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President Donald Trump addresses the nation, alongside Vice President JD Vance (L), Secretary of State Marco Rubio (2nd R) and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth (R), from the White House in Washington on June 21, 2025, following the announcement that the United States bombed nuclear sites in Iran. (Carlos Barria/AFP via Getty Images)

U.S. warplanes dropped bombs on Iran’s Fordow uranium enrichment facility and two other Iranian nuclear facilities on June 21, President Donald Trump announced on social media.

The president said the U.S. aircraft have already exited Iranian airspace and are now returning home.

“We have completed our very successful attack on the three Nuclear sites in Iran, including Fordow, Natanz, and Esfahan. All planes are now outside of Iran air space. A full payload of BOMBS was dropped on the primary site, Fordow,” Trump said.

Iran’s state news agency early Sunday confirmed that the Fordow nuclear site had been struck. The outlet also acknowledged strikes on the Natanz and Esfahan nuclear sites.

Israeli aircraft first began striking Iran on June 13, as part of an operation to halt Iran’s nuclear program and defang its offensive military capabilities.

The uranium enrichment facility at Fordow had been one of the top targets remaining in Israel’s ongoing campaign of air strikes on Iran. The facility is heavily fortified, buried hundreds of feet underground in a mountainous area of Iran, which Israel does not have the capability to penetrate.

“Congratulations to our great American Warriors. There is not another military in the World that could have done this,” the president added.

The strikes came just hours after reports emerged that U.S. Air Force B-2 Spirit stealth bombers had departed from Whiteman Air Force Base, Missouri, heading west.

Trump did not specify exactly what types of U.S. aircraft were involved in the strikes. However, the B-2 is the only aircraft equipped to carry and deploy a 30,000-pound bunker-busting bomb known as the GBU-57A/B Massive Ordnance Penetrator that has a chance at breaching Fordow.

While Trump had voiced support for the Israeli operation and said that Iran must not be able to obtain a nuclear weapon, he had avoided directly involving the U.S. military in the burgeoning Middle East flash point for more than a week. ( 🔴 Live Updates)

Ohio congressman and future president James Garfield championed the creation of a federal Department of Education in 1866 to address high illiteracy levels among former slaves and an influx of European immigrants.

As part of the post-Civil War Reconstruction effort, Confederate states were required to guarantee education for all in their rewritten constitutions. The new federal agency would monitor and enforce compliance, notes a brief history of the Department of Education published by the Conference Board think tank.

Garfield’s efforts led to President Andrew Johnson’s creation of the Department of Education in 1867.  However, representatives from both northern and southern states complained about the federal government having control over local schools. They downgraded the agency to the Office of Education after just one year and placed it within the Department of the Interior.

In the decades that followed, Presidents Calvin Coolidge, Herbert Hoover, and Franklin Roosevelt pressed for more federal involvement in public education, ahead of President Jimmy Carter’s successful campaign to establish the Department of Education as a Cabinet agency in 1980.

Seven presidents and trillions of dollars later, President Donald Trump and Education Secretary Linda McMahon have cut the size of the agency in half, transferred many of its functions to other agencies, and seek to eliminate it.

Politically, the main arguments for and against the Department of Education have been repeated often over the past 158 years.

“It’s like déjà vu for education all over again,” said Gerard Robinson, a professor of public policy at the University of Virginia and an expert on the history of K–12 education policy. (More)

More Politics:

Palantir Technologies is roundly denying claims it’s building a massive, unified database containing Americans’ personal information, following media coverage implying its work for various federal agencies could enable unprecedented surveillance.

Since last month, media reports have highlighted the potential impact of the more than $900 million worth of federal contracts awarded to the Denver-based technology company since the beginning of the Trump administration.

“We are not building, we have not been asked to build, and we’re not in contract to build any kind of federal master list or master database across different agencies,” Courtney Bowman, the company’s global director of privacy and civil liberties, told The Epoch Times, “Each of those contracts are separate and fulfill specific mandates that are scoped and bound by congressional authorities and other laws.”

President Donald Trump signed an executive order in March designed to limit wasteful spending by “eliminating information silos” among federal agencies. The order mandates that federal agencies must share data with each other. Furthermore, it requires the federal government to have unrestricted access to data from state programs receiving federal funding. (More)

More U.S. News

A wide exposure of Beijing’s systematic forced organ harvesting scheme on the world stage could trigger the communist regime’s fall, a Chinese prison survivor says.

The Chinese regime’s state-led harvesting of organs from prisoners of conscience for sale is “so evil” that “everyone will stand up to be against it,” William Huang, a dissident who spent five years in a Chinese prison and eventually escaped to the United States, told The Epoch Times.

“This is why they try their best to hide this crime.”

Huang made the remarks after appearing in a recent webinar urging world leaders to call out the abuse.

Whistleblowers first revealed the existence of the forced organ harvesting scheme in 2006.

Annie, who used an alias in speaking with The Epoch Times, said her ex-husband participated in taking corneas from the detained Falun Gong practitioners in a northeastern Chinese hospital. Doing such work took a mental toll on the doctor. Annie said he had frequent nightmares, with his sweat soaking through the bedsheets.

In 2019, the China Tribunal in London confirmed the longstanding allegation after a year-long investigation, concluding that forced organ harvesting had been happening on a significant scale in China, with practitioners of Falun Gong being a primary victim.

Huang, a Falun Gong practitioner himself, became Beijing’s target over his involvement in setting up The Epoch Times’ website in China in 2000.

Attention has been growing on the issue—five states in the United States have passed laws aiming to block health insurance coverage for organ transplants or post-surgery care for organs originating from China. In Congress, two bills that would impose sanctions on the perpetrators have passed the House. (More)

More World News

🇺🇲American Thought Leaders: New Florida law bans the engineering of weather. Sayer Ji explains. (Watch)

✍️ Opinion: Remembering Solzhenitsyn’s ‘Warning to the West’ by Mark Hendrickson (Read)

🎵 Music: Creston – Symphony No. 2 (Listen)

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Overworked employees should learn to say ‘no’ to their bosses when their plates are full. (Biba Kayewich for American Essence)

We’ve all experienced situations where others crossed the line and challenged our personal boundaries, intentionally or not. Depending on our personalities, it can be easy to respond with either an angry outburst or a plastered smile. But neither response resolves the real issue.

“The sooner that we can communicate and manage expectations, the better it will be for everyone,” says etiquette instructor Bethany Friske. She offered some gracious solutions for a variety of uncomfortable situations.

Many today are too quick to cut off their families, Friske notes, particularly after marriage introduces complicated in-law dynamics. Communication—with a husband and wife each speaking to his or her respective parents about difficult matters—and an understanding that different upbringings are in play, will prevent flared tempers.

Ever have a friend continually ask a favor or press you to attend an event, even when you’re already stretched thin? Don’t feel guilty about saying no. Be honest about your situation, Friske says, using phrases like, “My schedule is booked right now, but please keep me in mind for next time,” or “I would have loved to, but with everything on my plate, I just need to have one night at home without having to go anywhere.”

Saying no to a boss is extremely hard, but overworked employees must communicate when their plates are too full. Friske suggests thanking a boss for thinking of you for a project, but then offering alternatives: “Would it be possible for me to do this next week?” or “I think it’s possible to get to it after I finish my current project.” Follow your email with a phone call, because voice inflection often diffuses tense situations. (More)

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—Ivan Pentchoukov, Madalina Hubert, and Kenzi Li.

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