Top World News

Aug 20, 2026 - World

Agreement is among largest third-country deportations driven by Trump administration’s immigration crackdown Twenty deportees from the United States arrived in Liberia on Thursday, as part of a new agreement that will see the west African country receive as many as 1,200 people under the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown.The group arrived at the Roberts international airport outside the capital, Monrovia. The Liberia-US agreement is one of the largest third-country deportation arrangements pursued by the administration since Trump returned to office last year. Continue reading...

Aug 20, 2026 - World

A vape distributor accused of illegally peddling nicotine products to kids has found a champion in Washington, D.C., a former ally of President Donald Trump's who is raking in millions as a lobbyist.His name is Roger Stone. Mother Jones reported Thursday that Stone has earned more than $4 million as a lobbyist for firms such as vape-distributor Ecto World under the new administration."Trump’s return to the White House has been a tremendous boon to Stone, who not long ago was claiming he had been nearly bankrupted by legal fees," Mother Jones reported. The report describes him as a "conspiracy theorist and political provocateur who was convicted of lying to Congress and witness tampering in the Trump–Russia investigation, sentenced to 40 months in prison, and subsequently pardoned by Trump."Stone’s lobbying firm Drake Ventures has signed up a slew of clients that include the cryptocurrency investor “Bitcoin Jesus,” indicted last year on federal fraud charges, and the military junta in Myanmar, reportedly paying Stone $50,000 a month.Crimes against humanity have spiked in the Junta since the military takeover in 2021, the report notes. As for Ecto World, it stands accused in New York of trying to get people hooked on nicotine. "New York State Attorney General Letitia James sued Ecto World and other vape companies for illegally distributing, marketing, and selling addictive candy- and fruit-flavored disposable nicotine products," the report states, "many produced in China, targeting sales to children and fueling the youth vaping epidemic."

Aug 20, 2026 - World

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent was presented a real head-scratcher on Thursday, he admitted at a press conference. "We've got a spike in oil prices today that I don't really understand," Bessent said during a White House address.Bessent made this bold claim as the international price benchmark for oil rose 2.4 percent to reach $93.78 per barrel just before noon, Thursday, according to CNBC. Oil prices reached their highest level in more than three weeks earlier this week after Iran pledged the Strait of Hormuz would remain closed, Reuters reported on Tuesday. On Wednesday, President Donald Trump took to Truth Social to threaten that he would announce the “MOST CRUSHING ECONOMIC OPERATION EVER TAKEN AGAINST ANY COUNTRY!”When Politico's Dasha Burns requested comment on the threat from a source inside the White House, she was told that Trump has decided to move away from military escalation and toward economic pressure."That means Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent is more involved in the war than Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth at this point," Burns explained. Yet, despite his position of power as both a war advisor and the leader of the department that balances (or tries to) the budget of the U.S. government, Bessent admitted he couldn't understand how continuing hostilities against a country that controls the Strait of Hormuz, one of the world's primary waterway passages for the oil trade, would cause oil prices remain high.This left viewers scratching their heads, too. "Feels like it’s his job to know," replied political commentator Chris Robinson, "but I understand Bessent is just a humble soybean farmer who’s estimated worth is half a billion dollars,."Another political commentator, Jim Stewartson argued that it was a question of intelligence."In addition to being an amoral greedmonster, " he wrote, "Scott Bessent is unbearably dumb."But HFI Research, whose substack on energy policy reaches roughly 19,000 readers, argued it was a question of honesty, writing, "If you are going to lie, at least try."

Aug 20, 2026 - World

Donald Trump's ballroom ambitions are running into trouble on two continents — and in Ireland, the obstacle is a snail.According to The Washington Post, Trump and his family have promised to build "the nicest ballroom in Ireland" at the Trump International Golf Links & Hotel in Doonbeg, a 12,000-square-foot hall seating 320 guests.However, unlike the fight in Washington, the roughly 300 residents of Doonbeg largely support the project. But the endangered Vertigo angustior snail, which lives in the resort's dunes, has long complicated development there. In February, planners approved the ballroom on the condition the Trumps submit a snail restoration plan.Days later, Liam Madden — a self-described "serial objector" known for derailing developments across Ireland, and who once helped kill a Trump seawall proposal at the same resort in 2020 — stepped into the breach and filed an appeal alongside Friends of the Irish Environment, which has disrupted the massive build-out."If there is a God in heaven," Madden said in July, "I will win the planning appeals and capitalize on it for notoriety." According to the Post, "He returned to the snail — this time focused on helicopters. The Trump Organization, a promotional video indicated, allows guests to be ferried in and out by helicopter. In materials published online, an aviation company, Executive Helicopters, said it has two 'heli landings' at the resort, one by the hotel and one on the golf course. To Madden, this was a 'fatal error': The Trump Organization neither mentioned the helicopters nor sought to measure their ecological impact. The ballroom proposal thus was 'tainted at law and beyond remedy,' he wrote."Geraint Ellis, an Irish planning law expert who reviewed Madden's appeal for the Post, agreed and said the activist "seems to have found some issues that are worthy of further scrutiny."Ireland's national appellate board is expected to rule by year's end, the Post is reporting.Meanwhile in Washington, the $900 million White House ballroom — complete with gold-colored presidential seals — is already under construction despite a D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals ruling this month calling the project "utterly lawless" for bypassing legally required reviews.

Aug 19, 2026 - World

President Donald Trump's hardening stance on Iran has rattled even senior Republican officials and generals in his own Department of Defense, with one calling him "a madman who can't be trusted," according to an insider.Veteran White House reporter Brian Karem, in a report for Raw America, identified how Trump has been weighing using nuclear weapons against Iran over the past two months."One unnamed Pentagon official confided to Raw America that the president’s threat that 'a whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again,' which he posted to his Truth Social early last month, was seen as particularly alarming within the DoD," Karem wrote."After what Trump said back in July, everyone should have known this is on the table," the Pentagon official told Raw America. "What do you think he meant by that?"The comments follow a chilling statement from former Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA). The former Trump MAGA ally claimed in a post on X Sunday that the president discussed the possibility of using nuclear weapons against Iran in recent strategy meetings and called him "pure evil."Greene argued that Iran was "nowhere near creating a nuclear weapon," and that the U.S. military had "killed their leaders and innocent little children in a school, and Iran has controlled the Strait of Hormuz ever since and punished the region for their part in it.""And now our government is the one actually discussing lowering the nuclear threshold in order to use nuclear weapons against Iran even though Trump claims he’s won the war like 40 times and says the U.S. controls the [Strait of Hormuz]," Greene wrote.She described why that was so troubling."Trump promised no more foreign wars, but may actually be the one who delivers a nuclear holocaust that would likely drag the entire world into major conflict, economic depression, and mass human suffering we’ve never seen in our lifetimes and maybe throughout history," Greene added.