July 14 2026 News

The US military says its forces have completed their latest wave of strikes on Iran.“During the five-hour mission, US forces successfully struck military targets across Iran including Bushehr, Chah Bahar, Jask, Konarak, Abu Musa, and Bandar Abbas to further degrade Iran’s ability to attack commercial shipping,” US Central Command says. “CENTCOM forces employed precision munitions against Iranian coastal defense systems, missile and drone sites, and maritime capabilities.”

President Trump on Monday said the U.S. could soon attack Pickaxe Mountain in Iran as American forces launched a new round of strikes against the country.“Pickaxe is a possible target for a nice big fat shot right near the front door,” Trump said in an interview on “The Hugh ​Hewitt Show” Monday afternoon. “We’re going to take out Pickaxe Mountain. Tell the Iranians to be ​ready.”Located near Iran’s damaged Natanz uranium enrichment facility in the Zagros Mountains, Pickaxe was not among the three nuclear sites targeted by the U.S. military in June 2025. But Trump told show host Hugh Hewitt that the U.S. has “a lot of eyes” on it.

The Knesset voted 63-52 on Monday to pass a deeply divisive Basic Law declaring Torah study a “foundational value” of the Jewish people and the State of Israel, following 10 hours of speeches and opposition filibustering, and despite resistance from the opposition, legal officials, reservists and some coalition lawmakers. The legislation makes Torah study the only value explicitly enshrined in one of Israel’s Basic Laws, giving it quasi-constitutional recognition. Haredi parties pushed to pass the law as part of their broader effort to preserve blanket military service exemptions for ultra-Orthodox men, while opponents argue it effectively elevates Torah study above all other national values.

As of May 2026, Anthropic confirmed that more than 80 percent of the code merged into its own production systems was written by Claude — its own AI. Not assisted by Claude. Written by Claude. The company’s own engineers have described the shift as moving from doing work to managing a system that does the work. One Anthropic engineer publicly stated that 100 percent of his personal code output was AI-generated, with 22 pull requests shipped in a single day. OpenAI’s announcement of GPT-5.6 in July 2026 included a data point that deserves more attention than it received: over the previous six months, the share of internal research compute devoted to AI coding inference grew one hundredfold, while internal agentic token usage — meaning AI agents working autonomously inside OpenAI’s own research infrastructure — increased twenty-two fold. OpenAI is now using its own frontier models to diagnose training failures, optimize training systems, run experiments, interpret results, tune computational kernels, and improve training recipes for the next model. The company described this as “quickly becoming standard.”

Over the weekend, the police department announced it was abandoning its contract with Flock Safety, the controversial company blanketing the United States in AI-integrated license plate cameras (ALPRs). Though its three-year contract with Flock is just about up, the LAPD says it won’t renew the partnership, citing residents’ concerns over privacy and civil rights, ABC reported. “This contract is not being renewed because of serious concerns around civil liberties and civil rights issues, particularly around privacy and the data that is being collected from these cameras,” LAPD’s chief information officer Dean Gialamas told ABC in a statement. “The LAPD had to make a difficult decision, in this case discontinuing using Flock services until we can get those data, privacy, security and sharing concerns ironed out through a contractual relationship.”

Sell your home, or the state will take it — that’s the ultimatum some homeowners in Georgia say they are facing amid the AI boom. Utility giant Georgia Power is planning to build a new transmission line to in part help power new data centers. It estimates 70-80% of the power on the new line will help serve data centers and the remaining 20-30% of power will serve the state’s growing residential and commercial demand. Ansley Brown’s childhood home that she said was built when she was 5 or 6 years old is just one of the properties impacted.“It’s ours,” she told CBS News. “It’s our family. We belong here. ”Her mother wanted the property to serve as “true generational wealth,” Brown said, adding that now “it’s being stripped from us.” Brown’s mother recently came to an agreement with Georgia Power to sell. If she didn’t, Brown said the utility could have sought to acquire the property through eminent domain — which is a legal process that allows private property to be taken, with compensation, for projects determined to serve a public purpose.

Israeli archaeologists have uncovered a series of rare Second Temple-era artifacts at the Ancient Shiloh National Heritage Site in southern Samaria, including a lavish ritual bath (mikveh), a clay cooking pot and a rare purple-dye snail shell used to produce the prestigious dye for tzitzit and the High Priest’s garments. The discoveries were made during ongoing excavations led by the Civil Administration’s Archaeology Unit in cooperation with the Binyamin Regional Council. Archaeologists say the finds provide new evidence of Jewish religious life at the ancient biblical site, where the Tabernacle stood before the First Temple was built in Jerusalem.

Search operations continued along the Black River in Missouri this week after a 1-in-1,000-year rainfall event caused catastrophic flash flooding, washed out roads and campgrounds and prompted hundreds of rescues. The National Weather Service issued a rare flash flood emergency on Friday, July 10, for parts of Iron and Reynolds counties, urging residents to move to higher ground immediately as thunderstorms unleashed torrential rainfall across south-central Missouri.

On Monday, July 13, the combined effects of Bavi and the enhanced southwest monsoon had left 20 people reported dead and 16 missing in the Philippines, while homes, roads, bridges and seaports were damaged or disrupted. About 146,000 families, or 654,000 people, were affected across 683 barangays, according to NDRRMC figures.