World News

Nayib Bukele has come to be known as the face fighting against gang violence and justice. However, a new ProPublica investigation reveals that image may be misleading.

The bombshell investigation comes from ProPublica, which gathered information from a long-running U.S. investigation of MS-13 as an effort to dismantle the gang's leadership and later expanded to focus on whether the Bukele government cut a secret deal with the gang in the early years of his presidency.

According to ProPublica, Bukele's allies blocked extraditions of gang leaders whom U.S. agents viewed as potential witnesses to the negotiations and persecuted Salvadoran law enforcement officials who helped the task force.

Further, the investigation suggests that the Bukele government may have diverted U.S. aid funds to the gang as part of the alleged deal to provide it with money and power in exchange for votes and reduced homicide rates. In 2021, agents drew up a request to review U.S. bank accounts held by Salvadoran political figures to look for evidence of money laundering related to the suspected diversion of U.S. funds.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/31829941

By Nidal Al-Mughrabi and Dawoud Abu Alkas
June 17, 2025 6:46 AM EDT

Summary

• Israeli military acknowledges firing, says it is investigating
• Witnesses say tanks opened fire on crowd
• Hundreds have been killed trying to get aid in past three weeks

Tehran “is the principal source of regional instability and terror,” declare G7 leaders in a joint statement.

The leaders of the G7 countries on Monday issued a joint statement saying Iran should not have nuclear weapons and affirming Israel's right to defend itself.

"Iran is the principal source of regional instability and terror. We have been consistently clear that Iran can never have a nuclear weapon," declared the statement, issued by the leaders of the U.S., U.K., France, Germany, Italy, Canada and Japan, along with the EU.

They pledged to "remain vigilant to the implications for international energy markets and stand ready to coordinate, including with like-minded partners, to safeguard market stability."

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/31521912

Six of the Group of Seven leaders are trying on the final day of their Tuesday to show the wealthy nations’ club still has the clout to shape world events despite the early departure of Donald Trump.

Prime Minister Mark Carney and his counterparts from the U.K., France, Germany, Italy and Japan will be joined by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and NATO chief Mark Rutte to discuss Russia’s relentless war on its neighbor.

World leaders had gathered in Canada with the specific goal of helping to defuse a series of pressure points, only to be disrupted by a showdown over Iran’s nuclear program that could escalate in dangerous and uncontrollable ways. Israel launched an aerial bombardment campaign against Iran on Friday, and Iran has hit back with missiles and drones.

At least 45 Palestinians were killed in the Gaza Strip while waiting for UN and commercial trucks to enter the territory with desperately needed food, according to Gaza’s health ministry and a local hospital.

The circumstances of the killings were not immediately clear. It did not appear to be related to a new Israel- and US-supported aid delivery network that was rolled out last month and has been marred by controversy and violence.

Palestinians say Israeli forces have repeatedly opened fire on crowds trying to reach food distribution points run by the US and Israel-backed aid group since the centres opened last month. Local health officials say scores have been killed and hundreds wounded.

Chinese authorities are carrying out rescue operations but the efforts have been complicated by a risk of additional explosions and the lack fo a large water source nearby.

An explosion at a fireworks factory in a village in central China's Hunan province has left at least nine people dead and 26 others injured, state-run National Radio said.

The blast occurred at 8:23 am local time (0:23 GMT) in the Hunan province on Monday. The reported death toll was as of 9 am (0:53 GMT) Tuesday, with rescue operation still ongoing.

The radio channel reported a "complicated" rescue effort as there was a risk of additional explosions. The factory was in a "mountainous area with no large water source."

From a distance they look almost like ordinary sailboats, their sails emblazoned with the red-and-white flag of Denmark.

But these 10-meter (30-foot) -long vessels carry no crew and are designed for surveillance.

Four uncrewed robotic sailboats, known as “Voyagers,” have been put into service by Denmark’s armed forces for a three-month operational trial.

Built by Alameda, California-based company Saildrone, the vessels will patrol Danish and NATO waters in the Baltic and North Seas, where maritime tensions and suspected sabotage have escalated sharply since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine on Feb. 24, 2022.

Link to study

Climate change has tripled the frequency of atmospheric wave events linked to extreme summer weather in the last 75 years and that may explain why long-range computer forecasts keep underestimating the surge in killer heat waves, droughts and floods, a new study says.

In the 1950s, Earth averaged about one extreme weather-inducing planetary wave event a summer, but now it is getting about three per summer, according to a study in Monday’s Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Planetary waves are connected to 2021’s deadly and unprecedented Pacific Northwest heat wave, the 2010 Russian heatwave and Pakistan flooding and the 2003 killer European heatwave, the study said.

Planetary waves flow across Earth all the time, but sometimes they get amplified, becoming stronger, and the jet stream gets wavier with bigger hills and valleys, Mann said. It’s called quasi-resonant amplification or QRA.

Brett Wilkins Jun 16, 2025

Flight-tracking websites showed dozens of Air Force aerial refueling planes departing from military bases in the United States and heading to Europe on Sunday, fueling speculation of direct U.S. involvement in the widening Israeli-Iranian war.

Military-focused news sites reported that around 30 U.S. Air Force KC-135R and KC-46A tankers were identified by flight-tracking software in what The Times of Israelcalled an "unprecedented mass deployment" to Europe.

At least 37 Palestinians were killed on Monday in new shootings in Gaza near food distribution centres run by private US contractors guarded by Israeli troops, local authorities said.

Witnesses blamed the shootings on Israeli troops who opened fire early in the morning as crowds of hungry Palestinians converged on two hubs managed by the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), a private organisation that recently began operating in Gaza with Israeli and US support.

The death toll on Monday was the highest yet reported in the near-daily shootings since the GHF began operations three weeks ago.

Hundreds of thousands of people dressed in red marched through the streets of The Hague on Sunday to demand more action against the "genocide" in Gaza.

NGOs such as Amnesty International, Save the Children, Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders), and Oxfam organized the demonstration, which ran through the city to the International Court of Justice. The protesters were all dressed in red, creating a "red line".

Organisers described it as the country's largest demonstration in two decades. Many waving Palestinian flags and some chanting "Stop the Genocide", the demonstrators turned a central park in the city into a sea of red on a sunny afternoon.

Video is linked. SFW, but keep your volume down.