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VATICAN CITY — U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio discussed “efforts to achieve a durable peace in the Middle East” in talks at the Vatican on Thursday aimed at easing tensions following U.S. President Donald Trump’s criticisms of Pope Leo XIV.
Rubio met with Leo and then Vatican Secretary of State Cardinal Pietro Parolin in a visit that lasted 2½ hours.
U.S. State Department spokesman Tommy Pigott said that Rubio and Leo discussed the situation in the Middle East “and topics of mutual interest in the Western Hemisphere. The meeting underscored the strong relationship between the United States and the Holy See and their shared commitment to promoting peace and human dignity,” he said.
In a separate statement about the Parolin meeting, Pigott said that the two diplomats discussed “ongoing humanitarian efforts in the Western Hemisphere and efforts to achieve a durable peace in the Middle East. The discussion reflected the enduring partnership between the United States and the Holy See in advancing religious freedom,” the statement said.
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A military court on Thursday sentenced Wei Fenghe and Li Shangfu to death with a two-year reprieve. This means their death sentences will be commuted to life imprisonment after two years, without the possibility of sentence reduction or parole, Xinhua reports.
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President Trump threatened Iran on Wednesday with new attacks, warning they would be at a “higher level and intensity” than previous rounds of bombing, if it declined to agree to a peace deal, which he said was “perhaps, a big assumption.”
His latest remarks, in a Truth Social post, came 13 hours after he said in a previous post that he was pausing Project Freedom, a U.S. military operation to guide vessels through the Strait of Hormuz that lasted one day and drew a violent reaction by Iran, to see if a peace deal could be reached amid “great progress” in negotiations.
“Assuming Iran agrees to give what has been agreed to, which is, perhaps, a big assumption, the already legendary Epic Fury will be at an end, and the highly effective Blockade will allow the Hormuz Strait to be OPEN TO ALL, including Iran,” Mr. Trump said Wednesday. “If they don’t agree, the bombing starts, and it will be, sadly, at a much higher level and intensity than it was before.”
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Billionaire Jeffrey Epstein was connected with several prominent people including politicians, actors and academics. Epstein was convicted of having sex with a girl.
Rick Friedman/Rick Friedman Photography/Corbis via Getty Images
- A US judge ordered the release of a suicide note purportedly written by Jeffrey Epstein.
- The note was said to have been found by Nicholas Tartaglione, his former jail cellmate.
- The judge did not vouch for the note’s authenticity, nor assess its chain of custody.
A federal judge on Wednesday released a document described as a suicide note purportedly written by the late Jeffrey Epstein and including the line: “It is a treat to be able to choose one’s time to say goodbye.”
Epstein, the disgraced financier and accused sex trafficker, was found dead in his Manhattan jail cell in August 2019 in what was ruled a suicide.
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North Korea’s UN envoy said his country was not bound by the Non-Proliferation Treaty on nuclear weapons and external pressure would not change its status as a nuclear-armed state, official media reported on Thursday.
Pyongyang threatened to withdraw from the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) in 1993 and formally did so in 2003.
It has since conducted six nuclear tests, prompting a raft of international sanctions, and is believed to possess dozens of nuclear warheads.
Signatories of the NPT have been holding a review meeting of the landmark pact at the United Nations.
There, “the United States and certain countries following its lead are groundlessly calling into question the current status and exercise of sovereign rights” of North Korea, Pyongyang’s top UN envoy Kim Song said in a statement carried by the official Korean Central News Agency (KCNA).
“The status of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea as a nuclear-armed state will not change based on external rhetorical claims or unilateral desires,” he added, using North Korea’s official name.
“To make it clear once again, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea will not be bound by the Non-Proliferation Treaty under any circumstances whatsoever.”
He continued that the country’s status as a nuclear-armed state has been “enshrined in the constitution, transparently declaring the principles of nuclear weapons use.”
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KINSHASA, Congo — Congo’s president warned on Wednesday that the African nation will not be able to organize and hold elections after his term ends in two years unless the conflict that has gripped the country’s east is resolved and stability returns.
The remarks by Congolese President Félix Tshisekedi, whose term expires in December 2028, came during a televised address to the nation in which he discussed a range of topics, including deportations of migrants from the United States under a deal with the Trump administration.
Congo’s decades-long conflict escalated in January 2025, when the Rwanda-backed M23 rebels advanced and seized the strategic city of Goma, followed by the town of Bukavu, which they took in February as they seek to expand their presence. The fighting has killed some 3,000 people and worsened what was already one of the world’s largest humanitarian crises, with around 7 million people displaced.
A U.S.-mediated peace agreement to end the fighting and other efforts have stumbled.
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WASHINGTON: A US Navy warplane fired on and disabled the rudder of an oil tanker that tried to break Washington’s blockade of Iranian ports, the US military said on Wednesday (May 6).
It is the second time the US military has fired on a ship it said was attempting to violate the blockade, which has been in place since April 13.
US forces warned the Iranian-flagged M/T Hasna, which was unladen, that it was in violation of the blockade, but its crew “failed to comply,” so a US F/A-18 Super Hornet “disabled the tanker’s rudder by firing several rounds from (its) 20mm cannon gun,” Central Command (CENTCOM) said in a post on X.
“Hasna is no longer transiting to Iran,” CENTCOM said, adding: “The US blockade against ships attempting to enter or depart Iranian ports remains in full effect.”
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Israel strikes Beirut for the first time since the ceasefire
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Japan’s Self-Defense Forces fired a Type 88 anti‑ship missile during a joint maritime exercise with U.S., Australian, and Philippine forces on Wednesday, hitting a decommissioned Philippine Navy ship in waters facing the South China Sea.
The drill took place as Manila and Tokyo began talks on a potential defence equipment transfer, made possible by Japan’s decision to scrap restrictions on military exports.
Discussions include the possible early transfer of Abukuma class destroyers and TC-90 aircraft to the Armed Forces of the Philippines, Japan’s Defense Minister Shinjiro Koizumi said.
Philippine Defense Secretary Gilberto Teodoro and Koizumi witnessed the live missile firing on the ground, while Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos Jr watched the exercise from military headquarters in Manila via a live video feed, the president’s office said.
“The exercise showcased coordinated maritime strike operations among allied forces and highlighted the AFP’s growing capability to operate alongside international partners in promoting regional security and freedom of navigation,” it said in a statement.
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Anthropic on Wednesday said it had reached a deal to tap the computing resources of Elon Musk’s SpaceX, marking a détente with its one-time critic and a boost for both companies in the high-stakes artificial intelligence race.
Under the agreement, Anthropic will use the full computing power of SpaceX’s Colossus 1 facility in Memphis, Tenn., which houses more than 220,000 Nvidia processors and will give the Claude chatbot maker 300 megawatts of new capacity within a month.
The deal gives the IPO-bound SpaceX a marquee customer as it looks to sell investors on its AI ambitions, while helping Anthropic ease capacity constraints following a surge in demand for products such as its AI coding tool, Claude Code.
The announcement came as Anthropic held a developer day in San Francisco on Wednesday, where it unveiled a new Claude AI feature called “dreaming,” meant to help its AI systems learn by reviewing work between sessions, spotting patterns and updating files that store user preferences and other context.
Iran reviews U.S. proposal for deal to end war as Trump issues new threats – National– globalnews.ca
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Iran said it was reviewing the latest American proposals on ending the war, as U.S. President Donald Trump threatened the country with a new wave of bombing unless a deal is reached that includes reopening the crucial Strait of Hormuz to international shipping.
Hope that the two-month conflict could soon end buoyed international markets on Thursday, even as the U.S. military fired on an Iranian oil tanker attempting to breach an American blockade of Iran’s ports hours earlier. The developments followed days of mixed messaging from the Trump administration over its strategy to end the war.
Trump posted on social media that the two-month war could soon end and that oil and natural gas shipments disrupted by the conflict could restart. But he said that depends on Iran accepting a reported agreement that he did not detail.
“If they don’t agree, the bombing starts,” Trump wrote.
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“Operation Trust Me Bro failed,” Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf has said, after the US president suspended efforts to guide ships through the Strait of Hormuz
Iran’s top negotiator has mocked US President Donald Trump after he abruptly suspended American efforts to guide ships through the Strait of Hormuz, adding that Washington was again spreading falsehoods about ongoing talks.
In a post on X on Wednesday, Iranian parliament speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf ridiculed Trump with a sarcastic one-liner: “Operation Trust Me Bro failed. Now back to routine with Operation Fauxios.”
Ghalibaf’s comments came after Trump paused ‘Project Freedom’, an operation aimed at clearing a path through the strait for more than 1,500 commercial vessels stranded in the Persian Gulf, just two days after its start. The US president, however, insisted that the decision was made based on what he described as “great progress” in negotiations and a request from Pakistan.
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Ukraine accused Russia of flouting a Kyiv-proposed ceasefire on Wednesday by carrying out dozens of battlefield assaults, air strikes and drone attacks in what President Volodymyr Zelenskyy described…
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The market for Treasury debt is challenging to interpret even when the environment is calm, much less when multiple geopolitical and technological disruptions are present simultaneously. Two papers released in the past year offer differing perspectives on a consequential unknown in the current market, which is the expected effect artificial intelligence (AI) will have on future productivity growth.
The first of the two relevant papers, co-authored by Isaiah Andrews and Maryam Farboodi, examined market signals in 2023 and 2024 around the releases of updated AI models from five leading developers (OpenAI, Anthropic, Google Deepmind, xAI, and DeepSeek). A main finding was that the nominal interest rates for long-term Treasury and corporate debt fell after these models became public by a statistically significant 12 basis points.
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The Tomahawk Land Attack Missiles the U.S. military fired during Operation Epic Fury take months to put on contract and years to produce.
Whether driven by U.S. military operations or support to partners, the challenge of quickly replenishing U.S. munitions is not new. Exquisite munitions often take an exquisite amount of time to manufacture and deliver. Defense officials, in turn, frequently want to compress that time as much as possible, seeking to restock fast and mitigate future risks.
The Russo-Ukrainian War has illuminated the challenge of accomplishing this feat. It also offers lessons for how the U.S can accelerate munitions production timelines in a crisis. Indeed, the U.S. experience attempting to surge munitions production from 2022 to 2024 did not reveal uniform failure in boosting production rates, but rather, sharp variation across weapons. Production rates of some munitions expanded meaningfully after 2022. Others stagnated. Interestingly, the emergency authorities and supplemental funding unleashed after 2022 were not responsible for this variation, as the full results of those initiatives and investments are still yet to come. Instead, decisions that pre-dated the Russo-Ukrainian War drove this variation.
The true lesson from the Ukraine crisis is that the United States cannot solely rely on improvisation to surge munitions production. Surge is indeed distinct from peacetime manufacturing or the mobilization of commercial entities to support wartime production demands. The Department of Defense should treat surging production as a core competency to be developed and rehearsed well in advance of a crisis.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced the end of “Operation Epic Fury,” claiming the offensive part of the war with Iran is over.
Rubio claimed in a White House press briefing, “The operation, Epic Fury, is concluded. We achieved the objections of that operation. This is the first step toward reopening the strait,” he added. “We are doing it not only because we were asked, but because we are the only ones that can.”
The U.S. is allegedly paying a CCP-connected firm to help identify potential stealth risks from embedding Chinese technology into the U.S. military. This claim is coming from the Washington Times; they cite anonymous military tech analysts within the industry.
A former CCP agent told CBN News he was part of an operation to identify and silence former Chinese citizens in America who spoke out against the party. He told CBN they use threats, entrapment, and even kidnapping.
He claimed, “The United Front is something that’s being defined by the Chinese Communist Party as one of its ‘secret’ or ‘magic’ weapons. And essentially its task is two things: On the one hand, expand the circle of friends of the Chinese Communist Party. So, co-opting or influencing, politicians, media, academia, and entrepreneurs. But on the other hand, its task is also to crack down on critics, to silence them, to divide them.”
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US Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent have both expressed a need for China to leverage its tight relations with Tehran to reopen the strategic Strait of Hormuz for “their own interests”.
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The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said it eliminated Hamas Commander Anas Muhammad Ibrahim Hamed, who infiltrated Israel and participated in the Oct. 7 Nova Music Festival Massacre.
Hamed was killed during a targeted Monday strike in Gaza, the IDF announced Tuesday.
“The IDF struck yesterday in the center of the Gaza Strip and eliminated Ans Muhammad Ibrahim Hamed, Nukhba commander in the Hamas terror organization, who raided the territory of the State of Israel and the Nova festival during the murderous massacre on October 7,” the IDF wrote in a Tuesday morning post on X.
The IDF called Hamed an “immediate threat to IDF forces operating in the Gaza Strip,” and said he was “eliminated in a precise airstrike.”
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The biotech entrepreneur secured a comfortable victory over small business owner Casey Putsch in Tuesday’s primary, advancing to the general election in the key Rust Belt state of Ohio.Ramaswamy will now face Acton, the former director of the Ohio Department of Public Health, who ran unopposed in the Democratic primary. The race is expected to be closely watched nationally.
In his victory speech, Ramaswamy thanked voters, saying, “for getting us to this point,” and added that, “the real destination is in November.”US President Donald Trump earlier endorsed Ramaswamy and praised him in a post, calling him “something special. he is young, strong, and smart!”
In a longer message, Trump said, “Vivek Ramaswamy is running for Governor of the Great State of Ohio… I know Vivek well, competed against him, and he is something special. He is Young, Strong, and Smart! Vivek is also a very good person, who truly loves our Country… Vivek Ramaswamy will be a great governor of Ohio, and has my complete and total endorsement – he will never let you down!”