Iran Announces Closure Of Hormuz After US Attacks– www.ndtv.com News Source
EXCERPT:
Iran’s military command said Thursday it will target any ship transiting the Strait of Hormuz, after it struck two vessels attempting to pass through the strategic waterway, as talks to end the war faltered.
The United States launched a new wave of attacks against Iran on Wednesday, with President Donald Trump vowing to “hit them hard” after accusing Tehran’s negotiators of “playing us for suckers”.
The Khatam al-Anbiya command said Thursday, “any vessel traffic through the Strait of Hormuz will be targeted” adding that the strait is now “completely closed to all types of vessel”, according to the Tasnim news agency.
China has become the first country in the world to operate an underwater data center, or UDC, powered by wind. Located off the coast of Shanghai, the complex represents a significant advance in the country’s strategy to secure energy supplies in the face of the accelerated growth of artificial intelligence, reduce dependence on fossil fuels, and reduce the environmental impact of its technology infrastructure.
The initiative is the result of a collaboration between private company HiCloud Technology and state-owned China Communications Construction, which involved an investment of 1.6 billion yuan, equivalent to about $236 million.
With an initial capacity of 24 megawatts, the facility is submerged at a depth of 10 meters in the Lin-gang Special Zone, within the China Pilot Free Trade Zone in Shanghai. This location allows seawater to be used as a natural cooling system, reducing the proportion of energy used to cool the infrastructure to less than 10 percent.
Three Indian mariners aboard the Palau-flagged M/T Settebello were killed on Tuesday night when the United States Navy fired on the vessel for ignoring the U.S. blockade on Iran. As the Washington Examiner previously reported, the Navy fired precision strikes at the engine room of the Settebello to disable the vessel. The incident occurred as the U.S. conducted self-defense strikes against Iran for deploying a drone that took down a U.S. Army Apache helicopter on Monday.
Sarbananda Sonowal, India’s minister of ports, shipping, and waterways, announced the casualties in a social media post on X early Thursday morning.
“It is deeply unfortunate to learn of the tragic incident aboard the Palau-flagged MT Settebello,” said Sonowal. “Sadly, three Indian seafarers initially reported missing are now confirmed dead after bodies have been located and identified.”
It is deeply unfortunate to learn of the tragic incident aboard the Palau-flagged MT Settebello. Sadly, three Indian seafarers initially reported missing are now confirmed dead after bodies have been located and identified.
This is a profound loss to our maritime family. The…
— Sarbananda Sonowal (@sarbanandsonwal) June 11, 2026
US Central Command, the US military combat command responsible for Middle East operations, followed up by launching what its press release described as “self-defense strikes against Iran, June 9, at the Commander in Chief’s direction in response to yesterday’s downing of a US Army Apache helicopter.”
Belfast attack suspect was granted asylum based on controversial fast-track questionnaire– rmx.news News Source EXCERPT:
The Sudanese asylum seeker charged in connection with the attempted beheading in Belfast on Monday was granted refugee status in Britain through a fast-track Home Office process that avoided a full face-to-face interview.
The Daily Mail reported on Thursday that the 30-year-old suspect, identified as Hadi Alodid, was allowed to remain in the U.K. after completing a 10-page questionnaire under the Streamlined Asylum Process, a system introduced under the then-Conservative government to help clear tens of thousands of unresolved asylum cases.
Alodid’s case was reportedly handled under the scheme, which was set up as ministers sought to reduce a backlog of 92,000 claims. The process was overseen by then-home secretary Suella Braverman and then-immigration minister Robert Jenrick, both of whom have since joined Reform UK, the party topping national polling in Britain.
According to the tabloid newspaper, the fast-track programme was known inside parts of the Home Office as the “grant 0factory,” allowing applicants from countries with very high asylum grant rates to have their claims processed without the usual in-person interview.
It initially applied to selected nationalities and was later extended to Sudanese applicants in June 2023. Alodid had travelled from Dublin to Belfast by bus in February of that year and was granted a five-year refugee visa in September 2023.
The Streamlined Asylum Process also covered applicants from countries including Syria, Afghanistan, Eritrea, Libya, and Yemen, despite significant security concerns surrounding particular entrants from those countries.
Migration Watch UK, which campaigns for stricter border controls, warned at the time that the scheme was a “dangerous folly” and an “asylum amnesty in all but name.”
A Conservative source told the Daily Mail that the policy had been driven by then-Prime Minister Rishi Sunak despite internal resistance at the Home Office. “The Home Office at the time did not want to do the fast-track scheme, but Rishi forced it on them,” the source said.
The revelation that the suspect was offered an easy ride into Britain prompted an angry response from Restore Britain leader Rupert Lowe, who said Jenrick and Braverman had “serious questions to answer” over the system introduced while they were in government.
“This is traitorous,” he wrote on X, before calling for the asylum system to be abolished, mass deportations, and a referendum on the death penalty for offenders who carry out extreme knife attacks in Britain.
Alodid has now been charged with the attempted murder of Stephen Ogilvie, 44. The victim reportedly lost his left eye and suffered wounds to his neck and back.
Maitiu Mag Tighearnan, a 32-year-old father, has been praised after intervening in the attack with a hurling stick. Tighearnan said he had arrived at the scene by chance and acted to “protect a young lad.”
“This was late at night, and so we thought we better go and break it up,” he said. “He shouted to me that the man attacking the other had a knife and to get something to help. At this point, I thought someone was going to lose their life.”
“Instinct took over and I ran over and I smashed this guy over the head with a hurling stick,” he said. “Right on the flat side, about three times. As hard as I could.”
“I just hope the victim pulls through and manages to recover as best he can,” he added.
The Daily Mail also reported that Ogilvie had survived a horrific attack in Scotland 25 years earlier. In 2001, he was tortured and set on fire in a flat in Livingston by drug dealer David McLeave, who was later jailed for 14 years by the High Court in Edinburgh.
According to the report, Ogilvie had been given the drug GHB, burned with a cigarette, stripped, doused in aftershave, and set alight while unconscious. He fled back to Northern Ireland after the attack and later reported the ordeal to authorities.
Houses are being burned down in Belfast in response to yesterday’s attempted beheading of a man by a Sudanese migrant.
Videos are surfacing of several HMOs (Houses in Multiple Occupation — properties frequently contracted by the UK Home Office to accommodate asylum seekers)… pic.twitter.com/X7kD94nWX9
Monday’s attack sparked major unrest in Belfast, where homes and cars were set alight after hundreds of people took to the streets on both Tuesday and Wednesday night. Houses in Multiple Occupation (HMOs) — properties whereby several unrelated individuals share facilities, a type of arrangement frequently used by the Home Office to accommodate asylum seekers — were targeted in attacks.
A new poll from the European Council on Foreign Relations found that only 1 in 10 Europeans consider the U.S. an ally, while only 50% viewed the U.S. as a “necessary partner.” 25% of those polled consider the U.S. an adversary.
The U.S.’s plans to build Ebola quarantine centers in Kenya is meeting with protests from Kenyans. The centers are intended to treat American citizens in Africa exposed to the Ebola virus. Protests at one center led to three protestors being killed.
Inflation hit a 3-year high primarily due to rising gas prices, which are primarily driven by the shutting down of the Strait of Hormuz. The Federal Reserve has already revealed there will be no rate cuts at least until 2027.
OMDURMAN, Sudan — Four years of violent warfare between factions of the Sudanese military have spawned the world’s worst humanitarian crisis.
Estimates range between 12 million and 14 million people who have been forcibly displaced. Even more, approximately 20 million people face severe hunger. That’s more than a third of the entire population. And anywhere between 60,000 and 400,000 lives have been claimed since the fighting began in 2023.
The overwhelming majority of the suffering has fallen on civilians, bystanders of the power struggle between the Sudanese Armed Forces and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces. The latter is the successor to the notorious Janjaweed Arab militia responsible for the genocide in Darfur in the early 2000s.
While women and children are the most vulnerable victims — often preyed upon for violent sexual attacks or recruited as child soldiers — Christians also are among the communities hardest hit in Sudan.
“Christians in the midst of this volatility are often last in line,” explained Ryan Brown, CEO of Open Doors US, a nonprofit that highlights Christian persecution worldwide. “If there is any type of aid to be made available, very rarely would that be provided to Christians. If there is any type of safe havens that are being granted from all the violence, Christians are often not welcome in.”
Police have arrested a Sudanese male on suspicion of attempted murder after what has been called an attempted beheading on the streets of Belfast.
The PSNI were cagey in their earlier statement when they called their suspect merely a man “believed to be Somalian”. This caution seems to have been justified as they’ve now rectified that, saying in a new statement that’s just been published that they can “confirm that the man in custody is Sudanese and not Somalian, as initially believed”. The force cited a “fast-time investigation” and said further updates would follow.
There was also a minor update on the victim, with the police saying they confirmed “that the injured man remains in a serious condition in hospital”. They also noted “inaccurate online posts regarding the victim’s condition”, but without any further context.
We’ll keep the updates coming as we get them.
The man arrested on suspicion of attempted murder over a brutal attack in Belfast, Northern Ireland, in the United Kingdom on Monday night has been revealed to be a “believed to be Somalian” in his 30s, police said. An update from the Police Service of Northern Ireland on Tuesday morning said the man had been arrested on suspicion of attempted murder on Kinnaird Avenue, north Belfast, around 22:30.
An injured man, unidentified other than to say he is in his 40s, was transported to hospital. He is in serious condition and police say he has received “significant injuries to his face, neck and back”.
The PSNI declared a critical incident after the attack and a spokesman said an investigation is underway to determine a motive. They said: “This brutal attack will have sent shockwaves through the community causing real concern. I want to reassure the local community that we are treating this attack with the utmost seriousness. Our investigation is continuing at pace. Community safety is our priority and we are currently engaging with local representatives and residents to provide reassurance and support.
“Our officers were on the scene within minutes and we wish to acknowledge the members of the public who strived to save the man from further attack. Their willingness to step forward to help another person shows incredible bravery and community spirit.”
Inside a modern data centre, performance is already constrained less by raw transistor capability and more by heat removal. Server racks packed tightly together push thermal systems to their limit, and operators often throttle workloads not because chips can’t compute faster, but because cooling systems can’t keep up. Against that backdrop, the claim that processors can become 1,000 times faster through a light-driven switching device sounds like it belongs to a different category of computing altogether.What makes this result interesting is not just speed, but the mechanism: information switching triggered by light pulses rather than sustained electrical current, with experimental cycle times measured in picoseconds rather than nanoseconds.
According to the research published in Science, ‘Picosecond ultralow-power switching device based on an antiferromagnet’, a non-volatile switching element that can change state in about 40 picoseconds, which is roughly 40 trillionths of a second. For context, conventional semiconductor logic typically operates in the sub-nanosecond range, and even high-end CPU clock cycles are orders of magnitude slower once pipeline and memory effects are accounted for.That difference is not incremental. It shifts the conversation from “how do we shrink transistors further” to “how do we switch information using physics that isn’t bottlenecked by charge movement through silicon channels.”The device, demonstrated under lab conditions, uses ultrafast optical pulses routed through a photodetector (a uni-traveling-carrier photodiode), which then triggers a change in electron spin states within a magnetic material stack. That switching event is what encodes information.
Iran says it has launched a missile attack at an airbase in Jordan hosting US forces, after also targeting Kuwait and Bahrain. The Revolutionary Guards said missiles have targeted the Muwaffaq Salti airbase, which is known to host US F-35 fighter jets and other aircraft.
Neither Jordan nor the US has acknowledged any attack, but if confirmed it would likely be the first time that Iran has targeted Jordan since the start of the ceasefire in April.
The US strikes on Iran followed the downing of a US Apache helicopter over the strait of Hormuz, from which two crew members were rescued in a stable condition. In a post on social media Trump said the US “must” respond to the helicopter crash.
Here is the latest:
The US launched multiple waves of strikes on Iran in response to a military helicopter crash off the strait of Hormuz that Donald Trump said Iran had downed. The Associated Press reported that the Apache helicopter that crashed went down after colliding with an Iranian drone, but it was not clear whether the collision was intentional.
US strikes were reported across Iran’s southern coast, on the strait of Hormuz. After more than three hours of military action, US central command (Centcom) said strikes were “completed”, adding that the US remained ready to defend against “unjustified Iranian aggression.”
Soon after, Iran launched retaliatory attacks against the US, according to the countries state media, which said American bases in the region and the US fifth fleet in Bahrain were targeted with drones. Kuwait and Bahrain issued air raid alerts and reported that air defences were active in repelling attacks. Iran also claimed it had targeted a US base in Jordan with long range missiles.
Iran’s foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, said no attack would go “unanswered”, soon after the US launched strikes on Iran. Posting an image of the strait of Hormuz with the label, “Forever Persian Gulf”, Araghchi says that “despite its defeats on the battlefield, the U.S. opted to test our determination.”
Five hours before the airstrikes, Trump had posted on social media that the US “must” respond to the helicopter crash, from which two crew members were rescued in stable condition. Before his social media post, however, Trump appeared to downplay the crash, telling the Wall Street Journal in a phone interview that it “wasn’t a big deal” and that “the pilot is fine.”
Iranian state media reported that no air military operations have taken place in the strait of Hormuz over the past 24 hours, according to Reuters.
Lebanon’s health ministry said 11 people were killed in Israeli airstrikes on the southern city of Tyre on Tuesday. The state-run National News Agency (NNA) had reported the first strike taking place not long before Israel’s military issued an evacuation warning for the entire city and surrounding areas ahead of strikes there.
After weeks in which President Donald Trump has expressed cautious optimism about peace talks with Iran, the United States retaliated against an Iranian downing of an American aircraft, raising questions about the administration’s Iran exit plan and how it will work with Congress going forward.
On Tuesday, the United States struck Iran in retaliation for the downing of an Army Apache helicopter. U.S. Central Command described the “self-defense strikes” as “a proportional response to unjustified Iranian aggression.”
Trump tied the strike into Iran’s hesitancy to accept American peace offers.
MAIDUGURI, Nigeria — A cholera outbreak in northeastern Nigeria has killed 74 people and infected more than 7,000 others since it started in early May, medical charity Doctors Without Borders said Tuesday.
The outbreak, reported in 14 of Borno state’s 27 local governments, is unfolding in communities with health systems made fragile by nearly two decades of violent extremism from the Boko Haram insurgent group.
The illness is endemic and seasonal in the country, where only 14% of Nigeria’s population of more than 200 million have access to safely managed drinking water supply services, according to government data from 2020.
News Source
EXCERPT: The president said Iranian forces had shot down a U.S. Apache helicopter over the Strait of Hormuz and the United States “must, of necessity, respond to this attack.” There was no immediate comment from Tehran.
More than 1,200 emergency personnel, supported by international teams from Japan and Australia, were deployed across the disaster zone as search crews continued inspecting damaged buildings for possible survivors. Although only four people remained officially listed as missing, authorities said heavily damaged structures still required thorough examination.
General Santos, a city of more than 700,000 people, was among the worst affected areas. Collapsing buildings and falling debris caused at least 13 deaths, while thousands of homes, schools, hospitals and public facilities suffered damage. Initial assessments indicated that more than 3,100 houses had been destroyed and 145 public buildings affected, including 12 hospitals and 89 schools.
President Donald Trump’s explanation for the latest escalation “doesn’t make sense,” Larry Johnson has told RT
The US and Israel carried out their latest strikes on Iran and Lebanon in a deliberate effort to sabotage the ongoing peace talks, former CIA analyst Larry Johnson has told RT.
On Wednesday local time, the US struck Qeshm Island and targets in southern Iran in response to the crash of a US AH-64 Apache attack helicopter off the coast of Oman – an incident US President Donald Trump blamed on Iran. Tehran, however, has refused to confirm that it was responsible for the crash.
Taiwan may feel distant to most Europeans, but a Chinese takeover of the island would send shockwaves from Washington to Tokyo, Taiwan’s deputy foreign minister François Chih-chung Wu told Euronews Next.
“If China attacks Taiwan, France, Europe, the United States, and Japan will all be affected. Taiwan will be in a terrible situation — but so will you,” he warned.
The deputy minister pushed back on China’s claim over Taiwan as part of its territory since the end of the Chinese civil war in 1949. Beijing has never ruled out using force to bring the self-governing island under its control and refuses to recognise it as a sovereign state, insisting it be referred to internationally as “Chinese Taipei,” a designation that reflects China’s position that there is only “one China” and that Taiwan is part of it.
Taiwan itself officially goes by the Republic of China, a name dating back to the government that fled to the island after losing the civil war to Mao Zedong’s Communist forces.
Taiwan’s history is far more complex than the narrative that it has always been part of China, Wu said, with the island ruled by the Dutch, the Spanish, the Qing Empire and Japan at different times.
The Qing Dynasty administered part of Taiwan for more than a hundred years, but it was only between 1885 and 1894 that it attached any real importance to the island and established it as a province — a mere ten years of genuine strategic interest that challenges the current Chinese claims of continued sovereignty.
“China was not the only country there,” he said, arguing this history does not justify Beijing’s ambitions.
The buzziest bit of the new artificial-intelligence bill from Reps. Jay Obernolte, a California Republican, and Lori Trahan, a Massachusetts Democrat, is probably the section that would let Washington preempt state rules on AI development for three years. For me, the more interesting part is its bet on auditing as a middle path between Silicon Valley self-regulation and an FDA-style premarket approval regime for frontier models.
Earlier this year, several dozen AI policy folks signed onto a proposal, “Frontier AI Auditing: Toward Rigorous Third-Party Assessment of Safety and Security Practices at Leading AI Companies” that “outlines a vision for frontier AI auditing, which we define as rigorous third-party verification of frontier AI developers’ safety and security claims, and evaluation of their systems and practices against relevant standards, based on deep, secure access to non-public information.”
What does that mean? For starters, an audit is not a permission slip. Rather than making a company clear a government gate before shipping, as the FDA does with drugs, an independent reviewer with access to the confidential innards of an AI company would check the latest model against a set standard. Think of it as how an accountant signs off on a public company’s books. Private firms do the examining while a public body stays in the background. Maybe it sets the rules, accredits the examiners, and holds the enforcement hammer.
Pakistan’s security forces opened fire on protestors in Pakistan-occupied Kashmir. The protesters represented the Joint Awami Action Committee (JAAC), who had been outlawed by the Pakistani government. The government accused the organization of intentionally causing upheaval.
The Nigerian military ran a successful rescue operation in the nation’s Borno state. They rescued 360 people who had been abducted from the Islamist terror group, Boko Haram.
Australia’s version of Britain’s Restore UK, One Nation, has taken the lead in a recent poll, surging ahead of the party in power, Labor, 31% to 30%. This is the first major poll showing One Nation take an overall lead.
The US president has reportedly urged the Israeli PM not to restart a full-blown war with Iran
US President Donald Trump threatened to withdraw support for Israel during a tense phone call with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Axios has reported.
Trump has held several heated phone conversations with the Israeli prime minister since Iran announced last week that it was suspending talks with the US over repeated Israeli strikes in Lebanon.
Iran’s conditions for a peace agreement include the cessation of hostilities on “all fronts,” including Lebanon, where nearly 3,700 people have been killed since early March, when Israel resumed strikes in response to attacks by Hezbollah.
Israel and Iran exchanged strikes on Sunday and Monday for the first time since a ceasefire was reached in April, following an Israeli strike in Beirut.
News Source
EXCERPT: China’s President travelled to North Korea for the first time in seven years, underscoring the strategic importance of ties between the two neighbours.
