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Pakistani airstrikes kill dozens in eastern Afghanistan

Pakistan says strikes were aimed at a terrorist group while Taliban condemn ‘cowardly act of aggression’Pakistani airstrikes in three eastern provinces of Afghanistan killed 36 civilians and wounded 163 others, Afghan officials have said, as attacks between the two countries showed no sign of abating.Pakistan’s information minister, Attaullah Tarar, said the operations on Sunday night were aimed at a terrorist group his country blamed for a deadly militant attack in Karachi that killed three security personnel over the weekend. Continue reading...

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Weather tracker: North-west US hit by snow ahead of eastern heatwave

Western states experience unseasonally low temperatures but New York and Washington DC could reach 40C by end of weekUnseasonal snow has fallen in some parts of the US, while other parts of the country brace for a heatwave this week.A strong cold front spread into the western US from the northern Pacific over the weekend, bringing an abrupt change in conditions to a region that had been experiencing high summer temperatures amid drought. Temperatures from the Canadian border to California have widely been 5-10C below the norm since Friday, and more than 10C below in some parts farther north. The pattern is expected to remain for much of the coming week. Continue reading...

Trump bashed by conservative Wall Street Journal board for one huge Iran failure

The Wall Street Journal editorial board lambasted President Donald Trump over his efforts to secure a durable peace deal with Iran.U.S. and Iranian officials have agreed to halt their attacks on one another and meet Tuesday to talk out their dispute over the Strait of Hormuz, and the conservative newspaper's editors bashed the 80-year-old president for failing to keep the crucial waterway open – as it had been before he launched the war on Feb. 28."The best selling point for President Trump’s memorandum of understanding with Iran was that at least it opened the Strait of Hormuz," the board wrote. "Well, now the regime is trying to nullify those terms by using force against commercial vessels, Gulf states and U.S. bases. All of this violates the deal and calls into question why Mr. Trump signed it."The U.S. and Iran have traded strikes, and Trump has hyped what he called “gentlemen’s agreements” with Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps leaders to "turn over a new leaf," but the Journal's editors said the president was wrong to trust them."Well, these are no gentlemen," they wrote. "It’s the same terrorist regime, and this is the Battle of Hormuz that Mr. Trump thought he had ducked. In case there was any doubt, foreign minister Abbas Araghchi said Sunday that Iran is solely responsible for managing the Strait under the memorandum. He said 'no other country has any responsibility in that regard.'""Force is the regime’s means to make the world bend," they added. "Without it, shippers refused to heed Iran’s dictates for Hormuz during the deal’s early days."The editorial board wondered why Trump was willing to give Iran anything without an assurance that the strait would remain free and open."The U.S. needs the leverage for nuclear negotiations, and it was never wise to give Iran a blank check," the board wrote. "All the more so now that the regime isn’t respecting the deal, which mandates a cease-fire as well as Iran’s 'best efforts for the safe passage of commercial vessels.' That means don’t shoot at them, for starters.""More U.S. 'love taps' against Iranian targets won’t impress the hard men in Tehran," the editors added. "They behave as if they have escalation dominance because they think Mr. Trump won’t return to war before the midterm elections. They don’t believe Mr. Trump’s social-media bluster because they see his reluctance to enforce the cease-fire terms."

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Israel recognizes death of 1.5 million Armenian Christians in Ottoman Empire during WWI as genocide

The Israeli government has approved a proposal to designate the mass extermination of Armenian Christians in the Ottoman Empire during World War I as a genocide.

Escalating US-Iran strikes threaten interim peace agreement

Tehran attacks Bahrain and Kuwait amid efforts to open strait of Hormuz without Iran’s direct oversightFresh hostilities in Gulf suggest US-Iran memorandum was too broadly wordedA new round of escalating strikes between Iran and the US has continued, further undermining the fragile interim peace agreement between the two countries, and prompting Donald Trump to threaten violence that would ensure Iran “will no longer exist”.On Sunday, Tehran launched drone and missile attacks against Bahrain and Kuwait after new US strikes on sites in southern Iran, and threatened a “complete halt” to negotiations to end the war. Trump said that a moment might come soon when he abandoned talks and the US would “militarily finish the job”. Continue reading...