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A BRITISH couple jailed in Iran on trumped-up spy charges have lost an appeal against their brutal 10-year prison sentence.
Lindsay and Craig Foreman were not even allowed to attend their own trial, heartbroken family revealed.
x01a Research Archives
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The United States bombed Iranian radar and drone control sites in Iran after Tehran shot down an American MQ-1 Predator drone this weekend, the US military said on Monday.
Iran acknowledged launching a retaliatory strike, while Kuwait said it was intercepting incoming drone and missile fire.
The duelling attacks reflect the fragility of a weeks-long ceasefire in the Iran war, which has seen repeated attacks even as American and Iranian officials try to negotiate a deal to extend it.
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On May 8, Taiwan’s Legislative Yuan broke a grueling six-month stalemate by passing a landmark $25 billion defense budget, catching many observers off guard. The vote brought sudden end to an agonizing legislative deadlock that had pushed U.S.-Taiwanese relations to the edge. For months, long-simmering frustration in Washington over Taiwan’s defense trajectory has threatened to boil over, catalyzed by an unprecedented bipartisan open letter from U.S. senators, demanding that Taiwan authorize the pending defense packages.
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An Iowa man is suspected of fatally shooting six relatives before taking his own life on Monday, authorities said.
Muscatine Police Chief Anthony Kies said officers responded to a report of a shooting at about 12:12 p.m. Monday at a home on Park Avenue in Muscatine, a city roughly 50 miles southeast of Cedar Rapids.
When officers arrived, they discovered four victims inside the residence suffering from gunshot wounds. All four were pronounced dead at the scene, Kies said during a news conference.
Investigators quickly identified the suspected gunman as Ryan Willis McFarland, 52, of Muscatine. Police said McFarland had left the residence before officers arrived.
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Sickening bodycam footage shows British cops handcuffing a dying student who had been stabbed with a ceremonial Sikh knife, after his killer accused the white victim of racism.
Video from the scene, which has sparked fury in the UK, shows Henry Nowak, 18, repeatedly telling police officers “I can’t breathe,” after being stabbed with an 8-inch blade in an unprovoked attack in Southampton, England, according to authorities.
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The government argues that deeper cooperation with the EU is in Britain’s national interest.
But the proposals have drawn criticism from some Eurosceptic lawmakers – particularly over the only major non-trade measure under discussion: rejoining the Erasmus+ exchange programme.
Erasmus+ enables students and other learners from participating countries to study, train or undertake placements abroad.
The UK withdrew from the programme following Brexit and launched the Turing Scheme as its replacement in 2021.
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A U.S. official said Sunday evening that Secretary Rubio spoke with both Lebanon’s President Josef Aoun and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu over the weekend about the ongoing negotiations between Israel and Lebanon.
To advance the talks, the U.S. proposed a sequence of events that would see the Iranian-backed Hezbollah militia in Lebanon stop all attacks on Israel, and in return, Israel would refrain from escalation in Lebanese capital Beirut.
The idea is that those first steps would create space for gradual deescalation and an effective cessation of hostilities.
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Jerome Powell, the former chair of the Federal Reserve, has warned that a single act of political interference in monetary policy could permanently destroy public trust in the central bank.
As Donald Trump’s administration continues to test the Fed’s longstanding independence, Powell said in a speech on Sunday night that the institution was in the midst of a “stress test”.
Powell, who was accepting the 2026 John F Kennedy Profile in Courage award in Boston, stepped down as Fed chair last month, and was succeeded by Kevin Warsh, but remains on its board of governors.
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At least 282 confirmed cases of Ebola have now been reported in Congo’s ongoing outbreak as authorities in Brazil said they were looking into two suspected cases.
The two patients who recently arrived in Brazil from Uganda and the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), where the outbreak is ongoing, exhibited symptoms such as fever and chills.
The first patient is a Belgian traveller who came from Uganda to Rio de Janeiro. The Evandro Chagas National Institute of Infectious Diseases, of the Oswaldo Cruz Foundation (Fiocruz), administered initial testing, which came back positive only for malaria. The patient remains isolated and the people who had contact with him are being monitored, according to health officials.
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We have previously covered the indictment of the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) in great detail:
The latest development is that SPLC has filed a Motion to Dismiss the Indictment for Vindictive Prosecution, focused very heavily on public statements from Trump and others in his administration both before and after the indictment.
From the Motion:
President Trump’s triumphant statement on April 24, 2026, three days after an indictment was unsealed against the Southern Poverty Law Center (“the SPLC”), was the latest manifestation of a top-down, retributive campaign in which he directed his Justice Department to go after those individuals and groups he deemed his political enemies, including the SPLC.
To carry out the President’s directive, others in the Administration targeted the SPLC, which now faces criminal charges for exercising its First Amendment right to identify, report on, and criticize extremist hate groups. The Administration has falsely accused the SPLC of being “anti-Christian,” of aiding the Biden Administration’s “weaponization” of the Department of Justice, of participating in political violence, and, most recently, of helping to “rig” the 2020 election against President Donald Trump. These examples of this Administration’s animus over the past year culminated in the criminal charges against the SPLC—an indictment premised on conclusory accusations but devoid of provable facts or a proper statement of the law….
Then, after praising the indictment his Justice Department handed him, President Trump went further. He publicly proclaimed the improper political motive behind the case, branding the SPLC a “Democrat Hoax, along with Act Blue and many others” and claimed that when the allegations are proven “the 2020 Presidential Election should be permanently wiped from the books and be of no further force or effect!” 2 President Trump doubled down on these farcical claims on a nationally televised 60 Minutes interview a few days later. He falsely proclaimed that the 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia “was all funded by the Southern [Poverty] Law [Center].”3 President Trump asserted that the SPLC had funded this “total fake” event “to make me look bad.”4 The SPLC’s efforts, according to the President, were “a part of the rigging of the [2020] election.”5
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Iran’s Tasnim News Agency, which has affiliations with the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), reported that a potential memorandum of understanding (MOU) between Iran and the United States has not been finalized.
According to Tasnim, Iran has not notified the Pakistani mediator involved in the talks that any agreement text has been completed. The agency indicated that Iranian officials would inform both the mediator and the public once an MOU is ready.
This statement came in response to earlier reports on the same day from outlets such as Reuters and Axios, which described negotiators as having reached a draft MOU. Reuters reported that U.S. and Iranian negotiators had reached a memorandum of understanding concerning a 60-day extension of the existing ceasefire and the initiation of talks on Iran’s nuclear program.
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A Russian drone struck an apartment building in NATO-member Romania, its defence ministry said on Friday, wounding two people in a city near the Ukrainian border.
“During the night of May 28–29, the Russian Federation resumed drone attacks on civilian and infrastructure targets in Ukraine, near the river border with Romania,” the Romanian defence ministry said, condemning an “irresponsible escalation”.
“One of these drones entered Romanian airspace, was tracked by radar as far as the southern part of the city of Galati, and crashed onto the roof of an apartment building, with the impact triggering a fire,” it said.
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We are often best defined not by the company we keep, but by our enemies. Having the right—left—enemies tends to be a very good thing indeed, as it’s a reliable indicator we’re doing the right things with the right people and for the right reasons.
It’s not always easy, however, to know the motives of people, or nations, when we’re dealing with issues of technology and/or public policy. One such issue is the proliferation of data centers, necessary for the burgeoning AI revolution, but controversial for that and other reasons. Among them is the amount of water and power they require. This is particularly ironic because they tend to be built in sparsely populated states like Wyoming, which often have water usage and power issues. More densely populated states tend to have reflexive “not in my backyard” sensibilities.
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On April 15, technology podcaster Dwarkesh Patel published a two-hour interview with Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang. For roughly forty minutes, Patel asked one question six different ways. The question was this: If American-made compute trains AI models with the serious cyber-offensive capabilities Anthropic’s Mythos Preview demonstrated — and that compute is sold to a strategic adversary — what responsibility does the seller bear?
Huang’s answers hovered a safe distance away from the question. AI is a “five-layer cake,” he told Patel, and ceding any layer to China would be industrial suicide. The Chinese, he argued, already have enough compute to do whatever they intend to do, so marginal sales do not change the strategic balance. By the end, Patel was visibly worn down. Huang accused him of arguing from extremes and of thinking in absolutes.
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The United States and Iran reached an agreement on Thursday to extend their ceasefire and lift restrictions on shipping through the Strait of Hormuz, sources told Reuters, though U.S. President Donald Trump has yet to approve it and Iranian state media said it had not been finalized.
According to four sources familiar with the matter, the agreement would extend the truce for another 60 days and allow traffic to flow through the strategic waterway while negotiators tackle difficult issues such as Iran’s nuclear program.
If approved by leadership in Washington and Tehran, it would amount to the biggest step towards peace since the conflict began on February 28. News of the possible agreement came after a round of tit-for-tat attacks between the two countries, the latest such incident since the ceasefire took effect in early April.
Trump has not yet approved the deal, the sources said. The White House declined to comment, and Iran has yet to comment on news of the proposed deal, which was first reported by Axios.
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Anti-data center activists typically cite concerns about water usage, pollution, or the cost of building the data centers themselves.
Many individuals are sincere in their activism. But public opinion on data centers is likely being shaped by foreign actors, according to a report from the Bitcoin Policy Institute. (RELATED: CHRIS JOHNSON: AI Data Centers Can Win Over Skeptics. But It Must Learn From Fracking)
BPI’s head of research Sam Lyman explained Wednesday that China uses social media as a “gain of function for their propaganda” on The Hill’s “Rising.”
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Iran has claimed that it has deployed a new air defence system to take down a United States MQ-9 Reaper drone near the Strait of Hormuz earlier this week. Iran’s state-sponsored media said the American drone– that costs between $16 million and $30 million per unit– was brought down near Qeshm Island in the Strait of Hormuz using a locally developed system called Arash-e-Kamangir.
If the claim is correct, the interception marked the first combat use of the defence system named after the legendary Iranian character Arash-the-Archer. It would mean Tehran has retained its military capacity to repel US and Israeli attacks despite months of war in the Middle East.
Iranian media claimed the drone was brought down over regional waters during an operation to protect the country’s airspace and maritime borders. “This operation, which was carried out using a system with hidden capabilities, is a clear and decisive message from Iran,” Iran’s Fars news agency quoted unnamed officials as saying.
However, so far, no independent source has corroborated the Iranian claim of a new interception system.
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A federal grand jury in Montgomery, Alabama, recently handed down an 11-count indictment against the Southern Poverty Law Center for wire fraud and conspiracy to commit money laundering. According to the Department of Justice, the SPLC secretly moved more than $3 million in donor money between 2014 and 2023 to individuals affiliated with the Ku Klux Klan and other violent extremist groups. To hide the trail, prosecutors say, the payments were routed through fictitious entities such as “Fox Photography.”
According to the indictment, a 55-year-old organization that built a brand on hunting hate has actually been bankrolling it. The temptation for conservative Christians will be to read that as simple vindication, and to a degree, it is. But that reading is too small. The SPLC did not collapse into alleged fraud because it found some exotic evil; it collapsed because it surrendered to an ordinary one. Fear is easier to sell than hope, and an enemy keeps the donations coming. This indictment is as much a mirror as a verdict, and the Church should be the first to look into it.
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The US will continue to ramp up economic pressure on the island, sources have told the outlet
US President Donald Trump is set to escalate Washington’s economic pressure campaign on Cuba in an attempt to force regime change, Axios reported on Friday, citing sources. The island is already enduring near-total fuel starvation and daily blackouts stretching up to 20 hours.
The US has thus far opted for a phased campaign designed to choke Havana, but which avoids a direct military invasion, several unnamed officials told the outlet.
“The best way to describe it is ‘accelerationism,’” one senior official said, referring to the philosophy of hastening societal collapse. “But we don’t want to kill off the regime just yet. There’s a method to this. It’s in stages.”