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Jun 23, 2026 - World

France recorded its hottest day ever on Tuesday amid an exceptional early heat wave across Europe, the national weather agency said.

Jun 23, 2026 - World

President Donald Trump faced a wave of scrutiny for agreeing to lift sanctions on Iran and unfreeze Iranian funds as part of the tentative peace deal between Washington and Tehran, but on Tuesday, the president announced a new detail regarding the agreement, one that could risk jeopardizing peace talks going forward.“The Money and/or Sanctions that the U.S. Treasury is releasing goes into escrow, controlled by the U.S.A., and will be used for the purchase of food and medical supplies, exclusively from the United States, including Corn, Wheat, and Soybeans from our great American Farmers,” Trump wrote on his social media platform Truth Social. “These are things that are desperately needed by Iran. This is a humanitarian crisis, and I feel it is necessary to help, NOW, before it is too late. Talks are going well!”There is no mention in the 14-point memorandum of understanding of unfrozen Iranian funds or sanction relief being controlled by the United States. On the contrary, point 11 states that the United States would “make fully available for use the frozen or restricted funds and assets of the Islamic Republic of Iran upon the implementation of this MOU.”

Jun 23, 2026 - World

President Donald Trump's war on Iran satisfied no one, but two foreign policy experts say its failure may provide one enduring silver lining.Hawks who cheered the initial strikes are furious he stopped short of toppling the regime, doves are furious he started a war at all and, by nearly every measure, the campaign was a failure, wrote former Iran envoy Robert Malley and historian Stephen Wertheim in a new op-ed for the New York Times."Donald Trump has done the impossible once more," Malley and Wertheim wrote. "He went where his predecessors never dared, joining with Israel in a bid to overthrow or incapacitate the regime in Tehran. Having achieved neither, he appears to have accepted worse terms than he could have obtained through diplomacy. His war was a political albatross as well, garnering, at the start, less support from the public than any other major conflict in modern U.S. history.""Everyone is worse off and no one is happy: a fitting, extraordinary finish to a Trumpian war," they added.Missile defenses and aircraft damaged more than 20 U.S. bases, the Strait of Hormuz remains under Tehran's control and they have a nuclear program that, despite the bombing, can still only be resolved through negotiation. Iran, if anything, emerged emboldened, and yet Malley and Wertheim argued those failures might be the most useful thing to come out of the war."Those opposed to yesterday’s Iran war have a stake in preventing tomorrow’s, to break the entanglement of the United States in conflicts it regrets more quickly and more intensely the more they keep happening," the duo wrote. "This mission is hardly impossible. Military defeat — which is what the United States just suffered — has repeatedly compelled Americans to re-evaluate the severity of a threat they could not eliminate."The experience was painful enough that it may be hard to repeat, they argued. Just as Vietnam taught Americans that the "dominoes" wouldn't fall and Afghanistan taught them to separate the Taliban from Al Qaeda, a humiliating defeat — not persuasion or argument — has historically been what forces Washington to reconsider whether a threat was ever as dire as advertised.A clean, low-cost victory might have only emboldened the next intervention. It's precisely because this war went so badly — drained munitions needed elsewhere, alienated Gulf allies and fractured the U.S.-Israel relationship to the point of public rebuke — that hawks now have a weaker case for trying again.Trump, the analysis suggests, may end up as an accidental peacemaker, not because he sought restraint, but because he tested the limits of force against Iran and got burned. "Iran, by all rights, should not be one of America’s top problems," Malley and Wertheim concluded. "One day, one way or another, it will cease to be. The question is when, and at how terrible a price."

Jun 23, 2026 - World

The 76-year-old allegedly ordered he should have 12 wives to ‘repopulate’ the world. He and his wife deny the chargesGet our breaking news email, free app or daily news podcastThe leader of a cult and his wife allegedly groomed a young girl over a decade so she could bear 45 of his children in a post-apocalyptic world.William Kamm, also known as “Little Pebble”, was the leader of the Order of Saint Charbel, a religious cult run from a property on the New South Wales south coast. Continue reading...

Jun 23, 2026 - World

China's newest and most powerful aircraft carrier, the Fujian, has sailed through the Taiwan Strait, according to Taiwan's Defense Ministry