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A group of Democrats in the United States Congress have called on the State Department to break the US government’s longstanding silence on Israel’s nuclear capabilities.

In a letter sent to Secretary of State Marco Rubio, the Democrats pointed to the US-Israel war on Iran as the reason more clarity is urgently needed.

While Israel is believed to have possessed nuclear weapons since the 1960s, it maintains “a policy of nuclear opacity, never officially confirming the existence of its nuclear weapons program and arsenal”, according to the Washington, DC-based Nuclear Threat Initiative.

A company in Portland, Oregon, that specializes in AI targeting for drones has made significant shipments of materials to military contractors in Israel, according to cargo data reviewed by The Intercept. The shipments raise the possibility that a boutique Pacific Northwest tech firm has helped the Israeli military attack people in places like Gaza, Lebanon, and Iran, among others.

Sightline Intelligence, a firm focused on AI video processing, has made at least 10 shipments of hardware to the Israeli weapons giant Elbit Systems since 2024, according to investigators with the Movement Research Unit, the group that originally obtained the documents.

Latvia is investigating two drones which entered its airspace from Russian territory overnight and crashed in eastern part of the country near an empty oil storage facility.

Four empty oil tanks were reported damaged, with minor smouldering reported in one of the tanks. The local public broadcaster captured a drone flying in the area on their camera.

Latvian prime minister Evika Siliņa convened a crisis management meeting for 10am local time. She earlier said she was “in constant communication” with relevant ministers and state institutions.

“After the incident concludes, I expect reports from the responsible ministers on what happened,” she said.

Last April, Vladimir Putin visited the campus of Bauman Moscow state technical university, set on the banks of the Yauza River in the east of the city and home to some of the country’s brightest scientific minds.

He toured the campus, met undergraduates and boasted about Moscow’s ambitious plans for space missions to the moon and Mars. “You have everything it takes to be competitive,” Putin told the students.

What the Kremlin readout of Putin’s visit did not mention was a secret faculty inside the university, known simply as Department 4, or “Special Training”.

A team of researchers from the University of Waterloo say they have definitively identified the remains of four sailors belonging to the doomed Franklin Expedition — and settled a debate more than a century in the making.

One late night in May of 1859, the British Navy explorer Francis Leopold McClintock stumbled across a bleached skeleton on Gladman Point, roughly 75 kilometers west of today’s Nunavut hamlet of Gjoa Haven.

Nestled among the bones were a collection of papers: some poems, letters, and a seaman’s certificate for Harry Peglar, a petty officer aboard the doomed HMS Terror.

A decade earlier, the Terror had been, together with the HMS Erebus, part of an ill-fated expedition that would go down in history as one of the great tragedies of Arctic exploration.

In the end, all 129 crew members died.

Canada's Fisheries Department says a grey whale that was hit at high speed by a Sea-Doo in front of a horrified Vancouver crowd on Monday appeared in "good condition" the next day.

The Fisheries Department says in an update that while assessing whale health can be difficult, the animal was seen feeding and "moving normally" on Tuesday before officials lost track of it as it swam out of English Bay, "making deeper dives along the way."

The phrase “tax the rich” can be “just as hateful as some disgusting racial slurs”, according to the New York City billionaire Steve Roth, who said that the top 1% should be “praised and thanked”.

Speaking on his company’s quarterly earnings call on Tuesday, Roth, the CEO of Vornado Realty Trust, expressed his support for fellow billionaire and the CEO of Citadel, Ken Griffin, who was singled out in the 15 April announcement by New York’s mayor, Zohran Mamdani, of the state’s first “pied-à-terre” tax on second homes valued at more than $5m. In a video, Mamdani announced the policy in front of Griffin’s penthouse, which he said was purchased for $238m.

The Russian pavilion at the Venice Biennale was forced temporarily to shut its doors on the second day of the preview after the activist group Pussy Riot staged a chaotic protest against the country’s inclusion in the art festival.

Wearing pink balaclavas, the protesters ran towards the Russian pavilion where they gathered outside and lit pink, blue and yellow flares while playing punk music and shouting slogans, including “Blood is Russia’s Art”.

James Comer, the Republican chair of the House oversight committee, told reporters earlier as he entered a closed-door interview with Howard Lutnick that the commerce secretary had in the past not been “100% truthful” about whether he had ever visited Jeffrey Epstein’s infamous private island.

A reminder that Lutnick – the highest-ranking Trump administration official prominently named in the Epstein files, aside from Donald Trump himself – said on a podcast last year that he had decided to “never be in the room” with Epstein following a 2005 tour of the financier’s home in Manhattan that disturbed him and his wife.

But the release of case files on Epstein earlier this year showed that Lutnick had kept in contact with Epstein – even after Epstein’s 2008 conviction in Florida for soliciting prostitution from an underage girl – and met up with him a couple of times in 2011 and 2012.

Lawyers for Leon Black, the billionaire investor who has been accused in a civil lawsuit of raping a teenage girl inside Jeffrey Epstein’s New York townhouse in 2002, reached out to a powerful federal judge in 2024 to raise doubts about the alleged victim’s claims, a Guardian investigation found.

The move set off a months-long court proceeding, which was conducted outside of public view and led US district judge Jed Rakoff to reverse a $2.5m award that had been granted to the alleged victim in a separate Epstein-related class action lawsuit, according to court records. She was later given a much smaller settlement in the class action case.

I bought a ticket for Monday’s Alberta Christian Leadership Summit in Red Deer, keen to report on the event that promised a chance for religious leaders to talk about “faith, leadership and public policy in Alberta” with Premier Danielle Smith and other politicians.

But the night before, organizers called and told me, without providing a reason, that I was being deregistered and they were refunding my $200 fee. I wasn’t alone. A journalist from a major news outlet also got the call.

The summit’s website promises a “direct dialogue between Christian leadership and Alberta’s government [to help] shape the policies affecting our families, churches, and communities.”

A Canadian is fighting back in U.S. federal court over what he says is an attempt by the Department of Homeland Security, through Google, to seek "vast swaths of information" about his personal life following social media posts critical of Donald Trump's administration.

The Canadian John Doe plaintiff on Monday sued Markwayne Mullin, the current DHS secretary, in a lawsuit that contends DHS is engaged in "a transparent gambit to chill speech the government doesn't like." The suit was brought by American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) offices in D.C., where DHS is located, and in northern California, the jurisdiction where Google has its headquarters.