House GOP leadership pulled Wednesday afternoon's vote series after Rep. Anna Paulina Luna threatened to block all procedural rules votes until the Senate passes the SAVE America Act, which would require proof of citizenship to register and voter ID to cast a ballot. "The floor is not going to be open this week," Luna told Punchbowl News, with Rep. Chip Roy joining her revolt. Majority Leader John Thune says the votes simply aren't there in the Senate.
President Trump escalated the standoff by scrapping his planned Capitol Hill signing of the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act, declaring "Today's Housing News Conference and Signing is hereby cancelled until such time as we pass the desperately needed SAVE AMERICA ACT." The move turns a White House win into leverage against Senate Republicans. The signing had been slated for Wednesday afternoon.
Trump said Wednesday that Iran is "agreeing to everything that I want" but issued a fresh warning that the U.S. would resume military action if Tehran reneges, saying "otherwise, we just go back and do what we have to do." Meanwhile, IAEA chief Rafael Grossi insisted nuclear inspections "are going to happen," directly contradicting Iranian claims that no visits are scheduled. The exchange underscores how shaky the new framework remains.
Energy Secretary Chris Wright said roughly 20 million barrels of oil moved through the Strait of Hormuz in the last 24 hours aboard 72 ships, restoring pre-conflict flow levels, while Iran has exported some 40 million barrels since June 15. Trump claimed oil prices broke back above $70 a barrel as the lanes reopened. The rebound eases fears of an energy shock that markets had braced for during the fighting.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio confirmed Israel-Lebanon negotiations are underway in Washington from June 23 to 25, stressing that Lebanese forces, not Hezbollah, should control Lebanese territory. The talks aim to firm up a fragile ceasefire that has frayed in recent days. State Department spokesman Tommy Pigott said Rubio and Lebanese President Joseph Aoun discussed the next round directly.
The Israel Defense Forces said Wednesday it struck two "armed Hezbollah terrorists" in the Ali Taher Ridge area of southern Lebanon, describing them as an immediate threat to Israeli troops inside the security zone. The strike lands as Washington tries to broker a durable Israel-Lebanon arrangement. It also follows Defense Minister Israel Katz's vow that Israeli forces will not pull out of the zone.
Iran has restarted crude oil exports from its primary export terminal after a roughly six-week pause, as implementation of the U.S.-Iran agreement gets underway. The resumption is one of the first concrete signs that the framework is translating into action on the ground. It dovetails with the surge of tanker traffic now moving through the Strait of Hormuz.
The Pentagon's All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office released documents describing an October 2023 case in which law enforcement watched a larger "mother orb" appear to release smaller objects over a two-day stretch, behavior investigators still can't explain. Harvard astrophysicist Avi Loeb, discussing the files on Fox, noted that roughly 40% of anomaly cases lack any reasonable explanation. Loeb framed it as both a national security concern and, if ruled non-human, potentially "the biggest discovery ever made by humanity."
NASA has greenlit an infrared space telescope designed to spot near-Earth asteroids, including those that approach from the direction of the sun and are invisible to ground-based observatories. The NEO Surveyor mission is targeted to launch in the first half of 2026 and would dramatically expand humanity's early-warning net for hazardous objects. It's a rare planetary-defense investment finally moving from blueprint to launch pad.
Divers in the Solomon Islands captured the first documented case of biofluorescence in a wild reptile after spotting a hawksbill sea turtle whose shell glowed red and green under blue light. Scientists believe the green glow comes from the turtle itself, while the red may be from biofluorescent algae living on its shell. It's a genuinely strange, beautiful reminder of how much of the ocean we still haven't seen.
