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Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu landed in Washington Monday for his first White House meeting with Donald Trump since the two leaders launched a joint war against Iran in February — a war that is now on a fragile, unilateral pause. Trump halted a 13-night US bombing campaign last Friday after his military commanders told him it had run its course, and after immense domestic and Gulf-ally pressure over surging oil prices and missile strikes on US bases.

The two men are no longer in lockstep. Trump wants an exit and has publicly floated new talks with Tehran. Netanyahu, up for reelection and eager to finish what he started against both Iran and Hezbollah, wants to keep fighting. 'We have a little difference,' Trump conceded Monday. 'But pretty close, yeah.' Israeli commentator Amit Segal put it more bluntly in Israel Hayom: 'It is clear to everyone that Israel has been put in the back seat.'

Iran, for its part, is not playing along with Trump's diplomatic framing. Tehran said Monday it still controls the Strait of Hormuz — which it choked during the war, spiking global energy prices — and is not seeking to resume negotiations. An Iranian source said Iran will halt attacks only as long as the US maintains its pause. Meanwhile Iran hanged two more men convicted over January protests, part of an accelerating domestic crackdown that has seen thousands arrested and at least 3,000 killed by the regime's own count.

Netanyahu will present Trump with Israeli intelligence on Iran's nuclear program and press to widen the Abraham Accords and lock in the framework deal with Lebanon over Hezbollah. But the strategic question hanging over the meeting is whether Trump lets Israel restart the war he just paused — with US midterms roughly 100 days away and the American public visibly tired of the fight.

The Trump administration on Monday asked the US Supreme Court to allow, for now, an executive order targeting mail-in voting that lower federal courts have repeatedly blocked. The emergency appeal lands roughly 100 days before the November midterms and marks Trump's most aggressive move yet to reshape voting rules before ballots are cast.

In parallel, Trump escalated demands that the Senate cancel its August recess until it passes the SAVE Act, which would require documentary proof of citizenship to register to vote federally. Senate Majority Leader John Thune pushed back publicly, telling reporters he needs the president to 'show me how this ends' given Democrats have the votes to filibuster.

The factual predicate for the push is thin. Study after study — including work by conservative think tanks — has found mail-in ballot fraud is vanishingly rare, on the order of a handful of cases per million ballots cast. Non-citizen voting in federal elections is likewise extraordinarily rare and already illegal. What the SAVE Act and the executive order would actually do is add documentary hurdles — birth certificates, passports — that millions of eligible Americans, disproportionately lower-income, elderly, and voters of color, cannot readily produce.

Coupled with a Shopify CEO's viral endorsement this week of a tiered voting system that would disenfranchise non-taxpayers, and Trump's other efforts to consolidate control over federal election machinery, the moment marks the most sustained assault on universal suffrage in decades. Whether the Supreme Court's conservative majority intervenes on the emergency docket — as it has increasingly done in Trump's favor — will help determine the ground rules for the November election.

A wildfire west of Bordeaux has torched more than 420 square kilometers in under four days — one of the largest blazes in modern French history — and is now threatening the vineyards that anchor France's most famous wine region. On the Cap Ferret peninsula, homes and beach resorts have been evacuated. French authorities ordered nearly 4,000 additional people out on Tuesday as an incoming heat wave threatens to break firefighters' fragile containment lines.

The fire has been extreme enough to generate France's first officially recorded pyrocumulonimbus cloud — a fire-driven thunderstorm whose lightning has ignited new blazes miles away from the main front. Across the border, the Madrid region is enduring what officials are calling its worst wildfire season on record. Combined, the fires have forced more than 300,000 evacuations across France and Spain.

The backdrop is a Europe that is simply hotter and drier than it used to be. The UK is entering its fourth heatwave of the summer with temperatures forecast at 35°C; England has recorded just 4.4mm of rain this month, tied for one of the lowest totals ever measured. July 2026 is on pace to be England's second-hottest month on record. These conditions are exactly what climate models have projected for the Mediterranean and western Europe for three decades — longer, hotter, drier fire seasons with more frequent extreme-behavior fires.

Beyond the immediate human toll, the economic damage is compounding. Bordeaux's wine industry, already struggling with falling global demand and climate-driven vintages, now faces smoke taint and destroyed vines. The fires are a preview of the new European normal: fire seasons that overwhelm firefighting capacity built for a cooler century.

The Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo has climbed to 3,200 confirmed cases and 1,405 deaths, the country's health ministry reported Sunday, with more than 125 new cases and 50 new deaths added in a single day. The case fatality rate — roughly 44% — is consistent with historic Ebola outbreaks and underscores how lethal the virus remains when it reaches populations with limited access to early treatment.

This outbreak is now the second-largest in Ebola's history, approaching the toll of the 2018–2020 eastern DRC epidemic that killed more than 2,200. Congo has faced 15 Ebola outbreaks since the virus was first identified along the Ebola River in 1976, more than any other country. The current crisis is spreading in regions with active armed conflict, damaged health infrastructure, and deep community suspicion of foreign responders — the same combination that drove the 2018 outbreak out of control.

Unlike a decade ago, effective countermeasures exist. The Ervebo vaccine, licensed in 2019, provides strong protection, and monoclonal antibody therapies (Inmazeb and Ebanga) can dramatically reduce mortality when given early. But vaccines and drugs only work if they reach patients, and reports from the ground suggest ring vaccination and contact tracing are lagging badly behind transmission.

The international response has been muted, in part because global public health capacity has been battered by US aid cuts, the withdrawal of the US from the WHO, and ongoing crises elsewhere. An Ebola outbreak of this size is not a local problem — it is a test of whether the post-2014 global outbreak response architecture still functions.

A 6.8-magnitude earthquake struck southwestern Japan on Tuesday afternoon, causing building collapses, fires, and dozens of injuries in Kumamoto Prefecture. The US Geological Survey placed the epicenter about 3 miles east of the city of Uto at 4:27 p.m. local time. Japan's national broadcaster NHK reported at least 50 people taken to hospitals.

'Power outages and fires are happening in some areas, and roads and bridges have been damaged and buildings collapsed,' Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi said in an initial statement. A tsunami warning was issued along parts of the Kyushu coast and later lifted. Emergency services are conducting search operations and assessing structural damage in a region still marked by the deadly April 2016 Kumamoto earthquake sequence, which killed more than 270 people.

Japan sits at the intersection of four tectonic plates and is one of the most seismically active countries on Earth. Its building codes and early-warning systems are among the world's best, which is why a magnitude 6.8 quake — an event that would be catastrophic in most of the world — results in dozens rather than thousands of hospitalizations. Aftershocks of comparable or larger magnitude are possible in the coming days and weeks, and officials warned residents in affected areas to avoid damaged structures.

Bryan Kohberger, the criminology PhD student who pleaded guilty last year to the 2022 stabbing murders of four University of Idaho students, filed a handwritten petition Monday asking a court to let him withdraw the plea and go to trial. Kohberger, 31, is currently serving four consecutive life sentences plus 10 years at the Idaho Maximum Security Penitentiary.

In the filing and in a separate statement to The New York Times, Kohberger alleged his defense team induced the plea through 'unkept promises' and 'blatant disinformation' — claiming they promised him unusually favorable prison conditions including contact visits and employment, while frightening him with 'elaborate lies of DR (death row) life.' He said attorneys failed to disclose or investigate evidence including an 'unknown hair in Chapin's hand,' and that they told him the plea 'need not be truthful, despite petitioner's vehement denial of actual guilt.'

The claims contradict what Kohberger himself told 4th District Judge Steven Hippler at his July 2, 2025 plea hearing, when he confirmed under repeated questioning that he was pleading guilty 'freely and voluntarily' because he was in fact guilty, and initialed a nine-page waiver saying no other promises had been made. Idaho law requires a defendant seeking to withdraw a post-sentencing plea to show 'manifest injustice,' a demanding standard rarely met.

The murders of Kaylee Goncalves, Ethan Chapin, Xana Kernodle and Madison Mogen shook the small college town of Moscow, Idaho, and the plea deal — which took the death penalty off the table — already divided the victims' families. A withdrawal attempt is likely to reopen wounds without much prospect of success, but the filing does raise questions about defense counsel conduct that a judge will now have to adjudicate.