Bahrain's interior ministry said on Thursday local time that sirens sounded in the country and urged residents to "remain calm and head to the nearest safe place."
This follows the Iranian military saying it attacked the US Fifth Fleet in Bahrain with drones, in response to Washington's latest attacks, according to Iran's Mehr news agency.
Iran also attacked the US Fifth Fleet during yesterday's retaliatory strikes.
Kuwait's military said its air defense systems are intercepting missiles and drones after detecting "hostile" aerial targets.
The army urged residents to follow security instructions and obtain updates only from official sources. The General Staff noted that defense units are acting under established operational procedures. Kuwait's Civil Aviation Authority also said the country temporarily shut its airspace, forcing flight diversions.
While Kuwait did not assign blame, Iran's military had carried out a strike against Kuwait's Ali Al Salem Air Base just one day earlier, a site that hosts United States forces.
https://breakingthenews.net/Article/Kuwait-intercepts-'hostile'-strikes-closes-airspace/66483422
The United States Central Command (CENTCOM) said its forces completed the latest round of "self-defense" strikes in Iran at the order of US President Donald Trump.
Marine Corps units joined Air Force and Navy aircraft in hitting Iranian radar, communication systems and air defense positions, the command said. "The strikes are in response to Iran's unwarranted and continued aggression," it noted, adding that the US forces remain "vigilant, lethal, and ready."
The operation marked the second day of attacks following the downing of a US Army Apache helicopter near the Strait of Hormuz.
https://breakingthenews.net/Article/US-says-latest-Iran-strikes-completed/66483336
The SAVE America Act remains in limbo, but it achieved a critical milestone during a late-night vote-a-rama to advance the GOP’s $70 billion immigration enforcement package, when Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) switched her vote. That means the only thing preventing it from becoming law is the 60-vote threshold in the Senate.
The legislation, formally titled the Safeguarding American Voter Eligibility Act, would require proof of U.S. citizenship at voter registration and a valid photo ID to cast a ballot in federal elections. It cleared the House months ago and has sat in the Senate since, caught between a Republican majority that supports it and a 60-vote cloture threshold that has become its ceiling.
Despite the filibuster standing in its way, reports suggest that meeting the 50-vote threshold to pass has given the legislation new momentum.
The path to 50 came through Sen. Mike Lee's (R-Utah) amendment, which used the bill's original, unmodified form as passed by the House. An earlier attempt by Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) to attach a modified version that included additional provisions, such as barring men from competing in women's sports, fell short when four Republicans defected. Sens. Collins, Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska), Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), and Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) all voted against the Graham version. Collins switched her vote on Lee's amendment and provided the crucial 50th yes vote.
“51 votes for the SAVE America Act during tonight’s budget reconciliation vote-a-rama,” Lee said in a post on X during the session.
“That means that but for the Zombie Filibuster, the House-passed SAVE America Act would now be on its way to the White House for President Trump’s signature.”
The Zombie Filibuster he references is the modern mutation of a once-demanding procedural tool that required senators to physically hold the floor with hours of continuous speech. Today, any senator can invoke it with a single objection; legislation dies unless it clears 60 votes, and no one has to say a word.
Lee and a bloc of conservatives have pressed Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD) to force a talking filibuster, requiring Democrats to hold the floor continuously until they run out of steam and the bill advances by a simple majority. However, Thune has so far declined.
Thune’s concern is that a sustained floor fight and a flood of Democratic amendments could fracture the Republican conference or cause collateral damage to other pieces of Trump's agenda. It is a calculated bet that the bill's supporters find increasingly difficult to accept.
The filibuster has taken a huge toll on the productivity of the U.S. Senate. Congress is on pace to enact less legislation in this two-year session than at any point since Barack Obama's presidency. According to GovTrack, just 97 bills became law across the two most recent Republican-controlled Congresses, compared to 274 during the 118th Congress. The last time the number sank this low was the 112th Congress.
Yet, the battle inside the chamber bears almost no relationship to where the country stands on the SAVE America Act. A Harvard-Harris poll from earlier this year found broad public support for the SAVE America Act, with 71% of Americans supporting the legislation, including 69% of independents and even 50% of Democrats. Support for its key provisions is even stronger: 81% favor requiring voter ID, 75% support proof of citizenship to vote, and 80% want states to remove non-citizens from voter rolls. Perhaps most striking, 85% of Americans—including 84% of independents and 82% of Democrats—agree that only U.S. citizens should be allowed to vote in federal elections. Overall, 60% view the bill as a commonsense measure to prevent fraud and safeguard election integrity.
Trump has directed his frustration at Senate Parliamentarian Elizabeth Macdonough, who ruled the SAVE America Act ineligible for inclusion in the GOP's $70 billion immigration enforcement package under the Byrd Rule, which governs what legislation qualifies for budget reconciliation at a 50-vote threshold.
Trump has called on Thune to remove her.
"Just the other night, as an example, she ruled against us on a proposal that would have easily been approved, and should have been, by anyone else," Trump posted. He followed with a sharper message on Truth Social: "We have every right to change her, and should do so, IMMEDIATELY," Trump wrote, adding, "As long as she's there, we will never get our desperately needed, SAVE AMERICA ACT, approved, and put into full force and effect!"
Thune dismissed the pressure as routine.
"That's not a new request, as you all know," Thune said of Trump's demand, "and as is typically the case, the parliamentarian, the rulings break both ways. And, you know, we lose a few, we win a few, but that's been true when Democrats have been in the majority, too."
Collins, who provided the decisive 50th vote on Lee's amendment, has previously stated she will not support eliminating the filibuster, and it’s unlikely she’ll change her mind on that with her facing a tough reelection bid this year. But reaching the 50-vote threshold to pass the upper chamber is a modest victory that could change the debate going forward.
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/save-america-act-hits-milestone-does-it-have-momentum-now
India is taking unprecedented measures to restore confidence in its national student examination system after a series of scandals fuelled angry protests from young people and put pressure on Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government.
In May, authorities took the extraordinary step of cancelling the medical entrance exam results of more than 2 million students after allegations of widespread leaking of the papers.
For the retest on June 21, the government will now deploy the Indian Air Force for the first time ever to transport question papers, according to officials familiar with the matter.
Individuals involved in setting the exams will be kept under strict surveillance with restricted access to phones and communications, the officials said, asking not to be identified because the details are not public.
Modi’s government is trying to curb the fallout of the entrance exam scandal as a separate controversy involving erroneous school marks linked to a new online system simmers.
The two issues have fuelled protests by Gen Zs in India and been channelled into a political movement called the Cockroach Janta Party, which is calling for the education minister to resign.
Entrance exams are a crucial gateway for students to enter university, find jobs and improve the economic and social status for their families. The stakes are especially high since unemployment for 25 to 29 year olds is estimated at about 20 per cent, according to Azim Premji University.
To restore public integrity, officials have effectively created controlled environments around the printing facilities for exam papers, and restricted the communication and movement of staff involved in preparing the examination material, officials said.
New Delhi sees the fallout as temporary and expects the issues to be fixed. India’s federal investigative agency, the Central Bureau of Investigation, has launched a probe into the alleged paper leak involving the medical entrance examination.
“The Prime Minister himself is personally looking into it,” Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan told reporters on June 9. “We will rectify the errors that occurred and ensure the examination is conducted properly.” The minister has not responded to demands that he step down.
The minister and National Testing Agency did not respond to requests for comment.
The deployment of military aircraft reflects the government’s seriousness in safeguarding the exam papers after the leaks.
The Indian Air Force has agreed to extend its help under the aide-civil-authority charter of the military, according to officials familiar with the matter. It will largely use helicopters to transport question papers to more than two dozen locations, they said.
Some critics point out that this is not a good use of the military’s resources.
“IAF is not a courier service,” retired Air Vice-Marshal Manmohan Bahadur wrote in a recent opinion piece in The Print, an online news website. He argued that the government should address the flaws in the examination system rather than relying on the airforce to safeguard test papers.
Modi’s rivals led by the opposition Indian National Congress have been quick to use the controversies to criticise his administration. Political analysts have also pointed out that issues like the exam paper leaks undermines institutions in the country.
“What faith can anybody have in a system if it’s unable to even do these basic things correctly?,” said Yamini Aiyar, a visiting fellow at Brown University. If students and parents no longer believe that success comes through merit and fair competition, the sense of trust and social cohesion that holds the system together can start to weaken, she added.
Anthropic released Claude Fable 5, a next-generation "Mythos-class" AI model, on Tuesday. The model is designed to restrict dangerous capabilities in areas such as cybersecurity and biological research after CEO Dario Amodei warned about risks last month.
The model gives users access to Anthropic's more powerful Mythos model, which the company had previously deemed too risky for public release last month. However, when users ask about sensitive topics, such as bioweapons or software exploitation, Fable 5 redirects them to the older Claude Opus 4.8 model.
"We maintain that Anthropic is the leading pure-play AI lab, combining best-in-class model intelligence with its cutting-edge, benchmark-leading Claude Fable 5 frontier model released June 9, 2026; with clear commercial traction and momentum in its enterprise offerings," BMO analyst Brian Pitz wrote in a note earlier today.
Pitz noted, "Anthropic's strengths are particularly evident in coding, agents, and enterprise, where Claude has emerged as a leading model powering tools such as Claude Code and Cowork, both of which have scaled rapidly. This reinforces the company's advantage in translating model intelligence beyond benchmark performance into viable, real-world applications—what we view as the next key battleground in AI."
The release of Claude Fable 5 prompted Pitz's team to declare, "While it is too early to crown a winner among foundation models, we see Anthropic and OpenAI as the leading pure-play AI labs today."
The Verge's Tom Warren reported that Claude Fable 5 has already raised security concerns within Microsoft, prompting the tech giant to limit internal employee access to the model due to Anthropic's data-retention requirements.
Warren said that Claude Fable 5 has been rolled out to GitHub Copilot and Foundry customers but is not available in the internal GitHub Copilot model picker used by Microsoft employees. Other Claude models remain available internally because they operate under zero data retention rules.
He said the issue centers around Anthropic's safety architecture. Claude Fable 5 requires Anthropic to retain prompts and outputs for 30 days to operate new safety classifiers, while some flagged content can be stored for up to two years if it violates usage policies. These rules could potentially create risks for confidential information.
Pitz published the current AI leaderboard overview with Anthropic's models on top (but at the time of the note, Claude Fable 5 was not included):
Western AI Models Comparison
BMO analysts see the release of new advanced models driving AI revenue to $1.8 trillion by 2032. That would mean the market has expanded at an average annual growth rate of 48% since ChatGPT launched in 2022.
Token prices have declined over the last six days.
"Adoption is becoming less about what frontier models can do and more about the price... the recent drop in the token index may reflect some of this shift toward cheaper models," Citadel analysts noted (read).
Prices per million tokens for Western models vs. Chinese models
Tokenmaxxing.
Average cost per task.
What X users have been creating with Claude Fable 5:
by Jill McLaughlin via The Epoch Times,
California is home to the lion’s share of illegal immigrant families in the United States with children who received federal welfare assistance in 2024, according to a federal report published on June 10.
More than 80 percent of all nationwide cash assistance allocated to such households was spent in California. The report tracked $759 million in Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) spent in 2024 on families headed by a parent living in the country illegally.
In those cases, the child qualified for federal welfare, even though the parent was excluded from the federal program because of immigration status.
“These cases receive relatively little public attention, yet ... data show that they are far from a negligible part of the program,” wrote authors David Swegle, director of the Office of Family Assistance at the Administration for Children and Families under the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, and Alex J. Adams, assistant secretary at the Administration for Children and Families, in the report.
Nationally, the federal government paid 85,000 households with qualifying children receiving assistance who were living with their illegal immigrant parents in the U.S. in 2024.
“Although the benefit is formally paid on behalf of the child, it still supports a household that includes an immigration-status-ineligible parent,” the authors stated. “The significance of these cases therefore cannot be judged solely by the fact that the adult is not the formal recipient.”
The cases are also significant because they don’t have to adhere to the TANF rules requiring work expectations, such as regularly applying for jobs, and the payments aren’t limited to the federal 60-month lifetime limit, according to the report. The illegal immigrant families, therefore, can receive federal welfare until the child turns 18 years old.
Low-income American families are held to the federal welfare restrictions that require work participation and are restricted to a 60-month lifetime limit, the authors said.
The number of TANF cases involving an illegal immigrant parent reached nearly 850,000—or 10 percent of all cases—in 2024, up from nearly 6 percent in 2001.
Of those, nearly 78,000 households—or about 91 percent—also received federal food assistance through the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), the report revealed.
Most of the illegal immigrant parents—over 106,000—identified as Hispanic, while 5.3 percent were White, 4.3 percent were Black, and 2 percent were Asian, the report stated.
California was the primary driver of the national totals, according to the report.
In 2024, the state accounted for nearly 60,000 affected households, or about 70 percent of the national total of the illegal immigrant-headed households.
The state’s annual cash assistance paid to those homes reached about $618 million, or about 81 percent of nationwide spending on these cases, the authors reported.
The average monthly benefit in California for child-only households with illegal immigrant parents increased from an estimated $408 in 2013 to $875 in 2024—an increase of 114.5 percent, according to the report.
“No other state approached California’s combination of scale, concentration, and fiscal impact,” the authors stated in the report.
The next-largest states were New York, with about 7,635 households and about $47.5 million in annual cash assistance, followed by Massachusetts at about 3,777 households and about $27.3 million, and Washington at about 1,796 households and about $12.2 million, the report found.
From 2001 to 2024, the U.S. spent about $18.3 billion in TANF cash assistance on these cases involving illegal immigrant parents with welfare-recipient children, according to the report.
