United States senators have passed a package of sweeping cuts that would slash Washington’s foreign aid expenditures by about $8bn as part of President Donald Trump’s pledge to drastically shrink federal spending.
The package, which passed in a 51-48 vote early on Thursday, cancels $9bn in spending already approved by Congress, including more than $1bn to be stripped from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Two of the Senate’s 53 Republicans voted with Democrats against the legislation.
The vote was seen as a test of how easily senators would approve spending cuts recommended by Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).
The president, who has made slashing federal spending a domestic priority, established the department and had put billionaire tech mogul Elon Musk at the helm to identify areas for government cost-cutting before the SpaceX and Tesla CEO left in May. A public spat between Musk and Trump over deficit spending erupted a short time later.
Food for starving children in Afghanistan, Pakistan to be burned
Much of the $8bn in foreign aid cuts under the “rescissions” package, which now returns to the House of Representatives for final approval, had been allocated to the now-defunct US Agency for International Development (USAID), a prime target for DOGE.
The agency, which was established during the Cold War to run aid programmes and project US soft power internationally, closed its doors this month after the Trump administration’s announcement in January that it was shutting down USAID.
Within the funding that was cut was $4.15bn to boost economies and strengthen democratic institutions in developing countries, The Associated Press news agency reported.
The package also cancelled $800m for a programme that assists with emergency shelter, water, sanitation and family reunification for people fleeing their homelands as well as $496m for food, water and healthcare in countries affected by natural disasters or conflicts.
A senior US official said on Wednesday that nearly 500 tonnes of high-energy biscuits intended to feed 27,000 starving children in Afghanistan and Pakistan would soon be incinerated due to the Trump administration’s decision to shut down USAID.
‘A bunch of junk’
Democrats argued that weakening foreign aid efforts would diminish the US’s global status and leave a vacuum that would be filled by rivals like China.
Senator Brian Schatz said cutting food aid and disease prevention measures was having life-and-death consequences, AP reported.
“People are dying right now, not in spite of us but because of us,” he said.
But Senator Lindsey Graham, a Republican, told the AFP news agency that while he was a “big fan” of foreign aid and the soft power it brought, he believed money was being wasted.
“When you start spending money on a bunch of junk and liberal programmes disconnected from the purpose of the aid package, it makes it difficult on a guy like me,” he said.
Republican leaders had removed a $400m cut to an HIV prevention programme from the package after requests from its own lawmakers. The programme is credited with saving millions of lives.
US Constitution’s ideals ‘undermined’
The cuts to public broadcasting, which Republicans have accused of having a left-wing bias, also met with fierce objections. Democrats said they would remove a key public service that performs a vital role, particularly during emergencies like natural disasters.
The package cancels $1.1bn that the Corporation for Public Broadcasting was due to receive over the next two years. It would help fund National Public Radio (NPR) and the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) as well as more than 1,500 local radio and television stations.
Democrats said the rescissions package, by cutting $9bn from a $6.8 trillion federal budget, would do little to meaningfully tackle the deficit but would harm important public institutions.
“It is yet another example of the spirit and ideals of our constitution being undermined in a terrible way,” New Jersey Senator Cory Booker told AFP.
Others, including Senator Mitch McConnell, the former Republican Senate leader, expressed concerns about ceding congressional spending powers to the president, saying he was worried about handing the White House a “blank cheque” on spending issues, AP reported. But he ultimately voted to approve the package.
A French court has ordered the release of pro-Palestinian Lebanese fighter Georges Ibrahim Abdallah, who has been imprisoned for 40 years for his role in the killings of two foreign diplomats in France in the early 1980s.
The Paris Appeals Court ordered on Thursday that Abdallah, 74, be freed from a prison in southern France on July 25 on the condition that he leave French territory and never return.
The former head of the Lebanese Armed Revolutionary Brigade was sentenced to life imprisonment in 1987 for complicity in the 1982 murders of United States military attache Charles Robert Ray and Israeli diplomat Yacov Barsimantov in Paris and the attempted murder of US Consul General Robert Homme in Strasbourg in 1984.
First detained in 1984 and convicted in 1987, Abdallah is one of the longest serving prisoners in France as most prisoners serving life sentences are freed after less than 30 years.
The detainee’s brother, Robert Abdallah, told the AFP news agency in Lebanon on Thursday that he was overjoyed by the news.
“We’re delighted. I didn’t expect the French judiciary to make such a decision nor for him to ever be freed, especially after so many failed requests for release,” he was quoted as saying. “For once, the French authorities have freed themselves from Israeli and US pressures.”
Abdallah’s lawyer Jean-Louis Chalanset also welcomed the decision: “It’s both a judicial victory and a political scandal that he was not released earlier.”
Abdallah is expected to be deported to Lebanon.
Prosecutors may file an appeal with France’s highest court, the Court of Cassation, but it is not expected to be processed quickly enough to halt his release next week.
Abdallah has been up for release for 25 years, but the US – a civil party to the case – has consistently opposed his leaving prison. Lebanese authorities have repeatedly said Abdallah should be freed from jail and had written to the appeals court to say they would organise his return home to Beirut.
In November, a French court ordered his release on the condition Abdallah leaves France.
But French prosecutors, arguing that he had not changed his political views, appealed the decision, which was consequently suspended.
A verdict was supposed to have been delivered in February, but the Paris Appeals Court postponed it, saying it was unclear whether Abdallah had proof that he had paid compensation to the plaintiffs – something he has consistently refused to do.
The court re-examined the latest request for his release last month.
During the closed-door hearing, Chalanset told the judges that 16,000 euros ($18,535) had been placed in the prisoner’s bank account and were at the disposal of civil parties in the case, including the US.
Abdallah, who has never expressed regret for his actions, has always insisted he is a “fighter” who battled for the rights of Palestinians and not a “criminal”.
The Paris court has described his behaviour in prison as irreproachable and said in November that he posed “no serious risk in terms of committing new terrorism acts”.
This summer in Western Europe, there is constant talk of “unprecedented heatwaves”. According to the media, authorities are working hard to help people cope with and protect themselves from the adverse effects of sweltering temperatures.
As someone in Gaza, it is hard not to be grimly amused by this panic.
After all, as temperatures began to rise, my homeland – at least what remains of it – has been transformed into an open-air furnace.
Now, in the middle of another hot, humid Mediterranean summer, we don’t even have the bare minimum to shield ourselves from the heat. I read report after report advising Europeans to stay indoors, stay hydrated, use sun cream and avoid strenuous outdoor activity. Meanwhile, we in Gaza have no homes, no water, no shade and no escape.
We cannot “limit outdoor activity” because everything we need to survive is outside: water trucks that may come twice a week if we’re lucky, food distributions, firewood to scavenge. We cannot “stay hydrated” because water is scarce, rationed and often polluted. And sunscreen? We would sooner find medicine on Mars.
Summer in Gaza used to be a season of joy with beach days, courtyard gardens, a breeze under the trees. But the ongoing Israeli onslaught has turned it into a season of torment. The beaches are blockaded. The courtyards are rubble. The trees are ash. Israel has flattened most of Gaza, turning soil into dust, parks into deserts and cities into graveyards. Gaza is now a shadeless city.
The heat itself has become a silent killer. But Gaza’s deadly summer is not natural. It is not just another consequence of climate change either. It is Israel’s making. The endless bombing has created greenhouse gas emissions and thick layers of dust and pollutants. Fires burn unchecked. Garbage piles rot in the sun. Farmland is razed. What was once a climate crisis is now climate cruelty, engineered by military force.
The irony is bitter: Europe blames its heatwaves on a meteorological “heat dome”, a bubble of trapped hot air. But Israel has trapped us in another kind of dome: overcrowded nylon tents that act like ovens in the sun. These camps are not shelters – they are slow-cooking chambers. They trap heat, stink, fear and grief. And we, the displaced, have nowhere else to go.
Summer is no longer a season I look forward to. It is a dilemma I endure. The sun hangs overhead like a sentence. It scorches the ground beneath my feet so that even my slippers burn. I cannot stay inside the tent during the day. It is too hot to breathe. But I cannot be outside for long either. I must go. I must wait in long lines for water, then again for food – under a sun so punishing I fear sunstroke as much as starvation.
We are told to queue with discipline, but how can you queue when your body is faint and your child is hungry? I push forward through crowds, not out of greed, but desperation. I scavenge for fuel – wood, plastic, anything to burn. I return to my tent only to collapse into more heat.
The nights offer no mercy. With most of Gaza’s population now crammed near the coastline, the tents radiate heat back at each other. Unlike the earth, they do not cool after sunset. They store the suffering. I feel my neighbours’ breath, their sweat, their sorrow as if the heat itself is contagious. Insects swarm us in waves, drawn to the warmth. My mother and sister swat them away as if they were the bombs we can still hear in the distance.
Living in a tent for a second summer should make it easier. It doesn’t. It makes it worse.
Last summer, after being displaced from our home in eastern Khan Younis, we at least had some food variety. There were still deliveries of aid. We could still cook. But since March 2 when Israel blocked humanitarian aid again, we have descended into engineered starvation.
The United States and Israel now stage a grotesque theatre called the “Gaza Humanitarian Foundation” to distribute flour. They place sacks of flour inside metal cages as if we are livestock. People are forced to queue for hours under an open sky, stripped of shade and dignity. Soldiers scream at them to take off their hats, lie face down on blazing asphalt, crawl for food. After all that, you might still leave empty-handed – if you’re not shot first.
They have lowered the bar of our existence. We no longer ask for safety or shelter. We ask only: Do we have enough food to last the day?
Israel has combined every tool of deprivation: heat without shade, thirst without water, hunger without hope. There is no electricity to run desalination or pumping stations. No fuel to chill the little water that comes. No flour, no fish, no markets. For many of us, this summer could be our last.
This is not a climate crisis. This is weather used as a weapon – a war waged not only with bombs and bullets but also with heat, thirst and slow death. Gaza is not just burning – it is being suffocated under a man-made sun. And the world watches, calls it a “conflict” and checks the forecast.
The United States and Germany have struck a deal to provide Ukraine with weaponry to protect cities from nightly Russian attacks.
Germany was prepared to pay for the systems as part of a broader US deal to sell Europe arms destined for Ukraine.
Details began to emerge on July 10 when Chancellor Friedrich Merz said Germany would buy US-made air defence systems.
“We are also prepared to purchase additional Patriot systems from the US to make them available to Ukraine,” Merz was quoted as saying on the sidelines of a Ukraine Recovery Conference in Rome.
On Friday, US President Donald Trump told NBC News that the US would sell NATO US-made weapons, including the Patriots, that NATO would give to Ukraine.
Adding to the crescendo, US Senator Lindsey Graham told CBS on Sunday: “In the coming days, you will see weapons flowing at a record level to help Ukraine defend themselves.”
(Al Jazeera)
Meanwhile, Russia continued to capture Ukrainian villages.
On Friday, the Russian Ministry of Defence claimed to have seized Zelyonaya Dolina in the eastern region of Donetsk and Sobolevka in Kharkiv in the northeast. Nikolayevka in Donetsk fell on Sunday, Malinovka in Zaporizhia on Monday and Novokhatskoye in Donetsk on Wednesday.
Yet even at this accelerated rate of 15sq km (6sq miles) a day, Russia would need 89 years to capture the rest of Ukraine, The Economist magazine estimated.
Russia continued to pound Ukraine’s cities with combinations of drones and missiles every night over the past week.
The biggest attack came early on Saturday. The Ukrainian air force said it downed or electronically suppressed 577 of 597 drones launched overnight and 25 of 26 Kh-101 cruise missiles.
June also saw the highest monthly civilian casualties in three years with 232 people killed and 1,343 injured, the United Nations Human Rights Monitoring Mission in Ukraine said.
Trump: ‘We’re getting our money back in full’
Trump announced on Monday at the White House that he had approved $10bn in weapons sales to Ukraine, which were to be paid for by Ukraine’s European allies.
“We’ve made a deal today where we’re going to be sending them weapons and they’re going to be paying for them,” he said.
(Al Jazeera)
He doubled down on that financial message, telling reporters on Tuesday that after spending billions to help Ukraine, “we’re getting our money back in full.”
Graham played on the same theme.
“Stay tuned for a plan where America will begin to sell to our European allies tremendous amounts of weapons that can benefit Ukraine,” he told CBS.
Trump said he would send 17 Patriot systems to Ukraine. It was not clear if this meant 17 batteries or 17 launchers. “It’s everything. It’s Patriots. It’s all of them. It’s a full complement with the batteries,” Trump said.
A Patriot battery usually contains six launchers, each typically carrying four missiles.
The particulars of the deal have remained murky and perhaps deliberately so.
German Defence Minister Boris Pistorius, who was in Washington, DC, on Monday, didn’t disclose details.
“But one thing is clear – and this is a message to all other European NATO members: Everyone must open their wallets. It’s about urgently raising the funds needed, especially for air defence, because Ukraine is under enormous pressure,” Pistorius said.
[Al Jazeera]
Russia has increased its attacks on Ukraine’s cities since the beginning of the year. In June alone, Moscow launched 330 missiles and 5,000 drones against Ukraine.
While Patriots are too expensive to use on drones, they are the only weapon in Ukraine that can shoot down ballistic missiles and are also effective against cruise missiles.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said in April that Ukraine needed 10 more Patriot systems to protect its cities – presumably referring to complete batteries.
Germany’s head of defence planning, Major General Christian Freuding, said on Saturday that Pistorius and his US counterpart, Pete Hegseth, had discussed a German offer to buy two Patriot systems for Ukraine. It was not clear if Pistorius’s visit to Washington, DC, was related to that.
On Tuesday, Trump told reporters the Patriot systems were “already being shipped, … coming in from Germany”.
Separately, Zelenskyy told Trump’s special envoy to Ukraine, General Keith Kellogg, when they met in Kyiv on Monday that Ukraine was ready “to purchase American weapons, particularly air defence systems”.
Russia reacts with fury to US-German deal as Trump weighs sanctions
Moscow has balked at the Western deal for Ukraine.
“Mr Merz is a fierce proponent of confrontation on all fronts and of aggressively mobilising Europe,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said on Friday.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said Germany, France and the United Kingdom were “attempting to raise Europe for war, … a direct war against Russia”.
Trump also announced possible secondary sanctions on buyers of Russian oil.
“We are very, very unhappy with Russia – I am,” he said Monday in the White House while sitting next to NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte. “I am disappointed in President [Vladimir] Putin because I thought we would have a deal two months ago.”
(Al Jazeera)
Trump said he was putting Putin on 50 days notice.
“We’re going to be doing secondary tariffs if we don’t have a deal in 50 days. It’s very simple. And they’ll be at 100 percent.”
The tariffs would be levied on goods the US imports from countries that buy Russian oil, an idea Graham has aggressively pursued in recent weeks, naming China, India and Brazil as the worst offenders.
“We would like to understand what is behind this statement about 50 days,” Lavrov said. “Earlier, there were also the deadlines of 24 hours and of 100 days. We’ve seen it all and really would like to understand the motivation of the US president.”
Lavrov was referring to Trump’s campaign boast that he would end the war in Ukraine in a day and Kellogg’s self-imposed 100-day goal to bring about a ceasefire.
Some observers are sceptical about whether Trump will get tough on Putin, whom he has openly admired.
Dmitry Medvedev, the deputy chairman of Russia’s Security Council, shrugged off Trump’s remarks.
“Trump issued a theatrical ultimatum to the Kremlin. The world shuddered, expecting the consequences. Belligerent Europe was disappointed. Russia didn’t care,” he wrote on social media.
But Peskov on Tuesday called Trump’s remarks “very serious”, adding: “Something in them concerns President Putin personally.”
On Wednesday, the normally restrained Peskov sounded even more alarmed that Europe was now willing to foot the bill for the war without US assistance.
“What we are observing so far is that the Europeans are displaying a completely aggressive militarist stance, declaring their intention to spend enormous funds to purchase weapons, to further provoke the continuation of war,” Peskov said.
“Of course, it is very hard to predict anything amid such an emotional state, bordering on irrationality, which reigns on the European continent,” he added.
The only thing that assuaged Russian concerns was indecision over sending Ukraine Germany’s Taurus missiles, which can strike deep inside Russia with large warheads.
That news suggested that Europeans “still have some sense of reason left”, Peskov said on Wednesday.
European defence and reconstruction without the US
Europe’s willingness to spend on defence may also have brought forth the dawn of more independence from the US.
Last week, the UK and France announced a scaling-up of their Combined Joint Force to a corps level, a reorientation of that force from overseas expeditions, “refocusing it on defending Europe” and upgrading it “to war-fighting readiness”.
They announced new procurement of Storm Shadow/SCALP missiles and joint research on a generation of missiles that would “harness the power of AI”.
They also issued the Northwood Declaration on closer nuclear coordination. “Any adversary threatening the vital interests of Britain or France could be confronted by the strength of the nuclear forces of both nations,” the UK Ministry of Defence said.
France and Britain are the only European states with a nuclear deterrent.
The US Senate Armed Services Committee, meanwhile, approved $500m in security assistance for Ukraine as part of its draft language for the next fiscal year – the only military aid announced under the Trump administration.
Under former President Joe Biden, the US spent $64.6bn on military aid to Ukraine, according to a tracker run by the Kiel Institute for the World Economy.
Biden also left $4bn unspent in the form of a presidential authority to draw down weapons from US stockpiles and send them to Ukraine. Trump has not exercised that authority, insisting that the US needs to be paid back.
As Trump touted $10bn in weapons sales, the European Commission announced 10 billion euros ($11.6bn) in investments in Ukraine, leveraged through 2.3 billion euros ($2.7bn) in loans and grants from European institutions.
The announcement came at the Ukraine Recovery Conference.
The money is for rebuilding critical infrastructure and networks and helping small businesses.
“We need a Marshall Plan-style approach,” Zelenskyy declared upon arrival in Rome, referring to the post-World War II system of grants from the US that rebuilt the European economy.
Women sit at a bus stop damaged during Russian drone and missile strikes in Kyiv, Ukraine, on July 10, 2025 [Alina Smutko/Reuters]
The Syrian government has announced that local leaders will take control of security in the southern city of Suwayda in an attempt to defuse violence that has killed hundreds of people and triggered Israeli military intervention.
Syrian forces had entered Suwayda, reportedly to oversee a ceasefire after deadly clashes between Druze fighters and local Bedouin tribes killed more than 350 people, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights war monitor.
Witnesses, however, reported that government forces had aligned with Bedouin groups in attacks against Druze fighters and civilians.
Israel carried out deadly strikes on Syria on Wednesday, including on its army headquarters in Damascus, saying they were aimed at defending Syria’s Druze minority. It threatened to intensify its attacks unless Syrian government forces withdrew from the south.
On Wednesday, Syria announced its army’s withdrawal from Suwayda while the United States – Israel’s close ally working to rebuild Syrian relations – confirmed an agreement to restore calm, urging all parties to honour their commitments.
Syrian interim President Ahmed al-Sharaa announced on Thursday in a televised address that security responsibility in Suwayda would transfer to religious elders and local factions “based on the supreme national interest”.
“We are eager to hold accountable those who transgressed and abused our Druze people because they are under the protection and responsibility of the state,” he said.
Before government intervention, Druze fighters largely maintained control of their areas.
Al-Sharaa emphasised to the Druze community that it is “a fundamental part of the fabric of this nation. … Protecting your rights and freedom is one of our priorities.”
Al-Sharaa blamed “outlaw groups” whose leaders “rejected dialogue for many months” of committing the recent “crimes against civilians”.
He claimed the deployment of forces from the Ministries of Defence and Interior had “succeeded in returning stability” despite Israel’s intervention, which included bombings in southern Syria and Damascus.
Israel, with its own Druze population, has positioned itself as a protector of the Syrian minority although analysts suggested this may justify its military objective of keeping Syrian forces away from their shared border.
US Secretary of State Marco Rubio expressed concern about the Israeli bombings on Wednesday, stating, “We want it to stop.”
Rubio later announced on X that all parties had “agreed on specific steps that will bring this troubling and horrifying situation to an end”, adding that implementation was expected without detailing specifics.
Al-Sharaa praised US, Arab and Turkish mediation efforts for preventing further escalation.
“The Israeli entity resorted to a wide-scale targeting of civilian and government facilities,” he said, adding that it would have triggered “large-scale escalation, except for the effective intervention of American, Arab and Turkish mediation, which saved the region from an unknown fate”.
He did not specify which Arab nations participated in the mediation.
Eight healthy babies have been born in the United Kingdom using a groundbreaking new IVF technique involving DNA from three people, offering hope to families with mitochondrial diseases, according to a world-first trial.
Experts at Britain’s Newcastle University and Monash University in Australia published the results of the much-awaited trial on Wednesday in several papers in the New England Journal of Medicine.
These genetic diseases, which affect one in 5,000 births and have no cure, can cause severe symptoms like vision loss and muscle wasting.
The new procedure, approved in the UK in 2015, uses DNA from the mother’s egg, the father’s sperm and a small amount of healthy mitochondrial DNA from a donor’s egg. This has led to the controversial but widely used term “three-parent babies”, though only about 0.1% of the baby’s DNA comes from the donor.
Out of 22 women who underwent the treatment at the Newcastle Fertility Centre in northeast England, eight babies were born. The four boys and four girls now range from less than six months to more than two years old.
For six of the babies, the amount of mutated mitochondrial DNA was reduced by 95-100%, and for the other two, it was reduced by 77-88%, which is below the disease-causing threshold.
The children are currently healthy, although their long-term health will continue to be monitored.
Despite this success, the procedure remains controversial and is not approved in many countries, including the United States and France. Opponents cite ethical concerns, including the destruction of human embryos and fears of creating “designer babies”.
