Israel struck more than 100 Hezbollah positions across Lebanon overnight Tuesday into Wednesday, according to the Israeli military, the heaviest single day of activity since the April 16 ceasefire went into effect. At least 31 people were killed, including several children, Lebanon’s health ministry reported. Israeli ground forces pushed farther north along a strategic river in southern Lebanon while air forces struck positions in the Bekaa Valley, Euronews reported. Israel also struck a building in Beirut, killing a man the military identified as a commander in Hezbollah’s Radwan Force. The Council on Foreign Relations noted it was the first Israeli strike on the Lebanese capital since the ceasefire announcement.
The April 16 agreement, brokered with U.S. assistance, was extended on April 23 and again on May 15 for 45 days. Iran called the latest strikes a violation of the truce terms. A fourth round of direct peace talks is scheduled for Washington on June 2 and 3. More than 3,200 people have been killed in Lebanon and more than one million displaced since the war began, according to the Lebanese Health Ministry.
In August 2006, after five weeks of fighting in the Second Lebanon War, the United Nations Security Council passed Resolution 1701 and both sides accepted a ceasefire. Within days each accused the other of violations. The formal agreement held long enough for the fighting to stop, but Hezbollah used the years that followed to rearm at a scale that made the conflict of 2006 look modest by comparison. A ceasefire that produces a peace agreement is one thing. A ceasefire that produces a pause is another. What this one produces remains to be established.
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton defeated four-term Senator John Cornyn on Tuesday in the Republican Senate primary runoff. Paxton took roughly 64 percent of the vote to Cornyn’s 36 percent, a margin of about 28 percentage points, the Texas Tribune reported. Trump endorsed Paxton the week before the vote. Cornyn, who has served in the Senate since 2003, becomes the first Republican senator from Texas to lose his party’s nomination for reelection.
Paxton faces Democratic state Representative James Talarico in November. Republicans now expect to spend roughly $250 million defending the seat, according to Time, and recent polls have shown a tight contest. A Democratic win would be the first Texas Senate victory for that party in more than three decades.
In May 2012, Richard Lugar of Indiana lost his Senate primary to Tea Party candidate Richard Mourdock after 36 years in the Senate. Lugar had voted for both of President Obama’s Supreme Court nominees, and the primary electorate had moved past him. Mourdock then lost the general election to Democrat Joe Donnelly, turning a safe Republican seat over to the other party for six years. The parallels to Cornyn’s situation are imperfect. The structure is not.
Eleven workers are presumed dead at the Nippon Dynawave Packaging facility in Longview, Washington, where a 900,000-gallon tank of white liquor imploded before 7:15 a.m. on May 26. Two deaths have been confirmed; nine others remain unaccounted for and officials have said there’s no hope of finding survivors. Washington Governor Bob Ferguson told reporters the disaster could become “the deadliest industrial tragedy in modern Washington state history,” OPB reported. White liquor, a caustic chemical mixture used in the paper-making process, can cause second- and third-degree burns on contact. Contamination from the implosion has reached the Columbia River. The facility, which employs about 1,000 people, manufactures tissue paper, cups, plates, and packaging materials. Corrosive chemicals in the affected area have continued to hamper search and recovery operations.
Federal prosecutors in the Southern District of New York charged Michele Spagnuolo, 36, an Italian national who worked as a staff information security engineer at Google, with using confidential company data to profit on Polymarket, a cryptocurrency-based prediction market. NPR reported that Spagnuolo had access to Google’s internal Year in Search data and used it to place bets under the username AlphaRaccoon on which singer would be Google’s most-searched person of 2025. He wagered $2.7 million across 25 separate bets and netted a $1.2 million profit, prosecutors said. The charges include commodities fraud, wire fraud, and money laundering. The Commodity Futures Trading Commission filed a separate civil case.
This is the second known federal criminal case tied to Polymarket trades. Prediction markets are regulated as commodity derivatives rather than securities, which created legal ambiguity for years about whether conventional insider trading laws applied. These charges suggest prosecutors have decided the ambiguity runs in one direction.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement is expanding its use of iris recognition technology. The Department of Homeland Security awarded a $25 million no-bid contract to BI2 Technologies for the deployment of hundreds of iris scanning devices at detention facilities and in field enforcement operations, NPR reported. The new contract is more than five times the size of the company’s previous DHS award, issued last fall.
Privacy advocates raised concerns about the agency building a biometric database without adequate external oversight. NPR documented multiple cases in which federal immigration officers collected DNA samples from legal observers and protesters at public demonstrations. ICE said the iris scanners are used to verify identity during enforcement operations. Sheriffs’ departments have used the technology for decades; this expansion moves it to a substantially larger scale.
NASA announced Tuesday that it has committed nearly $1 billion to four commercial companies for the initial phase of its Moon Base program. Astrolab received $219 million and Lunar Outpost received $220 million for lunar terrain vehicles under the Lunar Terrain Vehicle Services program, Spaceflight Now reported. Blue Origin received $188 million to use its Blue Moon Mark 1 Endurance lander to deliver NASA payloads to the Shackleton Connecting Ridge near the lunar south pole. Firefly Aerospace received $75 million to deploy the first drones to the lunar surface.
The first mission, Moon Base I, is targeted for launch no earlier than fall 2026. A second mission planned for later this year will transport more than 1,100 pounds of cargo to the surface, including a rover. NASA said it plans to announce more than a dozen Moon Base missions this year. The last time humans stood on the lunar surface was December 1972. These contracts are the first to commit real money to specific hardware for a sustained human presence there.
And one more thing worth reading.
Warren Holt takes on Marcus Aurelius in “Marcus Aurelius Quotes”, publishing Thursday in the Ideas section. Aurelius’s Meditations was a private journal, written by a man managing the Roman Empire through plague, two decades of war, and a treacherous co-emperor. Warren’s interest is in what happened when those private entries became wellness-brand copy: the gap between what the emperor wrote in that specific context and what we have decided the lines mean now. “Waste no more time arguing about what a good man should be. Be one,” Aurelius wrote in the Meditations. Warren wants to know whether we’ve been doing the arguing.
It is Wednesday. Israel struck more than 100 positions in Lebanon overnight as a ceasefire signed six weeks ago frays toward its fourth round of peace talks. Ken Paxton defeated a four-term Texas senator in his own party’s primary. Eleven workers are presumed dead at a paper mill in Longview, Washington. A Google engineer was charged with using internal company data to profit on a prediction market. Federal immigration authorities are expanding a national database of iris scans. And NASA committed nearly a billion dollars to put hardware on the moon. That’s the day.