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Japan has canceled an annual high-level meeting with key ally the United States after the Trump administration demanded it spend more on defense, the Financial Times reported on Friday.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth had been expected to meet Foreign Minister Takeshi Iwaya and Defense Minister Gen Nakatani in Washington on July 1 for the yearly 2+2 security talks.

But Tokyo scrapped the meeting after the U.S. asked Japan to boost defense spending to 3.5% of gross domestic product, higher than an earlier request of 3%, the newspaper said, citing unnamed sources familiar with the matter.

A new report from the Network Contagion Research Institute (NCRI) details a coordinated influence operation by Russian and Iranian actors aimed at U.S. conservative audiences — especially online communities that identify with the MAGA movement. The campaign deploys inauthentic accounts, false-flag conspiracy narratives, and a handful of high-visibility American influencers to steer debate and widen ideological rifts.

From 1 May to 10 June 2025 researchers logged more than 675,000 posts promoting false-flag explanations for shootings, bombings and other violence. These claims usually allege that the U.S. government, Israel, or “globalists” staged events to tighten control or **discredit conservatives. Most amplification appeared on X, Telegram and TikTok feeds with large pro-Trump followings.

The surge almost always begins with anonymous bot accounts. Many sport profile pictures of U.S. soldiers or bald eagles but show machine-translated phrasing typical of Russian sources. After a few days of generic pro-Trump memes, the accounts pivot to sharper disinformation wrapped in anti-Biden or anti-NATO rhetoric.

Panama has declared an emergency in its main banana-producing region, after shops were looted and buildings vandalised in ongoing protests over a pension reform.

The government says constitutional rights will be suspended for the next five days in the north-western Bocas del Toro province.

The measure restricts freedom of movement and allows the police to make arrests without a warrant.

Troubles in the region began a month ago, when the local banana workers union joined a nationwide protest against proposed pension cuts and declared a strike.

Emerson Colindres had no criminal record and was attending appointment with ICE when detained

A teenage student and soccer stand-out was arrested by immigration authorities four days after his high school graduation ceremony in Ohio earlier this month, and deported to Honduras this week, his family has said.

Emerson Colindres, 19, had no criminal record and was attending a regularly scheduled appointment with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in Cincinnati when he was detained on 4 June, according to the Cincinnati Enquirer.

His parents told the newspaper he was deported on Wednesday to a country he has not lived in since he was 8 years old.

Lawmakers in Britain have taken a historic step toward allowing assisted dying. The change would see England and Wales join other countries that allow terminally ill adults to choose to end their lives.

Lawmakers in the United Kingdom have approved a bill allowing terminally ill adults in England and Wales to end their lives.

The vote marks a major step toward legalizing assisted dying — one of the most significant social policy changes in decades and comparable to Britain's partial legalization of abortion in 1967.

Vladimir Putin has revived a controversial narrative, claiming that theoretically "all of Ukraine is ours." He also sparked more immediate concerns with comments about seizing Ukraine's city of Sumy.

Vladimir Putin has declared that Russians and Ukrainians are "one people" and that, in that sense, "all of Ukraine is ours."

The assertion underscores Moscow's continued underlying rejection of Ukrainian sovereignty and raises renewed alarm over Russia's territorial ambitions.

Speaking at the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum on Friday, Putin issued a series of provocative remarks, notably stating: "We have a saying… where the foot of a Russian soldier steps, that is ours."

A federal judge in Washington, D.C., has issued a preliminary injunction ordering top national security officials who discussed military operations on the encrypted messaging service Signal to notify the acting archivist of the United States of any messages they have that may be at risk of being deleted. But in calling for those records to be preserved, the ruling stopped short of ordering the government to recover past messages that may already have been lost.

American Oversight, a nonprofit government watchdog, brought the lawsuit after the journalist Jeffrey Goldberg was mistakenly added to a group chat on Signal in which Trump administration officials discussed a planned U.S. military attack against Houthi rebels in Yemen. American Oversight says the officials violated federal records law with their use of Signal, a commercial messaging app that allows messages to be automatically deleted.

In his ruling Friday, U.S. judge James Boasberg said American Oversight had failed to show that the recordkeeping programs of the agencies involved in the case are "inadequate," or that "this court can provide redress for already-deleted messages," as the group had requested.

The Department of Homeland Security has requested an extra $2 billion to meet its needs by the end of September

Immigration and Customs Enforcement could run out of money as soon as next month amid the Trump administration’s ramped-up efforts to deport unauthorized immigrants.

While there are more than three months left in the fiscal year, one estimate has found that the agency is already $1 billion over budget, according to Axios. Legislators in both parties have raised concerns about the speed at which the agency is spending its funds, which may prompt Donald Trump to seek additional funds from other agencies to support his deportation efforts.

Lawmakers have stated that the department responsible for ICE, the Department of Homeland Security, overseen by Secretary Kristi Noem, could violate the law if it continues to spend at current levels.

A federal judge is ordering the release of Columbia University pro-Palestinian activist Mahmoud Khalil.

U.S. District Judge Michael Farbiarz indicated that he will issue an order requiring that Khalil be released today. He denied a motion by the government to stay the ruling for seven days.

The judge asked the parties to consult with a magistrate judge about any conditions that will be attached to Khalil's release on bail.

The Trump administration cannot withhold billions of dollars in transportation grant funding from Democratic-led states refusing to cooperate with immigration enforcement, according to a ruling on Thursday.

Chief U.S. District Judge John McConnell in Providence, R.I., granted a preliminary injunction in the case filed by 20 states, saying "large-scale irreparable harm would occur without the preliminary injunction."

The ruling comes ahead of a June 20 grant application deadline for states. Prior to that deadline, Department of Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy imposed conditions on that funding, requiring applications to agree to adhere to an Immigration Enforcement Condition upon submission.

Utah Sen. Mike Lee's proposal has united the left and right -- against him.

Last week, the Lee-led Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee released a draft proposal, intended for inclusion in the so-called “One Big Beautiful Bill,” that would mandate the sale of between 2.2 million and 3.3 million acres of public land owned by the Bureau of Land Management and the U.S. Forest Service in the American West.

Lee has framed the proposal as a means to increase affordable housing, and emphasized that it excludes national parks, national monuments, and designated wilderness areas from being sold.

Critics have expressed skepticism that the bill would do much to mitigate the housing crisis, contending that it would only result in the public being barred from land they now enjoy.

With misinformation and murky details on bird flu and measles outbreaks, experts worry about the next pandemic

Amid controversial dismissals for independent advisers and staff at health agencies, alongside lackluster responses to the bird flu and measles outbreaks, experts fear the US is now in worse shape to respond to a pandemic than before 2020.

H5N1, which has received less attention under the Trump administration than from Biden’s team, is not the only influenza virus or even the only variant of bird flu with the potential to spark a pandemic. But a subpar response to the ongoing US outbreak signals a larger issue: America is not ready for whatever pathogen will sweep through next.

“We have not even remotely maintained the level of pandemic preparedness – which needed a lot of work, as we saw from the Covid pandemic,” said Angela Rasmussen, an American virologist at the Vaccine and Infectious Disease Organization at the University of Saskatchewan in Canada. “But now, we essentially have no pandemic preparedness.”