Category: 2. World

Elon Musk says he is launching a new political party, weeks after a dramatic falling out with US President Donald Trump.

The billionaire announced on his social media platform X that he had set up the America Party and billed it as a challenge to the Republican and Democratic two-party system.

However, it is unclear whether the party has been formally registered with US election authorities, and Musk has not provided details about who will lead it or what form it will take.

He first raised the prospect of launching a party during his public feud with Trump, which saw him leave his role in the administration and engage in a vicious public spat with his former ally.

During that row, Musk posted a poll on X asking users if there should be a new political party in the US.

Referencing that poll in his post on Saturday, Musk wrote: “By a factor of 2 to 1, you want a new political party and you shall have it!

“When it comes to bankrupting our country with waste & graft, we live in a one-party system, not a democracy.

“Today, the America Party is formed to give you back your freedom.”

As of Saturday, the Federal Electoral Commission had not published documents indicating the party had been formally registered.

Musk was a key Trump advocate during the 2024 election and spent $250m (£187m) to help him regain office.

After the election, he was appointed to lead the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (Doge), which was tasked with identifying swingeing cuts in the federal budget.

His fallout with Trump began when he left the administration in May and publicly criticised Trump’s tax and spending plans. The legislation – which Trump has called his “big, beautiful bill” – was narrowly passed by Congress and signed into law by the president this week.

The massive law includes huge spending commitments and tax cuts, and is estimated to add more than $3tn to the US deficit over the next decade.

Israel is sending a negotiating team to Qatar for talks on a Gaza ceasefire proposal, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has confirmed.

In a statement late on Saturday, Netanyahu’s office said the Israeli leader had instructed negotiators “to accept the invitation for close talks”.

But the statement said that “the changes Hamas is requesting to make to the Qatari proposal were delivered to us last night and are unacceptable to Israel”. It did not elaborate on what changes were being requested.

Hamas said on Friday that it had given a “positive” response to a United States-brokered proposal that would involve a 60-day truce in Gaza, renewing hopes of a possible end to Israel’s deadly assault on the Palestinian enclave.

More to come…

Camp Mystic

Renee Smajstrla

Jane Ragsdale

Heart O’ the Hills

Britain is re-establishing diplomatic relations with Syria after the country’s years-long civil war, the foreign secretary, David Lammy, has announced during a visit to the capital, Damascus.

“There is renewed hope for the Syrian people,” Lammy said in a statement. “It is in our interests to support the new government to deliver their commitment to build a stable, more secure and prosperous future for all Syrians.”

Lammy’s visit to Syria is the first by a British minister in 14 years and is accompanied by a pledge of £94.5m for urgent humanitarian aid and to support the country’s long-term recovery and help countries hosting Syrian refugees in the region.

The west has been slowly resetting its approach to Syria since insurgent forces led by the Islamist Hayat Tahrir al-Sham ousted Bashar al-Assad as president in December after more than 13 years of war.

Just days ago, the US president, Donald Trump, signed an executive order terminating a US sanctions programme on Syria, ending its isolation from the international financial system and helping it rebuild after the war.

Britain also eased its sanctions in April, unfreezing the assets of Syria’s central bank and 23 other entities, including banks and oil companies to encourage investments, though it kept in place those targeting members of the former regime.

A stable Syria will reduce the risk of “irregular migration”, ensure chemical weapons are destroyed, and tackle the threat of terrorism, Lammy said, after meeting his Syrian counterpart, Asaad Hassan al-Shaibani, and the president, Ahmed al-Sharaa.

In those meetings, Lammy reiterated the importance of an “inclusive and representative political transition” in Syria and offered Britain’s continued support, the statement said.

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Lammy is also due to travel to Kuwait, where regional security and strengthening bilateral relations will be top of the agenda. In addition, he is expected to announce a new partnership with the Gulf monarchy to tackle the humanitarian crisis in Sudan.

Iranian missiles struck five Israeli military bases during the recent 12-day war, according to radar data analyzed by researchers at Oregon State University and shared with The Telegraph.

The hits — which reportedly include a major air base, an intelligence centre, and a logistics hub — have not been disclosed by Israeli authorities due to strict military censorship.

The Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) declined to confirm the reported strikes but stated:“What we can say is that all relevant units maintained functional continuity throughout the operation.”

Read More: Israeli strikes on Gaza kill at least 35 Palestinians since dawn

The radar-based findings suggest that six Iranian missiles reached targets in Israel’s north, south, and centre, contradicting public claims of minimal damage to military infrastructure.

In addition to the newly revealed hits, 36 other Iranian projectiles are already known to have caused widespread damage to civilian and industrial areas. Though only 28 people were killed, over 15,000 were left homeless — a testament to the country’s civil preparedness and alert systems.

Israel admits that 50 Iranian missiles hit amid strict censorship. Photo: Reuters

The new evidence paints a more complex picture of Israel’s air-defence performance. While the IDF and US-backed systems — including Iron Dome, David’s Sling, Arrow, and the US THAAD system — intercepted the majority of incoming missiles, about 16% were breaking through by day seven, The Telegraph’s analysis shows.

This aligns with an IDF statement citing an overall success rate of 87%.

Despite that performance, journalist Raviv Drucker of Channel 13 warned: “There were a lot of [Iranian] missile hits in IDF bases, in strategic sites that we still don’t report about to this day… It created a situation where people don’t realise how precise the Iranians were and how much damage they caused in many places.”

Also Read: Hamas gives ‘positive response’ to US-backed Gaza ceasefire proposal

Iranian officials and media have showcased videos of missiles breaching Israeli defences, often with revolutionary songs and satirical cartoons mocking the Iron Dome.

One Iranian official told The Telegraph: “The main goal of firing [suicide drones] at Israel is always to keep their systems busy… Many don’t even get through – they’re intercepted – but they still cause confusion.”

Maj Gen Ali Fazli, deputy commander-in-chief of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard, claimed on Iranian TV: “Never before have we been at such a level in terms of military readiness, operational cohesion, and fighter morale.”

Israeli military sources countered, estimating that only half of Iran’s 400 missile launchers were destroyed, leaving substantial capacity intact.

“We assessed that Iran had approximately 2,000 to 2,500 ballistic missiles at the beginning of this conflict… Their missile stockpile could grow to 8,000 or even 20,000 missiles in the next few years,” said one Israeli official.

Maj Gen Fazli responded that much of Iran’s arsenal remains untouched: “We have not yet opened the doors of even one of our missile cities… only about 25 to 30 per cent of existing missile capability has been used.”

Researchers from Oregon State say a fuller assessment of the war’s impact will be published in two weeks.

Some 27 people, including nine children, have been confirmed dead after flash floods in the central of the US state of Texas, authorities said on Saturday, as rescuers continued a frantic search for survivors, including dozens still missing from a girls’ summer camp.

The sheriff’s office in Kerr County, Texas, said more than 800 people had been evacuated from the region as flood waters receded in the area around the Guadalupe River, about 137 kilometres northwest of San Antonio.

“We will not stop until every single person is found,” Kerr County Sheriff Larry Leitha said at a news conference.

At least 23 to 25 people from the Camp Mystic summer camp were missing, most of them reported to be young girls. The river waters rose 29 feet rapidly near the camp.

The US National Weather Service said that the flash flood emergency has largely ended for Kerr County, the epicentre of the flooding, following thunderstorms that dumped as much as a foot of rain early on Friday. A flood watch, however, remained in effect until 7pm for the broader region.

Kerr County sits in the Texas Hill Country, a rural area known for its rugged terrain, historic towns and other tourist attractions.

Texas Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick said up to 500 rescue workers were searching for an unknown number of people who were still missing, including many who had come to the area for an Independence Day celebration by the river.

“We don’t know how many people were in tents on the side, in small trailers by the side, in rented homes by the side, because it was going to be the Fourth of July holiday,” he said on Fox News Live.

US President Donald Trump said the federal government was working with state and local officials to respond to the flooding. “Melania and I are praying for all of the families impacted by this horrible tragedy. Our brave first responders are on site doing what they do best,” he said on social media.

Dalton Rice, city manager for Kerrville, the county seat, told reporters on Friday that the extreme flooding struck before dawn with little or no warning, precluding authorities from issuing advance evacuation orders as the Guadalupe River swiftly rose above major flood stage in less than two hours.

State emergency management officials had warned as early as Thursday that west and central Texas faced heavy rains and flash flood threats, citing National Weather Service forecasts ahead of the holiday weekend.

The forecasts, however, “did not predict the amount of rain that we saw”, W Nim Kidd, director of the Texas Division of Emergency Management, told a news conference on Friday night.

The weekend disaster echoes a catastrophic 1987 Guadalupe River flood in which 10 teenagers drowned when trying to leave a church camp, according to the National Weather Service.

Turkish authorities detained three more mayors from the main opposition party on Saturday, according to a prosecutor’s statement and media reports, expanding a months-long legal crackdown that has expanded beyond its origins in Istanbul.

The mayors of the big southern cities of Adana and Adiyaman were detained on allegations of extortion, the Istanbul chief prosecutor’s office said, along with some eight other people.

Broadcaster NTV said Antalya’s mayor and the deputy mayor of Istanbul’s Buyukcekmece district were also detained as part of the broader investigation in which hundreds of members of the Republic People’s Party (CHP), including 11 mayors previously, have been targeted since October last year.

The CHP broadly denies the charges and calls the probe politically driven, charges the government denies.

In March Istanbul Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu, the main political rival of President Tayyip Erdogan, was jailed pending trial on corruption charges, which he denies. That sparked the largest street protests in a decade and a sharp selloff in Turkish assets.

CNN
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Japan’s government on Saturday warned of more possible strong earthquakes in waters southwest of its main islands, but urged the public not to believe unfounded predictions of a major disaster.

Authorities on Friday evacuated some residents from remote islands close to the epicenter of a 5.5-magnitude quake off the tip of the southernmost main island of Kyushu.

That quake on Thursday, strong enough to make standing difficult, was one of more than 1,000 tremors in the islands of Kagoshima prefecture in the past two weeks that have fueled rumors stemming from a comic book prediction that a major disaster would befall the country this month.

“With our current scientific knowledge, it’s difficult to predict the exact time, place or scale of an earthquake,” said Ayataka Ebita, director of the Japan Meteorological Agency’s earthquake and tsunami monitoring division, after a 5.4-magnitude quake shook the area again on Saturday.

“We ask that people base their understanding on scientific evidence,” Ebita told a press conference.

The manga, which some have interpreted as predicting a catastrophic event on Saturday, has prompted some travelers to avoid Japan. Arrivals from Hong Kong, where the rumors have circulated widely, were down 11% in May from the same month last year, according to the latest data.

Japan has had record visitor numbers this year, with April setting an record monthly high of 3.9 million travelers.

Ryo Tatsuki, the artist behind the manga “The Future I Saw,” first published in 1999 and re-released in 2021, said she was “not a prophet,” in a statement issued by her publisher.

Earthquakes are common in Japan, one of the world’s most seismically active areas. It accounts for about one-fifth of the world’s earthquakes of magnitude 6 or greater.