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The measures will see apps including TikTok and Snapchat banned for UK teens early in 2027.

Ebola Cases, Deaths Jump In Congo As Outbreak Spreads

Authored by Zachary Stieber via The Epoch Times,

The number of Ebola cases and deaths has risen in Congo, the epicenter of an ongoing outbreak, officials said on June 14.

Response personnel carry the body of a person who died from Ebola in Bunia, Congo, on June 13, 2026. Jospin Mwisha/AFP via Getty Images

Thirty-two new deaths and 72 new cases have been confirmed in the central African country, Congo's Ministry of Communications said in a statement.

The cumulative number of cases is up to 782, and the cumulative number of deaths is 181.

The case fatality rate, or the percentage of sick people who have died, is 23.1 percent.

The outbreak, which was first detected in May but believed to have started earlier, has also spread to two additional health zones in Congo, officials said. One of the new zones is in Ituri province, where most of the cases are; the second is in North Kivu province.

The three provinces with reported cases are all in eastern Congo.

Health officials have been working to identify suspected cases and encourage people with symptoms to travel to health facilities.

"Vigilance remains essential. Anyone presenting with fever, vomiting, diarrhea, or any other suspicious symptoms must go immediately to the nearest health facility for prompt care," the ministry stated. "Adherence to preventive measures - particularly regular handwashing, acceptance of contact tracing, and avoidance of any contact with sick or deceased individuals from suspected causes - remains crucial to curb the spread of the epidemic."

The largest Ebola outbreak in history was in West Africa and ran from 2014 through 2016. There were 28,610 reported cases, and 11,308 reported deaths.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said in a June 11 paper that, if crucial public health measures are not implemented, the new outbreak could become as large as the 2014 outbreak.

"Although the worst outcomes (higher numbers of cases and associated deaths) in these projections were less likely when a larger proportion of patients were identified, isolated, and treated, this outbreak could, within 3 months and under low-isolation scenarios, become the second largest Ebola outbreak in history," the CDC said.

Ebola is a disease caused by orthoebolaviruses. The current outbreak is caused by the rarely seen Bundibugyo virus.

Transmission primarily happens through direct contact with bodily fluids from infected individuals.

While Ebola can in many cases be deadly, 56 people have recovered in the outbreak in Congo, according to the latest figures.

Another 359 patients are in isolation or being treated in a hospital.

Uganda, which shares a border with Congo, has reported 19 Ebola cases and two deaths. Ugandan officials said Monday that there have been no cases for 10 days.

"Ebola is under control in Uganda," Uganda's Ministry of Health said in a Jun 13 post on X. Ugandan officials said people should visit the country.

Sanitation workers from Bunia city government spray disinfectant in the central market area near a rubbish truck in Ituri province, as they continue efforts to combat the Ebola outbreak in Bunia, Congo, on May 23, 2026. Moses Sawasawa/AP Photo Tyler Durden Tue, 06/16/2026 - 03:30

Dear Abby advises a woman on whether she should acknowledge Father's Day with her biological father, whom she's only met twice.

Norwegian Royal Family Rocked: Crown Princess's Son Convicted of Rape, Sentenced To Four Years

In a verdict that has rocked Norway's monarchy, Marius Borg Høiby, the 29-year-old son of Crown Princess Mette-Marit, was found guilty of two counts of rape and sentenced to four years in prison.

Marius Borg Høiby, son of Norwegian Crown Princess Mette-Marit, pictured in Oslo, Norway on June 16, 2022. Hakon Mosvold Larsen/NTB/AFP/Getty Images

The Oslo District Court convicted him on 34 of 40 charges, spanning rape, assault, abuse in close relationships, drug offenses, and restraining order violations. He was acquitted on the other two rape counts. Prosecutors had demanded over seven years; the defense sought 18 months. He must also pay victims around $61,000 in compensation.

Key Facts from the Verdict

• Guilty on two counts of rape
• Sentenced to four years in prison
• Acquitted on two other rape charges
• Convicted on 34 out of 40 total charges
• Ordered to pay approximately $61,000 to victims
• Defense plans to appeal rape and domestic violence convictions

The seven-week trial detailed Høiby's struggles with drug addiction and a lifestyle of excess. Evidence included self-made videos of sexual encounters and more than 800 electronic messages. In court, he described an "extreme need for recognition" from his unique position in the royal family.

"I’m mostly known as my mother’s son, not anything else. So I’ve had an extreme need for recognition my whole life," he told the court. "And that manifested itself in a lot of sex, a lot of drugs, and a lot of alcohol."

The incidents took place between 2018 and 2024 after nights of partying. Prosecutors argued that what began as consensual sex became non-consensual when the women were asleep or incapacitated. Høiby insisted he was "not in the habit of having sex with women who are asleep."

His lawyers have said he will appeal and have pushed for his release so he can support his ailing mother.

Princess Mette-Marit's Health and Royal Family Pressure

Crown Princess Mette-Marit, 52, is battling pulmonary fibrosis and is on a lung-transplant waiting list. Doctors have indicated she may have only about a year left without a successful transplant.

Marius Borg Høiby with his mother Crown Princess Mette-Marit, pictured in 2022 Credit: PDKOB/The Mega Agency

The scandal comes amid other challenges for the royals, including criticism over the princess's past contact with Jeffrey Epstein after his 2008 conviction. Polls showed support for the monarchy falling to a record low of 60% during the trial, with a slight recovery later.

The Royal House has stated it has no comment on the court outcome.

This case underscores the contrast between the public image of the Norwegian royal family and the private difficulties faced by its members.

Tyler Durden Tue, 06/16/2026 - 02:45

No state earned an A+ grade, but 12 of the 13 highest-rated states are in the Midwest and South

The system was designated as Invest 90L and is the first invest of the 2026 Atlantic hurricane season.

Authorities said seven people were traveling by airboat to the Kissimmee River when the accident occurred.

Remigration & The Save Europe Act

Authored by 'eugyppius' via American Greatmess,

In 2024, the Austrian Identitarian activist Martin Sellner began serious efforts to push his concept of remigration into the political mainstream, and since then the German state and its civil society collaborators have extended him every assistance.

Gregory Bovino, ex-Customs and Border Patrol Chief, appears with (from left) Eva Vlaardingerbroek, Martin Sellner, and Alfonso Gonçalves at the second Remigration Summit in Portugal last week.

Domestic intelligence agents and activist journalists at Correctiv collaborated to convict Sellner and Alternative für Deutschland of planning the mass deportation of naturalized Germans in a late 2023 meeting in Potsdam. They called this small private meeting a “Secret Plan against Germany” and drew not-so-subtle comparisons to the notorious Wannsee Conference. Ensuing anti-AfD protests lasted months, even as litigation succeeded in deconstructing much of the slander Correctiv had propagated. The hysteria cost AfD some support ahead of the European elections, but it also succeeded in making “remigration” a household word throughout the Federal Republic—something that Sellner and his Identitarians could never have achieved on their own. Unbelievably, the Correctiv reporting was turned into a theater piece, and the actual Wannsee Villa where Nazi government officials and SS leaders met to plan the Final Solution in 1942 received a sign advising visitors of Sellner’s Potsdam meeting and “the . . . obvious . . . link between today’s ethno-nationalist fantasies of deportation and the historic Wannsee Conference.”

For their next act, authorities toyed with legally doubtful schemes to ban Sellner from Germany, while police devised pretenses to disrupt the speaking events Sellner had scheduled in the Federal Republic to present his book on Remigration. All this meant more press and more eyeballs for Sellner’s cause. When Sellner co-organized the inaugural “Remigration Summit” last spring in Italy, authorities tried to prevent the attendance of several German Identitarian activists by temporarily banning them from leaving the country, and they did the same again when the second “Remigration Summit” convened in Portugal last week. In each case, their restrictions ensured that small conferences held in other countries and attended by no more than a few hundred people could remain the subject of reporting and controversy here at home.

I don’t know to what degree the German approach to Sellner’s remigration program reflects a calculated strategy, and to what degree it’s just all the pinched head girls in the state bureaucratic apparatus having a collective aneurysm over the latest politically naughty thing to come across their desks. Either way, the unique German system of “defensive democracy” requires an enemy against which to array its defenses, and in the decades since the Berlin Wall fell this enemy has become “the extreme Right”—concentrated like the old Communist foe in the eastern states of the former DDR, embodied by Alternative für Deutschland rather than the SED, and constructed as an equal if not greater threat to Our Democracy. Because, unlike the Communists, this enemy does not really exist, it requires regime propagandists to engage in heavy revisionism—for example, by casting as an NSDAP successor a populist-Right party with politics broadly equivalent to the 1980s-era CDU, and by building up and deploring particular villains like Sellner.

Now, political dissidents and activists of all stripes have a curious relationship with establishment discourse. The one is like oil and the other is like water; they cannot occupy the same space. In the past years, the myth that Diversity Is Our Strength and that mass migration might fix our pension plans, alleviate our cultural ennui, and improve our culinary offerings has collapsed. Anti-migrationism has gone mainstream in many circles, driving right-populists to seize upon remigration as the new cause. I would imagine that a similar process unfolded from the establishment perspective; as major politicians and journalists decided the time had come to put the brakes on the steady stream of younger males streaming into our country from the Global South, they needed to draw a new line in the sand to differentiate themselves from the populist rabble-rousers.

Thus, with the help of literally everybody from Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s benighted traffic light government to the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution to Alternative für Deutschland to Martin Sellner and his Identitarians, remigration became the new anti-migration. Which is fine, as far as it goes; people should support the causes they want, and nobody would dispute that, particularly in the last ten years, a great many people have forced their way into Europe, where they have proceeded to abuse our social welfare systems, violate the law at disproportionate rates, and substantially degrade the quality of life. If I could push a button and make these people leave, I would.

Unfortunately, this problem does not come packaged with any easy solutions, and I am less and less certain (1) how remigration is supposed to work and (2) whether the newly ascendant and highly dogmatic remigrationists on the Right have any path toward realizing their vision. While remigrationists preach the manifold benefits of putting migrants on airplanes back to the Global South, the migrants’ native countries in many cases refuse to accept them, mass migration continues, if at a somewhat slower pace, the AfD remains firewalled out of German politics, our elaborate NGO machinery continues to push migrationist humanitarianism, a broad elite consensus resists even efforts to deport many of those who are here illegally, and primary EU law confounds remigrationist proposals at numerous points. Remigration would prove a tall order if 85 percent of Germans reversed their stance on the idea tomorrow. Sellner’s full, heavily technocratic vision, meanwhile, would require broad institutional buy-in and support from all major parties, including large parts of the Left, over a period of decades. We are talking about a new social consensus to compel or encourage the mass resettlement of entire populations, as deep and broad as the consensus that until recently existed behind climatism. That probably can’t happen without serious generational turnover or some kind of serious political upheaval.

I do not write this as a condemnatory political ninny or an incurable contrarian. I consider Sellner a friend, and I am even his translator. Yet personal considerations like these aren’t enough to blunt my skepticism.

The most recent initiative in remigration land is something called the Save Europe Act, rolled out by Sellner and Dutch political activist Eva Vlaardingerbroek at the Remigration Summit 2026 in Portugal. Basically, there’s an EU procedural mechanism known as the European Citizens’ Initiative (ECI), whereby ordinary people can bring a legal proposal for consideration directly before the European Commission. To do this, they need only gather a million signatures in support and meet a few other requirements. Among other things, the Save Europe Act demands “legislative and policy measures” to impose a “moratorium” on non-European migration, to deport “illegally staying migrants, rejected asylum seekers,” and criminals, to “establish a harmonized EU-wide framework for broader remigration” and to “remove social welfare incentives and benefits that function as pull factors for migration.”

All of that sounds great, as does the fact that Sellner and Vlaardingerbroek claim to have gathered well over 200,000 “signatures” so far. Unfortunately, reality tends generally to be less great. To begin with, Sellner and Vlaardingerbroek have yet to register the Save Europe Act with the European Commission at all. The signatures they are collecting—really, just email addresses—are part of an internet publicity campaign and have no wider significance. According to me, chances that the Commission agrees to register the Save Europe Act as a formal ECI are quite low, for the Commission may reject any proposal that “is . . . manifestly contrary to the values of the Union.” If Sellner and Vlaardingerbroek do manage to squeeze their initiative through registration and the Save Europe Act becomes more than a buggy website, then they’ll still need to collect a million signatures—not from random internet people, but from verified citizens of EU member states. And if they meet that hurdle, they’ll compel a response from the Commission and a hearing in the European Parliament. Even in this best-case scenario, there is no chance that the Save Europe Act becomes law, inspires any laws, or changes anything at the EU level at all.

Defenders of the Save Europe Act who have bothered to read the fine print accept that they are not on the path to making Remigration official EU policy. They argue instead that publicity surrounding the Save Europe Act will “move the Overton Window” and normalize remigration as a concept. These arguments neglect the fact that remigration has already been normalized; as I wrote above, since 2024, it has become almost a household word in Germany, if one denoting a very bad and fascistic concept approximately on par with outright genocidal fascism. Otherwise, I have learned to be wary of intangible, immeasurable ends in the world of political activism. Western politics abounds with activists who are changing perceptions, challenging conventions, deconstructing myths, complicating assumptions, correcting prejudices, deepening understandings, and now moving Overton Windows, and the only thing these projects and their goals have in common is that nobody can work out what any of them mean in concrete terms.

Mass migration has been an absolute curse. People want the migrants to stop coming, and they want the ones who are already here to go back home. They feel impotent to change the situation, and it’s natural that they should support social media campaigns promising at the very least to give them a voice. That’s fine, and most of this is probably harmless, but the truth is that we’re not going to petition the migrants away. I’ve read so many appeals to the Overton Window at this point that the concept has become quite threadbare for me, but if anything has shifted mass media discourse these past years, it is not activist campaigns but the manifold and quite serious problems caused by mass migration itself. As in so many other areas—from COVID to climatism—retarded elite policies are failing and unwinding themselves, but we’re not yet winning.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of ZeroHedge.

Tyler Durden Tue, 06/16/2026 - 02:00

One child suffered a gunshot wound to the chest; all parties involved are juveniles, police say.

Miguel Rojas gave the Dodgers a late lead Monday night. And this time, their bullpen didn’t squander it.

Instructor Luis Felipe Feliciano Egoroff, 32, frequently posted videos on social media of jaw-dropping bungee-jumping stunts off the Skeleton Bridge.

Iran manager Amir Ghalenoei said his team was told it needed to leave Los Angeles immediately following its 2-2 draw against New Zealand on Monday.

An already thin Mets pitching rotation lost a key component Monday as a giant question mark is set to return.

A 21-year-old woman was raped inside the 125th Street and Saint Nicholas Avenue subway station around 7:40 p.m. on Sunday.

Brooks Koepka, who won the U.S. Open the last time it was played at Shinnecock, is dealing with an injury that threatens to hamper his bid to repeat.

The "Mean Girls" actress experienced intense backlash after branding the slain conservative political activist as "hateful."

The "Mean Girls" actress experienced intense backlash after branding the slain conservative political activist as "hateful."

Superstar attacking midfielder Christian Pulisic was not a full participant in Monday’s training session for the USMNT.

“We don’t really know anything, why it happened or whatever. All we know is that car was shot up and a one-year-old baby was killed," Carolyn Stokes, the tot's great-grandmother, said.

Who Won The Third Gulf War?

Authored by Andrew Korybko,

Iran is poised to gradually return to the US-led Western order within certain limits exactly as Iran’s moderate faction has long wanted, its hardline faction has successfully preserved the armed forces and their missile stockpile, while Israel achieved none of its goals in its most epic defeat ever.

Iran and the US plan to sign a Zarif-inspired memorandum of understanding (MoU) on ending the Third Gulf War this Friday in Switzerland. The exact details aren’t yet known, and Fortune reported that there were at least three competing texts, but all of them “include similar elements around reopening the vital Strait of Hormuz waterway, giving Iran sanctions relief and opening the door to longer-term negotiations around its nuclear program.” That’s already enough to arrive at several very important conclusions.

For starters, reopening the strait without Iran’s wartime petroyuan toll booth in place would represent a significant concession by the Islamic Republic, whose media surrogates celebrated this model as an historic multipolar milestone. The same goes for resuming negotiations on its politically sensitive nuclear program. The sanctions relief in exchange might arguably be worth it, however, judging by this estimate here of the profound economic-financial damage caused by the US’ (imperfect) blockade.

On that topic, it was explained here in late March that “The US will have lost the Third Gulf War if China can still rely on Iran as a reliable low-cost energy supplier while turning the yuan into a global reserve currency that challenges the petrodollar”, so preventing both is imperative from the US’ perspective.

With the petroyuan reportedly out of the picture, that leaves Iran’s oil export dependence on China, but sanctions relief could help gradually redirect its sales (such as to India) without disrupting the market.

Likewise, if reports about a $300 billion reconstruction fund for Iran are true (even if the final sum is much lower but still tens of billions of dollars), then US and Gulf investments in Iran’s energy industry could lead to them controlling its exports.

It was assessed in January that “The US Wants To Replicate The Venezuelan Model In Iran”, which would be on the path to implementation in that scenario.

The resultant interdependence could advance collective security and facilitate the US’ regional withdrawal.

Iran’s moderate (“reformist”) and hardline (“principalist”) factions would therefore achieve some of their goals, the first with respect to sanctions relief and the second with regards to preserving the country’s (arguably battered) armed forces as well as their missile stockpile, not to mention their political system.

Nevertheless, the factional balance would have shifted in the moderate’s favor since the US wouldn’t sign a MoU if the moderates couldn’t control “rogue” hardliners, who could potentially rekindle the war.

It can therefore be concluded that the moderates beat the hardliners in Iran’s deep state power struggle, but this was due to the US and Israel killing dozens of top hardline figures, after which their respective institutions (especially the IRGC) were weakened and ultimately tamed by the moderates.

To be sure, “rogue” hardliners – regardless of their relationship to the IRGC – could still sabotage the MoU, but Trump 2.0 feels comfortable enough that they won’t otherwise it wouldn’t go through with the signing.

A new regional era is emerging whereby the Third Gulf War might very well lead to Iran’s gradual reincorporation into the US-led Western order, albeit within limits, which lays the groundwork for better ties with its Gulf neighbors.

In that scenario, Israel would stand to lose since it could no longer divide-and-rule Iran and the Gulf, nor would the US have its back if Israel resumes hostilities with Iran due to the recent revival of the possibly irreconcilable Trump-Bibi rift. Israel is therefore the war’s biggest loser.

Tyler Durden Mon, 06/15/2026 - 23:25