do you fight a war in the digital age when, uh, you know, when you have terrorists that embed themselves in civilian populations in schools and civilian neighborhoods and apartment blocks in mosques and so on, how do you fight them?” he shot back. "They send rockets to indiscriminately kill our people, while they hide behind their own,“ he argued while talking over her. “They're targeting our civilians while hiding behind their own civilians. So what are you going to do? What do you think would happen if this happened to New York City from New Jersey? You think if they rocketed you with the, you know, with this firepower and murdered about 10,000 of your people, murdered, raped, maimed, disemboweled 10,000 Americans? What do you think the response of the United States to you about it? Would it be a lot stronger than ours?” - YouTube youtu.be

While President Donald Trump promised Iranian protesters "help is on the way," his administration secretly handed their immigration files to the government they had fled, a new lawsuit charges.The Iranian American Legal Defense Fund and Public Citizen filed the suit Tuesday in federal court in Washington against Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin, acting Immigration and Customs Enforcement director David Venturella, and their agencies.The lawsuit asks the court to stop the practice and notify every Iranian refugee whose files were shared without consent."The law couldn't be more clear that information in asylum applications is protected," said Michael Kirkpatrick, a Public Citizen attorney on the case. He called it "potentially a matter of life and death."The lawsuit alleges that starting in March 2025, ICE held monthly secret meetings with representatives of the Iranian government — conducted through Pakistan's embassy, since the U.S. has no formal diplomatic relations with Tehran — and handed over immigration files, asylum applications, and personal records of detained Iranians.According to the lawsuit, ICE officials also brought Iranian government representatives directly into detention facilities to meet with detainees face to face.The detainees had shared sensitive details — their identities, families, political beliefs, and religious affiliations — in confidence, trusting they would never reach Tehran."The Iranian Government engages in unlawful killings, forced disappearances, torture, arbitrary detention, and persecution of political dissidents, religious minorities, and LGBTQ individuals," the State Department found in its own human rights report, the lawsuit notes.The administration deported more than 100 Iranians on at least three flights, the Washington Post reported, with some called in for interrogation by the intelligence wing of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps upon arrival.The lawsuit says the U.S. government "materially increased the likelihood that Iranian asylum seekers will be detained, interrogated, tortured, or killed upon return.""This policy has also exposed the Iranian asylum seekers' family members and acquaintances to retaliation in the form of arrest, interrogation, torture, and death," it adds.Just two weeks before the last deportation flight, Trump posted on Truth Social urging Iranians to "keep protesting — take over your institutions… They will pay a big price," telling them "help is on its way.""The new policy has continued notwithstanding the June 2025 military strikes by the United States, the massacre of tens of thousands of Iranian protestors by the Iranian Government in January 2026, and the war launched by the United States on February 28, 2026," the lawsuit states.

Researchers testing a cheap, homegrown oil in Uganda found what cats knew all along – it worked as well as the artificial chemical used globally A homegrown catnip lotion has proven “just as effective as Deet” as a mosquito repellant in trials carried out in Uganda.Catnip, or Nepeta cataria, is a common herb from the mint family. The chemical in the plant that causes feline euphoria – nepetalactone – also has insect-repelling properties but this has not previously been commercialised. Continue reading...

Victims with cuts and gunshot injuries rushed to hospital after fighting between prisoners from two drug gangsClashes at a Sri Lankan jail have killed 26 people, including seven guards, and wounded more than 100 in the country’s deadliest prison riot in years, officials said.Victims with cuts and gunshot injuries were rushed to Negombo hospital, north of the capital Colombo after overnight fighting between prisoners from two drug gangs, police said on Monday. Continue reading...

Secretary of State Marco Rubio threatened to escalate the controversy over President Donald Trump's intervention in a U.S, soccer player's suspension by using an upcoming NATO summit to focus on it.While meeting with Chilean Foreign Minister Francisco Perez Mackenna on Monday, Rubio was asked about Belgium's appeal of FIFA's decision to reverse U.S. player Folarin Balogun's suspension ahead of the World Cup match with Belgium."It was a bad decision," Rubio said of the suspension. "I think it was the right decision to reverse it.""And if you're Belgium, why would you want to play a game and win a match, and then you win this match, and then everyone will argue you didn't really win it because their best player, leading scorer, was not on the pitch during that — during the match?" he continued. "You want the other side to be at its best so that your victory is not tainted in that way."The U.S. Secretary of State went on to claim that Belgium might be "trying to get an international incident.""I don't know; maybe we'll bring it up at NATO tomorrow when we're there with the Belgians and everybody else," he warned. "But I just hope the match will go on, everyone will be at full strength, and the winner will be the winner."

Impoverished island was already struggling to keep the lights on before the US imposed a blockade in JanuaryCuba on Monday suffered its third nationwide power outage since the start of the year, the state electricity company said.The impoverished island was already struggling to keep the lights on before the US president, Donald Trump, imposed an oil blockade in January, which has depleted the already dwindling supply of fuel for Cuba’s power plants. Continue reading...

A federal judge blocked part of President Donald Trump's immigration crackdown, citing the president's own "preference" for white immigrants.U.S. District Judge Algenon L. Marbley of the Southern District of Ohio issued the ruling Monday, blocking three U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services policies that had frozen green card and work permit applications for people from seven countries."This general hostility to immigration contrasts with an apparent interest in and preference for the migration of white people," Marbley wrote. "Aside from a stated desire for more Scandinavian immigration, President Trump has sought to welcome white South Africans."From October 2025 through May 2026, the ruling notes, 6,665 of the 6,668 refugees admitted to the U.S. were from South Africa.At a December 2025 rally in Pennsylvania, Trump asked: "Why can't we have some people from Norway, Sweden, just a few?... Send us some nice people.""In sum, both the President and the Vice President have publicly and repeatedly expressed outright hostility toward immigrants, both before and after the 2024 presidential election," the judge wrote, finding the pattern impossible to ignore."Their ire appears focused on immigrants from countries in the Caribbean, South America, Africa, and Asia," he added.Trump has claimed that white South African farmers face a "genocide" and made their plight a priority. "Farmers are being killed," he told PBS in May 2025. "They happen to be white."The administration has since proposed raising the U.S. refugee cap to 17,500 — with the additional 10,000 slots reserved exclusively for white Afrikaners."We are processing resettlement cases for white Afrikaners at a record pace," Sharif Aly, president of the International Refugee Assistance Project, told Democracy Now!. "This program has never been a fast program, and it's being expedited for just this one population."Marbley also cited Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan's dissent in a recent immigration case, calling Trump's statements about certain countries "repellent and racially inflected" — including his claim that immigrants from those nations are "poisoning the blood" of the United States.The ruling is the 11th of its kind. At the hearing, the government told the judge it expected to lose — and spent its argument focused only on how narrow the remedy should be.