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Excess deaths in France, Belgium, Spain, and the Netherlands last month surpassed 4,600.

A centrist think tank offered to conduct an exclusive poll for Zeteo to gauge Americans’ attitudes about Medicare for All. Here’s what we found.

The post New York Hasn’t Raised Housing Allowances for Needy Residents in Decades. That’s Unconstitutional, a Lawsuit Says. appeared first on ProPublica.

The Trump administration is attacking journalists for reporting on President Trump ditching his new Qatari jet for security reasons. MS NOW’s Carol Leonnig reported Wednesday evening that the president abruptly swapped the new jet for his old Air Force One on his trip from the NATO summit in Turkey to the U.K. due to concerns about the aircraft’s defense systems. She noted the new Air Force One didn’t have the necessary communications and defensive capabilities for “safe travel amid Iran hostilities.”Leonnig’s post was angrily singled out by White House communications director Steven Cheung, even though multiple other outlets reported the same information. “Carol Leonnig is a liar and this article is complete Fake News. She has no idea what she is talking about. She says the White House declined to comment. Not true. We gave comment to The New York Times and many other outlets,” he wrote Thursday on X. “Carol is not a real journalist. A complete fraud.”Cheung never actually disputed any of Leonnig’s reporting in the post—he just called it fake news without offering up any response. And if his issue is with Leonning not attributing his comment, all he said to The New York Times on a similar story was “the new Air Force One is a state-of-the-art aircraft that has been fitted with high-level security protocols that ensure the safety of the president and his staff.” He also mentioned that “there are many enemies of America who have their sights on [Trump], and we use every tool at our disposal—including distraction and misdirection—to address those threats.” But none of that language addressed the reason Trump switched planes. Trump himself claimed rather unconvincingly that the Qatari jet was going to a U.S. military base in Europe “so the soldiers can see it.” In reality, the new jet simply doesn’t have the same command-and-control functions of the original Air Force One. And while experts have said that it would take years and billions of dollars to upgrade the Qatari jet’s defenses to the presidential level, the Trump administration did it in weeks—all before ditching it partway through its first official trip.

The Houston killing comes amid a sharp surge in ICE operations across the United States. A reported 10,000 people have been arrested by ICE in just 5 days. Devin Martinez , July 9, 2026

It was May 20, 2026, at one minute past midnight. I and two colleagues stood in front of the main gate of Vandenberg Space Force Base (VSFB), located along Highway 1 (AKA the Pacific Coast Highway), on the Central Coast of California. We were looking up to the night sky. Suddenly a large, tube-shaped object appeared, launched from the base, traveling southwest over the Pacific Ocean, with flames coming from its rear end. A delayed, rumbling roar arose behind it. We were briefly spellbound by the display, and lowered our protest signs to our sides. We were somewhat awed, somewhat afraid, and somewhat angered by the spectacle.

The US military said it has struck over 170 targets in Iran over the past two days.

Trump officials are on the hunt for the person who leaked details about a hostile meeting between the Pentagon and the Vatican earlier this year.In January, the Pentagon reportedly threatened an ambassador from the Holy See, days after the pope made antiwar remarks during his State of the World address. The U.S. ambassador to the Vatican, Brian Burch, told The New York Times Thursday that the meeting had been “grossly mischaracterized.” The 51-year-old co-founder of CatholicVote presumed the story came from the Vatican’s side, and personally called Cardinal Pierre for an apology for what Burch described to the Times as “an attack on the United States.”Burch told the national daily that he had also asked for the cardinal’s help in identifying “who was lying about the meeting.” The Times noted that Burch later posted a statement in which he claimed that Cardinal Pierre had “emphatically denied” reports of the confrontational exchange, and that the Vatican had confirmed the details of the meeting were exaggerated. The cardinal, however, did not respond to a request for comment from the Times. The Pentagon denied ever making such a threat.Pope Leo XIV has continually upset the president and a number of Donald Trump’s underlings through his relentless advocacy for world peace, particularly as it relates to the president’s warmongering. The Chicago-born pontiff has thus far railed against the White House’s lethal and unproductive attacks on small watercraft in the Caribbean, the sudden infiltration of Venezuela, and the escalating conflict in Iran, the last of which he said in June was not a “just” war.Trump, meanwhile, has not shied away from throwing his own fire at the religious leader. In May, Trump told conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt that he believed the pope was “endangering a lot of Catholics and a lot of people” by advocating for global peace and prosperity. “But I guess if it’s up to the pope, he thinks it’s just fine for Iran to have a nuclear weapon,” he said.Trump, however, has not done a very good job himself of stripping nuclear capabilities from Iran’s theocratic regime. Iran lacked a single bomb’s worth of uranium in 2018, three years after former President Barack Obama brokered the Iran nuclear deal to limit the country’s enormous uranium stockpile. But that changed later that year when Trump withdrew the U.S. from the pact and imposed a series of tough economic sanctions against the Middle Eastern country.By 2025, Iran had curated an 11-ton stockpile of enriched uranium, the whereabouts of which remain largely unknown. The total stockpile could create as many as 10 bombs if fully enriched, according to a 2025 assessment by the International Atomic Energy Agency.On Wednesday, Trump indicated that he would no longer be willing to negotiate with Tehran’s leadership, suggesting that—despite having been president from 2017 to 2021—he had only just now started to understand Iran’s theocracy.“I don’t want to deal with them anymore. They’re scum,” Trump told reporters at a NATO summit presser in Ankara, Turkey. When asked what had changed since the memorandum of understanding was preemptively signed last month, Trump said: “I got to know ’em.”