With UNIFIL's mandate expiring at year's end and Washington widely expected to veto any renewal, European military chiefs have quietly drafted a plan to keep boots on the ground in Lebanon — with or without the UN's blessing.

• The EU Military Committee, which includes the chiefs of staff of European armies, submitted a recommendation to EU foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas calling for a joint European force of roughly 5,000 soldiers to replace UNIFIL through direct cooperation agreements with the Lebanese Army.
• European diplomats describe their assessment of the US position as "highly pessimistic," with Washington seen as likely to use its Security Council veto — part of a broader Trump administration push to reduce UN funding and restrict its officials.
• Israel is also pushing hard to end the mission, and has directly targeted UNIFIL positions since Mar⁠ch 2, killing six UN military personnel and striking dozens of international force sites.
• Lebanon, meanwhile, sits in a "receiving position" — 80 MPs signed a petition asking the Security Council to keep UNIFIL, while UNIFIL Commander General Diodato Abagnara has briefed President Aoun, Speaker Berri, and the Foreign Affairs Committee on UN Secretary-General Guterres's alternative observer-force proposals.

What to watch: Whether Beirut can coalesce around a unified official position — and get it to New York — before the Security Council's calendar forces the issue.

The idea of a shadowy "deep state" pulling Lebanon's strings is a popular explanation for why nothing gets fixed — but a sharp new analysis argues the truth is stranger and more brazen than that.

• Rather than a hidden apparatus working against the state, the piece in Al Modon argues Lebanon's "deep state" is an open alliance of politicians, businesspeople, media figures, and patronage networks who collectively need the state to remain weak enough to keep dividing its spoils.
• The political conflict in Lebanon, it argues, is not over economic visions or public policy but over who gets to appoint, employ, sign, and distribute — "a competition to own the state" rather than govern it.
• The uncomfortable conclusion: those who promise to confront the deep state often absorb it upon entering office, inheriting its balances, networks, and calculations rather than dismantling them.

The bigger picture: The analysis lands as a broader warning that those who promise to confront the deep state risk gradually integrating into the very system they claimed to change.

Lebanon's State Shura Council has delivered a ruling with real teeth — definitively closing off the government's attempt to quietly write off what it owes depositors through an executive order rather than a proper law.

• The council on May⁠ 21, 2026, rejected the Lebanese state's request for a retrial, upholding its Feb⁠ruary 2024 ruling that annulled Cabinet Decision No. 3 of May⁠ 2022 — which had sought to cancel part of the Banque du Liban's foreign-currency obligations to commercial banks.
• The ruling establishes three binding principles: the administrative judiciary can override the executive on property rights; any loss restructuring requires explicit parliamentary legislation; and the decision sets a judicial precedent against future deposit confiscation schemes.
• The Association of Banks' lawyer, Dr. Akram Azoury, said the ruling "contributes to rebuilding confidence in the banking system," while Secretary-General Fadi Khalaf called for a clear recovery plan that "defines responsibilities and holds each party accountable."

Why it matters: The ruling forecloses one contested path for distributing financial-crisis losses, pushing any future restructuring plan back to parliament — where it always constitutionally belonged.

With Hormuz tensions exposing how fragile global supply chains can be, Türkiye and Saudi Arabia are pushing to finalize costs, investment needs and financing arrangements for a strategic rail corridor linking Saudi Arabia and Türkiye by the end of 2026.

• Turkish Transport Minister Abdulkadir Uraloğlu told Asharq Al-Awsat that technical teams are completing detailed studies and a concrete financial framework — covering costs, investment needs, and financing — is expected to emerge by year-end.
• The project requires rehabilitation of roughly 400 km of damaged rail infrastructure across Syria and Jordan, with some sections needing full reconstruction; Saudi Arabia and Türkiye signed railway and logistics memorandums of understanding earlier this⁠ month.
• Future phases could extend the corridor to Qatar, the UAE, Kuwait, and Oman, connecting Gulf energy exporters directly into Europe's unified railway network via Türkiye's existing Asia-Europe rail links.

The bigger picture: The corridor is explicitly framed as a strategic alternative to Hormuz-dependent shipping routes, placing infrastructure competition at the center of the region's shifting geopolitical alignments.

Nearly 500,000 people die from heat-related causes every year, according to UN figures, and urban areas — which trap heat up to 15 degrees Celsius warmer than surrounding countryside — are where the crisis lands hardest.

• Cities from Antalya, Turkey to Teresina, Brazil and Kilifi County, Kenya are deploying green roofs, urban forest corridors, real-time weather station networks, and decentralized solar grids to reduce heat exposure for vulnerable populations, according to Deutsche Welle.
• Fortaleza, Brazil has launched a network of 10 weather stations providing real-time temperature and UV data, and plans to install air conditioning powered by solar energy across all public schools by 2028.
• The WHO's regional director for Europe noted: "Heat is a silent killer, but it is not an inevitable one — we have the tools, now we must use them," as cities share adaptation strategies at preparatory UN climate talks.

Zooming out: As more than half the world's population now lives in cities, the pace and equity of urban heat adaptation — particularly in middle-income countries where not all families have air conditioning — will shape public health outcomes for decades.

Scientists feared the sunflower sea star was functionally gone after a disease killed an estimated six billion of them between 2013 and 2017 — the largest marine epidemic ever recorded. Eighteen have just been found alive off Northern California.

• Researchers located the stars — one of the largest sea star species on Earth, spanning over three feet — in the Greater Farallones National Marine Sanctuary, collecting genetic tissue and water samples to aid potential repopulation efforts.
• Their collapse triggered a cascade: with no sunflower stars to eat purple sea urchins, urchin populations exploded and destroyed kelp forests, causing a 90 percent loss of habitat in the Farallones and threatening nearly 800 keystone species that depend on kelp.
• Researchers have identified the bacterium Vibrio pectenicida as responsible for the die-off, though what drives its spread is still under study; cross-breeding and pairing stars with beneficial bacteria are among proposed recovery strategies.

What to watch: Whether the Trump administration's National Marine Fisheries Service — which has reportedly not yet completed a proposal to list the sunflower sea star under the Endangered Species Act — moves to offer the species formal legal protection.