MIDDLE EAST - Israel and Lebanon have agreed to a fresh ceasefire which will boost Donald Trump’s broader efforts to strike a long-term peace deal with Iran. In a joint statement with the US, both Jerusalem and Beirut said the truce was contingent on Hezbollah withdrawing its fighters from Lebanon’s southern border with Israel. The Iranian-backed militants renewed attacks across the frontier on March 1, a day after the US-Israeli strikes began on Iran.

USA - Anthropic, the world’s most valuable AI start-up, has called for a global freeze in AI development and warned that humans risk losing control of the technology. The company behind the Claude chatbot offered to suspend work on more powerful systems if it could be assured that others would do the same. “If it were possible to effectively slow the development of this technology to give ourselves more time to deal with its immense implications, we think that would likely be a good thing,” executives at the company wrote. They compared the rise of powerful AI systems to an “arms control problem” and warned that there was a limited amount of time to rein in the technology. Anthropic recently surpassed ChatGPT maker OpenAI to become the world’s most valuable AI company with a $965 billion (£719 billion) valuation. It has withheld the release of its most powerful system, Mythos, from the general public due to fears it could be used to carry out devastating cyber attacks.

EUROPE - In what can only be described as the latest humiliating blow to the crumbling Pax Americana, gold has officially overtaken US government bonds as the world's top reserve asset. The FT reports that, according to a fresh report from the European Central Bank released Tuesday, bullion now accounts for 27% of global central bank reserves at the end of 2025 - up sharply from 20% the prior year. US Treasuries, once the untouchable king of the reserve world, have been knocked down to 22% from 25%. The euro's share remained flat at 15%. This isn't some organic portfolio rebalancing. It's a full-scale de-dollarization revolt years in the making, turbocharged by Washington's own weaponization of the dollar.

GERMANY - German Foreign Minister Johann Wadephul has blamed Berlin’s failure to secure a seat at the UN Security Council on his country’s superior moral positions. If only there were a German word for that… Germany failed to win a temporary seat on the UN Security Council for the first time in history on Wednesday, losing out to Portugal and Austria in the ‘Western Europe and Others’ group.

USA - INSANITY: New York State Democrats Pass Bill Replacing the Words “Mother” and “Father” with These Two Ultra-Woke Terms. Democrats in New York State have declared war on the nuclear family after passing a bill designed to kowtow to the radical pro-trans lobby. As The New York Post reported on Wednesday, the New York State Legislature this week passed legislation that would erase the terms “mother” and “father” from state child custody and parental laws in favor of two woke, gender-neutral terms. The terms that would be used instead? Gestating parent and non-gestating parent. This sounds like something straight out of the Babylon Bee.

USA - The US Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service confirmed the detection of New World Screwworm larvae in a calf less than 50 miles inland from the Texas-Mexico border. The flesh-eating screwworm maggots were found in the umbilical area of a 3-week-old calf in Zavala County, Texas. The reintroduction of the New World Screwworm has been feared by authorities in Texas for some time. The discovery in Zavala County poses a serious threat to livestock producers within the state and nationwide should the screwworm migration spread. As reported by Breitbart Texas’ Bob Price, officials in the state have braced for the threat as the pest’s northward migration progressed through Mexico towards the Lone Star State. “This will impact everybody in some form,” Miller told Breitbart Texas in an exclusive interview. “Livestock, wildlife, pets — even people. Ranchers, deer hunters, pet owners — get ready.” The devastating parasite makes its first appearance in the United States since its eradication in 1966.

ISRAEL - Thousands of people attended the 24th Jerusalem Pride Parade on Thursday, in honor of Pride Month. As part of the opening to the event, former prime minister Yair Lapid announced that in the first 100 days of the next government, they would pass a law ensuring that all couples in Israel would be equal. "Mother and father, father and father, mother and mother, all will have the same rights, all will be equal before the law," he said. "We stand here with the entire gay community today to say: The situation is not a given, reality is not a decree of fate," he added. "We are masters of our own destiny. If this government has a problem with LGBT people, then this government should go home, because the community is not going anywhere. Happy Pride Month. I am proud to be here with you."

DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC OF CONGO - More Than 1,100 Dead and No End in Sight. While Christians are being slaughtered and kidnapped on a daily basis in Nigeria, Christians are also being massacred in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). Like in Nigeria, the perpetrators are not Mennonites. They are Islamic extremists. Islamist terrorists killed 57 Christians over a week-long period ending June 2, 2026, in the Beni region of North Kivu, Democratic Republic of Congo. ISCAP has claimed the killing of at least 1,100 Christians in northeastern DRC since its campaign escalated in December 2024, and more than 6,500 since first pledging allegiance to the Islamic State in 2017. The pace of attacks in 2026 has been relentless. According to UNHCR, more than 7.3 million people are internally displaced in eastern DRC, the highest total in Africa and among the highest in the world.

USA - The House of Representatives on Wednesday voted 215-208 to end the war with Iran. This is the first time the House has voted to stop Trump’s military action in Iran. Four Republicans voted with the Democrats: Thomas Massie, Brian Fitzpatrick, Tom Barrett and Warren Davidson. The resolution is likely dead on arrival in the Senate. If it passes the Senate, Trump will veto the resolution. House lawmakers on Wednesday passed legislation designed to force President Trump to end the Iran War, marking a victory for Democrats and the constitutional purists who say the conflict is illegal without explicit congressional approval. Still, the vote represents a significant development in the political battle over the Iran War, putting Congress on the record condemning a conflict that has dragged on for more than three months — and rattled the global economy — with no clear end in sight.

RUSSIA - More than 40 patients have now been selected for Russia’s personalized cancer vaccine program, with the first treatments already producing a strong immune response, Russian Federal Medical-Biological Agency head and former Health Minister Veronika Skvortsova told RT’s Rick Sanchez on Wednesday. Speaking on the sidelines of the St Petersburg International Economic Forum 2026, Skvortsova said the treatment uses artificial intelligence as a key weapon against cancer. The vaccine is custom-made for each patient in a process that takes around 42 days. Scientists take material from the person’s tumor and blood, sequence the RNA, and use AI-driven predictive algorithms to compare the patient’s genome with that of the tumor in order to identify unique mutations. Once those targets are found, the vaccine introduces peptides that teach the immune system to recognize the same markers on malignant cells and selectively kill them, while leaving healthy tissue intact.

USA - Writing in the Chronicle of Higher Education, literature Professor Tyler Jagt told of an assignment for his rhetoric and writing class that asked students to read a 20-page paper. Not one student finished the paper. “It was the same length I had assigned for five years and the same length I had read without complaint as an undergraduate a decade ago,” wrote Jagt, who has taught literature and critical writing at Mercer University, James Madison University, and Wake Forest University. “When I asked why, a student answered honestly: It was too long, and she kept losing track of what the paper was about. This was not a remedial class: These were students who had cleared the admissions process and written essays good enough to get them here. Yet a routine academic reading assignment had defeated them.”

USA - “The world is deeply in need of moral leadership” on the issue of artificial intelligence, American tech expert and entrepreneur Eli Pariser told Vatican News, a couple of days after the publication of Pope Leo XIV’s first encyclical Magnifica humanitas, on safeguarding the human person in the time of artificial intelligence. “Right now, the people who are leading it are so frenzied by the technological race and the money that's at stake that they're really not spending enough time thinking about the deep ethical and moral questions,” he continued. In an interview with Vatican News, Pariser spoke about the impact that the encyclical is having in tech circles and beyond, and commended the Pope’s view that there is still time to develop AI in a way that benefits humanity. “I'm very grateful to the Pope and the Vatican for leading the conversation and reminding people that at the end of the day, this has to be about human dignity and human flourishing and not about technology,” he emphasized. “It is anthropological, not technological.”

USA - Google has requested permission to release up to 64 million infected mosquitoes across California and Florida in a “debugging” programme designed to slow the spread of disease. Flooding the states with tens of millions of mosquitoes may sound like a surprising way to reduce the number of the blood-sucking insects, but the bugs in question would all be sterilised males. Male mosquitoes do not bite and thus do not carry the risk of spreading disease posed by females. Instead the plan is for them to mate with females, who would then lay eggs that will never hatch, thereby reducing the number of mosquitoes generation by generation.

USA - The story is that some of America’s most powerful banks, two government-sponsored enterprises holding trillions of dollars in mortgage paper, and federal regulators at Treasury and the SEC have all agreed to play along — without the public ever being asked whether religious law from abroad should be reshaping how American capital moves. Major US banks including JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Wells Fargo, Bank of America, Citicorp, and Merrill Lynch now offer shariah-compliant financial products structured around Islamic religious rulings. Observant Muslims regard the charging or earning of interest, called riba, as forbidden. So a parallel set of financial instruments has been engineered to mimic the function of conventional loans, mortgages, and investment vehicles without technically involving interest. National-security analysts see leverage being accumulated by activist investors who answer to clerics rather than to fiduciary duty as ordinarily understood. And the American public, by and large, has never been told any of this is happening.

MIDDLE EAST - Netanyahu led Trump into war with Iran. Now he won’t let him end it. For Benjamin Netanyahu, a US-Iran peace deal that leaves the Islamic Republic in place and free to rebuild presents an existential threat. This prospect, more than anything else, explains why Israel’s prime minister ordered the rapid escalation of Israeli attacks on Lebanon in recent days, analysts have said. The bombing is designed to undermine the finely-balanced peace negotiations – something that appeared to bear fruit on Monday when Iran said it was “suspending talks” with the US.