Category: Nation World News Wires

ROME — Child malnutrition has reached critical levels in a third of Afghanistan’s provinces and is expected to worsen as funding shortfalls force cuts in food distributions and other support, the U.N. World Food Program said Tuesday.

“We must act now to stem the rise in child deaths, which this crisis is provoking,” John Aylieff, WFP’s country director in Afghanistan, said in a statement, adding that “it is already too late for too many.”

Afghanistan continues to recover from decades of conflict and upheaval, including the chaotic withdrawal of U.S. forces in 2021 as the Taliban took power.

Olga Cherevko, spokesperson for the U.N. humanitarian office in Afghanistan, said nutrition specialists report that “wasting among children has worsened this year in over three-quarters of the country.” Children suffering from a condition known as wasting are acutely malnourished, become very thin for their height, and need immediate therapeutic feeding.

But “too many children arrive at health facilities severely malnourished” while others never make it, Cherevko told reporters at U.N. headquarters by video from Afghanistan, where she has traveled across the country in recent months and weeks.

WFP said 142 health centers closed in 2025 because of aid reductions and more than 13,000 children lost access to nutrition treatment. It did not mention any specific donor, such as the United States, where the Trump administration has made sweeping cuts in foreign aid.

Nearly 3.7 million Afghan children are projected to suffer from acute malnutrition this year, along with 1.2 million pregnant and breastfeeding women, according to WFP.

The agency said 12 Afghan provinces have reached critical levels of acute child malnutrition, a record number. It cited a combination of conflict, unemployment, rising food prices, disease outbreaks, poor water and sanitation, and reduced humanitarian funding.

Deliveries delayed by the Iran war and other fighting

WFP said supply shortages linked to conflict in the Middle East and the nine-month closure of Pakistan’s border because of fighting between the neighbors have disrupted deliveries of nutrition products, leaving nearly one million malnourished women and children without essential nutrition services for five months.

From August through October, WFP said, food distributions aimed at preventing famine in the worst-hit areas are being suspended due to lack of funding, even though the annual peak season for malnutrition is between July and October.

It said it urgently needs $540 million over the next six months.

WFP previously described cuts as ‘devastating’

Humanitarian groups in Afghanistan are grappling with steep funding cuts. In February, Aylieff told the Associated Press that cuts had been “devastating” and were forcing the agency to turn away three out of four acutely malnourished children.

Funding for food assistance has dropped sharply — by about 59% since 2022 — even as needs have surged, according to a recent WFP report.

In June, the U.S. pledged $800 million to WFP, which said it will help more than 38 million people in at least 37 countries.

Cherevko of the U.N. humanitarian office said the larger $1.71 billion humanitarian appeal for Afghanistan is just over 26% funded, which is “alarming,” especially since malnutrition and other indicators are worsening.

LOS ANGELES — A California man who was arrested at President Donald Trump’s Los Angeles-area golf course was pretending to be part of the security detail preparing for Trump’s visit and had a stash of illegal weapons in his car and home, authorities said.

Jeanine John Taele, 38, was due in court Wednesday on a federal weapons charge but the hearing was canceled. He is being held at a downtown LA jail on state charges, according to booking records, and not yet in federal custody, said a spokesperson for the U.S. attorney’s office.

Taele was arrested Sunday at Trump National Golf Club in Rancho Palos Verdes, two days before Trump visited for a fundraising dinner.

Taele was first seen on the property Friday, walking throughout the course wearing an earpiece and taking photos and videos of federal agents’ activities as they conducted a security assessment, according to a federal criminal complaint.

Taele drove away but then returned to the course Sunday. He approached federal agents and said he was employed by the State Department and was there for a security detail. Taele said he had a loaded weapon in his vehicle and was arrested after it was searched, according to federal officials. Authorities also found a 16-round magazine with ammunition in his pocket.

He already appeared in court on state weapons charges and a second-degree robbery charge for an unrelated incident.

Taele is charged federally with possession of an unregistered short-barreled rifle that was found at this home, authorities said. The complaint alleges the firearm is an illegally modified AR-style rifle with a barrel that was cut down to 10 inches from 14 inches.

The Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department said a search of his pickup truck in the club parking lot turned up a loaded 9mm pistol, binoculars, and a badge that read “security protection agent,” according to federal prosecutors.

Law enforcement searched his home in the nearby city of Downey on Monday and found a rifle and other firearms, magazines and ammunition, body armor, and notebooks with “concerning statements,” federal authorities said. No details about the statements were released.

“Mr. Taele’s troubling behavior at the President’s public golf course merely days before the President was expected to arrive raised serious red flags for law enforcement,” Patrick Grandy, the assistant director in charge of the FBI’s Los Angeles office, said in a statement. “There is no room for error, particularly in light of previous attempts on President Trump’s life.”

In brief remarks about Taele’s arrest to Fox News on Tuesday, Trump said “only consequential presidents” are targeted, “and I am definitely consequential,” which he said brought him “a little solace.”

Taele was a corporal in the U.S. Marines who was deployed to Iraq in 2008 and Afghanistan in 2010 and worked as a warehouse clerk, according to the U.S. Marine Corps. He earned numerous commendations, including an award for good conduct, during his service from 2008 to 2016.

The Los Angeles County public defender’s office, which is representing Taele in the state criminal case, did not immediately return an email seeking comment Wednesday. Family members could not immediately be reached for comment.

Last year a jury found a man guilty of trying to assassinate Trump at the president’s Florida country club. And while a candidate in 2024, Trump narrowly escaped an assassination attempt by a shooter on a roof at a campaign rally in Butler, Pa.

CEDAR CREST, N.M. — New Mexico’s attorney general sued the U.S. Department of Justice on Wednesday, accusing it of blocking the state from investigating sex crimes at Jeffrey Epstein’s sprawling ranch near Santa Fe.

The lawsuit in federal court in Washington, D.C., said the department and Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche stonewalled New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez’s criminal investigation into Epstein and others, taking action that “actively harms victims and undermines the public interest.”

The lawsuit sought judicial intervention to force the federal government to turn over materials to New Mexico’s investigators. It was filed the same day that the New Mexico House of Representatives released a report saying “those directly responsible for protecting New Mexicans relied on others to do their job,” including federal prosecutors in New York.

According to the Washington lawsuit, Torrez and his senior prosecutors “have faced sustained resistance” to the kind of information-sharing common between state and federal investigators.

In a statement, the Justice Department said it was not releasing some information the state requested because federal court orders ban disclosing “victim-identifying information carte blanche, and New Mexico has provided no lawful basis to justify such sweeping disclosures.”

It said protecting victim privacy remains a top priority, though the Justice Department “remains available to assist New Mexico’s investigation consistent with the law and binding court orders.”

The lawsuit said the Justice Department and Blanche were hiding information about Epstein and his co-conspirators when New Mexico is one of the few jurisdictions that may still be able to hold Epstein’s associates accountable or “provide some sense of justice to survivors.”

In a video conference call with reporters, Torrez said his office has made 10 separate requests for key information and has been ignored or denied.

“We have heard repeatedly they will cooperate and what our team has experienced is anything but cooperation,” Torrez said.

“Todd Blanche today with a stroke of a pen could grant us the access that he claimed,” Torrez said. “Instead they have decided to stonewall, to obstruct, and to frankly conceal for whatever reason.”

Epstein took his own life in a federal jail in New York City in August 2019 after he was denied bail on sex trafficking charges lodged against him when he was arrested a month earlier.

His former girlfriend and close associate, Ghislaine Maxwell, is serving a 20-year prison sentence after she was convicted in 2021 of sex trafficking charges at a trial in Manhattan, where some witness testimony alleged that Epstein and Maxwell had sexually abused women at the New Mexico ranch.

Meanwhile, the interim report by the New Mexico Survivors’ Truth Commission, established in February by the New Mexico House of Representatives, in part blamed federal prosecutors in Manhattan for a dearth of information about Epstein’s activities in New Mexico, saying they “never prioritized New Mexicans, focusing instead on Epstein’s misdeeds in New York, Palm Beach, Florida, and the Virgin Islands, while leaving Epstein’s offenses in New Mexico unexamined.”

Later in the report, though, the commission cited evidence gathered by New York’s federal prosecutors to describe women who described suffering sexual abuse from Epstein at his Zorro Ranch.

At Maxwell’s trial, Annie Farmer, now a psychologist, testified she was 16 when she agreed to go to Epstein’s New Mexico ranch, where Maxwell touched her breast during a massage and Epstein unexpectedly crawled into bed and pressed himself against her.

A spokesperson for New York federal prosecutors sent along the Justice Department statement on Epstein in response to a request for comment.

Coinciding with the release of the report, about 50 members of the media and the public gathered in a legislative hearing room at the New Mexico state capitol on Wednesday to hear about the commission’s preliminary findings.

Rachel Benavidez, the lone speaker in the “survivor testimony” portion of the meeting, alleged that Epstein sexually abused her at Zorro Ranch beginning in the late 1990s. Benavidez said Epstein’s connections with powerful people in the state allowed him to “roam free here in New Mexico unchecked” after he had been convicted of sex crimes elsewhere.

“We don’t need more paper files sitting as artifacts,” Benevidez said, urging the commission to question “co-conspirators” who helped Epstein evade accountability in the state.

She has said in other interviews that she was brought to the ranch to work as a massage therapist but she did not get into that in her testimony Wednesday except to say Epstein had exploited “The one thing that meant everything to me at that time, my hard earned career.”

Epstein purchased his sprawling estate in Stanley, N.M., a sparsely populated ranching community about 30 miles south of Santa Fe, in 1993 from former Democratic Gov. Bruce King and built a hilltop mansion with a private airstrip and helipad.

The property was sold by Epstein’s estate in 2023 to the family of Don Huffines, a Republican who was recently appointed state comptroller in Texas. In a February social media post on X, Huffines said the property has been renamed San Rafael Ranch after a saint associated with healing and that his family plans to operate a Christian retreat there.

In December, the Justice Department started releasing investigative records pertaining to Epstein and Maxwell in accordance with the Epstein Files Transparency Act.

Complaints quickly arose about shoddy redactions and too many sealed materials from accusers and members of Congress who fought to pass the transparency act. Records that were released, including photographs, interview transcripts, call logs, court records, and other documents, were either already public or heavily blacked out, and many lacked necessary context.

WASHINGTON — Jeanine Pirro this week found out there’s a tradeoff between loyalty to President Donald Trump and being loyal to reality.

The U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia — a fierce defender and decades-long friend — openly refuted Trump’s claims of vandalism regarding one of his treasured D.C. construction projects, admitting in court filings that damage to the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool was due to shoddy workmanship.

The moment comes as Trump is struggling to convince Americans to believe what he’s telling them on the economy, his agenda and his war on Iran ahead of pivotal midterm elections in the fall — and reveals the inherent challenges for his team in delivering hard truths he doesn’t want to hear. Trump has historically engaged in exaggeration, but this was a moment in which he wanted a U.S. citizen, Olympic canoeist David Hearn, to be indicted, tried, and possibly imprisoned for the act of touching a chunk of sealant in the already damaged pool.

The White House said that Trump was not aware ahead of time that Pirro’s office would drop the charges.

Trump says he told Pirro he was “not happy” about her decision, saying a video backed him up even though it’s not clear from the footage shot at a distance that any property destruction occurred. “Well I just think she was totally wrong,” Trump told reporters on Tuesday night. “And everybody saw the vandalism.”

By publicly rebuking Pirro, Trump sent a message to other administration officials that he is not to be contradicted, regardless of what the facts show.

“He just blows it up like a keg of dynamite — it’s a form of intimidating employees to be in group-think,” said Rice University professor Douglas Brinkley, a presidential historian. “‘If you work for me, you triple down.’ Never disagree with the boss, even in a small fractional way.”

Some Republicans blame Trump’s choices on ‘bad advice’ from staff

Trump has faced withering criticism for launching a war with Iran without fully laying out the rationale for the public or considering that country’s ability to withstand intense bombing. Trump snubbed a housing bill to address the affordability problems that voters say are their biggest concern, letting it become law without his signature.

Some Republican lawmakers have suggested that Trump is being sheltered from facts or chalk up his choices to poor staff work. During Trump’s second term, Republican senators including Ted Cruz of Texas and Thom Tillis of North Carolina have said publicly the president was receiving “bad advice,” a subtle critique of the president that shifts blame onto the aides who are supposed to be providing him with credible information.

The latest blow-up “reflects a president who is struggling to shape the narrative as his national approval ratings remain extremely low,” said Julian Zelizer, a political history professor at Princeton University. “The more controversy that he faces — over Iran, the Epstein files, inflation, and more — the less control he has and the stronger the chances that he will be forced to confront reality.”

The president continues to dwell on the 2020 election that he falsely claims to have won. He likes to boast that America is booming with an unverifiable $19.2 trillion in investments from foreign countries, even as economic growth has been meager over the prior three months. He posted a Jesus-like picture of himself on social media and said after a backlash that he thought it depicted him as a medical doctor.

The White House did not respond to questions about how aides brief the president and whether officials feel comfortable providing information that could contradict his public statements.

Pirro had been faithful to Trump’s wishes, until now

Until now, Pirro, a former Westchester County judge and TV show host, has largely been faithful to Trump’s wishes. Her office sent a subpoena in January to the Federal Reserve regarding the congressional testimony by the central bank’s then-chair, Jerome Powell, about a $2.5 billion renovation of its headquarters.

Pirro defended her decision to threaten Powell, who said the threat of a criminal indictment was really a pretext to pressure the Fed into slashing its benchmark interest rates in accordance with Trump’s wishes.

“This office makes decisions based on the merits, nothing more and nothing less,” Pirro posted on X. “We agree with the chairman of the Federal Reserve that no one is above the law, and that is why we expect his full cooperation.”

Her actions temporarily slowed efforts in the Senate to confirm Kevin Warsh as the next Fed chair. The Justice Department dropped the probe in April, roughly a month after a government prosecutor said in a closed-door court hearing that the government hadn’t found any evidence of a crime.

On the reflecting pool, Pirro pursued the investigation despite what defense lawyers say was abundant evidence from the outset that the damage at the pool was the result of preexisting problems that had nothing to do with Hearn. A new court filing from Hearn’s team disputes the Justice Department’s contention that it only recently learned its case was flawed and urges a judge to not only dismiss it but to foreclose the possibility of ever resurrecting it.

“From day one, the case against Mr. Hearn was motivated by political considerations and devoid of adequate factual support,” defense lawyers wrote. “Those political pressures have not dissipated in the mere four weeks since the government saw fit to obtain the indictment.”

Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche declined to discuss internal Justice Department conversations related to the case.

He deflected on the question of whether or not he supported the decision, acknowledging on one hand that Trump has “every right to be extraordinarily frustrated with damage done to our national monuments in this city and elsewhere” while simultaneously praising Pirro for what he asserted was “an unprecedented effort” to improve safety in the nation’s capital.

“When you look at the D.C. U.S. Attorney’s body of work over the past year and a half and where we are in this city compared to where we were, they are doing a phenomenal job,” Blanche said. “Now does that mean that every case goes exactly the way that President Trump wants or I want or U.S. Attorney Pirro wants? Of course not, it doesn’t.”

Pirro blamed others for giving Trump bad advice

What makes the reflecting pool incident different was that the administration contradicted claims of property damage made repeatedly by the president.

On Friday, the government moved to dismiss the criminal case and said that any damage to the pool was caused by the bungled work of the contractor and “the rush to complete the project prior to events associated with the America 250 celebration in the weeks surrounding Independence Day 2026.”

Interior Secretary Doug Burgum has supported Trump’s claims that vandals damaged the pool. That suggests that the conflict around this issue could continue to simmer.

While Trump and many of his supporters are able to exist within their own information bubble, the administration had basically declared in court that the president was wrong. That was different from a judicial ruling or news report fact-checking him, said Kathleen Hall Jamieson, a professor of communication at the University of Pennsylvania.

“It’s difficult to discredit that by saying these are anti-Trump forces,” she said.

RANCHO PALOS VERDES, Calif. — A California man carrying ammunition and with a gun in his car was arrested Sunday at President Donald Trump’s Los Angeles-area golf course after appearing to monitor security preparations two days ahead of Trump’s fundraiser there, authorities said Tuesday.

The Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department said the man was taking photos and video and had a 16-round magazine with ammunition in his pocket. Authorities recovered a loaded pistol in his car. Law enforcement searched his home Monday and found a plethora of firearms, magazines, and ammunition, body armor, and notebooks with “concerning statements.”

The sheriff’s department announced the arrest as Trump was preparing to arrive for a fundraising dinner for the Republican National Committee at the Trump National Golf Course in the suburb of Rancho Palos Verdes just south of Los Angeles.

The 38-year-old man was arrested for allegedly carrying a concealed firearm and possessing prohibited ammunition. The sheriff’s department said the man was being investigated by the El Segundo Police Department for robbery.

The sheriff’s department said there is “no credible threat to our communities.”

A jury in 2025 found a man guilty of trying to assassinate Trump at the president’s Florida country club.

PRAHOVO, Serbia — Water levels on the Danube River, the second longest in Europe, have dropped so low because of drought that the hulks of dozens of World War II German battleships are emerging into view.

They are a curious distraction from the summer heat crisis. The Danube’s record low water levels also have forced power plants to the brink of shutting down, and governments across Central and Eastern Europe are taking steps to conserve electricity.

In the middle of the river separating Serbia and Romania near the Serbian port of Prahovo, a rusty hull is now visible along with a broken mast where the Nazi flag used to fly.

The ships, some still laden with weapons, belonged to Nazi Germany’s Black Sea fleet that the Germans deliberately sank as they retreated from Romania and as Soviet forces advanced deeper into Europe near the end of the war.

Historians say up to 200 German warships were scuttled in September 1944 near Prahovo in the Danube gorge as they came under Soviet fire. The idea behind the deliberate sinking was to slow down the Soviet advance in the Balkans. But Nazi Germany surrendered months later, in May 1945.

The sight of the old warships is a reminder that the Serbian government, with European Union financial support, has long been trying to do something about them. Some were removed from the river by Communist Yugoslav authorities, but most have remained because of the explosives they carried.

Now, however, authorities are trying to keep traffic moving on the Danube, which flows through 10 nations, as the dropping water levels create dangerous conditions. Experts have linked the unusually hot weather to global warming and other factors.

Krsta Brandic, a Prahovo resident, said the low water levels have almost stopped ship traffic: “As you can see, the (big) ships can’t pass anymore.”