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Elon Musk said he is starting a new political party, which he dubbed the 'America Party' in a post on X Saturday.

Musk was born in South Africa but obtained his citizenship in 2002. He took an increasingly prominent role in politics through his partnership with Donald Trump during the 2024 U.S. presidential cycle, pumping money into the Republican's campaign and utilizing his social media platform, X, to promote him.

However, Musk and Trump had a very public fall out after the tech mogul departed the federal government. While Musk has walked back some of his more outrageous allegations and attacks, he has persisted with the idea that the U.S. needs a new political party.

Falling childhood vaccine coverage and a large, smoldering outbreak that was kindled in an undervaccinated pocket of West Texas have driven the United States to a troubling new milestone: There have been more measles cases in the US this year than any other since the disease was declared eliminated a quarter-century ago.

There have been at least 1,277 confirmed cases of measles reported in the US in 2025, according to data from the Johns Hopkins University Center for Outbreak Response Innovation.

Just halfway through the year, the case tally has already surpassed the last record from 2019, when there were a total of 1,274 cases.

A written ruling details why a judge restored funding for many NIH grants.

A federal judge issued a stinging rebuke to the Trump administration, declaring that its decision to cancel the funding for many grants issued by the National Institutes of Health was illegal, and suggesting that the policy was likely animated by racism. But the detailed reasoning behind his decision wasn't released at the time. The written portion of the decision was finally issued on Wednesday, and it has a number of notable features.

For starters, it's more limited in scope due to a pair of Supreme Court decisions that were issued in the intervening weeks. As a consequence, far fewer grants will see their funding restored. Regardless, the court continues to find that the government's actions were arbitrary and capricious, in part because the government never bothered to define the problems that would get a grant canceled. As a result, officials within the NIH simply canceled lists of grants they received from DOGE without bothering to examine their scientific merit, and then struggled to retroactively describe a policy that justified the actions afterward—a process that led several of them to resign.

In short:

Russia has become the first country to formally recognise the Taliban's government in Afghanistan since it seized power in 2021.

Afghanistan's Foreign Ministry called Russia's official recognition a historic step.

The Taliban has sought international recognition while also enforcing its strict interpretation of Islamic law.

A Tennessee man pardoned by Trump in January for his role in the Jan. 6, 2021, assault on the U.S. Capitol will nevertheless serve a life sentence for plotting to attack FBI agents and seeking to incite a "civil war," according to prosecutors.

Edward Kelley, who was the fourth U.S. Capitol rioter to enter the building on Jan. 6, 2021, faced a separate prosecution for targeting federal agents while he was being investigated for his role in the Capitol attack.

The Justice Department argued Kelley created a "kill list" of FBI agents and others who investigated his role in the Jan. 6 siege. Prosecutors said Kelley "distributed this list — along with videos containing images of certain FBI employees identified on the list — to a co-conspirator as part of his 'mission.'"

According to a new poll, 57% of male Republicans say they are likely to support Elon Musk's "America Party"

Almost half of voters said they are likely to support a new political party proposed by Tesla CEO Elon Musk, according to fresh polling.

A Quantus Insights survey released Wednesday found that 40% of voters said they would be likely to back Musk's "America Party," which aims to serve voters disillusioned with both Republicans and Democrats. Musk shared the poll's results on X, calling the results "Encouraging."

Musk first pitched a new political party in early June after he clashed with Donald Trump over the GOP's multi-trillion-dollar tax and spending bill.

The push to remove religious exemptions for vaccines is meant to drive up vaccination rates. It's working.

In the past decade, California, Connecticut, Maine and New York have removed such exemptions in an effort to drive up vaccination rates.

It seems to be working. Maine, for example, had one of the country’s highest vaccination opt-out rates in 2017, at 5.3%. Two years later, in 2019, it passed a law that eliminated religious and philosophical exemptions to vaccinations.

Since then, Maine’s kindergarten MMR vaccination rate has climbed from less than 94% to nearly 98%.

When California passed a law in 2016 removing personal belief and religious exemptions after a measles outbreak that began at Disneyland, MMR coverage increased by 3% in 2019. It has remained high, at 96.2%, according to the California Department of Public Health.

The actions come at a critical time in America’s vaccination history. The country is on track to have the largest measles outbreak in decades, with 1,267 cases already logged this year.

Donald Trump is facing a sharp backlash from young voters, with new polling showing his approval rating among Generation Z has dropped to one of its lowest points yet.

The latest YouGov/Yahoo poll, conducted between June 26-30 among 1,597 adults, shows that among Gen Z voters, his net rating has deteriorated sharply, falling from -23 points in May to -41 points in June.

Net ratings do have a tendency to swing much more than a simple approval rating. Still, the president's approval rating in June is low, at 27 percent. The margin of error is at plus or minus 3.2 percent.

Lucas Walsh, a youth political behavior expert and professor at Monash University, told Newsweek that Trump's falling support among Gen Z voters may reflect how young people "respond to issues rather than party allegiances."

Samsung is reportedly delaying the launch of its Taylor, Texas, fab, citing difficulties in securing customers for its output. Sources told Nikkei Asia that even if the South Korean chipmaker brings in the necessary equipment to produce chips at the new plant, the company cannot do anything with them due to the lack of demand.

Aside from that, the original planned process node for the Taylor plant is no longer aligned with current demand, highlighting the rapid pace of semiconductor technology.

The chip maker started construction on the Taylor fab in 2022, with an initial investment of $17 billion. By 2024, the company decided to increase this to $44 billion, with the addition of another advanced fab and expanded R&D operations. This move is supported by a $6.6-billion CHIPS Act subsidy, which was finalized in December last year, despite multiple delays and setbacks.

Two Dutch intelligence agencies said on Friday that Russia is increasing its use of prohibited chemical weapons in Ukraine, including the World War I-era poison gas chloropicrin.

The Netherlands' military intelligence and the security service, together with the German intelligence service, found that the use of prohibited chemical weapons by the Russian military had become "standardized and commonplace" in Ukraine.

According to the findings, the Russian military uses chloropicrin and riot control agent CS against sheltering Ukrainian soldiers, who are then forced out into the open and shot.

For the first time in over a century, Parisians and tourists will be able to take a refreshing dip in the River Seine. The long-polluted waterway is finally opening up as a summertime swim spot following a 1.4 billion euro ($1.5 billion) cleanup project that made it suitable for Olympic competitions last year.

Three new swimming sites on the Paris riverbank will open on Saturday — one close to Paris’ Notre Dame Cathedral, another near the Eiffel Tower and a third in eastern Paris.

Swimming in the Seine has been illegal since 1923, with a few exceptions, due to pollution and risks posed by river navigation. Taking a dip outside bathing areas is still banned for safety reasons.

Immigrant advocates and civil rights lawyers say evidence is mounting that immigration agents carrying out the Trump administration's deportation crackdown in southern California are engaging in widespread racial profiling.

They've raided known hubs for Latino workers almost daily – hardware store parking lots, car washes, and street vendor corners. Videos of many of those operations, filmed by bystanders and posted to social media, have shown agents arresting people who appear to be Latino as they stand on sidewalks or wait at bus stops.

On Wednesday, the American Civil Liberties Union and other legal groups filed a federal class action lawsuit alleging that immigration agents roving the streets are targeting people based on the color of their skin or their apparent occupation. They want a judge to declare the raids unconstitutional.