Top World News

Jun 23, 2026 - World

Abelardo De la Espriella, a right-wing lawyer who used to practice law in Florida, appeared to win his presidential bid in Colombia this week after securing an endorsement from President Donald Trump, and the journalists at Zeteo opted to shed light on his “eye-opening” background in a scathing report.“He Tied Firecrackers to Cats. Yes, you read that right,” reads Zeteo’s report published on Monday. “On a television show, De la Espriella confessed that when young, he tied firecrackers to cats to try to make them fly, but they ended up exploding. He first said he was an ‘innocent’ child at the time, then walked the story back, saying it was a bad joke. Sure.”Also a businessman, De la Espriella has “made a brand of flaunting his wealth,” Zeteo’s report reads, and is “often seen wearing tailored suits, fedoras, and fancy watches.” He practiced law in Miami, Florida as a defense attorney and “came to prominence” defending right-wing paramilitaries and "politicians accused of corruption.”De la Espriella also “sexually harassed” a journalist during an appearance on a popular radio show, Zeteo reported.On a popular radio show, De la Espriella made a crude boast about his anatomy, claiming it would win him women's votes, then showed a female reporter a suggestive photo of himself in sweatpants. The reporter said she felt "violated, harassed, and disgusted." A court ordered him to apologize publicly.De la Espriella received a "congratulatory call” from Trump after his apparent election victory, Reuters reported, with the president touting his endorsement record after De la Espriella’s election win Tuesday morning. De la Espriella’s victory represents a recent “shift to the right” in Latin America.

Jun 23, 2026 - World

President Donald Trump faced a wave of scrutiny for agreeing to lift sanctions on Iran and unfreeze Iranian funds as part of the tentative peace deal between Washington and Tehran, but on Tuesday, the president announced a new detail regarding the agreement, one that could risk jeopardizing peace talks going forward.“The Money and/or Sanctions that the U.S. Treasury is releasing goes into escrow, controlled by the U.S.A., and will be used for the purchase of food and medical supplies, exclusively from the United States, including Corn, Wheat, and Soybeans from our great American Farmers,” Trump wrote on his social media platform Truth Social. “These are things that are desperately needed by Iran. This is a humanitarian crisis, and I feel it is necessary to help, NOW, before it is too late. Talks are going well!”There is no mention in the 14-point memorandum of understanding of unfrozen Iranian funds or sanction relief being controlled by the United States. On the contrary, point 11 states that the United States would “make fully available for use the frozen or restricted funds and assets of the Islamic Republic of Iran upon the implementation of this MOU.”

Jun 23, 2026 - World

President Donald Trump's war on Iran satisfied no one, but two foreign policy experts say its failure may provide one enduring silver lining.Hawks who cheered the initial strikes are furious he stopped short of toppling the regime, doves are furious he started a war at all and, by nearly every measure, the campaign was a failure, wrote former Iran envoy Robert Malley and historian Stephen Wertheim in a new op-ed for the New York Times."Donald Trump has done the impossible once more," Malley and Wertheim wrote. "He went where his predecessors never dared, joining with Israel in a bid to overthrow or incapacitate the regime in Tehran. Having achieved neither, he appears to have accepted worse terms than he could have obtained through diplomacy. His war was a political albatross as well, garnering, at the start, less support from the public than any other major conflict in modern U.S. history.""Everyone is worse off and no one is happy: a fitting, extraordinary finish to a Trumpian war," they added.Missile defenses and aircraft damaged more than 20 U.S. bases, the Strait of Hormuz remains under Tehran's control and they have a nuclear program that, despite the bombing, can still only be resolved through negotiation. Iran, if anything, emerged emboldened, and yet Malley and Wertheim argued those failures might be the most useful thing to come out of the war."Those opposed to yesterday’s Iran war have a stake in preventing tomorrow’s, to break the entanglement of the United States in conflicts it regrets more quickly and more intensely the more they keep happening," the duo wrote. "This mission is hardly impossible. Military defeat — which is what the United States just suffered — has repeatedly compelled Americans to re-evaluate the severity of a threat they could not eliminate."The experience was painful enough that it may be hard to repeat, they argued. Just as Vietnam taught Americans that the "dominoes" wouldn't fall and Afghanistan taught them to separate the Taliban from Al Qaeda, a humiliating defeat — not persuasion or argument — has historically been what forces Washington to reconsider whether a threat was ever as dire as advertised.A clean, low-cost victory might have only emboldened the next intervention. It's precisely because this war went so badly — drained munitions needed elsewhere, alienated Gulf allies and fractured the U.S.-Israel relationship to the point of public rebuke — that hawks now have a weaker case for trying again.Trump, the analysis suggests, may end up as an accidental peacemaker, not because he sought restraint, but because he tested the limits of force against Iran and got burned. "Iran, by all rights, should not be one of America’s top problems," Malley and Wertheim concluded. "One day, one way or another, it will cease to be. The question is when, and at how terrible a price."

Jun 23, 2026 - World

Written in 1947, Kiyoshi Tanimoto’s account of the horrors of the atomic bomb attack will be published in August and is being made into a filmThe memoir of a man who survived the horrors of Hiroshima is to be published for the first time this summer after its discovery in a US archive.The 230-page memoir was written almost 80 years ago by Kiyoshi Tanimoto, who witnessed the city’s destruction after the atomic bomb was dropped in 1945. He will now be portrayed in a feature film by Takehiro Hira, whose acclaimed roles include the detective in the Netflix Japanese-British drama Giri/Haji. Pre-production begins in November, ahead of the shoot in February 2027. Continue reading...

Jun 22, 2026 - World

President Donald Trump appeared angered by a reporter's suggestion on Monday that his negotiation tactics with Iran may be giving the regime leverage over him. Trump held a press gaggle in the Oval Office after he signed an executive order to support America's quantum computing industry. While he was taking questions, one reporter asked Trump if he was willing to cause economic mayhem by striking Iran again, which Trump said was an option that he's considering. The back-and-forth escalated from there. "War with Iran could cause worldwide depression, as you noted, Mr. President," the reporter began. "Are you willing to risk economic catastrophe and strike Iran again?""Well, not the way I'm doing it. It won't cause depression," Trump replied. "Nuclear weapon supersedes depression. Depression is real bad. Nuclear weapons will cause depression."The reporter then asked if Trump's willingness to cause economic harm to Americans to continue fighting Iran gives the regime leverage over the Trump administration. Trump scoffed at the suggestion. "Their Navy is gone. Their Air Force is gone. Their leaders are all dead. Their country is a mess. Their economy is shot," Trump began, repeating his claims from the weekend that recent reporting from The New York Times is "all wrong" about the state of Iran. "The reason the news is doing so badly, or, put it another way, the reason why I won in a landslide even though I got 92% negative press is that nobody believes the press anymore, and they have to start believing," Trump said. "The Times and everybody else, they're grasping for straws."Trump then claimed that the U.S. economy is doing well and continues to "set records" in performance. That's despite the most recent inflation report showing that inflation hit its highest point since the COVID-19 pandemic last month. "So, when you ask a question like that," Trump said to the reporter, "it's so stupid."