Top World News

Jun 18, 2026 - World

Updated document, which emphasises harm done to African women, is being considered by other Caribbean countriesBarbados’s prime minister, Mia Mottley, has announced a new manifesto from Caribbean leaders asserting the “moral, ethical and legal case” for reparations over damage caused by hundreds of years of enslavement.Mottley was speaking at a “historic” conference in Ghana to advance the push for reparatory justice after the United Nations adopted a landmark resolution declaring the trafficking of enslaved Africans as the gravest crime against humanity. Continue reading...

Jun 18, 2026 - World

‘Mastermind’ Dawie Groenewald given fine of 2m rand or four-year jail term almost 16 years after arrestTwo traffickers of rhino horns have been sentenced by a South African court in what police said was the world’s largest such case, partly bringing to an end an almost two-decade legal saga.Dawie Groenewald and Tielman Erasmus had faced more than 1,700 charges ranging from illegally hunting and dehorning rhinos to racketeering and money laundering. Continue reading...

Jun 18, 2026 - World

While Donald Trump is being excoriated by Republicans over his Iran deal, which one GOP lawmaker called “… a tremendous foreign policy blunder,” MS NOW’s Bill Rohde stated on Thursday morning that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth can expect that his role in advising the president to launch the war has put his job at risk.Discussing the blowback Trump is facing over the war that, for the moment, has ended in a stalemate, Rohde claimed that Hegseth is already a prime target instead since he is already on the outs with a substantial number of Republican lawmakers.“At some point. President Trump is the person most responsible for this strategic defeat and failure,” Rohde told the "Morning Joe” co-hosts. “But I would argue the person second most responsible, who is in the most dangerous position politically, is Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. He repeatedly lied to the American public in his press conferences about the progress of the war, and he also refused to give basic information to members of Congress. There's a lot of ill will among senators and House members towards Pete Hegseth.”Quoting Hegseth asserting “The aftermath of this is going to be in our interest,” Rohde asked, “Did he warn the president about the Strait of Hormuz before this war? Was he honest with the American public? And to the 50,000 Americans who risked their lives in the 13 soldiers who died? You know, his performance is just something that has to be looked at.”Co-host Willie Geist added, “We haven't seen the defense secretary in public much since those podium-banging news briefings that he would give every week, where he would lecture the media about how to cover the war, what was actually happening, and from all the reporting that he would show the president of the United States an iPad with things blowing up to show that they were doing well. It turns out this is a much, much more complicated problem than can be solved by blowing things up.” - YouTube youtu.be

Jun 18, 2026 - World

According to former CIA official Marc Polymeropoulos, Donald Trump’s Iran deal, which has set off a deluge of criticism within the Republican Party, has left the leadership of Israel in a state of shock.Appearing on MS NOW with “Morning Joe” co-host Willie Geist, Polymeropoulos, who just returned from Tel Aviv, claimed he found a sense of betrayal during his visit. Geist prompted the 26-year veteran of the CIA with, “Marc, take us to Tel Aviv this morning. And what Bibi Netanyahu must be thinking; that he got his man in the White House in Donald Trump, that he went to the Situation Room, sold the war successfully. He thought that Donald Trump, the United States military, would come in and finish off Iran, take out the regime, and now he sits here this morning with this memorandum of understanding anyway, with explicit language that says there can be no attacks on Lebanon.”“So the Israelis I speak with are in a state of panic, one former Mossad official said, literally, ‘I can't believe this is happening,’” he reported. “But in some ways they should have known better,” he explained. “And one analyst actually told me, ‘Look, you know, Benjamin Netanyahu decided to ride the tiger — that's Donald Trump. And the tiger just turned around and just bit him on the rear end.’”“And like many of us predicted he would, he continued, “Because Trump was no dedicated, you know, savior. He was not the messiah for Israel. He's too transactional.”“Let me just add one quick thing, Willie,” he insisted. “Let's not forget at the end of the Biden administration, if you calculate what President Biden did after October 7th, he gave the Israelis $18 billion in military aid. Yet somehow, he is seen as not a supporter of Israel. That was preposterous. And right now, I think the Israelis are realizing that Trump was not who they thought he was, and that this MOU actually puts them in a very precarious national security situation, particularly in terms of ballistic missiles and what to do about Hezbollah, a terrorist entity sitting on their northern border.” - YouTube youtu.be

Jun 18, 2026 - World

Donald Trump's highly controversial Iran peace deal is causing the Republican Party no small measure of angst, with conservative journalist David Drucker half-jokingly stating on MS NOW that the GOP is caught up in the throes of the “35 stages of grief" — a far cry from Elisabeth Kübler-Ross's "5 stages of grief" when death approaches.Appearing on “Morning Joe,” the conservative “The Dispatch” pundit attempted to explain how Republicans — with Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) leading the charge — are laboring to defend the president just moments after co-host Mika Brzezinski read off widespread criticisms of the president and his deal from GOP lawmakers and conservative media outlets.Asked what he is hearing, Drucker reported, “We've talked about this before, but, you know, there were so many Republicans in Congress and and center-right thinkers who have believed that after nearly 50 years, the action President Trump took going to war against Iran with israel was a courageous decision, was the right decision, and the United States needed to see it through.”“And they were very gratified by the president's policy here,” he added, “And now they're going through the, you know, the 35 stages of grief, which is ‘If this is true, it's going to be really bad. Well, I don't know if it's true because I haven't seen the text. I'm not going to react until I've seen the text. All right. Well, I've seen the text, and now that I've, you know, now that I've looked at the text, maybe it's really not so bad because look, he did say he'll bomb them if they don't follow through.’”“There are others who are just very honest about their disappointment, about their disappointment with both President Trump and the deal,” he added. “But it's a real mixed bag politically. I will just say the president boxed himself in here, because this is what happens when you don't make a public case for major military action. The president never asked for the support of the American people, for the support of Congress, for support from our allies. And so when things inevitably bog down, because we were only willing to do so much militarily for understandable political reasons, the president didn't have any allies and friends with skin in the game who were there to back up the policy and see it through. And that's part of why he ended up looking for a get out of jail free card here." - YouTubeyoutu.be