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Jul 2, 2026 - World

An offhand comment from Donald Trump to Vice President JD Vance may not have been meant for public consumption, according to political analyst Heather Digby Parton.In an unguarded moment this week, Vance disclosed that Trump told envoys tasked with negotiating a peace deal with Iran to "use the [memorandum of understanding] to refill the world's oil economy, refill some stocks and then to see where the hand is." According to Parton, that was an admission that the administration is stalling negotiations to drive down gas prices before possibly restarting the war, but that Vance's blunder is simply business as usual in an administration where "verbal incontinence" cascades from the top down. Trump's tendency to blurt out whatever pops into his head has become so normalized that his vice president is now doing the same thing — casually revealing strategic calculations about a potential Middle East conflict to the public, she suggested.According to Parton, during Trump's first term, "... administration officials like John F. Kelly, his second White House chief of staff, and Jim Mattis and Mark Esper, his first two defense secretaries, tried to contain the president’s worst impulses, they were often unsuccessful. Trump seemed congenitally undisciplined, unable to stop himself from articulating every thought that passed through his head, usually to brag, blame or threaten. The result was a presidency that was, in a word, unstable."Now a year and a half into his second term, that instability has grown because he believes he can do no wrong."Trump’s old compulsion to behave erratically and shoot his mouth off is now combined with a megalomania that has him building monuments to himself and musing openly about being included in the pantheon of dictators like Joseph Stalin and Adolf Hitler. Today he’s driven by a belief that he is omnipotent, and nothing he does will have any negative consequences. He has come to believe that whatever he says is the right thing, no matter what," she wrote. Even worse, she suggested, if Trump faces "blowback," he dismisses it and makes more outrageous claims."He is impervious to criticism now because he literally believes he can do no wrong, and there are tens of millions of people who believe that too," she warned.

Jul 2, 2026 - World

Security guard Hernán Alberto Gil Flores, 43, initially told rescuers not to tell his wife in case he did not surviveA 43-year-old security guard who survived last week’s devastating earthquakes in Venezuela thanks to a pocket of air in his workstation cabin has been pulled from the collapsed basement of a shopping centre amid huge cheers from international rescue teams.Hernán Alberto Gil Flores had been trapped for eight days under the rubble of the Galerías Playa Grande in the hard-hit coastal port city of La Guaira since the back-to-back quakes struck. Continue reading...

Jul 2, 2026 - World

Eleven-year-old developed symptoms 19 days after encounter in Ontario in ‘exceedingly rare’ caseDoctors in Canada say a child who awoke to find a bat resting on his nose and mouth while visiting an Ontario cottage later died of rabies, in an “exceedingly rare case” that highlights the need for better public awareness.In a report published this week in the Canadian Medical Association Journal, infectious disease physicians confirmed that the 11-year-old boy died from rabies, a fatality they said probably could have been prevented with greater awareness of how the virus is transmitted. Continue reading...

Jul 2, 2026 - World

Charges yet to be filed over incident in Mukdahan involving 11-year-old, as police seek to establish circumstancesAn 11-year-old boy has driven his parents’ truck into a Buddhist procession in Thailand, killing at least nine monks.CCTV footage shared by a local rescue group showed the moment the monks, wearing orange robes, were run over as they walked in procession along a road. The timestamp on the footage was shortly before 11am local time on Thursday. Continue reading...

Jul 2, 2026 - World

With the country engrossed by the unexpected success of the US men's team’s performance in the 2026 World Cup, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin refused to take the high road when the team from Iran was eliminated.In a column for MS NOW, political analyst Zeeshan Aleem called out the former Oklahoma plumber-turned-US senator for gloating in the Iran team elimination after the US government made their appearance a nightmare with travel restrictions and continued harassment by government officials."I'm just glad they're done, and they're not coming back," Mullin boasted, according to Politico. "I was so happy when we were able to pull their visas and said they could leave U.S. soil, and I might have sung a song or two, or maybe danced a happy dance."According to Aleem, what Mullin glossed over was the fact that the U.S. government had spent weeks making life hell for Iran's team. The administration didn't just deny visas to support staff—it forced Iran to move its training base from Arizona to Mexico, sabotaged their preparation time, and treated elite athletes like criminals rather than competitors in an international sporting event.And yet Iran nearly made it to the knockout stage anyway—three draws despite the handicaps the Trump administration imposed.Calling the Donald Trump appointee "classless," Aleem added, "After all this, Mullin had the opportunity to wish Iran’s team well or stay silent. Instead he gloried in their loss and underscored the narrative that the team should be viewed purely as a proxy for the Iranian government."He added that had Mullin been gracious or, better yet, said nothing, it would have been a boon to Trump negotiators who have been spinning their wheels attempting to negotiate an end to the war with Iran that has help put the US economy into a tailspin. "It’s a reminder of how Mullin’s comments are not just unsportsmanlike, they’re bad diplomacy. The U.S. is in negotiations with Iran to wind down a war in which the U.S. has faced a humiliating loss and lacks the leverage to extract good terms. Why would a prominent Trump official bask in Iran being ousted from the World Cup, a globally watched opportunity to use soft power?" he asked. "A long-term thinker might have used the tournament to show Iran that the U.S. could be fair-minded. Instead, the Trump administration confirmed countless Iranians’ suspicions that the U.S. is treacherous and untrustworthy, as if hawks in Iran needed more ammunition."