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President Trump spent the weekend trying to calm the waters in Washington and roil them in the Persian Gulf.
Let’s begin with the less serious of these two self-inflicted crises.
Updated at 7:26 p.m. ET on June 22, 2026
When President Trump summoned Lonnie Bunch, the secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, for lunch at the White House on August 28 of last year, Bunch’s advisers assumed that the end was near.
George Rose / Getty
Yosemite Valley, including Half Dome, Clouds Rest, Bridalveil Fall, and El Capitan, viewed from Tunnel View after a brief rainstorm cleared on March 27, 2025, in Yosemite National Park, CaliforniaGeorge Rose / Getty
Heavy rains arrived in Santa Barbara County wine country, filling the creeks and streams and turning the hillsides a vivid green as viewed on January 20, 2023, near Santa Ynez, California.
Updated at 11:54 a.m. ET on June 22, 2026
In the past decade, Britain has churned through leaders faster than the average fringe revolutionary sect. Earlier today, Keir Starmer became the sixth prime minister to announce his resignation since 2016. He managed just over 700 days in power.
Used needles clinked into the plastic medical-waste bin in the death chamber at Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in Nashville. Tony Carruthers was strapped to a gurney for his scheduled execution on May 21, but as his attorney Maria DeLiberato watched the medical team repeatedly try and fail to access her client’s veins, she knew something was going terribly wrong. The medics whispered and gestured to one another. One asked for bigger needles, then smaller ones.
Right-wing Trump ally Abelardo de la Espriella has clinched a narrow victory in Sunday’s runoff presidential election in Colombia, defeating leftist Senator Iván Cepeda, an ally of current President Gustavo Petro. De la Espriella ran a fearmongering, “tough-on-crime” campaign, promising to build mega-prisons inspired by El Salvador’s authoritarian President Nayib Bukele, to bomb “narcoterrorist camps” and to abandon Petro’s peace efforts. His reported victory is also a win for U.S.
Keir Starmer has announced his resignation as the United Kingdom’s prime minister and leader of the Labour Party following growing pressure from within his own party to step down. During his time in office, Starmer faced mounting opposition over his embrace of austerity measures amid a cost-of-living crisis in Britain, as well as his brutal crackdown on Palestine solidarity protesters. Former Manchester Mayor Andy Burnham is widely expected to become the next prime minister.
Mediators from Pakistan and Qatar say the United States and Iran made “encouraging progress” during 18 hours of negotiations in Switzerland, where the two sides agreed to a roadmap toward reaching a final deal within 60 days. The talks took place despite Iran on Saturday announcing it was closing the Strait of Hormuz after Israel killed 83 people in Lebanon on Friday. Israel said it would agree to a new ceasefire in Lebanon but is also refusing to end its occupation of southern Lebanon.
Only Elon Musk and his memestock appeal could get serious investors to go along with a business plan that includes colonizing Mars…
Inflation is on the rise, but the Trump administration doesn’t seem concerned.
Is the industry screwed?
Brendan Greeley offers up the surprising origin story of our favorite currency.
Guest host Mary Childs explains why index funds are bending their rules and giving investors little choice but to opt into the AI boom.
The State Department said the country had failed to address the president’s concerns about treatment of its white citizens.
The World Professional Association for Transgender Health has a leading role in determining how gender-affirming care is provided.
The health secretary has visited four House districts with toss-up races in the last six weeks.
But inside the health department, workers say the dysfunction of the DOGE era persists.
Outward’s hosts sit down with the host and co-creator of When We All Get to Heaven.
The neighborhood changes, the church moves, people forget and remember “the AIDS years,” but AIDS isn’t over.
The AIDS cocktail opens new possibilities. And MCC San Francisco tries to use the experience of AIDS to make bigger social change.
The church’s minister gets sick and everyone knows it.
The church’s “it couple” faces AIDS, caregiving, and loss as part of a pair, part of families, and part of a community.
“Another Wasted Life.” That’s the name of a remarkable new song by the Pulitzer Prize-winning, Grammy-winning artist Rhiannon Giddens. She released a video of the song on October 2 to mark International Wrongful Conviction Day. The song was inspired by Kalief Browder, a Bronx resident who died by suicide in 2015 at the age of 22 after being detained at Rikers Island jail for nearly three years, after being falsely accused at the age of 16 of stealing a backpack.
As part of our Juneteenth special broadcast, we feature our interview with pioneering musical artist Rhiannon Giddens, who won a Pulitzer Prize for her opera Omar, about Omar ibn Said, a Muslim scholar in Africa who was sold into slavery in the 1800s.
We feature a special broadcast marking the Juneteenth federal holiday that commemorates the day in 1865 when enslaved people in Galveston, Texas, learned of their freedom more than two years after the Emancipation Proclamation. We begin with our 2021 interview with historian Clint Smith, originally aired a day after President Biden signed legislation to make Juneteenth the first new federal holiday since Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Day.
The new documentary Shoot the People profiles the Nigerian British photographer and activist Misan Harriman, the first Black photographer to shoot the cover of British Vogue and an outspoken advocate of Palestinian rights. We speak to Harriman in New York City ahead of the film’s U.S.
The Department of Justice has intervened in a legal case involving the world’s first trillionaire, Elon Musk, asking a Mississippi federal court to toss a lawsuit from the NAACP against Musk’s company xAI, a subsidiary of SpaceX. The NAACP says xAI is violating the Clean Air Act by running dozens of unpermitted gas-burning turbines in majority-Black neighborhoods to fuel its data centers in Memphis, Tennessee.
In at least two battleground states, voters will decide in the midterms whether to protect a right to the procedure.
for my father
My father’s hands flapped in a spiral of smoke—a weak light.
What did I dream then, a child drenched in image? Sleek light,
falling honeyed rivers, purpled fruit. What did I need
to imagine my body, calm in migration? I wanted to seek light.
Dawn sank into my hands like rain. I wanted to evaporate
& ask God to reveal my face. I wanted to speak light
& watch the earth settle into being. Each splash of wilderness
unraveled into clean, solid lines. From there I would leak light.
Kim Kyung-Hoon / Reuters
A man in a bear costume takes part in an emergency-response drill simulating a bear intrusion in Yaita, Tochigi Prefecture, Japan, June 17, 2026.Kim Kyung-Hoon / Reuters
Hunters look at a map and diagram while taking part in a bear-emergency-response drill in Yaita on June 17, 2026.Kim Kyung-Hoon / Reuters
A man wearing a bear costume takes part in a bear-emergency-response drill in Yaita.Kim Kyung-Hoon / Reuters
A participant deploys bear spray during the drill.