August 17 2026 News

Jewish worshipers were reportedly allowed to use prayer books at the Temple Mount on Sunday, marking the latest in a series of blows to a status quo arrangement that bans non-Muslim prayer at the flashpoint Jerusalem holy site. While in the past, police would eject or detain Jewish visitors caught praying on the Temple Mount, the policy has largely fallen to the wayside over the past three years under National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir, who has repeatedly demanded that police allow Jews to pray there.

As the United States approaches $40 trillion in national debt, the larger global picture is even more staggering: governments, businesses, financial institutions and households worldwide now owe nearly $353 trillion, raising questions about how long the present debt-based financial system can continue without a major restructuring. The growing global debt burden deserves attention — not because Scripture specifically predicts a “$353 trillion debt collapse,” but because it describes an end-time economic system capable of exercising extraordinary control over commerce.

Iran’s military is offering rewards of up to $30,000 for killing or capturing US soldiers, with women eligible for twice that amount, despite the absence of US ground troops in Iran apart from a search and rescue operation for a missing American airman. Army chief Amir Hatami announced the bounty after what he described as widespread interest among Iranians in taking part, according to the state-run IRNA news agency.

A columnist for Qatar’s state-owned daily Al-Sharq has argued that the United States is on a trajectory toward electing its first Muslim president, pointing to the Democratic Senate nomination of Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan as the latest marker on a path he traces back through Barack Obama’s 2008 election and Zohran Mamdani’s mayoral win in New York City. The column was written by Abd Al-Rahman Al-Shammari, who writes for Al-Sharq and also hosts and anchors news on Qatar’s state television, according to a translation published by the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI). Al-Shammari opens with an extended comparison to the biblical account of Moses raised inside Pharaoh’s palace, then applies the same image to American politics: groups once excluded from power, he writes, are “growing up inside the palace” of the U.S. political system even as America has spent the past two decades at war across large parts of the Muslim world, in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Syria, Yemen, and Libya.

Drought conditions have worsened across Central and Western Europe since the start of the summer with southern England, northern Italy and parts of Central Europe among the hardest-hit areas, according to the Global Drought Observatory. About half of Europe’s land area is experiencing drought with 9 percent reaching the alert level, including southern Germany, Hungary, Romania, Austria, the Czech Republic and Slovakia, according to the Combined Drought Indicator for mid-July.

A widely followed Orthodox lecturer has told his students that President Trump survived last year’s assassination attempt in Butler, Pennsylvania, for a specific divine purpose, that his mission is to dismantle the Iranian regime, and that he risks losing Heaven’s backing the way King Saul lost his kingship if he continues to delay. The remarks came from Rabbi Mendel Kessin, in the latest installment of an ongoing series examining what he calls the hanhagot, the patterns by which Hashem governs history. Kessin paused a lengthy theological discussion to address what he called “one thing” his audience would want to hear about current events, and used the moment to deliver one of his sharpest public statements yet on the American president.

France’s Constitutional Court has essentially accepted the euthanasia bill as passed by France’s National Assembly with the priviso that the Constitutional Court improved conscience rights. On July 15, 2026; France’s National Assembly passed a bill to legalize euthanasia and assisted suicide by a vote of 291 to 241. This was the final vote in the National Assembly and it overrides the previous votes rejecting the euthanasia bill in France’s Senate.

Norman, Oklahoma’s city council turned down Flock’s automated license plate readers more than once. The surveillance cameras hit the city anyway, carried in by the county sheriff and a scatter of homeowner’s associations the council has no authority over. All nine members of the council said no. Mayor Stephen Tyler Holman told 404 Media that Flock gave the city two presentations in three years, both at the request of a police department that wanted the cameras, and that the company’s answers on privacy and data security were what sank the deal. He asked why anyone would want a record of every vehicle going in and out of the city, whether or not the driver had done anything wrong, held for 30 days on a database whose security and access nobody at Flock could fully account for.

A magnitude 6.9 earthquake hit Indonesia just hours after a more powerful magnitude 7.7 quake struck off the coast of the eastern part of the country, according to the U.S. Geological Survey. These quakes were followed by nearly a thousand aftershocks, disaster management officials said Sunday. Thousands of people in Eastern Indonesia have been displaced by a powerful earthquake, as the country marks its Independence Day, reeling from the impact of fresh tremors. The 7.7-magnitude quake early on Saturday killed at least 68 people and injured more than 100.