El Nino, Nature’s chaotic climate agent, has formed in a warmed-up Pacific Ocean and is expected to grow to historic strength, meteorologists announced Thursday.
Experts said the El Nino, a natural warming cycle, should further heat a globe already warming from fossil fuel pollution and will likely turbocharge extreme weather across the planet. Meteorologists forecast it will rival — or exceed — a record El Nino that began in 1997 and helped trigger billions of dollars in damage from heat waves, floods, droughts, tornadoes and wildfires.
The U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration officially confirmed the existence of the El Nino, which is a warming of the Pacific near the equator that affects weather patterns across the globe. NOAA’s announcement said there’s a 63% chance that the El Nino will get so intense this late fall and early winter that it “would rank among the largest El Nino events in the historical record going back to 1950.”
The warm, deep waters of an El Nino affect weather patterns by bringing “a lot of extra heat to the surface, fueling a lot of extreme events for a lot of places around the world,” said Clark University climate scientist Abby Frazier.
The numbers “8647” appeared in large scale on the grass of the National Mall on Thursday, June 11, only days before President Donald Trump’s birthday, prompting an investigation from the U.S. Park Police.
Eight-year-old Jad Suleiman was walking home from school in the Jabaliya refugee camp in northern Gaza on Monday when the Israeli airstrike hit. A piece of shrapnel lodged in his neck, killing him instantly. Outside Shifa hospital, his body lay on a stretcher wrapped in a loose white sheet. Dressed in jeans and a blue and red checkered shirt, the smallness of his body was accentuated by his oversized backpack, still on his limp shoulders.
A campaign of ethnic cleansing of Palestinian Bedouins in the occupied West Bank is being driven not by rogue extremists, but by the Israeli state, according to a major new report. 
Israel has emptied four facilities within the Al-Aqsa Mosque complex that served as offices for the Islamic Waqf, in what a monitoring group has described as an escalating campaign against the Jordanian-backed body.
Ukraine is increasing defense and security spending by UAH 1.56 trillion ($34.6 billion), bringing total 2026 security and defense expenditures to a record UAH 4.4 trillion ($97.6 billion), Prime Minister Yulia Svyrydenko said.
Soaring gasoline prices, triggered by the U.S. war with Iran, have pushed inflation to its highest level in more than three years.
