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A Russia-appointed official in Ukraine’s occupied Luhansk region said Monday that Moscow’s forces have overrun all of it — one of four regions Russia illegally annexed from Ukraine in September 2022 despite not fully controlling a single one.

If confirmed, that would make Luhansk the first Ukrainian region fully occupied by Russia after more than three years of war and as recent U.S.-led international peace efforts have failed to make progress on halting the fighting.

Vladimir Putin has effectively rejected a ceasefire and hasn’t budged from his demands, which include Moscow’s control over the four illegally annexed regions.

Donald Trump's move to cut most of the US funding towards foreign humanitarian aid could cause more than 14 million additional deaths by 2030, according to research published in The Lancet medical journal.

A third of those at risk of premature deaths were children, researchers projected.

Low- and middle-income countries were facing a shock "comparable in scale to a global pandemic or a major armed conflict," said Davide Rasella, who co-authored the report.

Citizens of Hong Kong used to rally for democracy every July 1. The National Security Law has kept the streets quiet for the last five years, but the movement's fading slogans still echo in people's minds.

"For over 10 years, July 1 meant protest — walking the streets for universal suffrage and other demands, running into familiar faces, ending the day with a drink or dinner. It felt like we were trying to build a better society," says Vinze, 40, a Hongkonger who asked not to use his real name.

July 1 is the date when UK rule in Hong Kong ended and the city rejoined China in 1997, with Beijing pledging to give it broad autonomy under the "one country, two systems" policy.

For many years, liberal citizens of Hong Kong marked July 1 by marching against what they saw as government overreach. But Beijing was undeterred — in the summer of 2020, the authorities imposed the National Security Law, abruptly shrinking the space for public expression. Then, in 2024, Hong Kong cemented the shift with Article 23 which expands police power, allows for closed trials, and focuses on treason, sedition and state secrets.

Twenty bodies, several of them decapitated, were found on a highway bridge in a part of Mexico where factions of the Sinaloa drug cartel are fighting each other, authorities said Monday.

Four headless corpses were found by the roadside while 16 bodies were discovered inside an abandoned vehicle, the Sinaloa state prosecutor's office said.

Five human heads were found inside a bag at the scene. All of the bodies showed signs of gunshot wounds, prosecutors said.

State and federal prosecutors have charged more than 320 people and uncovered nearly $15 billion in false claims in what they described Monday as the largest coordinated takedown of health care fraud schemes in Justice Department history.

Law enforcement seized more than $245 million in cash, luxury vehicles, cryptocurrency, and other assets as prosecutors warned of a growing push by transnational criminal networks to exploit the U.S. health care system.

As part of the sweeping crackdown, officials identified perpetrators based in Russia, Eastern Europe, Pakistan, and other countries.

From 22 Chinese women detained in 1874 for being ‘lewd and debauched’, experts point to a grim US tradition

One day after Donald Trump’s inauguration, five pregnant immigrant women – led by an asylum seeker from Venezuela – sued over the president’s executive order limiting automatic birthright citizenship, out of fear that their unborn children would be left stateless.

The case went before the supreme court, which sided with the Trump administration Friday by restricting the ability of federal judges to block the order.

The legal drama recalls a scene a century and a half earlier, when a different cohort of immigrant women went to the country’s highest court to challenge a restrictive California law. In 1874, San Francisco officials detained 22 Chinese women at the port after declaring them “lewd and debauched” – a condition that allowed for denial of entry.

Record-breaking heat continues to scorch most of Western Europe. Spain broke its June heat record, and extreme temperatures are expected to move toward Germany by midweek.

Authorities in Spain on Monday confirmed the country's highest-ever June temperature, as an ongoing heat wave pushed the mercury at one point on Saturday to 46 degrees Celsius (115 F).

The record was set in Huelva, near the border with Portugal, topping the previous record of 45.2 C set in 1965 in the nearby city of Seville.

The record-breaking temperatures come as a "heat dome" continues to sit over Western Europe, a weather phenomenon during which a high-pressure system holds dry, hot air in place over an extended period of time.

International police body Interpol says scam centers that use human trafficking victims to carry out their crimes have gone global. Once limited to Southeast Asia, the criminal model is spreading — and uses AI.

Human trafficking-fueled scam centers have significantly expanded their operations worldwide, according to a crime trend update released on Monday by the international police agency Interpol.

Hubs where trafficking victims are forced to take part in online fraud first emerged in a few Southeast Asian nations, but investigators are now also uncovering similar fraud centers in other regions.

The abrupt cutoff of satellite data crucial for hurricane forecasting is delayed by one month, until July 31, according to a message posted by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Monday.

The impending data loss from a Department of Defense weather satellite system was announced on June 25 and slated to take place “no later than” Monday, according to an earlier NOAA announcement.

The decision, which was initiated by the Defense Department, caused an uproar among meteorologists, public officials and the media in the midst of hurricane season. The fear is that the missing information could degrade the accuracy of hurricane forecasts. The move comes in the wake of steep personnel cuts at the National Weather Service and other parts of NOAA.

As we reported earlier this month, many ChatGPT users are developing all-consuming obsessions with the chatbot, spiraling into severe mental health crises characterized by paranoia, delusions, and breaks with reality.

The consequences can be dire. As we heard from spouses, friends, children, and parents looking on in alarm, instances of what's being called "ChatGPT psychosis" have led to the breakup of marriages and families, the loss of jobs, and slides into homelessness.

And that's not all. As we've continued reporting, we've heard numerous troubling stories about people's loved ones being involuntarily committed to psychiatric care facilities — or even ending up in jail — after becoming fixated on the bot.

"I was just like, I don't f*cking know what to do," one woman told us. "Nobody knows who knows what to do."

The Justice Department is aggressively prioritizing efforts to strip some Americans of their U.S. citizenship.

Department leadership is directing its attorneys to prioritize denaturalization in cases involving naturalized citizens who commit certain crimes — and giving district attorneys wider discretion on when to pursue this tactic, according to a June 11 memo published online. The move is aimed at U.S. citizens who were not born in the country; according to data from 2023, close to 25 million immigrants were naturalized citizens.

The focus on denaturalization is just the latest step by the Trump administration to reshape the nation's immigration system across all levels of government, turning it into a major focus across multiple federal agencies. That has come with redefining who is let into the United States or has the right to be an American. Since his return to office, the president has sought to end birthright citizenship and scale back refugee programs.

Speaking ahead of his 90th birthday, the Dalai Lama has indicated that the Tibetan Buddhist institution could continue after his death after all.

The Dalai Lama, the spiritual leader of Tibet's Buddhists, on Monday gave his strongest indication yet that the centuries-old institution could continue after his death.

Speaking at prayer celebrations ahead of his 90th birthday on July 6, Tenzin Gyatso told followers that "there will be some kind of a framework within which we can talk about its continuation."

Tibetan Buddhists believe that the Dalai Lama can choose the body into which he is reincarnated, as has happened on 14 occasions since the creation of the institution in 1587. But the current Dalai Lama has suggested in the past that he could potentially be the last.