The #US Senate approved early Thursday a package of spending cuts proposed by President Donald Trump that would cancel more than $9 billion in funding for foreign aid programs and public #broadcasting.

#Iran ready to respond to any new attack, supreme leader says.
Iran is ready to respond to any renewed military attack, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said on Wednesday, adding that Tehran was capable of delivering a bigger blow to adversaries than the one it gave during the 12-day Iran-Israel war.

“The fact that our nation is ready to face the power of the United States and its dog on a leash, the Zionist regime (Israel), is very praiseworthy,” Khamenei said in comments carried by state TV.

Israel and the U.S. launched strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities last month, saying that they were part of a program geared towards developing nuclear weapons. Tehran maintains that its nuclear program is purely for civilian purposes.

“The base attacked by Iran was an extremely sensitive American regional base,” Khamenei said in reference to an Iranian missile barrage on Al Udeid base in Qatar, adding “an even bigger blow could be inflicted on the U.S. and others.”

Iran is under pressure to resume nuclear talks with the U.S. as Washington and three major European countries have agreed to set the end of August as the deadline for a deal.

If no progress is reached by then, France’s foreign minister warned international sanctions would be reapplied via the United Nations snapback mechanism.

“In both the diplomatic and military fields, whenever we enter the stage we do so with our hands full and not from a position of weakness,” Khamenei said.

He urged diplomats to heed “guidelines” and vigorously continue their work, without elaborating.

Iran’s parliament shared a statement on Wednesday saying the country should not resume nuclear talks with the U.S. as long as preconditions are unmet.

(Reporting by Parisa Hafezi, Dubai newsroom; Editing by Alex Richardson and Andrew Cawthorne)

#Cuban minister under pressure for saying country has no beggars. Cuba’s labour minister denied there are beggars in the poor, Communist-run country in official testimony, prompting rare criticism by Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel of one of his own ministers on Tuesday.

“We have seen people who appear to be beggars, but when you look at their hands, when you look at the clothes those people wear, they are disguised as beggars ... In Cuba, there are no beggars,” Labor and Social Security Minister Marta Elena Feito said on Monday, while testifying before a commission of parliament.

“They have found an easy way of life, to make money and not to work as is appropriate,” she said in a statement broadcast live on state television.

Her words struck a nerve in Cuba, where years of crisis marked by runaway inflation and scarcity of basic goods have left large swaths of the population living day-to-day and a small, but increasing number of visibly impoverished people on the street,

“These people, who we sometimes describe as homeless or linked to begging, are actually concrete expressions of the social inequalities and the accumulated problems we face,” Diaz-Canel told the same commission on Tuesday.

“I do not share some of the criteria expressed in the commission on this issue,” he said.

Feito characterized people wiping windshields on street corners as possibly looking for money to get drunk, and those picking through garbage as unlicensed self-employed recyclers dodging taxes.

“The economic crisis has exacerbated social problems … the vulnerable are not our enemies,” Diaz-Canel said.

The minister was not seen during broadcasts of Tuesday’s parliament session.

Reporting by Marc Frank, additional reporting by Nelson Acosta; Editing by Rod Nickel

#Israel’s military said it was striking targets belonging to Hezbollah’s elite Radwan force in eastern Lebanon on Tuesday, the latest attack despite a ceasefire between Israel and the Iran-backed militant group.

Three members of #UN commission on Israel resign. The three members of a United Nations commission charged with investigating human rights abuses in Israel and the Palestinian territories have resigned, saying it is time to renew the body, a UN spokesperson said Monday.

The three-person commission was created in 2021 and has been sharply criticized by Israel.

South Africa’s Navi Pillay, 83, who once headed the international tribunal for Rwanda, cited her age in a letter announcing her resignation.

Australia’s Chris Sidoti, 74, said in his letter it was an “appropriate time” to renew the commission, while India’s Miloon Kothari, in his late 60s, just said it had been “an honour” to serve.

Jurg Lauber, the head of the UN’s Human Rights Council, asked the council’s member states to propose new members by August 31.

Iranian leader suffered minor leg injury in Israeli air strike last month — Fars
Masoud Pezeshkian and other senior officials were forced to flee the building where a meeting of the Supreme National Security Council was being held through an emergency hatch, the news agency revealed

#Ukraine’s security agency says it killed Russian agents suspected of gunning down its officer.

The Security Service of Ukraine, or SBU, said in a statement that the suspected Russian agents were killed in the Kyiv region after they offered resistance to arrest. A video released by the agency showed two bodies lying on the ground.

The agency said earlier that a man and a woman were suspected to be involved in Thursday’s assassination of Ivan Voronych, an SBU colonel, in a bold daylight attack that was caught on surveillance cameras.

Media reports claimed that Voronych was involved in covert operations in Russia-occupied territories of Ukraine and reportedly helped organize Ukraine’s surprise incursion into Russia’s Kursk region last year.

After a series of massive attacks across Ukraine involving hundreds of exploding drones, Russia launched 60 drones overnight, Ukraine’s air force said. It said 20 of them were shot down and 20 others were jammed.

The Ukrainian authorities reported that four civilians were killed and 13 others injured in Russian attacks on the Donetsk and Kherson regions since Saturday.

The Associated Press

#Giant #shoes found near Hadrian’s Wall spark mystery around the soldiers of ancient Rome.

Archaeologists have unearthed a stash of unusually large shoes at the ruins of a first-century military fort along Hadrian’s Wall, a 73-mile (117-kilometre) stone barrier that famously shielded the Roman Empire’s northwestern perimetre from foreign invaders. The discovery is raising new questions about the lives and origins of the fort’s inhabitants.

The giant leather soles were found at Magna Fort in May among 34 pieces of footwear, including work boots and baby-sized shoes, that are helping to paint a picture of the 4,000 men, women and children who once lived in and around the English site just south of the Scottish border.

Eight of the shoes are over 11.8 inches (30 centimetres) in length — a U.S. men’s size 13.5 or greater based on Nike’s size chart — making them larger than average by today’s standard and sparking suspicions that unusually tall troops may have guarded this particular fortress at the empire’s edge.

By contrast, the average ancient shoe found at a neighboring Roman fort was closer to a US men’s size 8, according to a news release about the discovery.

“When the first large shoe started to come out of the ground, we were looking for many explanations, like maybe it’s their winter shoes, or people were stuffing them, wearing extra socks,” recalled Rachel Frame, a senior archaeologist leading the excavation. “But as we found more of them and different styles, it does seem to be that these (were) just people with really large feet.”

As digging continues at Magna Fort, Frame said she hopes further investigation could answer who exactly wore these giant shoes. A basic sketch of the site’s past is just starting to come together.

Who wore the giant shoes?

The length of the extra-large Magna shoes suggests the original owners may have been exceptionally tall, Greene said. At Vindolanda, only 16 out of the 3,704 shoes collected measured over 11.8 inches (30 centimetres).

Ancient Roman military manuals often described the ideal recruit as being only 5 feet, 8 inches or 5 feet, 9 inches in height, according to Rob Collins, a professor of frontier archaeology at Newcastle University in England. But the soldiers stationed around Hadrian’s Wall came from all around the far-reaching empire, bringing a wide diversity of physical traits to their settlements, he said.

Still, why Magna specifically might have needed troops of towering stature remains unclear.

To piece together the shoe owners’ identities, researchers will examine the Magna shoes for any signs of wear, Frame said. Any foot impressions left in the shoes could be used to model the feet of the original wearers.

Linking the shoes to real human remains, however, could prove difficult. For one, the Romans near Hadrian’s Wall generally cremated their dead, using a headstone to mark the graves, Collins said. Any bones that remain around the settlements are likely from enemy, illegal or accidental burials.

So far, the few bones that have been found at the Magna site were too soft and crumbly to provide insight, Frame said, but the team continues to search for new burial spots. Pottery and other artifacts found around the site may also help with dating and matching the timelines of the known occupants, she said.

But the researchers worry they could be running out of time.