About 57% of polled Americans also believe economy is worsening in grim portrait of cost of living crisis, according to Harris survey for the Guardian
Ninety-five per cent of Americans believe the US is suffering an affordability crisis, as many report trouble with the rising cost of groceries and gas, according to an exclusive new poll conducted for the Guardian.
The survey, conducted by Harris Poll, paints a bleak picture of how people feel about the US economy amid the war in Iran and ahead of the key midterm elections this fall.
Judge says group – including Elton John and Liz Hurley – failed to prove allegations of unlawful information gathering against Associated Newspapers Limited
In his 436-page written judgment, Mr Justice Nicklin said the claimants failed to prove the allegations of unlawful information gathering (UIG).
As a reminder, the claimants were Prince Harry, Elton John and husband David Furnish, actors Liz Hurley and Sadie Frost, campaigner Doreen Lawrence, and former Liberal Democrat MP Simon Hughes. The judge wrote in his summary:
The court rejected the attempt to prove the claims by broad inference where there remained a legitimate and realistic possible lawful source pathway, or where the article-specific evidence did not prove that the relevant information must have been obtained unlawfully…
The court also held that the parties were bound by the cases they had pleaded. It was not permissible, at trial, to replace a pleaded allegation with a different, and in many instances more serious, allegation of UIG… The claims are therefore dismissed.
Experts say cuts have hindered the response to DRC’s Ebola outbreak and resulted in ‘significant numbers’ of deaths
Elon Musk has an Ebola problem. SpaceX stock dropped precipitously after its initial public offering, and Tesla faces a wave of lawsuits. But instead of focusing on his companies, Musk has posted frequently on X about the US Agency for International Development (USAID), which he helped dismantle – or, in his words, feed into the woodchipper – last year.
“Elon’s USAID crash-out over the past week has been a thing to behold,” said Jeremy Konyndyk, a former top USAID official who oversaw the agency’s Ebola response in 2014-2015 and the president of Refugees International. “In a way, it’s helpful that Elon is doing this, because it’s putting attention back on the issue of what he did last year.”
Three days of public mourning in Tehran was a political spectacle Iran's leaders wanted the world to see, writes the BBC's international correspondent Lyse Doucet.
Turkey prepares for the NATO Summit in Ankara, Turkey on July 7 and 8. —Omer Taha Cetin-Anadolu via Getty Images
Is Europe capable of securing itself?
That is the singular question NATO leaders gathering in Ankara, the Turkish capital, for a crucial summit on July 7 and 8, will have to confront. President Donald Trump and the alliance leaders are convening in Ankara at a time of profound transatlantic tensions, widening intra-European fractures over how to manage President Trump, active wars on the European continent and along its strategic periphery from Ukraine in the east to Gaza, Lebanon, and the broader Middle East in the south.
Self-doubt and self-abasement, which have defined the European approach to Trump and European security, are no substitute for strategy. Ankara must be the moment Europe stops mourning the alliance it once knew and begins building the one it actually needs.
In the short term, Europe must strengthen the collective weight of European NATO members, not the European Union members or EU as an institution alone, within the alliance. In the medium to long term, however undesirable the prospect may be, Europe needs to prepare for a security order that is not dependent on American power and the old terms of the alliance.
Europe needs a continent-wide security architecture encompassing NATO members both inside and outside the EU. It needs a reformed and expanded engagement with its Eastern neighborhood—Ukraine, Moldova, Georgia, and the Western Balkans—and with its Southern neighbourhood, stretching from North Africa and the Sahel through the Levant to the Persian Gulf.
And Europe needs an honest reckoning with an uncomfortable truth: any post-American security framework cannot simply replicate the existing NATO-centric order, which rests on strategic clarity, institutional permanence, and a shared threat perception.
Building a new NATO
A new security architecture in which the American role is reduced or redefined should move Europe to adapt to the present and prepare for the future. Europeis fearful of the future and relatively resistant to the ongoing global reordering, but the Global South is more hopeful about the future and more open to structural global change.Europe wants its future to resemble its post-World War II past. Major countries in Asia, the Middle East, and Africa—and the US—have moved on.
Hakan Fidan, the Turkish foreign minister, recently emphasized the importance of NATO’s official mantra for this summit, laying the ground for NATO 3.0—a milestone in the alliance’s history. The framework is instructive: NATO 1.0 describes the alliance’s Cold War rationale, designed to address a conventional, state-centric threat embodied by the Soviet Union.
NATO 2.0 describes the post-Cold War context, in which the alliance had to pivot toward non-state threats—most notably when, for the first time, NATO invoked its collective defense clause, Article 5, following the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks by al-Qaeda, acting in defense of the US against a non-state actor.
NATO 3.0 signals the alliance’s adaptation to today’s changing global order. This is a call for both cognitive and geopolitical adaptation, and it falls most heavily on NATO’s European members. Any continent-wide framework for European security must begin by building closer, more structured cooperation not only among NATO’s key EU member states but also among its non-EU member states: the United Kingdom, Turkey, and Norway.
An EU-centric approach to European security will not deliver a continent-wide new security order. Exclusion of non-EU states—the UK, Turkey, Norway, and some Western Balkan countries—will lead to more rivalry and fragmentation. France’s exclusion of the UK from the Security Action for Europe defence program already backfired.
This holistic logic must extend beyond geopolitical matters to encompass new defense industry initiatives, energy security, and supply-chain redesign. There have been encouraging developments: almost all European NATO members have increased their defense budgets. But the new moment requires a holistic understanding of both “security” and “Europe.”
New boundaries of European security
Europe must fundamentally rethink its engagement with its proximate security environment. The future of European security will be shaped as much by developments across its broader periphery as by those at its center. These two phenomena are intimately interconnected. And Europe will have to summon the political will to overcome potential resistance from far-right and populist parties to this strategic agenda. To respond effectively, Europe will have to summon the political will toovercome resistance from far-right and populist parties to this strategic agenda.
Both of these dimensions of Europe’s proximate security environment will be high on the agenda in Ankara, including renewed commitments to Ukraine. President Trump has expressed frustration over what he sees as insufficient European support during the Iran war. Europe, for its part, is alarmed by the prospect of American abandonment of Ukraine. Europe’s strategic periphery is not only integral to European security but is actively deepening transatlantic tensions and sharpening intra-European divisions.
Yet European strategic thinking is dangerously skewed toward its Eastern neighborhood, above all Ukraine. Support for Kyiv is imperative not only for the defense of the country, but also for the security of the continent. Europe, however, needs to adopt a wider conception of its neighborhood. In today’s European strategic imagination, geopolitics begins in Russia and ends in Ukraine. The continent risks becoming a single-issue actor, as has been painfully evident in Europe’s near-total absence from its Southern perimeter stretching from North Africa through the Levant to the Persian Gulf. The Iran and Gaza wars have thrown that absence and European strategic impotence into sharp relief.
Still, engagement with the Southern perimeter remains integral to European domestic political order and to European security itself. Consider the Syrian civil war: the resulting refugee crisis and the spread of jihadist radicalism across the Mediterranean provided fuel for far-right parties across the continent. What originates along Europe’s Southern strategic perimeter does not stay there. It travels, in the form of people, ideologies, and political shocks, directly into the heart of European politics. The Southern perimeter has the potential to redefine politics at the center, whether Europe chooses to engage with it or not.
It is long overdue for Europe to devise new strategies toward its proximate security environment, above all toward the Southern perimeter. The absence of a shared engagement strategy not only advertises Europe’s strategic vacancy in the face of rapid transformation across both its Eastern neighborhood and its Southern strategic perimeter.
It also feeds intra-EU rivalries and intra-NATO rivalries. This has been evident in the competing agendas of France and Italy in Libya, and in the clashing postures of Turkey and France in Libya and the Sahel. These contestations expand the room for Russia and China to operate across the Southern perimeter.
For many years, the prevailing expectation was that Europe would transform its neighborhood and remake it in its own image. The opposite has occurred. Both the Eastern neighborhood and the Southern perimeter are redefining Europe, and not in ways Europeans anticipated or desired. Going forward, the relationship between Europe and its broader proximate security environment will be a story of mutual transformation.
The Eastern neighborhood will not simply be stabilized and absorbed into European structures, and the Southern perimeter will not be reformed in Europe’s image. Both will continue to shape Europe as surely as Europe seeks to shape them.
The rise of minilateral diplomacy
The question of how best Europe can be present and effective across this dual proximate security environment forces a deeper issue: how best can Europe advance its security interests there?Conventional responses point to collective and institutional frameworks as the answer. But such frameworks may prove both unattainable and even undesirable.
The security architecture emerging from a redefined or reduced American role will have to be more variegated, ad hoc, issue-based, and flexible, resting on different forms of minilateralism: small coalitions of relevant states organized around specific crises, whether in the Eastern neighborhood, along the Southern strategic perimeter, or elsewhere.
Consider the E3 format—France, Germany, and the UK—which emerged in 2003 to negotiate with Iran over its nuclear program. That issue-based minilateral arrangement paved the way for the signing of the Iran nuclear deal in 2015, a landmark European diplomatic achievement.
The contrast with Europe’s near-total absence from current diplomatic efforts to resolve the renewed crisis with Iran, a country that sits at the intersection of its Southern perimeter and Europe’s most sensitive energy and migration corridors, is jarring. The Coalition of the Willing for Ukraine represents another such platform, operating outside both NATO and EU institutional frameworks, for coordinating European responses to the war in the Eastern neighborhood.
These minilateral models point toward the architecture of a post-American European security order: flexible, issue-specific, coalition-based, and applicable across both the Eastern neighborhood and the Southern strategic perimeter. In Ankara and beyond, NATO’s European members must do two things simultaneously: strengthen the European pillar of the existing NATO structure and begin preparing for a new European security architecture in which the American role is downsized and redefined.
The Ankara Summit should serve as Europe’s graduation ceremony: the moment the continent accepts full responsibility for its own security and asserts itself as the center of gravity not only for its Eastern neighborhood, from Ukraine and Moldova to the Western Balkans and the South Caucasus, but equally for its Southern strategic perimeter, from the Maghreb and the Sahel through the Levant to the Persian Gulf. Europe cannot afford to be a single-flank power in a multi-front world.
A spotted lanternfly stands in front of the skyline of New York City in August 2023, in Weehawken, New Jersey. | Gary Hershorn/Getty Images
Last summer, I was standing on a block near my house when I saw a very distinctive bug skittering up a tree trunk. It had a polka-dotty wing, with red underneath. It was, unmistakably, an invasive spotted lanternfly.
These are all over Brooklyn — they took off here around 2020 and 2021. And I knew what I was supposed to do in this situation: kill it.
Key takeaways
Ordinary people have been told to kill the invasive spotted lanternfly, and many have embraced the task. But the bugs haven’t caused as much damage as scientists first feared, and eradicating them was never a likely option.
There’s a moral cost to taking insect life. Three philosophical frameworks could help us decide how to act here: consequentialism (considering outcomes), deontology (considering motivations) and virtue ethics (considering what’s good, and what a good person would do).
Even after all of that, there might be no action that feels perfectly right. Luckily, there’s a name for the bad feeling that’s left behind after you do something you’ve decided is good: “moral residue.”
Following orders, I ran after it and inelegantly tried to hike my leg up the tree trunk to stomp it dead. A neighbor I didn’t know yelled at me from down the street, something like: “Get it! Get the lanternfly!”
I didn’t know quite how to respond because, actually, I’d been feeling ambivalent. On the one hand, I like being part of a civic group project, and it is satisfying to squash a bug. But I also wanted to say something like, “Isn’t it weird that we’re all happily participating in a campaign to kill living creatures? Something about it just feels wrong.”
Lanternfly season is now upon us. And I’m once again going to be faced with a moral question that comes up repeatedly in conservation, when we’re forced to choose between different types of beings and their lives: Should I personally be killing these invasive lanternflies? And what is the right way for any of us to think through that kind of decision, anyway? So this year, I enlisted the help of an environmental scientist who is also deeply schooled in moral philosophy to help me figure this out.
The lanternflies are here. Now what?
Around 2004, lanternflies landed — from their native habitat in China, India, and Southeast Asia — in South Korea. And they did a lot of damage there. Mostly to grapevines, but also to apples and other tree fruit, to ornamental trees, and to timber trees. Then, in 2014, the bug was detected in the United States, in Pennsylvania.
Non-native species arriving in new places are not always a forever problem, but the worry is that a non-native species without natural predators can get out of control. They can displace other species or, in the case of lanternflies, potentially kill a lot of trees.
So Pennsylvania took serious steps to manage the lanternflies, such as quarantines and pesticides. But the containment measures didn’t totally work. And when the general public got wind of the problem, some of them started taking matters into their own hands. (One enterprising individual even blasted some lanternflies with a blowtorch.) By 2018 and 2019, despite the efforts to stop their spread, the lanternflies landed in the city of Philadelphia, about 60 miles away from where they’d first been detected. And in the summer of 2020, amid everything else going on, their populations were exploding.
There’s footage of the bugs absolutely blanketing the sidewalk at the entrance of an unlucky Philadelphia Chipotle. There are photos of them wrapping around the trunks of Pennsylvania trees. And ordinary people in Philadelphia fought back — as they’d been told to! That summer of 2020, the Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture posted on Facebook about the lanternflies, saying that people should “squish their guts out any time you see them.”
A kill order.
People got…very into this. Stomping. Squishing. But — and here’s where it gets tricky — it doesn’t seem like the individual stompers have had that much of an actual impact on lanternfly population levels.
Scientists I talked to said that the point wasn’t to eradicate the bugs as much as slow their spread, to give other places more time to prepare. If you look closely, you can see that the public outreach campaigns in Pennsylvania, and eventually New York, also recommend things like reporting lanternflies if you see them outside of the quarantine zone (in Pennsylvania, you can even call the hotline at 1-888-4BADFLY) and scraping away egg masses, which is more efficient than stomping individual bugs.
When I started to hear about lanternflies in New York City, though, it seemed like those nuances had gotten lost. People were kind of just stomping with abandon — even with a sense of glee.
But there werealso signs that people were conflicted about the kill orders. A friend told me that, in the summer of 2021, she saw someone running after a lanternfly, yelling out, “The New York Times told me to kill you!” I personally know a couple of people who gave up stomping. The question even made it on Jimmy Fallon, where comedian Kate McKinnon winked openly at the audience while pretend-promising to kill the bugs the next time she saw them.
People were starting to wonder why exactly we had to kill the lanternflies, which are, quite frankly, gorgeous. And actually, the science was getting more murky on this question, too. The initial worries about how the lanternflies might kill all these trees and crops? Those have not panned out. As of now, in the US, the bugs are mostly a problem for grapes and, therefore, for grape growers. The damage they can do at vineyards is real, and there is still an argument to be made around making sure that they don’t expand to new places, where they might be even more destructive.
These past couple of summers, I have shared Kate McKinnon’s ambivalence about stomping lanternflies and how happy we all seem to be to comply with the kill orders. But this year, I wanted to face my ambivalence head-on — make a moral choice I can live by. So I called up Chelsea Batavia, an environmental scientist who has thought and written a lot about these issues. And when I did, I learned more than I had bargained for about the ethics of conservation — and of decision-making in general.
Bugs, choice, and “moral residue”
As I was thinking through my decision about whether or not to kill lanternflies this summer, if they should be so unlucky as to cross my path, I read through several different papers and articles. And there was one that I kept thinking about, which had been written by Batavia. She lives in Washington State, where she now works in government. (She’s representing her own views here, not the state of Washington.) Back when she was a PhD student at Oregon State University, studying ecosystem management and environmental ethics, she got interested in moral dilemmas in conservation. People who care about conservation are mostly trying to do the right thing, but sometimes, they face conflicting moral demands.
“You know, it’s challenging,” she told me when I called her up. For example: “Should we be killing barred owls to save spotted owls?”
This happened in the Pacific Northwest starting in 2013. Images of the bodies of invasive barred owls that had been killed in the name of conserving another species made people uncomfortable. And Batavia gets that. “It’s like, ‘thou shall not kill,’” she told me. But when you dig into the details, it gets more confusing. “We can think about it as an abstract, but at the end of the day, we are making decisions. We’re acting in the context of particulars, right? And once you get into those particulars, these high-level, ’Yes, we should kill,’ or, ’No, we should not kill’…there’s too much nuance.”
Batavia started thinking deeply about the ethics of this kind of situation. And she agreed to help me think through my version of that with the lanternflies.
People were kind of just stomping with abandon — even with a sense of glee.
“I guess a first response is that I think it is grossly inappropriate for anybody to be killing gleefully,” she told me.
This seemed like a very reasonable place to start. A lot of my discomfort is about how the killing can feel like this big collective game. But even if you put gleeful killing aside, there is still the question of killing at all. Batavia suggested looking into the world of “normative ethics,” which is about helping us choose what to do. It has three main frameworks we can consider. Number one is consequentialism.
“Consequentialism says, very coarsely put, the right action is the one that produces the best outcomes. So the focus is on what happens,” she explained.
In the case of the lanternflies, there’s one big obvious outcome: “We’re killing life,” says Batavia.
But on the flip side, humans are conscious and feel pain, and humans can be harmed by lanternflies. Especially humans who grow grapes. So that’s in the “kill them” column. Batavia pointed out a whole world I hadn’t thought of, also in the “kill them” column: If I stomp on lanternflies now, then maybe I’m preventing people in California or other states from having to make this decision. I’m also preventing the lanternfly’s future children from being killed.
“How do we weigh the value of a potential life that never was against the life that is here right now?” she asked. “I think that consequentialism is a useful tool for thinking through things.” But, she notes, it’s not a cure-all for decision making. “There’s a lot of uncertainty, and there are a lot of types of outcomes that can’t be quantified — and even if they could, they would not be comparable. So, I think that’s not helpful for you making your decision to try to make a calculation based on the best outcomes.”
I was relieved to hear this. Part of me thought I had to have all the information in order to responsibly make this decision — read all the appendices of all the studies. But that’s not necessarily required in order for me to make an ethical choice. It might even be a way for me to avoid a difficult decision. Though Batavia did say, it’s of course important that scientists keep learning more about outcomes. Like, if it turns out that the lanternflies making it to California is definitely going to cause mass human famine, that could really change my moral calculation. But for the moment, we decided to leave consequentialism aside.
The second framework Batavia told me about is deontology, which means “the science of moral duty.” It focuses on the intention behind my action. Why am I doing it?
“When you talk about feeling like you’re participating with your community and doing something to support your hometown, that to me sounds a lot like a deontological claim,” Batavia said. “You’re thinking about your intention. Your motivation is not to be cruel and kill lanternflies. Your motivation is to be a good neighbor, to make that connection, so to me, that’s not irrelevant. That is something to pay attention to.”
Okay, so we put those issues into the mix. And then, framework number three is called virtue ethics. It is a really old branch of normative ethics that essentially says that virtues should guide your actions.
“Aristotle talked about virtues being things like courage and temperance,” Batavia told me. “The idea is then, as you are moving through your life and you have to make moral decisions, you do what a virtuous person would do.” But: “The reason why this was not very popular as we got into the Enlightenment and we were looking for rules, it’s, like, that’s not a rule.”
There’s definitely something to be said for rules, but this flexible framework seems useful to me, too. Because there actually are multiple reasonable ways to think about this. Like, maybe a virtuous person would take on the task of killing bugs on behalf of their community. Or maybe a virtuous person would decide that the principle of protecting life is the most important thing here — gleeful killing of creatures can be a slippery slope. The important thing is to think about what’s actually good, and then try to take action to get there.
I also realized I had been assuming that I needed to make an ironclad decision that I could never violate — I think because I wanted to make sure I wasn’t letting myself off the hook. But it’s also true that there’s no law that says I always kill lanternflies or never do. Maybe I’d been looking for something overly simple.
“When I see work in conservation ethics — and a lot of ethics in general — it tends to be quite definitive. It says, like, ‘this is right,’ ‘this is wrong,’ and I really like language that gives us a way to say that it’s not that simple,” Batavia told me.
When she was getting her PhD, she felt like she really needed language like that to describe these conservation moral dilemmas, like the one with the invasive owls. “So I started snooping through some really gnarly moral philosophy stuff,” she said. She was “Looking for any scholarship that acknowledges that basically, moral ambiguity is a thing, that there’s this gray zone,” she said. “And that’s how I found this language around moral residue.”
The important thing is to think about what’s actually good, and then try to take action to get there.
Moral residue describes the feeling that’s left behind when you make what you think is the best ethical choice…and it still just feels bad.
“ It’s an emotional response, actually, which is super interesting, because moral philosophy puts a high premium on the mind, on rationality, on logic, on thinking, and deliberation,” she said. “So it was really interesting that an emotional signal is given language.”
Allowing my emotions into the room was clarifying. I’d had an idea that, if I still felt bad about my decision, that meant I hadn’t arrived at the right decision. But actually, I realized that I might just feel bad about both options — and I still have to choose.
“One thing moral residue is not meant to do is let anybody off the hook,” Batavia cautioned. “There is no ‘no-action’ option. You either kill them or you don’t. And I think you’re probably going to have to sit with some sort of discomfort either way.” But she thinks wading into the complexity is the right way to handle things. “That’s a responsible way to be, as a free, willing moral agent in the world,” she told me. “Like, if that’s not what we’re doing here as people, then I guess I’m not sure what we’re doing.”
Finding the best “good”
By the end of our conversation, I knew that Batavia wasn’t going to tell me what to do. But I did ask her what she would do if the lanternflies got to Washington.
“If they get to Washington, I’m definitely going to learn more,” she said. “But I think that this is where I would acknowledge my unwillingness to accept that personal burden of taking a life.”
She said she wouldn’t stomp them.
“And that would be a loss — because I would recognize that I do have an obligation for all the reasons that we’ve already talked about, why it might prevent future moral injury. But I think my reverence for life is probably a little bit too strong of a signal for me at this point.”
My conversation with Batavia helped me make my own decision. When the lanternflies come out this summer, I am going to stomp them. That’s not where Batavia landed for herself, but she modeled a way of making the decision that accepts the moral residue and makes the choice based on what feels most important to her. For me, the communitarian value of helping people in my region really matters. But, I also accept that means I’m going to be taking insect lives, and that my individual actions actually don’t have that much of an impact. I’ll have to live with the bad feeling that brings — the moral residue.
There is one big thing that I’m going to force myself to do differently from last year. This summer, if someone shouts out encouraging words as I go in for the kill, I’m going to make myself speak up about my discomfort. To say something like, “I actually hate killing these bugs. Isn’t it a rough trade-off that we’re being asked to make?” Because I think that having a weird, honest conversation with a stranger about something that matters might also be good in itself.
Tottenham Hotspur Stadium, London Fans and cynics are putty in the boyband’s hands as the lads lark their way through a catalogue of tracks that ricochet from hard rap to buttery pop
The 2001 film Josie and the Pussycats is about America’s conflation of art and consumerism at the turn of the millennium. But it could just as easily be about the K-pop industrial complex, grinding out act after act to see what sticks (sometimes with a lack of care for the art or the artists). The film culminates with nefarious label execs selling branded headsets that broadcast subliminal advertising messages directly into fans’ brains.
It’s a film that comes to mind while watching BTS play their first UK show in seven years, an unbelievably enjoyable spectacle of pyro and panoptical staging, and the purest distillation of what makes a boyband precision-engineered to capture fans’ hearts. BTS are the biggest K-pop group in the world. With more than 40m albums sold, they have a fanbase so fervent it is called the Army. This is the band’s first tour since a three-year hiatus for each member to complete 18 months of compulsory military service – marked by a new album, Arirang – and it’s hailed by activations across the capital including a London Eye takeover. A cynical mind might think the in-the-round staging provides more opportunity to sell expensive pit tickets. A cynical mind might see the brands blacked out on the water bottles onstage and think … “clearly Fiji Water didn’t cough up sponsorship”. A cynical mind might behold the light-up “Army Bomb sticks” wielded by the crowd and think … “are those mind-control devices?”
Result of court case against Associated Newspapers Limited expected this afternoon
Prince Harry and six other high-profile claimants have lost their claim against Associated Newspapers Limited, the Daily Mail publisher. The written judgment is here. We are just combing through it to give you some of the key lines…
The high court judgment is expected shortly. There is no court hearing but a written judgment will be published online by Justice Nicklin instead. Stay with us as we bring you the latest.
Blasts did not interrupt French president’s visit but are setback for Syrian leaders’ attempt to project stability
Explosions rocked Damascus near the hotel where French president, Emmanuel Macron, was staying on Tuesday, wounding at least 18 people, Syrian authorities said.
Macron was in the presidential palace for a meeting with the Syrian president, Ahmed al-Sharaa, when two improvised explosive devices detonated near the Four Seasons hotel where Macron was reported to be staying.
Graham Platner is facing growing pressure to end his campaign for U.S. Senate in Maine after Politico reported an allegation of sexual assault. Platner has denied the claim.
Iran said it had targeted more than 80 U.S. military facilities in Bahrain and Kuwait, after the U.S. launched strikes in response to attacks on commercial ships in the Strait of Hormuz.
The Bank of England is planning to loosen capital requirements for major UK lenders, even as policymakers expressed concern about the threat to financial stability from rapid AI developments and debt-fuelled stock investments.
The central bank said on Tuesday it was looking to remove and loosen some rules introduced after the 2008 financial crisis that determine the size of the financial cushion required to absorb losses and protect consumers and taxpayers when things go wrong.
A Perth man has spent five days fighting for his life after a robot vacuum cleaner explosion set fire to his home.
Lachie Perrem, aged in his 20s, was taken to hospital on Thursday with life-threatening burns from a blaze that left his fiancee and housemates without their home.
A Ukrainian woman believed to have set off a bomb targeting a tycoon with links to Russia has been found dead with gunshot wounds in a killing apparently carried out by a Ukrainian spy, it is claimed.
Many of the millions who turned out for funeral wanted to show their opposition the killing of their leader, regardless of their broader views of the regime
As the multipurpose, multinational funeral of Iran’s former supreme leader Ali Khamenei moved to the Jamkaran mosque in the holy city of Qom, and then to Najaf in Iraq, Iran’s leadership was weighing the mandate it had been given by the millions who have taken to the streets of Tehran over the past three days.
Some hailed the moment as a referendum from the streets showing support for the clerical establishment, and called for the strategy of confrontation with the west to be intensified. Others said it was more about a wider national pride that was conditional on demands for change and an end to the war being met.
The bottom line: Try to see a connection with your neighbors as an investment in your health and happiness, not a chore. | Laura Simonati for Vox
As a 30-something who works remotely, I’ve gone days without speaking to another human. And after living in the same apartment complex for four years, I’m ashamed to admit I don’t know a single one of my neighbors.
My experience isn’t totally aligned with the rest of the country. A 2025 Pew Research report found that about two-thirds of US adults know at least some of their neighbors. But a lot of those folks are older adults in suburban, home-owning environments, the report showed, and they’re more likely to maintain relationships with the people next door. Millennials (aka me) and Gen Z, on the other hand, aren’t nearly as likely to know who lives beside them, data suggests.
There are some good reasons for this: A lot of Americans live in car-dependent places that can reduce opportunities for spur-of-the-moment socializing with people in our periphery. Many neighborhoods also have limited tenure rates, research shows, meaning that people are less likely to be integrated into communities long enough to develop any kind of meaningful connections. Meanwhile, the pandemic led to a decline in community life, and social distancing may have cemented more lasting solitary habits overall. And getting to know your neighbors in our current political climate can be stressful; if you’re a Black or queer person or an immigrant, for example, knocking on a rando’s door might feel like a naive or even dangerous act when you haven’t a clue who is on the other side.
Unwillingness to chit-chat while taking out the trash undoubtedly makes for a less buzzing social life, but as Daniel P. Aldrich, Dean’s Professor of Resilience at Northeastern University, told Vox, refraining from community interaction isn’t just isolating; it’s dangerous.
“The importance of neighbors literally cannot be understood until we recognize how much of our health and our lives depend on them,” he explained. While a large chunk of adults rely on social media and digital communication to meet our social needs, Aldrich said that “if anything goes wrong…those online communities that we are so wedded to can’t do anything at all.”
Aldrich points to Hurricane Katrina as an example. He and his team found that communities with more social capital — aka neighborhoods where people actually knew, and cared for, each other — were more resilient following disaster. “For those evacuees, having strong social ties in the neighborhood was one of the best predictors of good mental health,” Aldrich said, adding that his own family living in New Orleans in 2005 was ultimately kept alive by their neighbors’ quick actions.
Here’s how to get a relationship with the people closest to you blooming, an endeavor that might save your life — or just save you a trip to the store when you run out of sugar.
Start small
Face-to-face interaction is paramount for everyone’s health ; this is a well-documented fact. But as Saba Harouni Lurie, a licensed therapist and founder of Take Root Therapy in Los Angeles, told Vox, if you’re nervous about talking with a neighbor, that’s totally understandable. “Most of the people that are in the world around you are also wanting more connection,” she explained. “I know that it’s scary, and I don’t want to invalidate that it’s scary. I can so appreciate the fear of rejection. It is really vulnerable to put yourself out there.”
Lurie advises starting small. “Give yourself a chance to say, ‘I’m going to say hello to 10 people in the next week or month and keep track of how many say hello back,’” she noted. “That can be a way to test the idea, ‘Is this as scary as I feel that it is?’ I would really imagine most people would be receptive and even eager to start connecting.”
When Leigha Bone, 39, first moved into her Mesa, Arizona, home, she made it a point to wave to everyone she passed on the street. “Even if they seemed reserved or standoffish, I would shove down my ego and decide that I would be positive, charming, and friendly,” she told Vox. “I accepted that I might be rejected or embarrassed but kept that nice, Ted Lasso/Michael Scott energy.”
You don’t necessarily need to be best buddies with your neighbors to reap the benefits of community. “When we first moved in, we briefly said hello to an elderly man who lives on one side of our condominium,” Aldrich recalled. “Gradually, we learned his name, invited him to our Passover seder, and then received a copy of his key. That proved quite handy when, after not hearing from him for a full day, we knocked on the door, used the key he gave us to unlock it, and found that he had fallen and was unable to call for help. We called an ambulance, helped him sit up, and ensured medical professionals took care of him. We check on him regularly and help him however we can.”
As for screens, Aldrich and Lurie said our phones aren’t necessarily prohibitive to meeting your neighbors. They can be really helpful if, for example, you are disabled or have social anxiety. The key is to treat them more like a starting point than the endpoint. But don’t discount the power of repeated in-person presence and warmth. Lurie got to know a neighbor she’s still in touch with (even after they both moved away!) with a simple exchange of hellos. “Over time, those hellos developed into longer conversations,” she recalled. “We spent time together outside the apartment and would also stop by each other’s apartments to connect and discuss our days and situations we were trying to navigate. But our friendship developed gradually and over time, and it still stands today.”
Put your personality on display and be on the lookout for identifiers in others
When writer (and occasional Vox contributor) Julia Ries Wexler, 38, first moved to Los Angeles in 2017, she’d frequently take her dog, Ollie, out for walks at the park near her apartment complex. And though her downstairs neighbor, Nancy Blaine, didn’t have a dog, her own neighborhood watch committee — consisting of two curious cats — would spot Wexler and Ollie passing by. After a few weeks of polite head nods, the two eventually struck up a conversation about their love for animals.
“She would be outside feeding the birds and the squirrels, and she would teach me a little bit about the different kinds of birds that lived in the park that we live next to,” Wexler said. “I just feel like there was a really strong shared love of animals that helped our friendship develop, as well.”
When a modest earthquake struck the city, Blaine tried to help her (understandably freaked out) new Angelino neighbor feel a bit more comfortable in the aftermath. “I felt very important and heroic in being youthful to my friend,” Blaine, who’s 25 years Wexler’s senior, told Vox. “But I felt an affinity toward her.” Though Wexler has since moved away, the two remain in close contact.
39-year-old Heather Mayer Irvine, who lives in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, says that bringing her 6-year-old daughter out on walks in the neighborhood has been key to striking up conversations. “We moved to this neighborhood when she was 18 months, and she’s always been on the lookout for friends and dogs,” she told Vox. “My husband and I have definitely met and started relationships with more neighbors because of her. She’ll run out, ‘can I pet your dog?’, and 15 minutes later, we’re chatting with the adults.”
Though we don’t all have dogs or kids to help lubricate social interactions, Lurie says that having some type of conversation-starting item on you — and looking for similar things in others — helps a lot. That can range from an object that puts your personality on display (say, a prominent bumper sticker or band t-shirt) or a hobby (perhaps you take a book or knitting outside on a nice day).
Find a neighborhood-adjacent third space
Spending time in a “third space” — aka a spot besides work and home, like the gym or a coffee shop — in your neighborhood (if there is one) can have a major positive impact on your psychological health and make it easier to get seamless connections going. Byron Cordero, a 37-year-old living in Miami, always makes it a point to “attend the cute, and maybe corny, Taco Tuesday or rooftop yoga Wednesday” held by his apartment complex to get to know neighbors in a new spot. And Ruth Furman, a 59-year-old from Las Vegas, developed friendships in her neighborhood pool through a water aerobics class. Even though Furman is the youngest in the group, she told Vox, “we share suggestions and stories about goings-on in the neighborhood, plus tips on shared interests, like thrift stores and free classes through the local libraries.”
Geoffrey Radcliffe, 47, also from Las Vegas, says he has several genuine friendships with his neighbors — something he credits, in part, to his condo’s proximity to a lake with a walking path. So when he’s craving connection, he’ll whip up a drink — he calls it a “walk-tail” — and head out to the lake. “For initial anxiety, a cocktail generally makes someone more talkative,” he told Vox. With a bit of liquid courage, Radcliffe will typically ask a passerby their dog or child’s name, how long they’ve lived in their home, what they like to do for fun — anything to keep the convo flowing. “These types of questions are easy to answer, and you can really get to know someone this way. If your neighbors aren’t into it, don’t push; they’ll come around when they see how much [fun] all the others on the block are having.”
His one warning? Limit yourself to a single walk-tail. “You shouldn’t overdo it, or you’ll end up making out with a single neighbor, and that’s generally not the best idea,” he explained. (That’s up for debate, of course, depending on what kind of connection you’re seeking out!)
Grow the relationship through mutual favors
Flashing a warm smile at a stranger will make you both feel good in the moment, but Lurie said that building community won’t happen overnight. “Knowing that it’s going to take time is really important. I also think that, with consistent efforts to extend a hand, it becomes a bit easier, and people become more receptive, and they’re going to often want to reciprocate too, and so, things can snowball in a really positive direction,” she said.
One surefire way to strengthen the connection, per Lurie? Favors. “Reciprocity is also a tool that really helps us come into closer contact with people,” she explained. “It doesn’t have to be something fancy or formal,” Aldrich added. It could be as simple as saying, “Hey, I’m going to Target. Do you need anything?”
When Edna Angie Frank, 37, moved into (and then began remodeling) her Paradise Valley, Arizona, home, she felt the cold shoulder from her neighbors immediately. “No one likes neighbors who remodel — duh,” she joked. Still, Frank was eager to make connections, and when she noticed her elderly neighbor living alone (who also seemed shunned by others on the block for being “grumpy,” Frank said), she decided to show up with homemade tacos. Today, Frank regularly checks up on the woman, helps put up her holiday decor, and takes out her trash. “Now, we’re besties. All it took was some Mexican food,” she said.
The bottom line: Try to see a connection with your neighbors as an investment in your health and happiness, not a chore. “Oftentimes when we’re working from home, the last thing we think about is touching our neighbors — getting in touch with them, getting to know their names — but that is so important,” Aldrich says. “For me, there is no level of investment in neighbors that is not worth it.”
Телеком-кейс о том, как управленческая аналитика помогла руководителям увидеть потери в процессах, сократить издержки и вернуть бизнес к положительному финансовому результату
Последние несколько лет телеком-бизнес все больше похож на белку в колесе.
Снаружи компании продолжают расти: подключают новых абонентов, запускают дополнительные услуги, модернизируют сети, делают репрайсинг и расширяют продуктовую линейку. На уровне выручки все выглядит как движение вперед. Но внутри P&L картина часто оказывается куда менее радостной.
Издержки растут быстрее выручки. Увеличивается ФОТ, сеть требует новых инвестиций, новые услуги создают новые бизнес-процессы, а каждый новый процесс почти неизбежно приносит с собой дополнительные затраты. Чем сложнее становится компания, тем больше внутри нее мест, где деньги незаметно застревают, расползаются или теряются.
Для телеком-рынка это особенно болезненно.
Закон Яровой, СОРМ-2, СОРМ-3, антифрод — для человека со стороны это просто набор отраслевых аббревиатур. Для тех, кто работает в телекоме, за каждой из них стоят новые обязательные расходы. Это не инвестиции в рост и не развитие продукта, а затраты, которые нужно нести просто для того, чтобы продолжать работать.
В итоге многие телеком-компании попадают в неприятную ловушку: абонентская база растет, выручка растет, продукты развиваются, а прибыль не появляется. Иногда компания формально становится больше, но финансово чувствует себя хуже. Рост базы, репрайсинг и выручка от новых услуг не перекрывают рост издержек.
В этой статье я хочу рассказать, как мы разбираем упавшие автотесты при помощи интеграции ТестОпс с Яндекс Трекером, MCP TestOps, MCP Яндекс Трекера и Cursor AI / Claude Code.
Но начнем не с AI. Сначала расскажу про сам процесс: зачем нам дефекты в TestOps, как мы руками разбираем запуск автотестов, почему без matcher-правил это быстро превращается в рутину и что именно мы потом автоматизировали.
Подготовили свежий дайджест об изменениях в регулировании вопросов защиты информации. В этот раз расскажем о проектах и инициативах, которые появились в апреле-июне 2026.
В данной статье рассмотрим функциональность Engee для построения моделей электропривода из физических блоков (не используя блоки с переменной Лапласа и математические блоки). В качестве нагрузки для инвертора выбрано параллельное включение резистора и асинхронного двигателя, асинхронный двигатель вращает маховик через понижающий редуктор, на каждом этапе проводятся измерения угловых скоростей. Исследуемую схему можно условно разбить на части: постоянное напряжение (источник постоянного напряжения), переменное напряжение (инвертор, трансформатор, асинхронный двигатель), механическое вращение (ротор двигателя, редуктор, маховик). Построение схемы начну с настройки инвертора, для его настройки не буду сразу подключать всю запланированную нагрузку, вместо этого будет использоваться чисто активная нагрузка, это ускорит процесс моделирования и сделает минимальными переходные процессы в схеме
Remember Project 2025? Democrats are building their own governing blueprint, and one proposal takes aim at the "annoyance economy": robocalls, endless hold times, hidden fees and other everyday frustrations.
Border police officer under investigation after CCTV footage shows him shouting at car’s occupants and throwing device
Israeli police have opened an investigation after CCTV footage showed a border police officer throwing a stun grenade into a car carrying young Palestinians during a raid on the Qalandiya refugee camp in the occupied West Bank.
The footage from Sunday, released by the Israeli rights group B’Tselem, shows an officer approaching a car and shouting at its occupants.
Микроэлектромеханические системы, или сокращённо МЭМС, представляют собой удивительный гибрид, в котором на одном крошечном кристалле соединяются электронные микросхемы и крошечные движущиеся механизмы. По сути, это «умные» микромашины, способные чувствовать, измерять и даже действовать, занимая при этом площадь в несколько квадратных миллиметров. Сегодня они незаметно, но прочно вошли в нашу повседневную жизнь. О них сегодня мы и поговорим.
8 июля у PostgreSQL юбилей — ей исполняется 30 лет. В 1996 году Марк Фурнье из компании Networking Services предоставил первый внешний сервер для разработки опенсорсного проекта Postgres. До этого СУБД разрабатывали на мощностях Калифорнийского университета в Беркли .
В день рожденья PostgreSQL мы публикуем перевод статьи, которая послужила основой СУБД. Кстати, у неё тоже юбилей — 40 лет с момента выхода.
Border police officer under investigation after CCTV footage shows him shouting at car’s occupants and throwing device
Israeli police have opened an investigation after CCTV footage showed a border police officer throwing a stun grenade into a car carrying young Palestinians during a raid on the Qalandiya refugee camp in the occupied West Bank.
The footage from Sunday, released by the Israeli rights group B’Tselem, shows an officer approaching a car and shouting at its occupants.
“Flamingo Revolution” protesters in Tirana, Albania, march during the 35th consecutive day of demonstrations against a proposed luxury tourism development project linked to Jared Kushner and other international investors, on July 4, 2026. | Vlasov Sulaj/NurPhoto via Getty Images
The Trump family has had Albanians up in arms for over a month now, as anger over a luxury real estate development has grown into a protest movement against government corruption and what they see as a political system that protects the corrupt over its citizens. Many observers describe the demonstrations as Albania’s largest civic protests since the fall of communism in the early 1990s.
The movement, dubbed “The Flamingo Revolution,” began in late May after President Donald Trump’s daughter, Ivanka, and her husband, Jared Kushner (also moonlighting as one of Trump’s Middle East peace envoys), set their sights on developing an island in the Adriatic Sea.
The proposed development includes a resort on Sazan Island and another luxury resort with up to 10,000 tourist accommodations that would affect the Vjosa-Narta Protected Landscape on Albania’s southwestern coast. The area is home to endangered Mediterranean monk seals, flamingos, nesting sea turtles, and hundreds of migratory bird species.
The proposal has been championed by Albanian Prime Minister Edi Rama, eliciting outrage. But for many Albanians, the Kushner-backed development is only the latest flashpoint. Protesters say years of corruption, weak government accountability, and an economic model centered on luxury tourism and foreign investment have benefited political elites while doing little for ordinary Albanians.
To better understand the protests and why so many Albanians have become disillusioned with their government, Today, Explained co-host Noel King spoke with Politico’s Jakob Weizman, who has covered the Western Balkans, including Albania, for nearly a decade.
Below is an excerpt of the conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.
What is the background on the foreign developments in Albania?
In 2024, Albania passed these very controversial amendments which brought about change to this law on protected areas, which essentially is what critics and protesters say opened the door for this luxury tourism resort from Jared Kushner.
Earlier this year, they began construction and it was met with fierce resistance from local residents and from activists. You could visibly see they were beginning construction, there were excavators, there were diggers, there were fences being built up. And when I went there myself, you could see that there was a road already built and you could see the foundation from the fences. So that was really what kicked off everything. People saw and they got really upset and they said, enough is enough. We’re going to take it to the streets.
Tell us about the protected land.
In this protected area along the southern coast of Albania, near the coastal city of Vjosa, there is this protected wildlife area which is home to endangered species of monk seals and flamingos. It’s a very popular turtle nesting site. It’s a migratory path for birds. And there’s also, it’s a special place that Albanians in that area hold dear to their heart. It’s a place where people go fishing. It’s a place where people go to the beach with their families. It’s an untouched area where you can really feel the beauty of Albania, and for that to be ruined by excavators and diggers and fences…
And then how does Ivanka Trump get involved in all of this?
On a podcast, Ivanka Trump had described a story, how she found the island when she was on a friend’s boat and swam out to the island, and they came ashore and they started hiking to the top of the island. And she was completely enthralled by the beauty of Sazan, which is Albania’s only island.
It’s a very unlikely story because first of all, the island used to be a military headquarters during the communist era. There’s a danger of explosive mines remaining across the island, and there’s a lot of glass everywhere. It’s not well-kept and there is a danger of snakes. When I told the locals about this story, they were like, “It’s completely false.” There’s no way she was able to do that. The island is a very rugged landscape, making it very difficult to hike barefoot to the top.
When the protests began, the podcast really began to go viral because people started sharing and people started getting upset — just treating Albania like it’s her own personal luxury haven.
Tell me what the protests look like and who’s involved.
It started growing from 10,000 to 20,000, and then it just became this daily routine for Albanians. You would finish work and then you would just go out on the streets and start protesting. Albania is a small country. It’s 2.4 million. And now, it’s going up to 100,000, maybe 200,000 [protesters]. And there are people driving from the UK, from Belgium, from Germany to join the protests and people driving from all across the country. I feel like it’s just an awakening of civic consciousness against this tourism boom in Albania and these foreign investments from Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump that they’re saying no to.
It’s very important to understand that Albanians have been through a lot in the last 100 years. They were under a monarchy. They were under the Nazi occupation, and then they went through a brutal communist regime for 50 years. And finally their hopes had surfaced once more after the fall of communism. It was a very poor country. It was isolated from the entire world during communism. So the land is so important to the Albanians, and when someone like Kushner comes along, it just wakes up the entire country and says, “No, this is ours, and you’re not going to touch it.”
Is there a case that tourism and investment could actually be a boom to Albania’s economy and these protests might be shortsighted?
To be fair, there are people I have spoken to who think that tourism is good for the country. I’m not going to say that all the people in Albania think that this is a bad thing. But there is so much suspicion and there are so many allegations of corruption. The country’s track record in the last 20, 30 years is not good and does not convince people that there’s going to be trickle-down economics where you build a resort and it will create jobs and add infrastructure and bring in investment and bring money to the people. They don’t believe that.
That’s why so many Albanians are leaving the country. The mass immigration from Albania is insane. You talk to anyone in Albania, their only dream is to leave. Edi Rama, the prime minister, is trying to bring this hope to the country: “We’re going to build these resorts and the money’s going to come down to you.”
Albanians don’t really trust the fact that this kind of development will be able to help the country. The scale of corruption that’s going on in the country is forcing people to lack trust in the government.
Donald Trump said he had a “very good talk” withVladimir Putin, ahead of arriving in Turkey.
This comes amid a wave of recent Russian strikes across Ukraine that have killed at least 21 people. The US president said that he also spoke with Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelenskyy ahead of the Nato summit.
Thames Water’s creditors are willing to pursue their bid for the debt-laden company even if the probable next prime minister, Andy Burnham, brings it into temporary nationalisation.
The group of 100 institutional investors, which hold about £14bn of Thames’s senior debt, are still discussing a £10bn rescue proposal for the struggling company with officials from the regulator Ofwat, and they have held meetings in recent days.
Ulta’s Summer Beauty Sale includes deals of up to 40% off on cleansers, shampoo, hair tools and more from brands like Olaplex, Sol de Janeiro and more.
Staying cool during temperatures this hot can be a challenge. Our editors recommend Shark fans, stick sunscreens and more to get through the upcoming heat wave.
With peace talks on hold, the U.S. said it launched a "series of powerful strikes" on Iran in response to Iranian attacks on three commercial vessels in the Strait of Hormuz.
