Top World News

Mar 6, 2026 - World

The normally vibrant southern suburbs are a ghost town, their throngs of people replaced by rubble and firesThe ding of half a million phones, a pause and a collective gasp: in an instant, more than 500,000 people had been made homeless.Shooting in the air, panicked phone calls and honking filled the streets of Beirut as people began to flee. Thousands abandoned their cars and began the slow march to the sea, desperate to escape the Israeli bombs which they knew would soon fall on their homes, whether they were in them or not. Continue reading...

Mar 6, 2026 - World

Landmark ruling in Celia Ramos case finds 310,000 women, most Indigenous, were targeted in brutal 1990s campaignThe highest human rights court in Latin America condemned Peru on Thursday over the death of its citizen Celia Ramos, who died at the age of 34 in 1997 after undergoing sterilisation “under coercion”.The landmark ruling by the inter-American court of human rights (IACHR) is the first on Peru’s forced sterilisation programme, which operated between 1996 and 2000 and was directed against poor, rural and Indigenous women. Continue reading...

Mar 6, 2026 - World

Rep. Riley Moore (R-WV) suggested that James Talarico, a Democrat running for U.S. Senate in Texas, was possessed by demons.The West Virginia Republican attacked the Texas hopeful during a Friday interview with MAGA influencer Benny Johnson."You're fighting for light," Johnson said while introducing Moore. "Christians throughout the world, quite frankly, under persecution. Christians always are the ones who get persecuted, beheaded, slaughtered.""They're always the ones who get trod under and nobody ever talks about them and it's evil," he continued. "You're a man of faith yourself that is actually talking about it."For his part, Moore claimed that protesters had demonstrated outside of his church in West Virginia, but did not allege they broke the law."I had people protesting me outside of my church. My family and I going on," he explained. "They showed up from wherever the hell they're from. And, you know, me and my family were just trying to go to Mass. And here they are. You know, I mean, no, no space is sacred to them.""Now we just got to make sure that James Talarico doesn't get into the Senate," Johnson said before ending the interview. "I mean, that guy saying that Jesus loves abortion and loves transing of the kids and that God is non-binary. I feel dirty, Congressman, just repeating his blasphemes and heresy on my show. I'm telling you what he says. It is antithetical to the Bible. It's actually anti-Christian. It's actually Antichrist's ideology.""I think he is demonic," Moore remarked. "And I think we need to keep an eye on that and watchful eye because there are other forces of work in my view."Johnson replied: "It's a defiling of God's order. It's a defiling of God's nature. Yeah. And it's pretty simple. It's nice. Even a even a, even a community college graduate like me can get it, Congressman."Talarico, a 36-year-old part-time Presbyterian seminarian and former middle school teacher, has built a political platform rooted in Christian theology and social justice. Talarico uses scripture to champion the poor and vulnerable, relying on Christ's teachings to challenge corporate interests and political divisions. He has gained national attention for using his theological background to criticize Christian nationalism, condemning it as a "betrayal of Jesus of Nazareth" that "worships power in the name of Christ." On his campaign website, Talarico references "a barefoot rabbi" who issued two overriding commandments: love God and love your neighbor, "because there is no love of God without love of neighbor." He writes that "every single person bears the image of the sacred; every single person is holy — not just the neighbors who look like me or pray like me or vote like me," and calls for followers to adopt the spirit of that rabbi who "walked into the seat of power and flipped over the tables of injustice," arguing it is time to "start flipping tables." His opposition to a Ten Commandments bill went viral when he declared: "Maybe they should try following the Ten Commandments before mandating them," demonstrating his conviction that genuine faith should guide political action rather than serve as political theater.

Mar 6, 2026 - World

Reports Kuwait was cutting output pushed up cost of barrel of Brent crude to highest weekly gain since Covid pandemic beganThe Iran conflict has driven the oil price past $90 a barrel to its highest weekly gains since the Covid-19 pandemic six years ago, threatening a fresh rise in global inflation.Reports that Kuwait had begun cutting production of oil at some fields after running out of space to store it drove the cost of a barrel of Brent crude to as high as $91.89 at one point on Friday – its highest since April 2024 and up from about $72.50 just before war broke out. Continue reading...

Mar 6, 2026 - World

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth spent his confirmation hearings promising senators he’d stop drinking. Based on his news conference about the Iran war on Wednesday, that might not be such a great idea.Reporting on dead American soldiers, Hegseth suggested, is becoming the “narrative.” The public, he said, should “cut through the noise” and focus on the mission.The “noise,” in this case, is six American lives.On Sunday, an Iranian drone struck a U.S. facility in Kuwait. The victims were Army reservists assigned to a logistics command. Their names, ranks, and ages: Sgt. Declan Coady, 20Sgt. 1st Class Nicole Amor, 39Capt. Cody Khork, 35Sgt. 1st Class Noah Tietjens, 42Maj. Jeffrey O’Brien, 45CW3 Robert Marzan, 54.Hegseth’s complaint was that their deaths were dominating coverage of the war. During Wednesday’s White House briefing, when CNN’s Kaitlan Collins read Hegseth’s words back to White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt, Leavitt didn’t flinch.“The press does only want to make the president look bad,” she said. “That’s a fact.”To this administration, a dead sergeant from West Des Moines is not a tragedy. He’s a political liability. News reporting on his demise is evidence of bias.Consider the source. According to a sworn affidavit submitted to the Senate under penalty of perjury by a former sister-in-law, Hegseth once had to be carried out of a Minneapolis strip club by his own brother — drunk, in uniform, during a National Guard drill weekend. Wearing a uniform while intoxicated is a violation of military law.NBC News also reported that 10 current and former Fox News colleagues said they had to “babysit” Hegseth before appearances because he smelled of alcohol. And a whistleblower complaint from his tenure at the veterans nonprofit Concerned Veterans for America described multiple occasions when he had to be removed from events after drinking to incapacitation.It is some new pinnacle of irony that a man who required his own “babysitters” at Fox News is now lecturing the press on professional conduct and what is worthy of the front page. It would be more defensible had his diatribe been attributable to an altered state.But this is a very recent discovery. Travel back to January 2024. Three American soldiers were killed in a drone attack in Jordan while Joe Biden was president. Republicans didn’t tell reporters to ignore the story. They blasted it across every microphone they could find. Donald Trump called the deaths “the consequence of Joe Biden’s weakness.” Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) demanded “devastating retaliation.” No one complained the coverage was unfair to the commander in chief.Go back to August 2021. After the suicide bombing at Abbey Gate in Kabul, Republicans spent years invoking those 13 deaths. They held hearings. They issued subpoenas. They put Gold Star families on stage at the Republican National Convention. Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) said the loss of life was grounds for impeachment.The political rule seemed simple: When American troops die, the president must answer for it. That rule apparently changed on Inauguration Day.Trump launched a war with Iran that already has American casualties and, by his own admission, will produce more. “Sadly, there will likely be more, before it ends,” Trump said Sunday. “That’s the way it is.”For the White House, that may be a strategic reality. For the family of Nicole Amor — a Minnesota mother of two who was days away from returning home — it is not simply “the way it is.” It is the destruction of their world.The American press has reported every U.S. combat death for decades, under Republicans and Democrats alike. Those stories are not a partisan narrative. They are the public record of war.The six names this week are Declan, Nicole, Cody, Noah, Jeffrey and Robert. Reporting them is not an attempt to make a president look bad, no matter how much Trump’s shameless sycophants whine.It’s journalism.Click here to subscribe to Ray Hartmann's Soapbox