Lebanese PM condemns wave of Israeli attacks on southern Lebanon

Nawaf Salam, the leader of Lebanese democracy, has called on the international community to repress Israel into adhering to a November ceasefire with the Lebanese organization Hezbollah.

The Israeli military struck a building in Toul, a town in the Nabatieh governorate, according to Lebanon’s official National News Agency (NNA). The army had earlier issued a warning to residents of the area around a building it claimed Hezbollah used.

Israeli bombardment of the southern Lebanese towns of Soujod, Touline, Sawanna, and the Rihan Mountain was also reported by Lebanese media outlets.

The Israeli attacks come just days before Saturday’s municipal elections in Lebanon’s southern districts, according to Salam’s office in a statement.

In light of the ongoing Israeli occupation of some of southern Lebanon, it is anticipated that Hezbollah and its allies will win the contests. Additionally, there are growing concerns about the safety of voters, particularly in border towns.

His office stated in its statement that Prime Minister Salam “stresses that these violations will not thwart the state’s commitment to holding elections and protecting Lebanon and the Lebanese.”

On May 22, people and members of the civil defense gathered near the Israeli attack site in Toul [Ali Hankir/Reuters]

Hezbollah fighters were instructed to retreat from the Litani River and construct military installations south of the Litani River as part of the ceasefire agreement in November.

Israel, for its part, had planned to leave Lebanon altogether, but it has still maintained troops in some areas. It asserts that it must remain there for “strategic” reasons.

A UN Security Council resolution calls for the disarmament of all non-state organizations and states that Lebanese troops and UN peacekeepers should be the only ones who can carry arms in southern Lebanon.

One fighter was killed in Rab el-Thalathine, southern Lebanon, on Thursday, according to the Israeli military, which carried out several strikes that targeted Hezbollah sites.

Hezbollah did not respond to the Israeli army’s assertion right away.

A shepherd was also hurt in a different Israeli attack nearby, according to the NNA.

In the Bekaa Valley in northeast Lebanon, Israeli forces “struck a Hezbollah military site containing rocket launchers and weapons.”

JPMorgan’s Dimon warns of US stagflation risk: Report

Jamie Dimon, the CEO of JPMorgan Chase, has warned that he can’t rule out the possibility that the country will experience stagflation, an economic term that describes a period of high inflation and unemployment while economic growth is slow.

In response to a question about some US Federal Reserve officials claiming the US economy was in a sweet spot, Dimon said in an interview with Bloomberg Television on Thursday.

At the Shanghai-based JPMorgan’s Global China Summit, Dimon made his remarks. His remarks come in light of US government policy changes that have caused retailers to declare that they must raise prices and put businesses in a wait-and-see mode due to the country’s growing geopolitical tensions, rising deficits, and consumer price pressure.

According to Al Jazeera, economists like Stuart Mackintosh, the executive director of the financial think tank Group of Thirty, shared Dimon’s concerns.

“We cannot exclude the possibility of stagnation.” We are currently faced with uncertainty regarding tariffs and many other policies that are putting downward pressure on American growth.

The US economy’s credit rating was downgraded by Moody’s Ratings last week. In response to the US’s growing national debt, the company reduced its gold-standard Aaa rating to an Aa1 credit rating.

At the company’s Monday investor day, Dimon’s remarks from Thursday served as further evidence.

According to Dimon, “Credit today is a bad risk.”

Dimon also made comments on US President Donald Trump’s “big beautiful bill,” which includes significant provisions of the Trump administration’s agenda, such as tax cuts, slashes to Medicaid and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), increased funding for immigration enforcement, and new taxes on colleges and universities.

They should do the tax bill, in my opinion. In a record obtained by the Reuters news agency, Dimon stated that while it will stabilise things temporarily, it will likely increase the deficit.

According to the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office, the tax bill would increase the nation’s debt by $3.8 trillion.

“Inflation rising,”

Dimon continued, “The US Federal Reserve is doing the right thing to wait and see” before making monetary policy decisions, according to Dimon in the Bloomberg interview. At its most recent policy meeting, the central bank chose to hold rates steady, which was in line with economists’ expectations.

Policymakers at the time weighed a stable labor market even as they acknowledged that it might be in the short run.

This is unsustainable, they say. “We could very well be in a much worse economic situation right away,” Mackintosh said.

As the US Department of Labor and the payroll and human resources firm ADP prepare to release their monthly report on the rate of job growth, more details on the state of the US labor market are anticipated in the coming weeks.

Dimon has long warned against rising inflation and stagflation.

He noted that “I believe there is a little more chance of inflation going up and stagflation” than most people would anticipate.

Russia says it received Ukraine’s list of names for major prisoner swap

A Kremlin spokesman informed Interfax that Russia had received a list of the names of the Ukrainian prisoners of war (POWs) as part of the planned dialogue between the two nations.

After Moscow released its own list of prisoners it wanted released, Dmitry Peskov told Interfax on Thursday that the list had been received.

In what would be the largest swap of the war, talks last week in Istanbul, Turkey, reached agreement on the deal, which will give each side 1, 000 POWs.

Since the start of the war in 2022, those discussions included the first direct peace negotiations between Russian and Ukrainian delegations.

Ukraine had requested a 30-day ceasefire before the meeting, but Moscow only approved the prisoner swap.

Since then, Ukrainian officials have accused Russia of purposefully stifling peace negotiations to consolidate its territorial gains.

The major prisoner swap is a “quite laborious process” that “requires some time,” according to Peskov, who added that “the work is proceeding at a quick pace.”

According to the Kremlin spokesperson, “everyone wants to do it right away.”

Meanwhile, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, the president of Ukraine, claimed on Thursday that the agreement to release “1, 000 of our people from Russian captivity” was perhaps the only tangible outcome of the meeting in Turkiye.

In a post on X, he wrote, “We are working to ensure that this result is achieved.”

Rustem Umerov, the president’s personal office, and several Ukrainian government ministries are supporting the exchange process, Zelenskyy added.

One of Ukraine’s top priorities, Zelenskyy said, is the return of all of our citizens from Russian captivity. Everyone who makes a contribution to this project is a blessing to me.

As Ukraine, the European Union, and the United States press Moscow to resume negotiations, Peskov refuted reports of upcoming Vatican peace talks, saying, “There is no concrete agreement about the next meetings.”

Vladimir Putin, the Russian president, and US President Donald Trump reaffirmed their commitment to putting an end to the “bloodbath.”

Putin thanked Trump for backing resuming direct negotiations with Russia and Ukraine, and declared that his country would “propose and is willing to collaborate with the Ukrainian side on a memo on a possible future peace agreement.”

Meanwhile, the Russian defense ministry announced on Thursday that its air defenses shot down 105 Ukrainian drones overnight, including 35 over the Moscow region.

Between late Tuesday and early Thursday, the ministry reported that it shot 485 Ukrainian drones over a number of regions and the Black Sea.

Oleksandr Prokudin, the governor of Kherson in southern Ukraine, added on Thursday that a Russian artillery attack in the area claimed the lives of one person.

Eleven people were hurt in 35 areas in the Kherson region, including the city of Kherson, over the past day when they were attacked with artillery shells and air attacks.

Trump blocks Harvard’s ability to enrol international students

According to the Department of Homeland Security, US President Donald Trump’s administration has prevented Harvard University from enrolling international students.

Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem claimed that the Trump administration was “holding Harvard accountable for fostering violence, antisemitism, and coordination with the Chinese Communist Party on its campus” in a post on X on Thursday.

Universities can enrol foreign students and benefit from their higher tuition costs to help pad their multibillion-dollar endowments, she said. “It is a privilege, not a right. “Harvard had plenty of opportunities to do what was right. It turned down.”

Noem claimed that the university’s Student Exchange Visitor Program certification had been suspended in a letter to the administration. The US Homeland Security Investigations unit, which Noem leads, is in charge of the program.

The decision means that current students must “transfer to another university in order to maintain their non-immigrant status,” according to the letter.

Harvard described the action as “retaliatory action” and “unlawful” in a statement.

The university stated in a statement that “we are fully committed to maintaining Harvard’s ability to host our international students and scholars, who come from more than 140 countries, and greatly enhance the university and this country.”

The university, which has refused to accept a list of demands related to its diversity programs and response to pro-Palestine protests, and the Trump administration are at odds with each other.

The administration’s response to the administration’s $2.6 billion grant and funding cuts totaled three rounds. The most recent one occurred on Monday. The administration is currently suing Harvard for violating the US Constitution with its conduct.

Alan Garber, president of Harvard, urged alumni to show their support and donations for the university earlier this week.

In an email where he launched the Presidential Priorities Fund and Presidential Fund for Research, Garber wrote, “The institution entrusted to us now faces challenges unlike any other challenges in our long history.” The funding cuts are intended to close any gaps left by the funding cuts.

earlier threat

Noem threatened to revoke Harvard’s Student Exchange Visitor Program certification in April, which is required by educational institutions to accept students on a variety of visa types.

She cited a federal law that mandates disclosures of academic records, enrollment, and disciplinary action for the administration on April 30 to give the administration a deadline of April 30 to provide detailed information about what she called the “illegal and violent activities” of foreign students on campus.

The university later told the agency it had the requested information, according to the Harvard Crimson, but they declined to provide any further details.

The threat came as a result of the Trump administration’s wider crackdown on pro-Palestine demonstrations at US universities, which federal officials have generally deemed to be “anti-Semitic,” according to Al Jazeera’s Kimberly Halkett.

According to Halkett, a journalist from Washington, DC, “The Trump administration has been clamping down heavily on Harvard and other colleges, including Columbia University,” over what the administration claims are “anti-Semitism” that exists on the campuses.

At the beginning of his presidency, the president established a joint task force to address this, according to her. But opponents claim that it expanded to include everything from changing university curriculum to stricter hiring standards. Trump has accused universities of instigatorating “anti-Trump” ideology.

According to federal data, in the US, in the year 2023, there were 7, 417 schools overall that were eligible for the Student Exchange Visitor Program.

US Supreme Court hits deadlock in case of publicly funded religious school

The United States Supreme Court has reached a deadlock in a case over whether a religious charter school in Oklahoma should be publicly funded.

Thursday’s tie vote allows a lower court ruling to stand. Previously, Oklahoma’s state-level Supreme Court had barred the use of government funds to establish the St Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual School, citing constitutional limits to the government’s role in religion.

But the US Supreme Court’s split vote on Thursday leaves an avenue open for other, similar cases to advance. With no decision from the highest court in the country, no new precedent has been set to govern funding for charter schools, which are independent institutions that receive government funding.

It is relatively rare, though, that a Supreme Court case should end in a tie vote. The Houston Law Review in 2020 estimated that there had only been 183 ties at the Supreme Court since 1791, out of more than 28,000 cases.

Normally, there are nine justices on the court’s bench — an odd number, to ensure that the judges are not evenly split.

But Justice Amy Coney Barrett recused herself from the hearings over the St Isidore school. Though she did not indicate her reasons, it is widely believed that Barrett stepped away from the case to avoid potential conflicts of interest.

Barrett has a close personal relationship with an adviser to the St Isidore school, lawyer Nicole Garnett. As young legal professionals in the late 1990s, they clerked together on the Supreme Court, and they eventually taught together at the University of Notre Dame in Indiana.

When US President Donald Trump nominated Barrett to the Supreme Court in 2020, Garnett even wrote an opinion column in the newspaper USA Today, praising her friend as “remarkable” and describing their lives as “completely intertwined”.

The Supreme Court’s brief, two-line announcement on Thursday acknowledged Barrett’s absence.

“The judgment is affirmed by an equally divided Court,” it read. “JUSTICE BARRETT took no part in the consideration or decision of these cases.”

That left the court split four to four, though the precise breakdown was not provided. Chief Justice John Roberts is thought to have joined with the three left-leaning justices on the bench to oppose the school’s use of government funds.

The Supreme Court currently has a conservative supermajority, with six justices leaning rightward.

In the past, the court has signalled receptiveness to expanding religious freedoms in the US, including in cases that tested the Establishment Clause of the US Constitution.

While that clause bars the government from “the establishment of religion”, what qualifies as establishing a religion remains unclear — and is a source of ongoing legal debate.

The Oklahoma case stretches back to 2023, when the Catholic Archdiocese of Oklahoma City submitted an application to open a taxpayer-funded charter school that would share Catholic teachings.

The school would have been the first of its kind, offering public, religious education online for children from kindergarten through high school. The plan was to open the following year.

The Oklahoma Statewide Virtual Charter School Board initially voted down the proposal in April, only to give it the go-ahead in June by a narrow vote of three to two.

That teed up a legal showdown, with opponents calling the school a clear violation of the constitutionally mandated separation of church and state. But supporters argued that barriers to establishing a Catholic charter school limited their freedom of religion.

Plans for the school even ended up dividing Oklahoma’s government. The state attorney general, Gentner Drummond, opposed the charter school as a form of “state-funded religion”. The governor, Kevin Stitt, supported the proposal. Both men are Republicans.

In Oklahoma, as in the majority of other US states, charter schools are considered part of the public school system.

When the case reached the state-level Oklahoma Supreme Court in 2024, that distinction became pivotal. The fact that St Isidore was a public — not private — school ultimately caused the court to strike it down, for fear of constitutional violations.

The judges ruled in a six-to-two decision that establishing St Isidore with state funds would make it a “surrogate of the state”, just like “any other state-sponsored charter school”.

The school, the judges explained, would “require students to spend time in religious instruction and activities, as well as permit state spending in direct support of the religious curriculum and activities within St. Isidore — all in violation of the establishment clause”.

The school’s backers appealed to the Supreme Court, leading to arguments being held in April. It was unclear at the time which way the high court seemed to be leaning, with Roberts pressing both sides with questions.

But conservatives on the Supreme Court’s bench seemed in favour of backing St Isidore’s appeal. Justice Brett Kavanaugh, for instance, argued that withholding taxpayer funds from the religious school “seems like rank discrimination against religion”.

“All the religious school is saying is, ‘Don’t exclude us on account of our religion,’” he said.

The left-leaning justices, meanwhile, indicated that a ruling in favour of St Isidore would pave the way for public schools to become religious institutions, a slippery slope that could require the government to fund faith-based education of all stripes.

On Thursday, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), which has backed a separate lawsuit against the school, framed the deadlock at the Supreme Court as a victory for the separation of church and state.

“The very idea of a religious public school is a constitutional oxymoron. The Supreme Court’s ruling affirms that a religious school can’t be a public school and a public school can’t be religious,” said Daniel Mach, director of the ACLU’s Program on Freedom of Religion and Belief.

But proponents pledged to keep on fighting. Jim Campbell, who argued in favour of St Isidore on behalf of Oklahoma’s charter school board, noted that the court may “revisit the issue in the future”, given the deadlock.