The U.S. military completed its 12th consecutive night of airstrikes on Iran, targeting maritime assets, missile storage facilities, coastal surveillance sites, and air defense systems. Iran's IRGC retaliated by striking U.S. military bases in Kuwait and Jordan, with both governments confirming the attacks Thursday morning. Secretary of State Marco Rubio told reporters Iran is "going to pay a price" when asked whether Washington plans further escalation.
Secretary of Energy Chris Wright and Saudi Energy Minister Prince Abdulaziz bin Salman signed a historic "123 agreement" Wednesday, laying the legal foundation for a decades-long, multi-billion-dollar nuclear partnership between the two nations. The deal includes a potential path for Saudi Arabia to enrich uranium on its own soil, raising nonproliferation concerns on Capitol Hill. Congress gets a vote on the pact but would need a veto-proof majority to block it.
Tropical Storm Bertha made landfall in Louisiana Wednesday, bounced briefly offshore, and is now bearing down on Texas, with a second landfall along the northwestern Gulf Coast expected today. The storm carries 45 mph sustained winds and threatens 2 to 6 inches of rainfall across South Texas, with storm surge up to 3 feet in coastal areas. Tropical storm warnings stretch from the Alabama-Florida border west to portions of the Texas coastline.
OMB Director Russell Vought met privately with House Republicans Wednesday to press the case for the administration's sweeping SAVE America Act spending package. Speaker Johnson and Senate Majority Leader Thune are scrambling to avert a government shutdown while threading a needle between hardliners and moderates on a continuing resolution. House Democrats called any CR a blank check for what they termed Trump's "violent mass deportation machine."
Iran-backed Houthi forces attacked two Saudi oil tankers in the Red Sea Thursday, citing enforcement of their recently declared naval blockade against the kingdom. The strikes add a new front to the expanding U.S.-Iran conflict, placing critical oil shipping lanes under mounting pressure. President Trump also signaled that any nuclear deal with Saudi Arabia is now conditional on Riyadh joining the Abraham Accords.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov met Thursday on the sidelines of the ASEAN summit in the Philippines in the highest-level U.S.-Russia diplomatic contact in months. The half-hour meeting centered on Ukraine, with Rubio pledging a U.S. "constructive role" in ending the conflict while Lavrov demanded a halt to Western weapons shipments to Kyiv. The two sides reached no ceasefire framework, though they also briefly discussed the situation in the Persian Gulf.
Wildfires are tearing across Southern Europe, killing two French firefighters near Bordeaux and one Italian firefighter in Sicily as emergency crews battle blazes on multiple fronts. More than 10,000 people were evacuated overnight near Bordeaux alone, while a single fire in Spain's Guadalajara province has scorched over 32,000 hectares north of Madrid. The 2026 European fire season has now burned more than 254,000 hectares across the EU.
Researchers have found a way to revive vancomycin, a powerful antibiotic that dangerous bacteria have learned to defeat, by pairing it with a small molecule called pghi-4 that blocks the bacterial resistance mechanism. The approach sidesteps the need to develop an entirely new drug and could extend vancomycin's clinical usefulness against some of medicine's most feared drug-resistant infections. Antibiotic resistance kills hundreds of thousands of people globally each year.
China's Gravity-1 solid-fuel rocket successfully lifted off from a floating platform in the East China Sea Thursday, placing nine satellites into orbit. The mission showcases Beijing's expanding commercial and offshore launch capabilities, which reduce the land footprint required for rocket operations and increase operational flexibility. As space becomes an increasingly contested domain, China continues to demonstrate it can launch from virtually anywhere.
After Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce's July 3rd wedding at Madison Square Garden, one entrepreneurial New Yorker swept up cigarette butts, candy wrappers, a stray AirPod, and an ovulation test kit from the pavement outside the venue. He sealed each item in an airtight acrylic cube labeled with a clever play on the couple's initials and sold all 50 for $25 apiece — every cube sold out. It may be the most profitable garbage collection in New York City history.
