Global
On June 24, US President Donald Trump announced a truce between Israel and Iran following nearly two weeks of open warfare.
Israel began the war, launching a surprise offensive on June 13, with airstrikes targeting Iranian nuclear facilities, missile installations, and senior military and scientific personnel, in addition to numerous civilian targets.
In response, Iran launched a wave of ballistic missiles and drones deep into Israeli territory, triggering air raid sirens across Tel Aviv, Haifa, and Beersheba and numerous other locations, causing unprecedented destruction in the country.
What began as a bilateral escalation quickly spiraled into something far more consequential: a direct confrontation between the United States and Iran.
On June 22, the United States Air Force and Navy carried out a full-scale assault on three Iranian nuclear sites—Fordow, Natanz, and Isfahan—in a coordinated strike dubbed Operation Midnight Hammer. Seven B-2 bombers of the 509th Bomb Wing allegedly flew nonstop from Whiteman Air Force Base in Missouri to deliver the strikes.
BANGKOK, Thailand -- A deadly Emerald Triangle border feud between Thailand and Cambodia has worsened to include economic boycotts, frontier closures, disputed claims over Hindu temples north of Angkor Wat, and an embarrassing, trust-breaking leaked phone call between the two nations' leaders about Thailand's military.
Also at stake is Thailand's political stability and survival of its fragile, rival-packed coalition government which is denying perceptions of being obsequious and soft on Cambodia while the Royal Thai Army favors a strong response.
Claiming to defend their side of the frontier, Thai armed forces shot dead one Cambodian soldier on May 28 in jungle and scrubland known as the Emerald Triangle where eastern Thailand, northern Cambodia, and southern Laos meet.
The Thai-Cambodian border includes a no man's zone that is not officially demarcated, attracting human and wildlife traffickers, illegal loggers, smugglers, fugitives, and other criminals.
Twenty years ago, one day in June 2005, I talked with an Iranian man who was selling underwear at the Tehran Grand Bazaar. People all over the world want peace, he said, but governments won’t let them have it.
Donald Trump has opened the military door to an atomic apocalypse.
But it’s likeliest to come through the “Peaceful Atom Window.”
The 400+ atomic power reactors (94 in the US) now operating worldwide are all sitting ducks for low-tech attack.
Iran or any other nation or terror group, with or without a nuclear warhead, can blow apart any commercial reactor with a single drone.
The resulting apocalypse can be spreading as you read this.
Commercial atomic power makes nuclear warheads ridiculously obsolete. The Trump/Netanyahu attacks on Iran’s alleged bomb factories ae marginal at most to today’s atomic reality.
Once blown apart by a drone, earthquake, tsunami, human error, equipment failure or simple sabotage, any atomic reactor can irradiate a continent, an ocean… the planet as a whole.
All commercial reactors operating in the world today are without comprehensive private insurance.
They are sitting naked ducks…absurdly vulnerable to a simple low-level attack from a single combatant with a drone, mortar, instrument of sabotage.
During the 1967 Six-Day War, Pakistan did not just pray, and it didn't just issue shallow political statements, but it did what only a decent country would do. It sent its pilots to the frontline and to fly in the Arab skies and while some countries were watching from afar and talking about "neutrality" like what they are doing now with Iran, Pakistan, despite the distance, was closer to the heart of the battle.
The profound and unrelenting struggles endured by Palestinians should, by any rational expectation, have irrevocably concluded the Palestinian cause. Yet, the struggle for freedom in Palestine is at its zenith. How is one to explain this?