After President Donald Trump’s administration spent weeks touting the Iran deal as a positive development, the agreement has rapidly collapsed. The conflict has clearly shifted back toward direct military escalation, with the Strait of Hormuz as the focal point of the latest round of retaliatory strikes, sanctions pressure, and diplomatic collapse. As previously reported, President Trump declared negotiations with Iran effectively over on Wednesday as he defended overnight U.S. strikes after Tehran violated the ceasefire Tuesday by attacking three commercial vessels in the Strait of Hormuz. U.S. Central Command said that American forces launched a new round of strikes on Iran after three tankers were attacked in the waterway. According to Reuters, the U.S. said it hit more than 80 Iranian targets, including air defense systems, command and control centers, radar installations, missile facilities, and more than 60 Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps boats operating in and around the strait. Iran then attacked U.S. military installations in Bahrain and Kuwait, which U.S. officials described as another violation of the MOU. In Bahrain, the reported targets included facilities associated with the U.S. Fifth Fleet, while Kuwait reported two ballistic missiles and 13 drones in its airspace. The IRGC claimed it struck 85 U.S. military facilities in the Gulf in response to U.S. strikes, according to AFP, which cited a statement carried by Iran’s state broadcaster IRIB. The latest exchange cemented the complete collapse of the memorandum of understanding, which had been intended to reduce hostilities while talks continued over Iran’s nuclear program and navigation through the Strait of Hormuz. Talks had already been on hold during the funeral ceremonies for the late Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, which concluded Thursday with his burial in Mashhad. During the six-day mourning period, crowds at the funeral chanted “Death to America,” called for revenge against the United States and Israel, and directed violent chants at President Trump. The funeral ceremonies coincided with a pause in negotiations as public calls for retaliation continued. At the NATO summit in Ankara, Trump sharpened his language toward Tehran. Trump said the U.S. would “probably” strike Iran again Wednesday night after Tehran attacked — and he quickly made good on that threat. U.S. forces launched a second round of strikes Wednesday night, continuing into Thursday. In the same exchange, Trump called Iranian leaders “scum” and “sick people” and argued that, if Iran obtained a nuclear weapon, it would use it. Trump also raised the possibility of restoring a blockade, saying that the U.S. may move to reinstate one that would apply only to Iran. The president warned that Iran could respond to that by laying mines in the Strait of Hormuz. The movements of the last several days underscore just how volatile the situation is — and how quickly diplomatic relations can unravel when the Iranian regime is involved.

A massive banner reading “We Will Kill Trump” was carried through the funeral procession for former Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei on Thursday, the latest in a series of death threats against President Donald Trump displayed during the regime’s state-organized ceremonies. The multi-day funeral ceremonies, which spanned several cities across Iran and Iraq, featured threatening and graphic signs and chants calling for Trump’s assassination. Held under the slogan “We Must Rise,” the Iranian regime sought to project national unity and strength following Khamenei’s death. Among the displays seen throughout the funeral events were posters showing Trump with crosshairs over his face alongside the warning, “There Will Be Blood,” giant banners promising rewards of up to $120 million for his assassination, and a black wall emblazoned with the hashtag “#WeWillKillTrump.” Calls for violence against Trump also came from the funeral stage itself. On July 5, Iranian poet Mohammad Rasouli, serving as the official master of ceremonies before prayer readings, asked the crowd over loudspeakers: “Why is the most bastard man in the world still alive? … Why should we not kill the man who killed our imam? It would be a disgrace if we did not.” Rasouli then led attendees in a chant declaring, “Trump’s murder is our responsibility.”   TEHRAN, IRAN – JULY 4: People bidding farewell to Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei lying in state in Tehran’s Grand Mosalla (mausoleum) pass by a wall full of graffiti with a written message “We will kill Trump” on July 4, 2026, in Tehran, Iran.  (Photo by Kaveh Kazemi/Getty Images) Other signs targeted prominent Americans, including Israeli-American philanthropist Miriam Adelson, Daily Wire Editor Emeritus Ben Shapiro, podcaster Laura Loomer, entrepreneur Peter Thiel, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC), and Foundation for Defense of Democracies CEO Mark Dubowitz, beneath the warning: “Sooner or later your heads will roll.” Khamenei, who ruled Iran for 37 years, was killed earlier this year in a joint U.S.-Israeli operation that targeted senior Iranian leadership. His death marked the most significant blow to the Islamic Republic since the 1979 revolution and triggered vows of revenge from regime officials and supporters. His body reached its final resting place at the Shrine of Imam Reza in Mashhad on Thursday. Notably absent from the funeral proceedings was Khamenei’s son and successor, Mojtaba Khamenei. According to reports, Mojtaba was injured and disfigured in the same strike that killed his father. He has not been seen or heard in public since he assumed power, though written statements attributed to him have been released. A mourner kicks a wanted banner of US President Donald Trump as people pay their respects at the Grand Mosalla where they gathered to pray for Iran’s slain supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei during the second day of funeral ceremonies in Tehran on July 5, 2026. (Photo by ATTA KENARE / AFP via Getty Images) The funeral also attracted a number of American activists and influencers who traveled to Tehran to participate in the ceremonies and amplify the regime’s messaging. Among them was social media personality Jackson Hinkle, who used his platform to praise Khamenei and condemn the United States and Israel. Hinkle, who has built a following defending authoritarian governments and Iranian-backed groups, posted videos from Tehran celebrating the regime and meeting with senior Iranian officials. In another video, Hinkle stood on a stage waving a red flag — a symbol often associated with calls for vengeance in Shiite Islam — while leading chants of “Down with Zionists.”   TEHRAN, IRAN – JULY 6: Mourners display a banner that reads Kill Trump during the third day of funeral ceremonies for Iran’s slain Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei on July 6, 2026 in Tehran, Iran.  (Photo by Majid Saeedi/Getty Images) The threats displayed at the funeral come amid growing calls for violence from powerful figures aligned with the Iranian regime. Last month, members of Iran’s Assembly of Experts appeared to endorse the assassination of President Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, declaring that anyone who gains access to the two leaders is obligated to “send them to hell.” The funeral unfolded as hostilities between Washington and Tehran continued to intensify. Despite the funeral, the United States and Iran exchanged attacks this week, with U.S. forces striking more than 100 Iranian-linked targets while Tehran launched attacks against American military installations throughout the region, including in Jordan.   TEHRAN, IRAN – JULY 4: People hold posters depicting US President Trump and Israeli PM Netanyahu as gather at the Imam Khomeini Grand Mosalla for a farewell ceremony for Iran’s late Ayatollah Ali Khamenei on July 4, 2026 in Tehran, Iran. (Photo by Majid Saeedi/Getty Images) On Wednesday, President Trump declared the U.S.-Iran memorandum of understanding effectively dead after Iranian attacks on commercial shipping in the Strait of Hormuz shattered a fragile agreement that had survived only 21 days. “They’re scum. They’re sick people,” Trump said during the NATO summit in Ankara when asked whether the agreement could be salvaged. “These people, they lie, and they cheat.”

Nobel Prize-winning chemist Omar Yaghi, who arrived in the United States as a teenage refugee and built one of the world’s most celebrated scientific careers at American universities, is leaving the country for a full-time position in China. Yaghi, who shared the 2025 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, has accepted a faculty appointment at Beijing’s Tsinghua University, where he will lead a newly created artificial intelligence research institute focused on accelerating the discovery of advanced materials. The move comes as China continues to aggressively recruit top Western scientists while expanding government investment in scientific research and artificial intelligence, against the backdrop of the Trump administration’s efforts to rein in federal research spending and refocus taxpayer funding. Born in Amman, Jordan, to Palestinian refugee parents, Yaghi spent his childhood in a one-room home without electricity or running water. At age 15, his father sent him to the United States in search of greater opportunity. That opportunity ultimately led to one of the most distinguished careers in modern chemistry. After decades of working and conducting research at American universities, Yaghi joined the University of California, Berkeley, faculty in 2012. He became internationally renowned for pioneering metal-organic frameworks, or MOFs — ultra-porous materials capable of storing gases, capturing carbon dioxide, harvesting drinking water from desert air, and enabling a wide range of industrial and medical applications. His work earned him a share of last year’s Nobel Prize in Chemistry alongside Richard Robson and Susumu Kitagawa. One of the most widely publicized applications of Yaghi’s research came in 2018, when his Berkeley laboratory successfully demonstrated a passive water-harvesting device capable of pulling clean drinking water directly from desert air. The invention, inspired in part by Yaghi’s childhood experience growing up with limited access to running water, is now moving toward commercialization through one of several American companies he helped found. Despite building his career in the United States, Yaghi has become increasingly critical of the direction of American scientific research. Before receiving his Nobel Prize, Yaghi criticized President Donald Trump’s immigration policies, arguing they threatened America’s ability to attract talented scientists from around the world. More recently, he has expressed concern over reductions in federal research funding and warned that American researchers have not embraced artificial intelligence quickly enough to remain globally competitive. In a recent interview with Scientific American, Yaghi said the current state of U.S. science was “not so encouraging” because of cuts to research grants and declining support from federal science agencies. He also argued that researchers must adopt AI “as a matter of survival of the advanced research system in the U.S.” Tsinghua University announced that Yaghi will head a new institute dedicated to using artificial intelligence to dramatically accelerate the design and synthesis of new materials. University officials said the institute aims to replace years of traditional trial-and-error experimentation with AI-assisted research capable of solving complex scientific problems far more quickly. Speaking during his appointment ceremony, Yaghi said he hopes the institute will develop new materials to address global challenges, including water shortages, carbon neutrality, and sustainable development, while also training a new generation of scientists working at the intersection of chemistry and artificial intelligence. Yaghi’s move reflects China’s broader effort to attract internationally recognized researchers as Beijing seeks to establish itself as the world’s leading scientific power. According to data from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, China’s overall research and development spending surpassed that of the United States in 2024. Chinese universities and government-backed research institutes have increasingly offered generous funding packages, cutting-edge laboratory facilities, and leadership opportunities to scientists from around the world. Researchers say Beijing’s strategy has evolved beyond simply recruiting foreign experts to teach students. Marina Zhang, a science policy researcher at the University of Technology Sydney, told Nature that Yaghi’s appointment suggests China is attempting to build entirely new research models that combine artificial intelligence with advanced materials science rather than merely catching up with Western institutions. Tsinghua officials similarly described Yaghi’s appointment as an effort to bridge scientific disciplines and create technological breakthroughs capable of reshaping future industries. Although Yaghi will now conduct his primary research from Beijing, he is expected to maintain ties to several American companies and nonprofit initiatives that continue developing technologies based on his discoveries. Still, his departure represents one of the highest-profile examples yet of China successfully recruiting a scientist whose career was largely built in the United States. As competition between Washington and Beijing increasingly extends beyond trade and military power into artificial intelligence and advanced technology, Yaghi’s decision underscores a growing battle not only over innovation itself, but over the scientists responsible for creating it.

Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, the Mexican immigrant killed on Tuesday by federal immigration agents in Texas, was not the target of an ICE investigation, according to a Department of Homeland Security spokesman.  The agents were searching for two people from Guatemala, whom the agents believed were in the van that Araujo was driving. Those individuals were not in the van, The New York Times reported. The Department of Homeland Security would not confirm to the Daily Wire that Araujo was not the target of the search but said agents observed the van with an individual who resembled one of the targets.  “After receiving a credible tip from our law enforcement partners, our officers conducted surveillance on a target’s address. Weeks prior to the incident, they noted two white vans at the property,” the department said. “On July 7, officers were almost at the target’s address when they observed a white van with an individual who resembled the target. Officers then initiated the vehicle stop.” The officers were not wearing body cameras. A spokesperson for DHS told the Daily Wire that the officers “had not been issued body-worn cameras due to back-to-back Democrat shutdowns” and that officers were expected to receive body cameras in the next 60 days. Over half of ICE agent field officers have received body cameras. Unlike previous shootings involving federal immigration agents that were captured extensively on video, such as the January shooting involving Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis, this incident has little recorded documentation from both law enforcement and the public.  Video that has emerged from the scene shows Araujo out of his vehicle, lying on the ground with a federal agent next to him. DHS says emergency services were called immediately after Araujo, a 52-year-old construction worker and father of three, was shot.  The encounter began when federal agents in an unmarked vehicle attempted to conduct a vehicle stop. Araujo was shot on the right side of his body after federal agents said he refused to follow multiple verbal commands, according to DHS. Araujo’s family believes he would have complied with federal agents if the unmarked SUV had clearly shown it was affiliated with law enforcement. The department claims Araujo attempted to weaponize his vehicle and run over an ICE law enforcement officer.  After the incident, Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum vowed to pursue “legal measures” that would “go beyond” a diplomatic protest. “We cannot turn a blind eye to the Mexicans who have died,” Sheinbaum said, adding, “Especially to Mexicans whose only crime is working honestly in the United States.” Several Democratic leaders in the United States have called for an independent investigation. 

Free speech in Europe, and Britain in particular, has been a concern for the second Trump administration. At the 2025 Munich Security Conference, Vice President J.D. Vance gave European leaders both barrels over the issue. Since then, U.S. government figures such as Sarah Rogers have ceaselessly drawn attention to the ever-increasing infringements on free speech in the U.K. In recent years, Britain has seen high-profile stories such as the jailing of mother-of-two Lucy Connolly for a swiftly deleted tweet about asylum seekers in the midst of the Southport riots in 2024, the arrest of comedian Graham Linehan over tweets about transgenderism, and police officers dismissed from their jobs over gallows humor in private WhatsApp groups. Much more could be said about “non-crime hate incidents” resulting in police visits, a proposed special ban on “anti-Muslim hostility,” and the Labour government’s clear desire to reduce digital freedoms through different forms of regulation, and even the outright banning of Elon Musk’s X. To American readers who take pride in the First Amendment, this might sound unthinkable. It can seem as if Britain is a victim of its un-American political system. Unlike the United States, Britain has no single written constitution. Rather, it combines unwritten conventions and statutes passed by its elected Parliament. Free speech warriors in both the U.S. and the U.K. increasingly suggest that, to protect their liberties, they should adopt a written constitution or Bill of Rights to safeguard things such as freedom of speech. However, Britain’s Parliament has never worked this way, nor should it start. The driving force of British politics has always been parliamentary sovereignty; that is, an elected Parliament can create and remove whatever laws it likes if it has a majority and the political will. Crucially, this means that no Parliament can bind its successor. If a new government is elected with a mandate to overturn the laws of the last one, it can always do so. This is not the case in written constitutional systems, such as the United States, which are subject to a constitution that is incredibly difficult or even impossible to change. It is this reality that has left President Trump, even with a conservative majority in the Supreme Court, unable to make good on his central campaign pledge to end birthright citizenship. In a true British system, he could have passed that law on day one. Britain’s free speech crisis is downstream of bad laws created by Parliament. This began with the Race Relations Act 1965, which, in the wake of tensions arising from post-World War II immigration, outlawed the expression of certain political beliefs. This was worsened by the Public Order Act 1986, which criminalized speech that was “likely to cause harassment, alarm or distress.” Later, already confused communications offenses designed for the era of snail mail and telephone operators collided disastrously with public-facing social media, just as “hate speech” offenses began to appear on the books under Tony Blair. It is these laws and others that helped to shape Britain’s own strain of cancel culture. But the British answer to bad speech laws is not a new written constitution that takes the question out of our Parliament’s (and therefore voters’) hands. Instead, it is to repeal the bad laws and, if necessary, replace them with good ones. This is the approach outlined in Reversing Britain’s Free Speech Recession, the latest report from the Prosperity Institute. Barrister Jon Holbrook, himself a vindicated survivor of cancel culture, has identified the laws that most need to be repealed or amended to restore a boom in the British free speech economy, with new legislation drafted and ready for implementation for a free speech government. In the revived Britain imagined in this paper, laws criminalizing speech that merely causes “harassment, alarm or distress” will be repealed; communications speech will be criminal only if it is intentionally menacing and targeted; all so-called “hate speech” laws will be repealed. Interference with free speech in the civil sphere will no longer be a matter for contested anti-discrimination law, but a simple matter of tort law. Spurious allegations will be deterred by a new costs regime that protects those wrongly accused. A cultural shift will be needed, certainly. But we must start with the law. English liberty gave the Western world its tradition of free speech. Yet lately, as Shakespeare wrote in Richard II, “That England, that was wont to conquer others, Hath made a shameful conquest of itself.” But it possesses all that it needs to liberate itself once again. *** Rhys Laverty is Editorial and Research Director of the Prosperity Institute.