TOP NEWS

Terrorist threats

The US raises the readiness of military bases in Europe

Several US military bases in Europe raised their alert level to the second highest over the weekend, reports CNN. The reason is that there are indications that military facilities and personnel may become targets for terrorist attacks.

A source within the US defense tells the news channel that the threat level has not been this high in ten years, and that this probably means that the military has received an "active and credible threat".

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Finland's Riksdag agrees to a defense agreement with the United States

A unanimous Finnish parliament has approved an agreement on defense cooperation with the United States, reports Yle.

In many ways, the agreement is reminiscent of the one that Sweden has also entered into with the United States. The Finnish DCA agreement was signed in December last year, but the Finnish Chancellor of Justice felt that the agreement needed to be supplemented on some points, as it violated the Finnish constitution.

Through the agreement, the US gets access to 15 military bases and training areas in the country. The US military is also allowed to store weapons and ammunition in Finland.

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Russian invasionUkraine's response
Ukraine: We have thwarted a Russian-backed coup in Kyiv

The Ukrainian security service SBU claims to have averted plans for a coup d'état, writes the New York Times. Four Ukrainians have been arrested on suspicion of acting with the support of Russia.

The plan was to organize a peaceful protest in a venue with room for 2000 people in the capital yesterday, June 30. They would later be urged to resort to violence and storm the parliament, writes the prosecutor's office on Telegram, according to Newsweek.

The SBU claims to have monitored the suspects and documented communications between them. Weapons, ammunition, mobile phones are said to have been found during the house search. They can be sentenced to up to ten years in prison.

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The Israel-Hamas war|The attacks
Israel's order: Evacuate Gaza's second largest city

Israel has again ordered Palestinians who recently fled to Gaza's second city of Khan Yunis to flee from there. This is reported by the international media, which interprets the warning as a harbinger of a new ground offensive. It comes after "projectiles" were fired into Israel from the area on Monday, according to AFP.

"For your safety, you must immediately flee to the humanitarian zone," the Israeli military writes in Arabic on X, according to Al Jazeera. It is not clear which humanitarian zone is meant. The Mawasi refugee camp has been shelled several times by artillery.

Devastation remains in Khan Yunis after an Israeli offensive earlier this year. Many Palestinians have fled back there to escape attacks in the southern city of Rafah and elsewhere, according to the AP.

Israel is "close to eliminating Hamas," says Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, according to Haaretz.

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The climate threat|The election in Great Britain
At least 30 candidates for Reform deny the climate threat

That global warming is caused by humans is a "hoax" or "fraud" - these are examples of social media by right-wing populist Reform UK politicians. Over the past two years, 30 of the candidates for Thursday's British election have made those kinds of statements, a review by The Guardian shows.

Having previously pushed the climate issue to the center of the election debate, the party has tried to bury it in the run-up to the election, political scientists Pallavi Sethi and Bob Ward from the London School of Economics write in an analysis.

- I do not debate against science, party leader Nigel Farage has said in several BBC interviews.

According to the researchers' analysis, the turnaround is due to a realization that climate denial turns off more voters than it wins, and that anti-immigrant sentiment is far more important to them.

Reform UK has increased sharply to 17 percent of the vote and is closing in on the Conservative Party, which has fallen to 19, according to an opinion poll in The Independent. Labor leads with 41 percent.
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