European leaders breathed a sigh of relief as US president Donald Trump departed last week’s NATO summit in Ankara, Turkey. Despite a few unseemly moments in which Trump reiterated his desire to seize Greenland and nonsensically ordered a halt to all trade with Spain, the meeting went off without any major catastrophes.
Most importantly, Trump did not announce any major troop withdrawals from Europe or any moves to leave the alliance. He even had warm words for Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky, and pledged to grant Ukraine a license to manufacture Patriot air-defence missiles domestically. By the end, even Trump proclaimed that there was “love” in the air.
But optics aside, the summit was an absurd exercise. NATO leaders revelled in their pledges to increase defence-related spending to 5%, even though everyone knows that this arbitrary number means nothing in the absence of deeper discussions about capabilities. The figure was pulled out of thin air last year to appease Trump. In the months leading up to the summit, the same leaders had worried that Trump would withdraw the US from the alliance or dramatically reduce its presence in Europe, which would then find itself at the mercy of Vladimir Putin’s Russia.
That is why NATO leaders expended so much energy preparing a summit that would not allow for any unscripted moments. Fears that the mercurial US president would use the occasion to undermine the alliance were palpable. When the moment came, European leaders reportedly fell over themselves to praise Trump, with NATO’s secretary general, Mark Rutte, leading the sycophantic charge.
Some commentators believe that saving NATO and keeping the Western alliance alive was worth this self-abasement. But by kowtowing to Trump and indulgently harking back to the good old days of the transatlantic relationship, Europe’s leaders are risking more than just their dignity.
Consider the period following the fall of the Berlin Wall. After the initial euphoria, many parts of the former German Democratic Republic (East Germany) were emptied out as their populations left, even as property prices were driven up by an influx of wealthier West Germans. The result was a wave of nostalgia for a lost world, expressed in films like Good Bye, Lenin!
The term coined to describe this emotion was Ostalgie (“Eastalgia”), and it has shaped German politics and culture for almost 40 years now. Although many East German writers have criticised such sentimentality for trivialising East Germany’s decades-long repression, some see it as the key to understanding what ails Germany’s eastern regions today. There one finds a widespread refusal to acknowledge that the world has changed, a habit of free riding, and a tendency—occasionally—to look ridiculous, such as when East Germans parrot Russian talking points on Ukraine.
Ironically, Europe’s problem today is not just that Ostalgie has held back eastern Germany; it is that a new malady, Westalgia, has taken hold. It was on full display in Ankara.
Westalgia has several key features. The first is a refusal to acknowledge that the world has moved on. By acting as if US security guarantees are still as ironclad as they were under the Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush administrations, and by continuing to purchase US weapons, they hope to turn back the clock. But a better strategy would recognise that America has changed in fundamental ways. Even if a Democrat moves into the White House in January 2029, US retrenchment will continue.
Europe’s hyper-reliance on American power clearly had an infantilising effect
Those who want to turn back the clock naturally see the past through rose-tinted glasses, even though elements of the post-cold war settlement were not to Europe’s advantage. Specifically, Europe’s hyper-reliance on American power clearly had an infantilising effect. Even when caught between a predatory Russia, a fickle US and a coercive China, Europeans are still wont to downplay and underestimate their own power and influence.
The second feature of Westalgia is a tendency to free ride. Just as eastern Germans grew accustomed to the transfer payments and subsidies (the infamous Solidaritätszuschlag, or “solidarity tax”) that flowed eastward after unification, so have Europeans become accustomed to America bankrolling their security. As a result, Europeans have under-invested, not just in defence but also in their industrial base, technological sovereignty and energy independence.
Instead of complaining that US citizens no longer want to be responsible for defending Europe, and instead of spending billions of dollars to satisfy Trump’s vanity, Europeans would be better off having a serious conversation about how they could fight a high-intensity conflict on their own, if necessary. Instead of spending an arbitrary share of their GDP on defence, they should critically evaluate their capability gaps and adjust their spending to match their needs. Coffers are tight everywhere, but it will be easier to justify expenditures on weapons if they appear less geared toward flattering Trump.
Third, in their subservience to the US president, Europeans often do not hide it well, which prevents them from being taken seriously—be it by Trump, Putin, or Chinese leader Xi Jinping. If there is one man who presumably respects Rutte less than Rutte himself, it is Trump. Europe will garner the world’s respect only when it stands up for itself.
Whereas Ostalgie was a bottom-up phenomenon, Westalgia is being driven by elites. Of course, European politicians need to allay their skittish electorates’ fears. But if they want to succeed in the 21st century, they must stop selling nostalgia and start looking to the future.
This article was first published by Project Syndicate on July 15th 2026
Britain finally has a published defence investment plan (DIP). Does it match the scale of the challenge facing Britain (and Europe)? Three questions can tell us. Readers will feel less optimistic as they proceed through the answers. But the good news is the British public are well ahead of the defence establishment on what needs to be done.
Question: Does the DIP match the Russian threat?
Answer: Somewhat.
Last year NATO’s secretary-general warned Russia would be ready to attack by 2030, if not earlier. The European Commission’s SAFE programme of massive defence loans is geared to that deadline. These prognoses presumably assumed Russia would make short work of Ukraine, and could then prepare itself for fresh aggression. But Ukraine has humiliated Russia’s navy and air force, and mauled its army. The tide of war may now be turning.
Still, if Russia looks like losing in Ukraine, Vladimir Putin may become even more dangerous. He would likely prioritise different ways of trying to coerce Ukraine’s allies—sabotage, subversion, cyber assaults, attacks on infrastructure (such as undersea cables and pipes), nuclear menaces and even the sort of air and missile attacks he has nightly rained on Kyiv. In this regard, the DIP rightly focuses on cyber/electromagnetic defence and prioritises underwater robotics as part of the new £5bn investment in drones.
However, the plan reaches the extraordinary conclusion that “Capable and effective Integrated Air and Missile Defence can only be accomplished as part of a NATO endeavour”. It took only one misdirected drone to bring down the Latvian government in May. Where are the proposals for an emergency ramp-up of production of air defence missiles by MBDA (Europe’s leading missile company, one third British-owned), and coordination with the plethora of “air shield” projects now springing up across Europe? Incoming British prime minister Andy Burnham may wish to consider whether, apart from a few RAF combat aircraft, he is content to rely for the defence of Britain’s skies on the kindness of others.
Question: Does the DIP reflect the lessons of Ukraine?
Answer: Not enough.
Those lessons are in effect the development of a new paradigm of warfare through the embrace of new technologies. The need for technological “transformation” was a major theme of Britain’s strategic defence review (SDR): and the DIP duly has a lot to say about drones and other robotics. But Ukrainian battlefield success has involved so much more: a fundamental move away from the cold war military currency of aircraft, ships and tanks (all now exposed as dangerously vulnerable) to a web of sensors and surveillance assets, identifying threats and targets for a panoply of different “kill” options, including missiles, drones, cyber and electronic counter-measures. These are connected through AI-assisted battle management systems and data clouds. Development and procurement cycles are shortened to weeks or even days; hardware and software updates take place within hours.
The DIP offers no sense of such radical transformation or urgency
The DIP offers no sense of such radical transformation or urgency. True, it envisages a new Digital Targeting Web, and drones are to be introduced alongside next-generation platforms: as uncrewed “wingmen” for the Tempest sixth-generation combat aircraft; as subsea robots controlled from mother ships; as constituents of local combat clouds operated by armoured vehicles.
But the balance of overall investment is still overwhelmingly directed towards those next-generation platforms: Tempest, the nuclear deterrent, the AUKUS programme with America and Australia for future nuclear-powered attack submarines, helicopters—the sort of stuff the traditional defence industry loves, and that governments like to term a “defence dividend” of regional job creation.
The DIP acknowledges defence must “ruthlessly prioritise and make tough short-term choices, disinvesting in [old] capabilities”. Yet it is hard to see where this is actually happening, apart from the sacrifice of some planned old-style destroyers and frigates. Predictably, mothballing the increasingly irrelevant aircraft carriers is not an option that has found favour. Overall the picture is one of “hybridisation”—grafting some of the new onto much of the old root-stock.
Question: Does the DIP reflect how Trump has changed the world?
Answer: Not at all.
President Donald Trump has sided with Putin over Ukraine, threatened NATO ally Denmark over Greenland and promised US troop reductions in Europe. But the DIP is happy to reaffirm that “the US remains the UK’s closest defence and security ally”. Faith in the “special relationship” is evidently undimmed in the British defence establishment.
Symptomatic is the DIP’s endorsement of last year’s bizarre decision to buy more American F35 aircraft to drop US free-fall nuclear bombs. Since half a dozen European NATO allies already provide this service, the additional deterrent value will be minimal. But the decision betrays an extraordinary insouciance about sovereign control of software-driven aircraft with source code the Americans have always refused to share, and that is now rumoured to contain a US-operated “kill switch”. (Compare the fate of American tractors stolen from Ukraine by the Russians, and promptly killed by the John Deere company—or the similar feature on Tesla cars.)
Continental Europeans are now taking the issue of excessive technological dependence on America with increasing seriousness. Calls for “strategic autonomy” and “buy European”, once viewed as Gaullist eccentricity, are now mainstream. Efforts to develop national alternatives to American big tech offerings for AI-assisted, data-driven command systems are proliferating. Little wonder that, as Keir Starmer has sought to strengthen ties with Europe, Britain has found its “defence card” commanding less respect than hoped: a year on from last year’s EU-UK summit, Britain’s anticipated quick admission to the EU’s main programme for defence industrial collaboration has yet to happen. With Palantir now well established with the UK’s defence transformation efforts, the next British prime minister needs to address European mistrust of Britain’s commitment to cross-Channel cooperation, Burnham can do this by ensuring the contract for the Digital Targeting Web does not go to US big tech.
The establishment trail the public
Overall, the picture emerges of a British defence establishment—an alliance of industry, armed forces and political interests—that expects its bills to be promptly paid by the government, without quibble; is ready to introduce some new capabilities battle-proven in Ukraine but while retaining much of the old; and has difficulty imagining a future not fundamentally dependent on America.
So the results thrown up by recent ECFR polling are striking. The “Briton in the street” is evidently well out in front of the elite consensus when it comes to internalising the implications of the Trump geopolitical earthquake. Polling respondents hold both EU member states and the EU itself in much greater esteem than they do the US. Many more Britons believe their continental neighbours would help them repel an attack than trust America to do so. When it comes to defence cooperation, fully 63% would prioritise relations with Europe, over 19% for the US.
When he takes office later this month, Burnham may find he has more political room for manoeuvre than he expects when defence investment next comes up for debate.
By Gospa News Editorial Staff
Since today, therefore, this War Daily Summary will no longer contain news only on the war (and related geopolitical issue) in the Middle East, but also on the war in Ukraine and any other international conflicts.
HELP GOSPA NEWS TO ENHANCE BREAKING UPDATES
Brief analysis by Fabio G.C. Carisio on August, 17, 2026
While the Russian Army continues to advance on the battlefield in Donbas, consolidating its military positions—predicting its complete annexation within a year—the Russian Aerospace Forces are engaged in an asymmetric strategic war against Kiev’s air force.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, using drones paid for by European Union citizens and built in a covert partnership with the US Pentagon and EU countries, continues to target Russia’s energy infrastructure and civilian buildings in a vain attempt to provoke a rebellion among the Russian population, as military bases are too well-protected to be attacked.
In the last few hours, more than a thousand kamikaze drones have been launched, killing at least six Russian civilians and seriously damaging the Wildberries (Russian Amazon) online distribution centers alone.
Without having to contend with the costs borne by the European Union, the leader of the pro-Nazi Zelensky regime can waste drones at will on massacres of civilians, as recently happened in Nizhnekamsk.
It should not be forgotten that European politicians and media censored or at least severely obscured the massacre of Russian schoolgirls that occurred on May 21, 2026, when more than one drone, using the lethal double-tap tactic, struck a dormitory in Starobelsk, in the Lugansk People’s Republic, which confederated with Russia after a popular plebiscite.
While Russian President Vladimir Putin, who could level much of Kiev in a single night with undetectable hypersonic missiles, to avoid a massacre of “Ukrainian brothers,” limits himself to striking the military and energy infrastructure that is bringing Ukraine’s military apparatus to its knees, increasingly short of Patriot air defense rockets.
But the escalation triggered by Zelensky, with the applause of US President Trump, has inevitably led Russia to raise the level of retaliation and also include civilian targets, such as ships in the port of Odessa.
As long as European, American, and Zionist leaders speculate on the Weapons Lobby, the conflict in Ukraine can only continue to escalate toward a total “preventive” war, like that waged by Israel and the US against Iran, and desired by NATO and, above all, Great Britain against Russia.
Until Putin loses patience and carries out a massacre in Kiev… But from that moment on, thanks to vile Western propaganda, every day will be a good day for the start of World War III.
The evidence presented in this analysis is documented in the exclusive investigations published below and in the last week’s updates below.
Fabio Giuseppe Carlo Carisio – founder and director of Gospa News
READ MORE IN THE INVESTIGATIVE ANALYSIS BELOW
ANALYSIS BY VANESSA BEELEY IN THE POST BELOW
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MI5 Intelligence Chiefs Secretly Lobbied UK government to designate IRGC as ‘Terrorist’ Organization
GEOPOLITICAL AND MILITARY ANALYSIS IN THE POST BELOW
FULL INVESTIGATION AND VIDEOS IN THE POST BELOW
FULL INVESTIGATION AND VIDEOS IN THE POST BELOW
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DEVIL NETANYAHU’s HOLOCAUST. Explosive UN findings: “Israel DELIBERATELY TARGETED Gaza CHILDREN”
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“The UN added Israel to a blacklist of perpetrators of sexual violence in conflict. We are done with the Secretary-General’s lies. Equating the democratic State of Israel with Hamas terrorists is a new low. Israel protects its citizens while Hamas massacres, rapes, and kidnaps”.
Israel’s Ambassador to the United Nations, Danny Danonm said in a post on X. In the post below all the previous dossier on this topic.
President Donald Trump threatened in an interview with Fox News to bomb Oman if it interferes in a potential deal with Iran over control of the Strait of Hormuz, the news outlet reported.
Oman has been negotiating with Tehran over the vital shipping route, where maritime traffic has nearly ground to a halt as talks on ending the U.S. war with Iran have stalled.
Below the CNN Breaking News keynotes about:
• Threat to Oman: President Donald Trump warned of an attack on Oman if it “gets in the way” of efforts in the Strait of Hormuz. Trump previously threatened the US ally in May.
• Iran agreement expires: The 60-day deadline for the two sides to reach a deal toward ending the conflict has now passed. Trump again said he is in no rush and claimed his administration has established a direct backchannel with Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, which the IRGC denies.
• Main priority: The president reiterated that the top goal in the war is preventing Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon, undercutting advisers who say keeping oil prices low is an important priority.
• Gaza ceasefire plan: Meanwhile, after Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner met Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu today for over four hours, Kushner said Hamas could disarm soon but indicated the US would support further Israeli military action in Gaza if not.
«US President Donald Trump threatened today to attack Oman if it interferes with US efforts in the Strait of Hormuz, as the conflict with Iran continues and a two-month window for peace talks expires without a clear path to end the war» CNN has reported in a video.
Trump’s comments come as the 60-day window for peace talks between the US and Iran, agreed to in June, closed Monday without any concrete plans announced for the war to end. Meanwhile, Iran said Monday that its talks with Oman regarding the Strait of Hormuz are complex but continuing.
In the latest days POTUS said that he wants to declare the Strait of Hormuz a U.S. territory: “I’ll Never Apologize” War Crimes
Ukraine again Failed to Shoot Down a Single Ballistic or Hypersonic Missile last Night
This follows from the summary of the Ukrainian Armed Forces Air Force Ukraine was attacked on the last night (August 16, 2026) nby Onyx, Iskander-M, S-400, KN-23 and Kh-59/69 missiles, as well as 106 drones.
3 FOOTAGES IN ONE VIDEO – legenda below
1st Footage – Kiev on fire after the heavy strikes which hit also the market of book in retaliation to the yet another attack on a distribution center of Wildberries, Russia’s largest online retailer with two million visitors a day.
2nd footage – Russian troops are delivering precision strikes on Ukraine’s military and fuel infrastructure
In the Kiev-controlled part of the Zaporizhia region, a gas station and related equipment were hit. The fact of the attack was confirmed by the head of the regional military administration, Ivan Fedorov. In the north of the Kharkiv region, the Russian Aerospace Forces are launching guided aerial bombs at enemy positions and fortifications. This is reported by local publications.
Direct hits to infrastructure facilities were recorded in Sumy, and large fires broke out in the affected areas. A massive raid by unmanned aerial vehicles continues in the Odessa region, explosions are heard in Sanzheyka. Systematic attacks on the fuel infrastructure leave the Ukrainian army without fuel at a time when the Western allies are reporting on the supply of new batches of weapons that have nothing to refuel.
3d footage – Russian FAB-500s level Ukrainian drone hub
The Russian forces сonducted a strike on the Ukrainian National Guard’s drone command post in the settlement of Dobropolye in the Donetsk People’s Republic using four FAB-500 high-explosive aerial bombs, Russia’s Ministry of Defense said.
Russian forces struck defense industry facilities in Kiev, the Kremenchug oil refinery and a steel plant in Krivoy Rog, the Russian Defense Ministry said.
“Russian forces struck Fire Point in Kiev, a company producing components, warheads and solid-fuel boosters for Flamingo ground-launched cruise missiles. Russian troops also struck Ukrdefense Company in Kiev, which produces components for strike drones, Khrushch interceptor drones and Garpiya air defense drones,” the Defense Ministry said.
Below the previous attack on Fire Point facility launched one week ago
Russian forces struck the Kremenchug oil refinery in the Poltava Region, where the remaining storage tanks continue handling fuel and lubricants supplied from abroad. The Russian military struck steelmaking facilities in Krivoy Rog in the Dnepropetrovsk Region, producing rolled steel for weapons and military equipment.
Russian forces also struck a dry cargo ship carrying military equipment for Ukrainian forces at the port of Odessa, the Russian Defense Ministry said.
Russian drones struck facilities for the production and storage of components for uncrewed boats used by Ukraine to attack Russian coastal cities, ships and infrastructure facilities in the Black Sea, the Russian defense ministry said.
“During the day, Russian attack unmanned aerial vehicles struck in the settlement of Belgorod-Dnestrovsky (40 kilometers southwest of Odessa): a production facility and a depot holding warheads and components for uncrewed boats used to attack ships and energy infrastructure facilities in the Black Sea, and Russian cities on the Black Sea coast,” it said.
Russian forces struck three dry cargo ships and two tankers, as well as fuel tanks at the port of Odessa, the Russian defense ministry said.
“Three dry cargo ships and two sea-going tankers used to deliver military cargoes and fuels for the Ukrainian army, as well as fuel tanks and warehouses holding military products were struck at the port of Odessa,” it said.
Russian air defenses intercepted and destroyed 822 Ukrainian fixed-wing drones over Russian regions and the Black and Azov Seas overnight (august, 16, 2026), the Russian Defense Ministry said.
“Russian air defense forces intercepted and destroyed 822 Ukrainian fixed-wing unmanned aerial vehicles over Belgorod, Bryansk, Vladimir, Volgograd, Voronezh, Kaluga, Kursk, Lipetsk, Nizhny Novgorod, Oryol, Rostov, Ryazan, Tambov and Tula regions, the Moscow Region, the Krasnodar Region and the Republic of Crimea, as well as over the Azov and Black Seas, from 8 p.m. Moscow time (5 p.m. GMT) on August 15 to 8 a.m. Moscow time (5 a.m. GMT) on August 16,” the Defense Ministry said.
Three people were killed and one more was injured in a drone attack on southern Russia’s Rostov Region, Governor Yury Slyusar reported.
“Last night, three people were killed as a result of an aerial attack on the Rostov Region, and one more has been hospitalized with injuries,” he wrote on Max channel.
More than 150 UAVs were destroyed over three cities and nine districts in the region in the Ukrainian attack, the official added.
Below the previous UAV attacks on Russia town of Nizhenekamsk wichiu killed 11 civilians including children
Three people were injured in a drone attack near the Moscow Automobile Ring Road (MKAD), according to Mayor Sergey Sobyanin.
“Defense Ministry air defense capabilities have downed another nine drones targeting Moscow. Three people were injured near MKAD, they are being given all necessary assistance. Emergency specialists are working at the scene where [drone] debris fell,” Sobyanin wrote on Max channel.
Since midnight (August,16,2026), as many as 132 unmanned aerial vehicles flying toward the Russian capital have been shot down, calculations by TASS based on the mayor’s posts show.
Iranian state television is showing, for the first time, evidence that Elon Musk’s “Starlink” devices are being used in U.S. military drones.
The IRGC is now displaying wreckage from 171 downed US and Israeli aircraft and drones — including MQ-9 Reapers, Hermes 900s, an F-15 fighter jet, and Starlink modems recovered from the wreckage.
Yemen’s Mokha port has suspended commercial and maritime operations after the Yemeni armed forces targeted it with more than 25 missiles in recent days, the port’s director said on Saturday.
The attacks killed seven people and caused an estimated $16 million in losses, the director told a news conference.
Mokha is a Red Sea port near the Bab al-Mandeb strait, a strategic chokepoint connecting the Red Sea with the Gulf of Aden and a key route for international shipping.
The port is controlled by Saudi-linked mercenaries. It has a smaller cargo capacity than Yemen’s main ports of Aden and Hodeidah, according to Iranian Press TV.
On Friday, spokesman Brigadier General Yahya Saree said in a statement that the armed forces subjected Saudi Arabia-linked targets to fresh heavy strikes.
He added that the servicemen targeted “warships belonging to its (Riyadh’s) tools and mercenaries in the al-Mokha area, using a large number of ballistic missiles.”
Hezbollah condemned on Saturday the major Israeli enemy’s escalation in southern Lebanon, affirming the Israeli occupation army carried out brutal massacres against civilians and warning that continued attacks and violations of Lebanese sovereignty would be met with an appropriate response, Al Manar Lebanese TV has reported.
In a statement, Hezbollah said Lebanese residents woke at dawn to an aggressive escalation and a brutal massacre allegedly carried out by the criminal Zionist enemy against civilians in the south. It said Israeli strikes targeted a home on the outskirts of the southern town of Ansar and a building in Deir Al-Zahrani, killing 11 people, including women and children, and wounding 12 others.
“Those grave crimes add to Israel’s long record of “massacres, crimes, and the shedding of Lebanese blood, as well as the destruction of homes, the bulldozing of farmland, and the erasure of entire villages,” the statement read.
Hezbollah said responsibility for the Israeli enemy’s continued aggression and violations of Lebanon’s sovereignty rested with the Israeli government and the United States, which it accused of providing Israel with political and military backing and cover.
At the same time, the group called on the Lebanese authorities to explore every available means to halt the Israeli attacks rather than persist with the humiliating direct negotiations and offer “Israel” free concessions, despite the Israeli enemy’s repeated crimes and attacks, as well as its openly stated aggressive and expansionist intentions toward Lebanon.
The Lebanese Parents of Child Martyrs Association on Saturday condemned a new Israeli massacre in the southern town of Ansar that killed a family of six, including four children, and called on Lebanese authorities to document the attack and pursue accountability through regional and international legal channels.
«In a statement, the association condemned the Israeli occupation army’s pre-dawn attack on a family in Ansar on August 15, 2026, which killed Ali Al-Hajj Hassan, his wife, Zeinab Nassereddine, and their children Zahraa, Hassan, Hussein, and Abbas» Al Manar Lebanese TV has reported.
Israeli forces carried out a series of airstrikes and attacks across South Lebanon on Saturday, killing at least nine people and wounding 11 in the past 24 hours, according to Al Mayadeen’s correspondent, citing the Lebanese Health Ministry.
Our correspondent reported that an Israeli strike on Deir al-Zahrani targeted a building along the town’s main highway. Ambulances rushed to the scene amid initial reports of a massacre, while rescue teams worked to assess the casualties and search for survivors.
The Health Ministry reported that the preliminary toll from the Deir al-Zahrani attack stood at two martyrs and nine wounded, bringing the reported toll from the two attacks to at least nine martyrs and 11 wounded.
Lebanese President Joseph Aoun condemned on Saturday the Israeli attacks on southern Lebanon, stressing that these violations constitute a “clear message to the negotiating process and to US efforts aimed at implementing the framework agreement”.
For his part, Lebanese Prime Minister Nawaf Salam described the Israeli escalation since dawn as “extremely dangerous”, saying that the strikes and heavy bombardment targeting Nabatieh, Ansar, Deir al-Zahrani, and neighboring villages were undermining efforts to establish stability in the South, as he posted on his X account.
The Israeli escalation began with an Israeli airstrike on an inhabited home in Ansar, in the Nabatieh district, killing seven people, including three children and two women, while two others were wounded, according to the Health Ministry.
Yemen’s Houthi rebels used six ballistic missiles in their Friday attack on the port of al-Makha, the internationally-recognised government’s army has said in a statement.
One port security official was killed while two sailors went missing, the army’s statement said. At least 8 civilians were injured in the attack, it added.
Attacking the port, a key hub for the inflow of food and goods, as well as civilian infrastructure, shows the Houthi group’s “determination to impose a suffocating siege on the Yemeni people”, military spokesperson Colonel Majid al-Nuzaili added.
A Yemeni military source told the Saba News Agency: “The Yemeni Armed Forces targeted an Aramco refinery in the Jizan region with two drones, and the strike was precise”
“The targeting comes in response to the Saudi enemy’s violation of Yemeni airspace and the country’s sovereignty in the governorates of Saada and Hajjah,” the sources added.
Iranian Parliament Speaker Mohammad Baqer Qalibaf says he halted negotiations following the latest Israeli attack on Beirut’s Dahiyeh and said Iran will hit the regime immediately.
Speaking at a gathering of cultural elites on Saturday, Qalibaf said, “In the latest attack on Dahiyeh, I halted the negotiations and announced: ‘Tonight, we will strike the regime, and if the regime responds, we will strike the entire region.’”
He said the outcome was that “the blockade was lifted that same night.”
The top Iranian negotiator also referred to talks over the Strait of Hormuz, saying a reopening had been scheduled for 30 days under an understanding.
He said that after US President Donald Trump said on social media that the blockade and the Strait of Hormuz would be opened together “tonight,” he warned, “If the false claim about the Strait of Hormuz is not corrected, we will carry out an attack.”
According to Qalibaf, Trump was forced to correct his post, which he described as an example of “negotiating as a form of fighting.”
Iran, however, was quick to react to the US president’s statement.
“The Strait of Hormuz was Iranian, is Iranian, and will remain Iranian. This strait will be opened and closed only on Iran’s orders,” Iranian Deputy Foreign Minister Kazem Gharibabadi reiterated on X on Saturday morning.
“It cannot be conquered with a tweet or an aircraft carrier, nor with a presidential decree, nor with an election campaign speech,” he added.
The aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln is en route to the United States after completing an extended mission of more than 260 days in the Middle East, necessitated by specific operational needs in the area.
«A U.S official told NBC News that the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln is set to head home from the Mideast. It comes as some families report poor living conditions for the sailors and marines on board». NBC News’ Gabe Gutierrez reports.
Acting Secretary of the US Navy Hung Cao says that reports of dire conditions on the USS Abraham Lincoln amid the US-Israel war with Iran, including accounts of sailors trying to jump overboard, have been blown out of proportion.
“Legitimate challenges of a long combat deployment are being twisted into a false narrative, while the genuine difficulties faced by military families are being used for headlines,”Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell chimed in on X. “That is shameful.”
Earlier today, US President Donald Trump dismissed concerns about conditions on board the USS Abraham Lincoln. Speaking to reporters on Friday, Trump rejected the assertion that the families of those on board the aircraft carrier are worried about their loved ones.
“The Sailors aboard the Lincoln are doing what American warriors have always done: remaining resilient, focused on the mission, and proud of their service on this historic deployment,” Parnell added. “We stand with them”.
Trump wants to declare the Strait of Hormuz a US territory
Donald Trump said that after the completion of the military operation against Iran, he intends to declare the Strait of Hormuz the territory of the United States.
“After we finish defeating Iran … pretty soon I will declare the Strait of Hormuz the territory of the United States,” the American president said, adding that the United States allegedly already controls the passage of ships through the strait.
Meanwhile, a large-scale oil spill was reported in the Strait of Hormuz after a missile strike on the Minoan Pioneer bulk carrier. The oil slick spread over more than 300 km, an area comparable to about 40,000 football fields.
“I’ll never apologize. I did the right thing” — Trump on his war-crime spree in Iran
Don told Americans to show some patience and PAY MORE for gas while he bombs more girls in Iran as part of his ego play.
“What we’re doing is a great service for — not only for ourselves, for the world,” the failed emperor declared.
Cities across Ukraine are facing near-daily Russian attacks, with 11 locations hit overnight on Thursday, including Sumy, Zaporizhzhia, Odesa and Kramatorsk.
Several people were killed and more than two dozen wounded, including children. Ukraine says more than 100 drones were launched, but it is no longer releasing figures for missiles used, citing security concerns and shortages of interceptor missiles.
Ukraine’s grain industry is also suffering from repeated Russian attacks on ports. Hundreds of vessels have been targeted by both sides in the Black Sea over the past month, prompting Ukraine to propose a ceasefire covering civilian vessels.
Kyiv says this would allow ports to reopen and farmers to export their harvest during a crucial period. Russia has not yet responded to the proposal.
These attacks came in retaliation for the ongoing lethal attacks on civilian buildings launched by the Ukrainian military.
The Russian Armed Forces liberated Rybalskyoe in the Zaporozhye Region within 24 hours, the Defense Ministry reported.
“As a result of decisive actions by units of the Battlegroup East, the village of Rybalskoye in the Zaporozhye Region has been liberated,” the statement reads.
The liberation of Rybalskoye in the Zaporozhye region allowed the Battlegroup East to expand its zone of control northwest of Novoye Pole and continue its advance, the ministry added.
“During the fighting, units of the Battlegroup East broke through the Ukrainian Armed Forces’ defenses. The enemy suffered losses of up to a company of personnel. Seven armored combat vehicles, 10 vehicles, 13 ground robotic systems, and more than 20 R-18 heavy hexacopters were destroyed. The liberation of Rybalskyoe allowed units of the Battlegroup East to expand their zone of control northwest of Novoye Pole and continue their advance in the special military operation zone in the Zaporpzhye region,” the ministry said.
“The actions of those who carried out this horrific act of terrorism, aimed at intimidating and harassing this family, are abhorrent,” the US ambassador to Israel wrote on X, referring to Israeli settlers besieging the home of two Palestinian families in Qusra, in the West Bank.
“There is no excuse for such violent behavior,” Mike Huckabee wrote on X. Among the homes targeted is one owned by a US citizen.
The Israeli army (IDF) has reversed its decision to evacuate Palestinian families whose homes are under siege by settlers in the West Bank village of Qusra, near Nablus, for several days.
The public broadcaster Kan reported, specifying that the commander of the IDF Central Command, General Avi Blot, ordered that soldiers enter only unoccupied homes.
The decision, Kan emphasizes, follows criticism of Israel for its handling of the situation in Qusra. The IDF had initially asked residents of the besieged homes, as well as other residences, to leave their homes for a few days in anticipation of a military operation in the area.
Armed Israeli settlers and Israeli occupation forces have besieged two Palestinian families in their homes since the weekend in an effort to usurp their properties in the West Bank village of Qusra through intimidation.
On Sunday afternoon, armed settlers and Israeli soldiers surrounded Yousef Hassan’s home, erecting a tent just outside and effectively trapping him inside with his wife and their two young daughters, leaving the family confined as the intimidation campaign unfolded around them.
The Israeli men gathered only meters from the location where 28-year-old Amir Moatasem Odeh was killed by a settler in March. Another attacker stabbed Odeh’s father. No arrests have been made in connection with the killing and assault.
“Every night, the settlers throw stones, use obscene language, and shout during the night. We are living in a state of terror,” Hassan said.
Israeli War Minister Katz openly declared that Israeli forces intend to maintain a long-term occupation of areas in Lebanon, Syria, and Gaza, ruling out withdrawal from what “Israel” has designated as so-called “security zones” and ordering the military to prepare for a prolonged presence.
Katz made the remarks on Wednesday during a visit to Israeli occupation forces deployed inside southern Lebanon, according to Israeli media platform Divuhim Online, as senior commanders discussed military preparations for a possible future confrontation with the Lebanese Resistance.
“The Israeli army is here to stay in the security zones in Lebanon, Syria, and Gaza and to protect the entire State of Israel,” Katz said. “We are up above and they are down below. I have instructed the Israeli army to take all necessary steps to prepare for a long-term presence in the area.”
The declaration comes almost two months after Lebanon and “Israel” agreed to a US-sponsored framework involving the gradual withdrawal of Israeli forces from southern Lebanon, the disarmament of Hezbollah, and the deployment of the Lebanese Army, beginning in designated test areas known as “pilot zones.”
«His remarks provide an unusually explicit articulation of an Israeli policy increasingly centered on maintaining military control beyond occupied Palestine’s internationally recognized borders, under the pretext of creating buffer or “security” zones.» Al Mayadeen Lebanese TV freported.
https://gospanews.net/en/2023/12/08/the-greater-israel-scheme-and-its-global-power-play-a-delusional-recipe-for-armageddon/
Such declarations reinforce longstanding warnings that Israeli military expansion is not intended as a temporary security measure, but as an effort to entrench occupation and impose new realities by force.
Spokesperson for the Central Headquarters of Khatam al-Anbiya (PBUH) affirmed that no ship can pass safely through the Strait of Hormuz without Iranian permission and supervision.
The Khatam al-Anbiya Central Headquarters is the highest operational military command center of the Islamic Republic of Iran Armed Forces, located in Tehran.
Washington’s baseless claims about the normal movement of ships through Hormuz are nothing but lies, he added.
Meanwhile, hte head of the Basij Mobilization Group, Hojjatoleslam Hussein Taeb, said, “The Americans ignited a war in the Strait of Hormuz to change the balance of power, but they were defeated once again.”
He added, “The Strait of Hormuz is under the administration and control of the Islamic Republic, and Iran continues its path in complete security and stability.
HUNTER BIDEN: ‘If it’s antisemitic to point out that Bibi Netanyahu evil incarnate… don’t know what to say to people anymore… just open your eyes’
TUCKER: ‘It’s such an obvious lie’
HUNTER: ‘How is it possible that they’re dividing us on things like that?’
TUCKER: ‘I agree’
The Russian armed forces launched a coordinated attack on defense industry facilities and transportation and logistics hubs in Kyiv and Zaporizhzhia, according to a statement from the Ministry of Defense.
The video shows the aftermath of one of the attacks in Kyiv.
Defense Ministry’s statement quoting by TASS:
“The Russian Armed Forces carried out a coordinated overnight strike using ground-based precision-guided weapons, resulting in the destruction of military-industrial facilities and transport and logistics centers in the cities of Kiev and Zaporozhye” the military said in a statement
The ministry later revealed in another statement that the targets of the overnight strike were successfully hit.
The Russian Armed Forces struck a Nova Post logistics terminal in Kiev, an automated compound storing and distributing dual-use goods, including components for long- and medium-range UAV production, robotic vehicles and electronic warfare systems.
Russian servicemen also hit the Kiev-3 transport and logistics center, also known as San-park, a large warehouse facility of approximately 50,000 square meters that stored up to 15,000 attack FPV drones, including those equipped with thermal imaging cameras, such as Beshket, Spuk, Komik-A, and Gorobets, as well as ground control stations and related components.
The Russian Armed Forces struck the Zaporozhstal steel mill (PJSC Zaporizhstal), a part of the Metinvest Group.
Leader of the Islamic Revolution Ayatollah Seyyed Mojtaba Hosseini Khamenei has made new appointments to six top military posts, including the head of the Islamic Revolution Guards Corps (IRGC).
In six separate decrees issued on Monday, Major General Ali Abdollahi was appointed Chief of Staff of the Armed Forces, with Brigadier General Kioumars Heidari as his deputy. Major General Ahmad Vahidi, promoted to the rank of Major General, was appointed commander-in-chief of the IRGC, with Major General Mostafa Izadi as his deputy.
Rear Admiral Ali Ozamaei was appointed IRGC Navy commander, and Hojjatoleslam Hossein Taeb was named head of the Basij Organization.
Gen. Abdollahi appointed Chief of Staff of the Armed Forces
In another decree, the Leader appointed Major General Ali Abdollahi as Chief of Staff of the Iranian Armed Forces, following the martyrdom of his predecessor, Major General Abdolrahim Mousavi, in a US-Israeli airstrike.
Ayatollah Khamenei said the appointment was made in view of Mousavi’s “glorious and honorable martyrdom” at the hands of the Zionist-American enemy and in appreciation of Abdollahi’s worthy services and valuable experience.
Spokesman for the Iranian Foreign Ministry Esmaeil Baghaei said the Strait of Hormuz will not reopen as long as the US maintains its naval blockade against Iran, stressing that Washington must end and make amends for its “destructive actions” before further steps can be discussed.
Speaking at a weekly press conference on Monday, Baghaei said the closure of the Strait of Hormuz was a result of the US and Israeli military aggression against Iran.
He noted that negotiations between Iran and Oman over a shipping route are naturally a bilateral matter involving the two coastal states.
The spokesman stressed that reopening the Strait of Hormuz depends on the conditions imposed on Iran and the waterway by the US and the Zionist regime, saying that the necessary conditions for reopening do not exist while the US naval blockade remains in place.
“As long as the US naval blockade continues, the necessary conditions for the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz do not exist,” Baghaei stated. He added that it is up to the US to stop and make amends for its destructive actions so that the sides could then discuss the next steps.
Asked about the possibility of Iran imposing transit fees on vessels passing through the Strait of Hormuz, Baghaei said discussions on such details are still underway and that Iran is not currently discussing the issue.
he number of people killed as a result of the drone attack on facilities in Nizhnekamsk has increased to 13, the press service of the head of Tatarstan told journalists.
Russian Investigative Committee Spokeswoman, Svetlana Petrenko, told TASS that a child was among those killed. Industrial and civilian facilities in Nizhnekamsk came under a large-scale drone strike, causing fatalities.
According to the investigation, Ukraine used drones to strike residential areas and industrial facilities in Nizhnekamsk.
The Ukrainian railway company Ukrzaliznytsia officially called the past days one of the most difficult and destructive weeks in its history. In five years, the country’s transport infrastructure has been attacked 41 times.
11 locomotives were damaged and disabled, tracks and station facilities used for military transportation were destroyed.
Passengers from trains had to be evacuated 350 times due to threats and arrivals. The loss of a key locomotive fleet and the constant destruction of tracks cause critical damage to the entire transport system of the country.
The strikes by the Yemeni Armed Forces (aka Houtis) on Al-Mukha and Marib decimated Saudi officers and their troop concentrations, targeting a heavy and medium weapons depot alongside a secret storage facility, a senior Yemeni source told Al Mayadeen‘s correspondent in Sanaa.
Yemeni Armed Forces spokesperson Brigadier General Yahya Saree said the operation, carried out using a large number of ballistic missiles and drones, came in response to Saudi Arabia’s continued mobilization of its proxies, its supply of weapons and equipment to them, and its ongoing attacks along the western coast and in Taiz governorate aimed at deterring the Yemeni people from confronting the blockade and aggression imposed on them for the past 12 years.
“The strikes were precise and caused extensive damage to the equipment and weapons, killing and wounding dozens, including Saudi nationals”,Saree said on Telegram.
The Yemeni Armed Forces reaffirmed their commitment to the declared equation of “blockade for blockade and escalation for escalation,” vowing to continue targeting any military buildup directed against the Yemeni people and the free governorates.
The strike on Mokha is the second operation carried out by the YAF on Sunday. Earlier in the day, the YAF announced that they targeted a Saudi Aramco refinery in Jizan with a drone, stating that the operation comes as a response to Saudi drone incursions into Yemeni airspace.
Saree announced that the forces successfully targeted the Aramco refinery in Jizan with a drone, achieving a precise hit. He said the operation came in response to Saudi drone incursions into the airspace of Yemen’s Saada and Hajjah provinces.
The announcement came after Saudi Arabia’s Energy Ministry reported earlier that a fire had broken out at a facility belonging to Saudi Aramco’s refinery in Jizan, southwestern Saudi Arabia. The ministry said Aramco’s industrial security firefighting teams extinguished the fire and that there were no injuries.
“During the last two years, we have lost so many of your colleagues in Iran, Lebanon and Palestine. They have lost their lives for the sake of doing their jobs. We have lost so many of our loved ones,” Iran’s foreign ministry spokesman, Esmaeil Baghaei, said in a news conference on Monday.
“We send a big salute to all of our martyrs who have lost their lives for the sake of our country and for the sake of the mission of journalism,” he added.
Israel rejects the 15-point document on Gaza and will not withdraw its forces until Hamas is genuinely disarmed, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said at the start of the government’s weekly meeting.
“Israel does not accept the 15-point document. The Israel Defense Forces will not carry out any withdrawal until Hamas is disarmed. And when I say the disarming of Hamas, it means heavy weaponry, lighter weaponry, all weaponry. We are talking about genuine disarmament, not fictitious disarmament,”Netanyahu said, according to his office.
“Right now, we are talking with the Americans about this issue. They have ideas, some of which are acceptable to us and some of which are unacceptable, and we know how to stand firm against these things,” he added.
Israel will not allow Iran to acquire nuclear weapons regardless of whether Washington and Tehran reach an agreement, Netanyahu said. “I greatly appreciate the historical partnership with the US against Iran’s attempts to acquire nuclear weapons. And I wish to emphasize once again: with or without an agreement, as long as I am prime minister, Iran will not have a nuclear weapon,” he said.
Footage appears to show a drone, aircraft parts, and other machinery.
This week, US media reports said that Washington faces depleted missile stockpiles—including long-range and air-defense systems—following the conflict with Iran, a claim the White House denied. The developments follow a war of words after Donald Trump said the two sides were talking again, which Tehran rejected.
The Russian military struck the Fire Point industrial plant in Kiev, which produces components and warheads for FP-5 Flamingo cruise missiles, the Russian Defense Ministry said.
According to the Russian ministry, Russian forces launched a strike overnight with ground-based precision weapons against a military industry enterprise and a fuel and lubricants depot in Kiev.
According to preliminary data, the asphalt-concrete plant in Kiev, used for the needs of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, was damaged.
In the Obolonsky district, fuel tanks caught fire, and armament depots were hit in Goloseevsky. In addition, the Fire Point enterprise, which produce kamikaze-drones, components and warheads for missiles, was hit in Kiev.
The Russian army also attacked the Grandterminal fuel depot, which supplies petroleum products to the Armed Forces of Ukraine.
The British TV channel Sky News published a report from a secret underground enterprise in Ukraine, which acts as the main hub for the production of long-range attack drones. Technicians, welders and engineers work around the clock at the plant, assembling over 200 drones per day.
The chief designer of Fire Point, Stilerman, also appeared in the frame, telling the journalist that the purpose of his work was to “dismantle the Russian Empire” with the support of Europe 02:01.
The FP-1 and FP-2 long-range drones are being produced on an underground conveyor. The cost of one such device is about $ 60 thousand, and the claimed flight range is up to 3,000 kilometers with an accuracy of 2-3 meters. The project is funded by Western donors through the Ministry of Defense of Ukraine.
Kiev began the construction of factories underground involuntarily, after the destruction of the traditional defense industry in the early days of its independence. Some of the enterprises have completely gone underground, while others are disguised with fake decorations.
Earlier, the Russian Ministry of Defense repeatedly delivered effective strikes against such centers. At the end of July, the assembly plant of the American corporation Terminal Autonomy, which produced noise-resistant drones for strikes deep into the territory of Russia, came under attack.
On July 19, the UKRTAC factory, which produced tactical equipment and ammunition for the Armed Forces of Ukraine, was completely destroyed. Despite the underground execution, Russian intelligence and precision weapons continue to methodically open and destroy military installations of the Kiev regime.
The refusal by the US and Europe to provide Ukraine with more Patriot missiles points to depleted stockpiles and sluggish interceptor production, military expert and Arsenal of the Fatherland columnist Alexander Sinyugin tells Sputnik.
The earlier plan for European countries to buy Patriot missiles from the US and pass them on to Ukraine is no longer viable, the pundit explains. The US lacks sufficient missile stocks, while Europe has already depleted much of its arsenal by supplying Ukraine.
“Only three countries currently manufacture these missiles: the US, Japan, and Germany, which secured a production license in 2024,” Sinyugin says. With production capacity well below Lockheed Martin’s, Germany is expected to use all of its missile output to meet Europe’s own needs, he projects.
Meanwhile, Russian hypersonic missiles, including Kinzhals and Zircons, easily overcome Patriot air defenses.
Hundreds of US troops have suffered traumatic brain injuries (TBI) in Iranian missile and drone strikes since Washington launched its war on Iran, highlighting the mounting physical cost of the US aggression and the potentially lasting consequences for American forces, according to Iranian Press TV.
Nearly 700 US troops have been wounded in Iranian missile and drone attacks on US bases since Washington’s aggression against Iran escalated, according to US military officials. Most were diagnosed with traumatic brain injuries and returned to duty after treatment, the Associated Press reported.
The Pentagon has described most of the injuries sustained over a two-week period as “minor concussions.” But medical experts warn that an apparently mild concussion can develop into persistent neurological problems, including headaches, dizziness, memory loss, difficulty concentrating and chronic fatigue.
Doctors say there is currently no reliable way to determine immediately which blast injuries will result in lasting complications. They are also continuing to study how powerful explosions can damage the brain even without a direct blow to the head.
The widespread use of Iranian missiles and drones has heightened concern within the US military, as explosions can occur in close proximity to American troops, increasing the risk of blast-related brain injuries.
The scale of the injuries has revived concerns that traumatic brain injury could once again become a major legacy of a US war, as it did during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. More than 500,000 US soldiers were diagnosed with TBIs between 2000 and 2025, according to US military data.
Turkiye, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan have committed to closer military cooperation in a joint defence agreement modelled on NATO’s Article 5, under which an attack on one member is considered an attack on all.
The deal comes as regional countries increasingly look to each other for security following Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza, its strikes on several countries in the region and the renewed conflict with Iran.
For Turkiye, which already fields NATO’s second-largest army and one of the world’s fastest-growing defence industries, the pact is a major strategic gain, expanding its reach into the Gulf and South Asia and opening access to new financial resources through a joint weapons programme.
But the real test, as Al Jazeera’s Resul Serdar Atas reports from Ankara, will come if a member is actually attacked — determining whether the agreement becomes a genuine regional security architecture or remains just a political declaration.
The Yemeni Armed Forces (aka Houtis army) carried out a large-scale military operation against Saudi military reinforcements, reporting hundreds of casualties and significant material damage, the YAF spokesperson, Brigadier General Yahya Saree, announced.
The Yemeni military spokesperson said the operation was a response to continued Saudi actions, stating that “in light of the criminal Saudi enemy’s persistence in continuing the siege and aggression against our dear Yemeni people for nearly 12 years, our Armed Forces monitored large Saudi military concentrations that were in their final stages, aimed at escalating against the free provinces and the Yemeni people to deter them from their position on ending the unjust siege.”
The operation, according to the YAF, resulted in:
Yemen’s Iran-backed Houthis have confirmed targeting multiple Yemeni Emergency Forces camps in the Marib and Hadramout governorates, including in the Ruwaik, Al-Abr and Al Thaniyah areas.
Houthi military spokesman Yahya Saree says the group used “a large number of ballistic missiles and drones” to destroy and burn campgrounds, troop concentrations, depots, weapons and military vehicles.
Yemen’s Houthi rebels have killed at least 30 government soldiers and injured 15 in missile attacks on Yemeni military camps in Hadramout and Marib governorates, government sources told Al Jazeera.
The fees for vessels transiting the Strait of Hormuz will vary based on the services rendered by Iran and Oman, according to a report by Fars News Agency, citing a source within the Iranian Foreign Ministry.
The source dismissed recent reports of disagreements between Iran and Oman over the percentage of cargo value – specifically, a tariff of 7% versus 3% – to be used as transit fees, stating these claims are false.
“Payments by vessels will depend on multiple factors, including the scope of services we can provide,” the official emphasized.
Previously, Reuters reported that Iran and Oman are engaged in negotiations to introduce transit fees ranging from 3% to 7% of the declared cargo value, as part of efforts to restore shipping through the strategic Strait of Hormuz.
Russian forces struck infrastructure sites and logistics centers used by the Ukrainian army and its deployment areas over the past 24 hours in the special military operation in Ukraine, Russia’s Defense Ministry reported.
“Operational/tactical aircraft, attack unmanned aerial vehicles, missile troops and artillery of the Russian groups of forces struck fuel and energy and transport infrastructure, logistics centers used by the Ukrainian army, sites for the storage of attack unmanned aerial vehicles, and also temporary deployment areas of Ukrainian armed formations and foreign mercenaries in 155 locations,” the ministry said.
The Ukrainian army lost roughly 1,395 troops in battles with Russian forces in all the frontline areas over the past 24 hours, according to the latest data on the special military operation in Ukraine released by Russia’s Defense Ministry.
At least 300 children have been killed in Gaza in the roughly 300 days since a so-called “ceasefire” was announced on October 10, 2025 – an average of one child a day, the United Nations children’s agency says.
Hundreds more have been wounded, many severely, UNICEF said in a statement on Thursday as it pressed parties to a proposed US-led peace plan to translate pledges into action.
“A ceasefire that leaves an average of one child dead each and every day is failing children,” said Edouard Beigbeder, UNICEF regional director for the Middle East and North Africa. “Children in Gaza are still waiting for the end to the violence they were promised.”
Families are now confined to about a third of the enclave, sheltering among destroyed buildings, rubble and uncleared waste, the agency said.
Children continue to face acute malnutrition, disease, unsafe water and damaged sanitation, while a shortage of incubators has left some premature newborns sharing machines.
On the night of August 5, the Russian Armed Forces hit seven large logistics centers in Ukraine. The Russian ballistic missile attack on the region surrounding Ukraine’s capital, Kyiv, has killed at least 14 people and injured 27 others, the city’s military administration said.
The strikes early on Wednesday morning come after at least 27 people were killed in separate attacks in both Ukraine and Russia earlier this week, with the five-year-long conflict showing no signs of slowing down.
The Russian Ministry of Defense has revealed details of a massive overnight strike on Kiev and the Kiev region. High-precision ground-based weapons and long-range attack drones have hit transport, logistics and distribution centers involved in the storage, production and supply of equipment and components in the interests of the Armed Forces of Ukraine.
In the capital of Ukraine, the goals were:
In the territory of the Kiev region, the following targets were hit:
In addition, three dry cargo ships delivering weapons and military equipment for the Armed Forces of Ukraine were hit in the sea south of Odessa.
The death toll among minors from Ukraine’s attack near Gelendzhik has risen to four, Russian childerns’ rights ombudswoman Maria Lvova-Belova said.
“An awful tragedy. Ukraine’s aggression. By now, we have reports about four killed children, three more children are in hospitals. One child has been operated on, two others are being examined, they have shrapnel wounds,” she told reporters.
According to earlier reports, the attack on Gelendzhik killed seven people, including three children, and left 58 people injured.
Russian air defenses intercepted and destroyed 475 Ukrainian drones over Russian regions, as well as over the Black Sea and the Sea of Azov overnight, the Defense Ministry reported.
In the Tula Region, one person was injured as a result of a drone attack, and a fire broke out at the Wildberries sorting center.
According to its statement, the drones were shot down over the Belgorod, Bryansk, Voronezh, Kaluga, Kursk, Lipetsk, Oryol, Rostov, Ryazan, Saratov, Smolensk, Tula, Ulyanovsk, Krasnodar, Tatarstan and Moscow Regions, Crimea, as well as over the Black Sea and the Sea of Azov.
Six Palestinians were martyred and eight others were injured over 24 hours as Israeli attacks on the besieged enclave continue despite the declared ceasefire, the Health Ministry in Gaza announced on Monday.
According to the Ministry, the victims included five people martyred in new Israeli attacks and one who succumbed to previous injuries.
The Ministry added that a number of victims remain trapped under rubble or stranded on roads and in inaccessible areas, as ambulance and civil defence crews continue to face difficulties reaching them.
The Health Ministry said the number of Palestinians killed since the announcement of the ceasefire on October 11 has risen to 904, while 2,713 others have been injured. Authorities also reported that the bodies of 777 Palestinians have been recovered during the same period.
According to the latest figures released by the Ministry, the cumulative death toll since the start of the Israeli war on Gaza on October 7, 2023, has reached 72,797, in addition to 172,821 injuries.
Israeli forces continue their relentless attacks across the Gaza Strip despite the announcement of a ceasefire agreement, amid ongoing destruction and humanitarian deterioration throughout the enclave.
On August, 2, Israeli forces have killed at least 19 Palestinians in Gaza, despite United States President Donald Trump announcing a plan he described as a “monumental step” towards peace and security in the shattered enclave.
Medical sources said that 14 Palestinians, including four children, have been killed in Israeli attacks across the Gaza Strip since dawn on Sunday.
The deaths on Sunday included three people killed in an air raid on a residential apartment in Al-Sousi Tower in western Gaza City – Abdullah Abu Taif, 33, his pregnant wife, Abeer Anan, 29, and their five-year-old son, Azzam – according to medical sources at Al-Shifa Hospital.
An attack on an apartment in al-Qarara, northwest of the city of Khan Younis, killed three members of the Al-Hams family – father Mahmoud, 38, his wife, Fatima, 37, and their young daughter. Three others were wounded, medical sources at Nasser Hospital said.
Kamu Abu Muailiq, 68, and his wife, Huda, 59, were killed in an attack on their home near Deir el-Balah in central Gaza, medics said. In the same area, two brothers were killed as they rode a motorbike.
In northern Gaza, a Palestinian was killed after being directly targeted in the Jabalia refugee camp. In al-Mawasi, Khan Younis, one Palestinian was killed, and five others were wounded in an Israeli attack on a tent.
Two Palestinians, including one, were killed in an Israeli drone attack on a tent for displaced people in the Remal neighbourhood, west of Gaza City. Four others were killed in a strike on a vehicle in Gaza City.
The Israeli attacks since dawn caused the largest daily death toll in weeks, according to Palestinian health officials.
Palestinians on Tuesday buried 112 members of a single clan killed in Israeli air strikes in November 2023, after their remains were recovered from beneath the rubble last month. Relatives of the Abu Shari’a and al-Hasayna family gathered in Gaza City to bid a final farewell to their loved ones, whose bodies lay in rows draped in Palestinian flags.
For many, it was a moment of both relief and renewed grief after nearly 1,000 days of waiting to recover the bodies of their relatives.
“There is a feeling of both pain and joy,” Amer Abu Shari’a, who lost relatives in the attack, told Middle East Eye. “Joy because we will bury and honour these martyrs after three years. But the sorrow has returned, as if the massacre happened today.”
On August, 4, Gaza and Palestine bid farewell to the largest funeral procession of martyrs in all of Palestinian history. Around 112 martyrs have been recovered from beneath their homes after nearly three years of war.
Today, the Al-Hassaneh and Abu Sharia families are burying 112 martyrs out of 308 family members who were killed and later recovered. Does the world see 44 children in a single funeral? Does it see 43 women?
Does it witness these scenes and still remain silent These are scenes from Gaza scenes that will forever remain in the history of Palestine.
The ongoing negotiations between Iran and Oman regarding the future operational arrangements for the Strait of Hormuz represent a pivotal moment in the region’s strategic landscape amid the US destabilising activities, Iranian Press Tv has reported.
These discussions, which began in the very first days following the Iran-US ceasefire on April 8 and entered a more serious phase after the June 18 agreement to end the imposed war, are a testament to Iran’s commitment to diplomatic engagement and its determination to safeguard its legitimate sovereign rights.
However, what should have been a straightforward bilateral process between two littoral states has been systematically disrupted and derailed by the United States and certain regional actors acting in concert with Washington (below the videos of latest US attack on July, 30).
Their obstructionism has not only delayed a mutually beneficial outcome but has also exposed the hollow nature of American influence in a region where Iran’s strategic interests are paramount and non-negotiable, a senior Iranian official aware of the details of ongoing negotiations told Press TV.
The Yemeni Armed Forces have struck a strategic installation inside Najran Regional Airport in southern Saudi Arabia, in response to the Riyadh regime’s ongoing aggression and blockade against their homeland.
Brigadier General Yahya Saree, spokesperson for Yemen’s Armed Forces, said on Tuesday afternoon that Yemeni military units targeted the vital target with a domestically-developed kamikaze drone. Saree noted that the retaliatory strike attained its desired objectives successfully.
He emphasized that the attack was a retaliation for Saudi Arabia’s violation of Yemeni airspace over the northern provinces of Sa’ada and Hajjah with unmanned aerial vehicles.
“We warn the Saudi enemy that any violation of our airspace will not go unanswered and unpunished,” Saree emphasized.
On July 20, the Sana’a government declared a maritime blockade against Saudi Arabia, stating that its authorities have enforced “an unjust and oppressive siege” on Yemen for almost 12 years, “looting our resources and enforcing a total blockade.”
Since then, the Yemeni Armed Forces said they have launched attacks on Saudi vessels in the Red Sea.
The Houthis from the Yemeni Ansar Allah rebel movement have used ballistic missiles to hit a Saudi oil tanker Wafa in the northern part of the Red Sea, Houthi Military Spokesman Yahya Saria stated.
According to him, rebels “struck a Saudi oil tanker Wafa in the northern part of the Red Sea near [the port city of] Yanbu using several ballistic missiles.” Saria said the strike was accurate.
An Indian cargo ship sank near Yemeni territorial waters after an attack in the Red Sea, but all 14 crew members were rescued by the Yemeni Coast Guard, India’s Shipping Minister Sarbananda Sonowal said on Tuesday.
The vessel, identified as the Faize Noore Oliya, was struck by a projectile near Yemeni waters, causing it to capsize and sink, according to Sonowal.
“Indian MSV Faize Noore Oliya has been hit by a projectile near Yemeni waters, causing the vessel to capsize and sink. India strongly condemns this unprovoked attack on the defenseless mechanised sailing vessel. The safety of our people is our supreme priority & I am relieved to inform that ALL 14 seafarers (including 13 Indians) have been safely rescued by the Yemeni Coast Guard,” Sonowal wrote on X.
Earlier on Tuesday, Yemeni news portal HYemen24 reported that the Yemeni Coast Guard of the Saudi-affiliated Yemeni government had rescued the crew of an Indian cargo ship after it came under attack by a booby-trapped boat in the Red Sea.
While Western-backed forces continue to strike at shopping malls in Russia, such as Wildberries and now Ozon the Russian military space forces are intensifying their bombing, not propaganda, but military, against targets in the enemy’s military-industrial complex.
Last night, Russian troops attacked several Ukrainian areas, with virtually no effective air defense from Western-backed forces.
More than 25 Russian precision-guided missiles were fired at Kiev alone, including Iskander-M ballistic missiles and Zircon hypersonic missiles, which hit targets in the capital of Ukraine and its suburbs (Vasilkov, Boyarka) without encountering effective air defenses, as has been the case for several days. Only one anti-aircraft missile was launched that night, but it failed to intercept the target. Even Zelensky was forced to admit this (probably in order to better request new military assistance in this area):
“Ukraine’s air defense system was able to intercept only one ballistic missile during the massive Russian attack on Kiev last night.”
Wildberries, Russia’s largest online retail platform, has been targeted again by Ukrainian forces: a logistics facility in the Samara region was hit, according to TASS. A fire broke out following the attack. According to initial reports, there were no injuries.
The Russian Defense Ministry announced that it destroyed 635 Ukrainian drones on the night of Saturday to Sunday in several regions of its territory and in annexed Crimea. In a statement published on the Russian state-run messaging app Max, the ministry stated that “overnight, air defense assets in action intercepted and destroyed 635 Ukrainian fixed-wing unmanned aerial vehicles.”
A private party organized in the center of the Russian capital to celebrate a high-ranking officer has turned into carnage. At least three people were killed and 21 injured in the explosion that occurred this evening outside the Balzi Rossi restaurant on Kudrinskaya Square in Moscow.
According to News-Pravda the death toll from the explosion at the entrance to the Balzi Rossi restaurant on Kudrinskaya Square has risen to five that include the woman who tried to bring in the explosive device, the security guard, and a cafe customer.
Among the guests at the event was General Alexander Chaiko, appointed to command the Russian Air Force just a month and a half ago.
According to the Interior Ministry, the explosion occurred at about 08:10 p.m. (05:10 p.m. GMT) near a summer cafe near house No. 1 on Kudrinskaya Square. According to the NAC, an unknown woman tried to bring an improvised explosive device there, but a guard stopped her.
An explosive device, a 1 kg TNT bomb filled with metal balls, detonated at the entrance to the Balzi Rossi restaurant. The device was in the possession of a “suicide bomber” who was probably used “in the dark.” As a result of the explosion, she died on the spot, her fragments were captured on video.
Investigators and criminologists of the Investigative Committee are working at the site of the explosion, the Investigative Committee said.
The police and Russia’s National Guard Rosgvardiya restricted access near the residential high-rise on Kudrinskaya Square, where the blast took place, a TASS correspondent reported.
The attack is part of a long series of targeted actions that, since the outbreak of the conflict in Ukraine in 2022, have targeted senior officials, military leaders, and prominent public figures close to the Kremlin.
Over the past four years, several generals and Russian administration officials based in the occupied territories have been victims of bombings and ambushes claimed or attributed to Kiev’s intelligence services with the help of NATO’s 007 and in particular of the British military counterspionage MI6 vvery active in the conflict as Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky is an agent of London, as also confirmed by high-profile arrests.
«The US military used one of its most powerful non-nuclear bombs to strike a residential building on the Iranian island of Qeshm, killing three people on Thursday night, The New York Times reported, quoting satellite imagery and an expert opinion»
TASS Russian news agency has reported confirming the first report by Gospa News International on July, 30 (read below update “Two children rescued from the rubble of the Trump’s Evil Bombs – VIDEO”) which specified that bunker-busting explosives had been used to destroy two family homes.
It said that the diameter of the crater and fragments of ammunition indicate the use of a heavy MK-84 aerial bomb weighing 2,000 pounds (about 907 kg). The newspaper said that it was not possible to find any evidence of military installations nearby. The strike was carried out in a densely populated area, the newspaper adds.
Captain Tim Hawkins, a spokesman for the US Central Command (CENTCOM), told The New York Times that the US military leadership is aware of the strike and is looking into it. He also said the United States never targets civilians.
Russian forces destroyed a large Ukrainian ammunition depot in Ukrainian-occupied Kramatorsk. The depot, carefully concealed by Ukrainian militants, was struck by two loitering munitions. The detonation of the munitions lasted for several hours. Several Ukrainian air defense systems were also hit in Kramatorsk.
In the Sumy region, at least ten FAB strikes with UMPK-based missiles and at least 45 Geran/Lancet/Molniya/FPV strikes were carried out over the past 24 hours.
Meanwhile, in the Kharkiv region, at least 11 guided bomb strikes, two MLRS/OTRK strikes, and at least 56 Geran/Lancet/Molniya/FPV strikes were carried out over the same period. Additionally, morning Geran and FAB strikes “visited” the outskirts of Illichivsk (Chornomorsk) in the Odessa region and Vasylkivka in the Dnipropetrovsk region.
It is also reported that new modifications of the Geranium family of attack UAVs are recently equipped with a laser rangefinder. The laser rangefinder is designed to partially implement the air-to-air detonation function of the warhead.
During the final stages of flight (during a dive or approach to a target), the rangefinder measures the exact distance to the ground or object in real time, after which, upon reaching the optimal altitude, the electronics initiate the detonation of the munition in mid-air. Air-to-air detonation of a high-explosive fragmentation charge significantly increases the area of destruction caused by the fragmentation. Thus, unlike the contact detonation of a kamikaze UAV’s warhead, air-to-air detonation covers a larger area.
A Russian missile attack has killed at least three people in Ukraine’s capital Kyiv and injured 15 others, the city’s mayor said.
The strikes hit early on Saturday, triggering more than a dozen explosions that reverberated across the city, witnesses told the Reuters news agency. Kiev was battered by “Iskander-M” and “Zircon” missiles.
Residents were trapped in damaged buildings in the Shevchenkivskyi and Solomyanskyi districts, Kyiv Mayor Vitali Klitschko said. All 15 injured people, including two boys aged 13 and 17, were hospitalised, with one in serious condition.
Fires and damage were also reported in several other districts of the capital, including burning warehouses in Darnytskyi and debris falling on buildings in Holosiivskyi. Emergency services remain on the scene as rescue efforts continue.
Russia has stepped up its attacks on Kyiv in recent months, taking advantage of Ukraine’s shortage of air defences capable of shooting down ballistic missiles.
Russian forces struck more than 80 seagoing vessels in Ukrainian ports and at sea that were involved in delivering cargo for the Ukrainian military, according to TASS estimates based on Russian Defense Ministry data.
Among them were two dry cargo ships, a sea ferry transporting military cargo and a screening boat hit in overnight group strikes on July 12, according to the ministry. On the same day, the ministry released footage that showed Geran-4 Seeker drones destroying a seiner converted to launch unmanned boats, a patrol boat, a ferry and a dry cargo ship.
According to the ministry, Russian forces struck 24 seagoing vessels used by the Ukrainian military during the week of July 11-17, including 14 dry cargo ships and one tanker.
A fighter jet crashed and erupted into flames at Marine Corps Air Station Miramar in California on Friday, sending smoke billowing into the sky that could be seen from miles away.
The single-seat F-35B Lightning II aircraft went down short of the runway just before 10 a.m. PT.
“We can confirm a mishap involving a Marine Corps F-35B in the vicinity of MCAS Miramar,” base spokesperson 1st Lt. Blake Starbuck said in a statement. “The pilot ejected, was recovered, and is enroute to a medical facility.”
Airport fire crews sprayed the wreckage with firefighting foam and worked to extinguish a grass fire surrounding the crash site.
“F-35 short final crash,” the Miramar air traffic control tower told firefighters in audio recorded by LiveATC.net. “It appeared that the parachute did deploy … and a pilot ejected.”
The cause of the crash was not immediately clear. Military plane crashes are typically investigated by the military as opposed to civilian crashes which are investigated by the National Transportation Safety Board.
The United States is reportedly reassessing the scale of its military footprint in Kuwait, with officials weighing a potential drawdown of forces amid shifting dynamics in the ongoing conflict with Iran, according to The Wall Street Journal.
Citing sources familiar with the deliberations, the newspaper reported that the Pentagon’s strategic review comes as Kuwaiti officials have underscored the need for an unambiguous security commitment from Washington, stressing that any reduction in U.S. personnel must not undermine the Gulf state’s defensive capabilities.
The reported deliberations highlight a delicate balancing act for Washington as it seeks to adjust its regional posture while reassuring key Gulf allies of its continued commitment to their defense.
Below a video of previous Iranian attack on US Base in Kuwait
At least 10 Palestinians, including four children, have been injured during a raid by Israeli settlers and military forces in the Junaid neighbourhood west of Nablus, according to the Palestinian Red Crescent.
Dozens of Israeli settlers are storming the western part of Nablus city under the protection of the Israeli army, sources have told Al Jazeera.
The Israeli army has arrested seven Palestinians from the Nablus governorate, amid raids in several neighbourhoods in Nablus city as well as in the towns of Tal and Salem, the Wafa news agency has reported.
At least three of the arrested were from Tal, where Israeli settlers were conducting attacks again after two Israelis were killed there last Friday, the Palestinian news agency said.
Israeli forces began raiding the town of Tal on Thursday, seizing four homes and converting them into military barracks.
There were 3,033 Israeli settler attacks between January 1, 2025 and the end of last month, according to data from the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA).
A series of massive midnight explosions rang out across the southern regions of Yohmor al-Chqif, Arnoun, and Kfar Tebnit after Israeli attacks, Lebanon’s National News Agency (NNA) reports.
The blasts resonated throughout the south, with shockwaves felt as far as el-Kharroub and Khalde. In the Marjayoun district, violent explosions near Beaufort Castle shattered windows and damaged homes in the nearby town of Qlayaa.
Residents described intense shockwaves that shook the area, accompanied by a heavy smell of gunpowder, according to the NNA.
It added that Israeli forces combed the outskirts of al-Mansouri and Biyout al-Sayyad in the Tyre District using heavy machinegun fire, while launching artillery shells at al-Mansouri.
Tank movements were also reported on the Baraachit hill towards Aainata in the Bint Jbeil District, alongside heavy explosions and vibrations across both the Eastern and Western sectors, NNA reported.
Israeli occupation forces set off a massive underground explosion beneath the UNESCO-listed Shaqif Fortress (Beaufort Castle) in the Arnoun area of southern Lebanon overnight Thursday into Friday, using an estimated 700 tons of explosives, according to a joint statement by the Israeli prime minister’s office and the Ministry of War.
The blast was powerful enough to be heard across much of southern Lebanon, with reports of the explosion being heard as far as Saida and Iqlim al-Kharroub in Mount Lebanon’s Chouf region. In Nabatieh, residents reported dust raining down over the area in the aftermath of the explosions in Arnoun.
Shaqif Fortress is one of South Lebanon’s most significant archaeological landmarks, a nearly 900-year-old Crusader-era fortress. “Israel” has bombed the fortress more than once, first in 1982, during the Battle of Beaufort, when the castle was heavily shelled and captured, and second during 1982 through 2000, when Israeli occupation forces used it as a base and later carried out significant demolition before withdrawing in 2000.
Three US F-35 fighter jets were destroyed and three others sustained heavy damage in a missile attack on Azraq Air Base in Jordan, the IRGC’s Public Relations Department announced, framing the operation as retaliation for US aggression on residential homes on Iran’s Qeshm Island.
“We will punish the aggressor today,” the IRGC said in a statement, explaining that the operation was carried out in response to American aggression in the early hours of the day.
The statement added that US forces used bases in Jordan to launch bunker-buster bombs at two residential homes on Qeshm Island, killing a father, a mother, and one of their children and injuring two other children.
The IRGC said Thursday it destroyed two drone hangars and a fuel storage facility at the US Ali Al Salem Air Base in Kuwait in its latest retaliatory strikes, according to Al Manar TV.
According to the statement, the operation was carried out as part of what the IRGC described as the “punishment of the aggressor.” It added that the IRGC Aerospace Force and Ground Force continue military operations against US forces while nationwide public gatherings in Iran persist.
The statement also said that public rallies have continued for 150 consecutive nights, describing their purpose as demanding “revenge for the blood of the martyred Imam” and “the expulsion of American aggressors from the region.”
The suicide drones of the Army of the Islamic Republic of Iran targeted the electricity generators, navigation system, and the administrative and support buildings “belonging to the terrorist U.S. Army at Sheikh Isa Air Base in Bahrain”.
During his cabinet meeting, Trump tells reporters that Washington will be hitting Iran “very hard” when asked what he expects over the next four weeks.
“At some point, they’re going to say we just can’t take it anymore,” he said.
Asked about reviving the ceasefire following back-and-forth attacks with Iran at a cabinet meeting in Camp David, Trump says, “We just want to win.”
“We’re doing very well. We’re trying to be nice, as nice as you can be in a situation like that, but you know, they’re being decimated. They have no navy, they have no air force, they have no anti-aircraft. Doesn’t mean they don’t have any capabilities — they have some, but very little,” he said.
“It’s very simple, they cannot have a nuclear weapon. Iran will not have a nuclear weapon, and they can’t have a nuclear weapon. If they did, the Middle East would’ve been wiped out,” Trump added
Russia unleashed a sweeping wave of strikes on Ukrainian military airfields, defense-industry facilities, and critical supply and command hubs, Russia’s Defense Ministry reported.
Ukraine’s largest logistics operator has been used by the Ukrainian Armed Forces to transport military goods, has become a legitimate military target, and is taking full advantage.
Below the footage of the warehouses of Novaya Poshta in Poltava that are all in fire
The barrage involved long-range, precision-guided munitions fired from land, sea, and air, backed by strike drones. Hit zones spanned 7 regions — Kiev, Lvov, Ivano-Frankovsk, Zhytomir, Rovno, Vinnitsa, and Dnepropetrovsk — with targets including air bases, arms factories, telecom relays, and logistics centers.
Missiles launched:
~8 Iskander-M/S-400 ballistic missiles launched from OTRK installations near Klintsy, Bryansk Oblast.
~6 Kn-23 ballistic missiles launched from 3 Hwasong-11A launchers near Liski, Voronezh Oblast.
~4 modified S-300 ballistic missiles launched from Kursk Oblast.
~2 Zircon hypersonic cruise missiles launched from ground-based installations near Belgorod City, Belgorod Oblast.
~1 Zircon hypersonic cruise missile launched from ground-based installations near Manturovo, Kursk Oblast.
~30 Kh-101 cruise missiles launched from 6 Tu-95MS strategic bombers at their launch lines near the city of Cherepovets, Vologda Oblast.
~18 Kh-101 cruise missiles launched from 3 Tu-160M strategic bombers at their launch lines near the city of Cherepovets, Vologda Oblast.
~8 Kalibr cruise missiles launched from a Buyan-M corvette at Novorossiysk Naval Base, Krasnodar Krai.
~1 Kalibr cruise missile launched from a vessel of an unknown type at Novorossiysk Naval Base, Krasnodar Krai.
Total missiles launched:
~48 Kh-101 cruise missiles.
~9 Kalibr cruise missiles.
~8 Iskander-M/S-400 ballistic missiles.
~6 Kn-23 ballistic missiles
~4 modified S-300 ballistic missiles
~3 Zircon hypersonic cruise missiles.
~78 missiles in total.
Ukrainian drones attacked a Wildberries warehouse in the Penza Region, leaving preliminarily one person injured, the Region’s Governor Oleg Melnichenko said.
“Enemy drones carried out a terrorist attack on a Wildberries warehouse. According to preliminary reports, one person was injured. Around 200 employees were evacuated,” he wrote on messaging app Max.
According to the governor, the attack caused a fire, which is being extinguished.
Two children were rescued and taken to hospital after a US strike hit a family home on Qeshm Island, while efforts continue to reach three relatives trapped beneath the rubble.
This attack confirms once again that US President Donald Trump’s War Department makes no distinction between military and civilian targets.
Beyond their relevance as a war crime, these attacks aimed at terrorizing the Iranian population in the hope of a revolution have no strategic military utility whatsoever and confirm the failure of the Trump administration’s wars, costly in terms of money and human lives of American soldiers.
After approximately 7,000 deaths since the start of the war in Iran, Trump can finally be accused of war crimes and genocide like his ally Netanyahu…
The Minab school massacre in Iran has not even slightly touched the evil pig heart of the American president.
A new round of fighting emerging in Iran this week brought a new player that could change the game entirely.
U.S. forces launched new airstrikes against Iran on Wednesday, U.S. Central Command announced, while earlier, and for the first time, the Saudi Arabian military joined with the U.S. in striking Iranian-backed militias in Iraq, The Associated Press reported.
And, according to Fox News, a former deputy CENTCOM commander said those developments and others could signify Iran being pushed to a “tipping point.”
US forces have hit several locations in Ahvaz in southwestern Khuzestan province, with power outages reported in some parts of the city, according to Iran’s semi-official Tasnim news agency.
At least seven locations in the city were hit, the IRIB state broadcaster added. It also said explosions were heard in the cities of Shadegan, Arvandkenar, and Abadan in Khuzestan province.
US completes new wave of strikes on Iran — CENTCOM Footage
Iraqi President Nizar Amedi has categorically denounced joint Saudi-US strikes on positions of Popular Mobilization Forces (PMU), commonly known as Hashd al-Sha’abi, across the country, which have killed at least 20 resistance fighters and wounded 32 others (details below in the yesterday updates).
Amedi, in a strongly worded statement released on Tuesday, condemned the aerial assaults “as an unacceptable act, a flagrant violation of Iraqi sovereignty, and entirely contrary to international law and the United Nations Charter.”
“We reiterate our vehement opposition to the use of Iraqi soil or a military field to launch attacks against neighboring countries. We call on all parties to respect Iraq’s sovereignty and refrain from any action that undermines its security and stability,” the Iraqi presidency said.
Islamic Resistance in Iraq issued on Monday a statement which categorically denied any involvement in attacks against the Saudi entity or its facilities, affirming that the response to the US aggression is inevitable, Al Manar Tv has reported.
«After the Islamic Resistance categorically denied any involvement in attacks against the Saudi entity or its facilities, the American enemy committed a new crime by targeting members of the Popular Mobilization Forces and a convoy serving the visitors of Imam Hussein (peace be upon him) in the holy city of Karbala, resulting in dozens of martyrs and wounded» the statement read.
«We affirm without doubt that the Saudi regime has never been, and never will be, anything other than a treacherous dagger and a corrupt tool directed by the White House and its suspicious intelligence agencies. Just as it once mobilized its capabilities to dispatch suicide bombers to shed Iraqi blood, today it has once again renewed its contract of subservience to carry out the crimes and directives of its masters in an attempt to undermine the will of our proud people».
So these are the decisions:
The Iranian Foreign Ministry has issued a fierce condemnation of joint airstrikes by the United States and Saudi Arabia on Iraq (details below in the yesterday updates), Iranian Press TV has reported.
Tehran says the attacks were a blatant violation of Baghdad’s sovereignty and a deliberate attempt by Washington and the Zionist regime to widen the regional war.
In a statement released on Wednesday, the Foreign Ministry specifically highlighted the “criminal and anti-human” targeting of official state facilities and service stations dedicated to the millions of pilgrims participating in the sacred Arbaeen procession.
“The Foreign Ministry of the Islamic Republic of Iran condemns in the strongest terms the aggressive attacks by the United States and Saudi Arabia on several areas in Iraq, including against facilities and sites belonging to official Iraqi institutions, as well as the mawakib and stations of Arbaeen pilgrims.”
About 800,000 units of weapons and ammunition have gone missing in Ukraine, ending up on the European black market, the Il Fatto quotidiano newspaper reported, citing that most of this arsenal comes from European military supplies.
The newspaper noted that since 2022, as many as 780,465 pieces of weapons have disappeared or have been stolen, with 149,000 of them in the first five months of this year alone.
Palermo Prosecutor Maurizio de Lucia told the anti-mafia commission that most of these weapons end up on the European market, catching the attention of the Italian mafia group Cosa Nostra.
The newspaper also emphasized that European countries providing military aid to Ukraine prefer to hide the details of their supplies to Kiev, making it harder for police officers to track the flow of weapons.
Iraq’s Popular Mobilisation Forces (PMF) says US-Saudi attacks have killed at least 20 of its fighters and wounded 32 others in strikes across seven provinces.
So far, there’s only been a statement of what has occurred today at 3:20am: “A strike on the 30th brigade of the Popular Mobilisation Forces (PMF). The group is legally part of Iraq’s state forces. So this is a significant infringement of Iraqi sovereignty”.
There’s been no statement from Baghdad so far. Right now we know Prime Minister Ali al-Zaidi has had an emergency meeting with his cabinet to establish what they’re going to do and what statement they’re going to put out later today.
The attacks hit PMF positions in the provinces of Baghdad, Wasit, Nineveh, Basra, Kirkuk, Karbala and Diyala, the state-sanctioned umbrella group of mostly Shia militias said in a statement.
The strikes also caused varying degrees of damage to buildings, vehicles and military equipment.
This attack could have very serious international geopolitical consequences, as the ranks of the PMF paramilitary forces — the valiant fighters who liberated Iraq from ISIS and thus earned official recognition from the national army — also include numerous Christians.
Therefore, this would be the first attack that President Donald Trump’s War Department has conducted against Christian militias, excluding, of course, the kidnapping of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro.
Video footage captures an Israeli airstrike hitting Al-Muttaqin Mosque in Gaza City, next to Yarmouk Stadium, where dozens of displaced people are sheltering in tents.
The strike triggered a powerful explosion that destroyed the mosque and serious injured several Palestinians.
The Islamic Revolution Guards Corps (IRGC) has staged a retaliatory ballistic missile strike against an American airbase in Jordan, besides halting three trespassing vessels in the Strait of Hormuz.
“In response to the aggressive actions of the child-killing US military, the brave fighters of the IRGC’s Aerospace Force launched several ballistic missiles at a US airbase and the US military’s Central Command’s headquarters in Jordan,” the Corps said in a statement in early Wednesday.
“As long as threats against the Islamic Republic continue and the unlawful and hostile actions of US forces against our interests persist, resistance will also continue,”it added.
The Jordanian Armed Forces says its air defences “dealt with five missiles coming from Iran that targeted the kingdom’s territory” at dawn today. It said the missiles were intercepted and shot down.
The United States has perpetrated numerous violations against Iranian territory since April 7, when US President Donald Trump announced a unilateral ceasefire in the latest bout of wholesale American-Israeli aggression targeting the Islamic Republic.
The violations continued even after Washington and Tehran signed a Pakistan-mediated memorandum of understanding last month, whose first clause had clearly mandated cessation of aggression on all fronts.
The video below shows US soldiers running to shelter in one of the recent strikes on Muwaffaq Salti Air Base, Jordan
Iran has rejected a proposal from Oman for their joint oversight of the Strait of Hormuz. Instead, Iran made a proposal of its own as both sides continue to pore over the terms of what a final agreement could look like.
Iran’s Deputy Foreign Minister, Kazem Gharibabadi, said in a state broadcast that Oman’s proposal had not sufficiently addressed Tehran’s concerns about control of the strait. Iran’s counterproposal would give Tehran more control over the waterway, he added.
The narrow strait has been at the centre of the conflict between the United States and Iran since late February when US-Israeli attacks began.
Before the war, about one-fifth of the world’s oil and liquefied natural gas exports were shipped from Gulf producers. Iran closed the strait shortly after the war began, triggering global supply challenges.
The Yemeni Armed Forces carried out a military operation targeting the Saudi oil tanker (NCC GHAZAL) for violating the maritime navigation ban imposed on the Saudi enemy and for ignoring warning calls, the spokesman General Yahya Saree said according to Al-Manar English Website.
The operation was conducted with a number of ballistic missiles and forced it to retreat and turn back, by the grace of God, he added.
The Armed Forces affirmed their continued implementation of the maritime blockade decision against the Saudi enemy, under the equation of “siege for siege” and “comprehensive escalation for comprehensive escalation”.
Thirty-seven commodity vessels passed through the Bab al-Mandeb strait yesterday, marking the highest daily count since July 19, when the Houthis declared a naval blockade of Saudi Arabia in the Red Sea, Reuters reports, citing shipping data.
Saudi Arabia’s Ministry of Defence has confirmed launching retaliatory attacks against Iran-backed groups in Iraq, saying those strikes were coordinated with the US Central Command.
It says they were in response to drone attacks on its territory, in the oil-producing regions, in particular. Now, those regions have been targeted pretty relentlessly throughout the course of this war since it started in February. And that’s all part of Iran’s strategy to try and push up the oil price and disrupt energy supplies.
The Saudi Ministry of Foreign Affairs said that the timing of the drone attacks was really unfortunate, because GCC countries and Jordan had been trying to work collectively to try and de-escalate tensions during this five-day pause in hostilities. But they said “Iran-affiliated terrorist militias” chose the “irresponsible escalatory” approach.
The Russian armed forces continued attacks on the port, marine, fuel and storage infrastructure of Ukraine, used in the interests of the Armed Forces of Ukraine.
In the border areas, calculations of the Geran drones destroyed gas stations in Mena, Chernihiv region, and Petropavlovsk, Kharkiv region. According to the Russian Ministry of Defense, the facilities were used to supply Ukrainian units with fuel.
On the outskirts of the village of Nikitovka, Sumy region, a Geran-4 Seeker drone struck an enemy attack UAV storage and launch site.
Strikes were also carried out on Ukrainian ports and naval vessels involved in the transportation of military goods.
More details in the description of the video in the Rumble Channel of Gospa News
Gas station hit with a glide bomb in Zaporozhye. Since may the Russian Aerospace Force has struck more than 200 gas and oil station (see update on July, 11) in retaliation of the previous attacks on civilian infrastructures unleashed by Kiev Army.
The Senate voted along party lines to approve President Donald Trump’s choice for the next director of national intelligence, Jay Clayton.
Jay Clayton, President Donald Trump’s pick to lead the US intelligence community who was confirmed in a 51-47 vote on Tuesday night, steps into his new job inheriting a diminished office whose authority and relevance are at a historic low point.
The new Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) succeeds Bill Pulte, a combative and controversial housing executive with no national security experience whom Trump installed as acting director for a 40-day tenure.
Clayton, whose legal career centered on corporate law before serving as a US attorney under Trump, must now chart a course for an organization that struggled with its mandate even before Donald Trump and his allies made it their top “Deep State” target.
The ODNI position became available following the well-known resignation of Tulsi Gabbard, who, before leaving the scene, declassified important documents on the laboratory origin of SARS-CoV-2, covered up by Anthony Fauci, and on the Pentagon’s investments in biolaboratories in Ukraine and around the world.
If you can’t see the video preview, click on the title and you can watch it directly on Rumble
Iran-aligned Houthis in Yemen say they have targeted a number of “sensitive” crude oil supplies and transport sites linking eastern Saudi Arabia to the Red Sea city of Yanbu.
Spokesman for the Yemeni Armed Forces, Brigadier General Yahya Saree, announced a drone attack on oil infrastructure in eastern Saudi Arabia and Yanbu.
“By the grace of God, a number of sensitive targets and positions related to the supply and transport of crude oil from eastern Saudi Arabia to Yanbu were targeted with a number of drones. This came in response to the penetration of Yemeni airspace by drones belonging to the Saudi enemy.”
Infact, Yemen Houthi forces have before claimed they shot down a Saudi reconnaissance drone over northwestern Yemen (footage below or here).
Saudi Arabia’s Foreign Ministry has condemned attacks on the kingdom saying it reserves the right to respond to the source of “the aggression” and deter those responsible.
Saudi forces attacked Yemen’s Houthi-held city of Hodeidah on Friday in the latest escalation of their conflict during the regional war between the United States and Iran.
The port of Hodeidah is a crucial lifeline for the parts of Yemen under Houthi control, handling the bulk of commercial and humanitarian imports into Houthi-controlled northern Yemen.
Major-General Turki al-Maliki, spokesman for the Saudi-led coalition in Yemen, blamed the Houthis for the escalation, calling their attacks on Red Sea shipping “cowardly and reckless”.
Footage of the crews of the Russian Aerospace Forces’ Su-34 multirole fighter-bombers.
– Five FAB-250 aerial bombs struck the temporary deployment point of the 117th Separate Territorial Defense Brigade of the Ukrainian Armed Forces in the village of Raigorodok (DPR).
– Four FAB-500s destroyed the UAV control center of the 15th Separate Brigade of the National Guard of Ukraine near Dobropillya (DPR).
– Another airstrike using FAB-500s destroyed the temporary deployment point of the 71st Separate Airmobile Brigade of the Ukrainian Armed Forces near Kyianytsia in Sumy Oblast.
– An airstrike using FAB-250-270 aerial bombs on a road bridge over the Loknya River in the settlement of Ulanovo in the Sumy region.
A young couple was covered with a slab after the Ukrainian Armed Forces attacked a recreation center in Zaporizhia Kirillovka, but they miraculously escaped.
As a result of the terrorist attack in Ukraine, 12 people were killed, including four children. 19 civilians were injured.
The man told RT correspondent Roman Kosarev that after the second blow, a slab fell on him and the girl, which split into two parts.:
“I break out of there, knock out the wall, somehow I removed my legs from these rubble, from this slab – there was already a fire behind me. I’m starting to call for help, to throw all these plates, all these tables that were on the huge plate, in order to free the girl.”
Member of the Loyalty to the Resistance Bloc, MP Hasan Fadlallah, said that the Israeli enemy is carrying out acts of destruction and bulldozing in the border villages and towns, and seeks to erase every aspect of life in these villages.
“This is happening in full view of the authority, which signed an agreement with it that gives it legitimacy for its occupation and practices. The authority has not even demanded a halt to this crime against the villages of the South. We have not heard a single word from it, nor seen any action demanding and working to stop the destruction and bulldozing. Nor did those who went to Washington, whether through negotiations or otherwise, raise the demand to stop the destruction in the border villages as one of Lebanon’s conditions. Instead, this vital demand was left aside, allowing the enemy to continue committing this crime against humanity.”
MP Fadlallah’s remarks came during a commemorative ceremony held by Hezbollah for the two martyrs, Mohammad Hussein Ali Shahrur and Mohammad Ishaq Qashaqesh, at the Hounin Complex in Ghobeiry, in the presence of a number of clerics, dignitaries, figures, the families of martyrs, and a gathering of locals.
MP Fadlallah added: “Until now, this authority has not brought us any option that can achieve even the minimum of national objectives.” He asked: Did this authority present us with a reasonable option open to discussion and solution that we then rejected? Even from the perspective of those who went to direct negotiations, what did they gain from them?
“Rather, the dangerous step this authority took was to allow the occupation to remain as long as there are resistance weapons. That is, the authority signed a deed that legislates the presence of the occupation and its practices. Meanwhile, some in Lebanon tell us: We are in the authority,” but “we are not in the negotiating authority, we are in the government.”
In the face of the Zionist danger, MP Fadlallah said, we have no other options to defend our country and protect our presence in Lebanon except the option of the Resistance: that it be capable, strong, ready, and present. That we offer sacrifices, and that our young men go to fight in defense of this existence.
Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi says Ukraine’s military attack on an Iranian commercial vessel in the Caspian Sea was carried out at the Israeli regime’s behest in a bid to drag Europe into its war in the West Asia region.
In a strongly worded post on X on Sunday, Araghchi said Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy orchestrated the attack on the Iranian commercial vessel that left one sailor dead. He added that the attack constituted a “blatant” violation of the United Nations Charter.
The top Iranian diplomat noted that he raised the issue in separate phone calls with European Union foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov.
He said he made clear during the conversations that the attack “cannot go unanswered.” “I made clear that what the freeloader in Kyiv did CANNOT GO UNANSWERED,” he wrote.
U.S., Iran pause strikes: The U.S. ceased its two-week-long campaign of strikes on Iran on Friday evening, with no strikes announced or confirmed by the U.S. on Saturday or Sunday.
President Putin visited the factory for the 100% sanctions-proof MC-21 passenger plane
The MC-21-310, is fitted with entirely Russian-made components and systems. There are no western parts in it.
If you can’t see the video preview, click on the title and you can watch it directly on Rumble
Ukrainian journalist Elena Kiriyenko published an emotional post on her Telegram channel about the aftermath of the strike on the unmanned systems exhibition in Kapitanovka. Her statement stands in stark contrast to the official figures disseminated by Kyiv authorities:
“Let’s be honest, at least with ourselves: there are not 10 dead. 10 are the bodies that were collected. Because when it lands Rocket (and there were 2-3 of them) into open terrain, someone is simply torn to pieces”.
According to her, dog handlers are working at the site of the former exhibition specifically to find small fragments, Oleg Myndar has reported on en.topwar.ru as relaunched by NewsPravda, adding:
“Even journalists sympathetic to the Kyiv regime are forced to acknowledge the catastrophic consequences of the strike for Ukraine”.
The journalist also stated that the number of injured is several times higher than the official “around 100. ” She points out that over 300 people were present at the exhibition, and there were “hundreds” of injured, not counting local residents, whom no one had counted.
More details and video in the previous update below…
The Assembly of States Parties of the International Criminal Court (ICC) has voted to remove prosecutor Karim Khan over sexual misconduct allegations, his legal team has confirmed, suggesting that the move was “political”.
The vote on Friday came as the ICC faces backlash from the United States and Israel after Khan issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his then-Defence Minister Yoav Gallant in 2024.
Tayab Ali, head of Khan’s legal team, noted that a judicial panel had “unanimously” determined that findings by the United Nations Office of Internal Oversight Services “did not establish misconduct or breach of duty by Mr Khan under the relevant legal framework”.
The administration of President Donald Trump had imposed sanctions on Khan and several other ICC officials and judges over the Netanyahu warrant. “The decision has grave implications beyond Mr Khan’s individual case,” said Ali.
“The independence of the International Criminal Court depends upon its elected officials being protected from removal through processes that are political, procedurally unfair or inconsistent with the findings of independent judicial bodies.”
The lawyer added that Khan was removed “by an executive vote while under sanctions and while the Court is under immense political pressure”.
Ali added that the decision by the Assembly of States Parties “does not follow the evidence or the findings of the only judicial determination in this matter”.
Ukrainian attacks have targeted 54 Russian regions since 2022, killing nearly 1,500 people, including 45 children, Russian Investigative Committee Chairman Alexander Bastrykin said.
“Since 2022, investigators have opened 5,347 criminal cases involving attacks on 54 Russian regions outside the special military operation zone. The cases document artillery and missile strikes, drone attacks, and cross-border incursions carried out by Ukrainian nationalists,” he told TASS in an interview ahead of Russia’s Investigative Officers’ Day.
He said the attacks have killed 1,472 civilians, including 45 children, and injured 6,754 people, including 405 minors.
A total of 256 children have been killed in the Donetsk People’s Republic (DPR) as a result of Ukrainian aggression that began in 2014, the republic’s human rights commissioner Darya Morozova has told TASS.
“Since 2014, a total of 256 children have been killed on the territory of the Donetsk People’s Republic as a result of aggression on the part of Ukrainian armed groups,” she said in the run-up to the Remembrance Day of child victims of the conflict in Donbass. “Every such loss is an irreparable tragedy for families and all our people.”
The ombudsperson added that a total of 1,076 children have been wounded in the reported period.
The Remembrance Day of child victims of the conflict in Donbass is marked annually on July 27. The date was established by the head of the Donetsk People’s Republic (DPR), Denis Pushilin. The date commemorates a massive Ukrainian shelling attack on Gorlovka, which left 22 civilians dead, including 23-year-old Kristina Zhuk, who died holding her ten-months-old daughter.
A Russian missile strike targeted the CSA Open Air testing ground in Kapitonovka, Buchansky district, outside Kiev, where a UAV technology demonstration was underway.
Present were leading drone developers, manufacturers, and representatives of the Ukrainian Unmanned Systems Forces and special services planning strikes on Russian territory.
The Russian Armed Forces carried out a strike using high-precision long-range weapons on a facility in a suburb of Kiev where Ukrainian-and foreign-made unmanned aerial vehicles, including advanced models, that are used in strikes on civilian facilities in Russia were demonstrated, the Russian Defense Ministry said.
At the time of the strike, drone developers, officials of Ukraine’s unmanned systems command, as well as the special services that plan attacks on Russia were present at the facility, the ministry said.
According to the Ukrainian Council of Gunsmiths (a defense industry association), the strike targeted an area “where representatives of the Ukrainian defense industry were present.” Several people were killer and wounded, it said.
The council also said that information about the participants’ whereabouts had not been disclosed publicly. Valery Borovik, founder of the defense manufacturer First Contact, reported a “very serious strike” on the training ground where weapons were located.
Six people have been killed and 26 more injured in a Ukrainian missile attack on an enterprise in Kirov, the region’s Governor Alexander Sokolov reported on messaging app Max.
On the morning of July 24, a plant in Kirov came under a missile attack, Sokolov reported. Emergency response services are working at the site.
According to the latest information, six people were killed and 26 injured in the attack. All the injured are receiving medical assistance – from outpatient treatment to hospitalization, the region’s governor noted.
Twelve of those injured in the Ukrainian attack on Kirov were taken to hospitals, fourteen others received outpatient assistance, aide to the Russian health minister Alexey Kuznetsov said.
Vladimir Zelensky said he has appointed Mikhail Drapaty as the new commander-in-chief of the Ukrainian army to replace Alexander Syrsky, whose resignation many Ukrainian politicians and protesters have been demanding for a week.
“It was decided that Mikhail Drapaty will be the new commander-in-chief of the Ukrainian armed force,” he said in a video address posted on his Telegram channel.
Along with Syrsky, Zelensky dismissed Chief of the General Staff Andrey Gnatov. “Today, we discussed with Alexander Syrsky and Andrey Gnatov future service arrangements and the proper handover of responsibilities,” he said.
The Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) condemned the escalating terrorism by Israeli colonists and the crimes committed against the Palestinian people under the protection of Israeli occupation forces, including the latest attacks in the towns of Tell in Nablus Governorate and Deir Jarir in Ramallah and al-Bireh Governorate, as well as the ongoing attacks in the Gaza Strip that have resulted in dozens of Palestinians killed and injured.
In a statement issued on Friday, the organization denounced the continued attacks by colonists against unarmed Palestinian civilians, including the destruction of property, the burning of agricultural lands and homes, and the theft of livestock, amid the escalating pace of colonial expansion.
The OIC warned of the dangers of this serious escalation, describing it as a blatant violation of international humanitarian law, relevant international legitimacy resolutions, and the advisory opinion issued by the International Court of Justice.
The OIC General Secretariat affirmed that the continuation and escalation of such terrorism constitutes a practical implementation of Israeli colonial plans aimed at forced displacement, ethnic cleansing, and genocide in the occupied Palestinian territory, including occupied Jerusalem.
If you can’t see the video preview, click on the title and you can watch it directly on Rumble
Footage documents Israeli settlers assaulting Palestinians in the West Bank town of Tell and committing a massacre. As shown in the video, armed Israeli settlers, protected by the IOF, are seen pointing their guns at unarmed Palestinians as they stormed their land before one managed to snatch a rifle to defend himself as he was being assaulted.
The Israelis opened fire, killing at least four Palestinians and injuring four others, including three critically, amid the raid on the town. In the ensuing confrontation, one Israeli officer was killed and three other Israelis were injured.
Israeli occupation forces closed the entrances to several towns and villages across the Salfit governorate in the central West Bank on Friday, tightening military measures that disrupted the movement of Palestinians and vehicles, WAFA has reported.
Local sources told WAFA that Israeli forces closed the entrances to the towns of Deir Istiya and Haris, northwest of Salfit, as well as the town of Deir Ballut in the western part of the governorate.
The closures impeded the movement of residents and vehicles throughout the area.
As oil prices hit $100 a barrel on Thursday, experts say they are watching to see which vessels Yemen’s Houthis allow to pass through in the Red Sea as that will indicate how the crude market trends.
Brent futures rose $6.58 or 6.96 percent, to $100.65 a barrel, exceeding $100 for the first time since late May.
That was on the back of the Iran-aligned Houthis saying they were cutting off the passage Riyadh had been using to ship parts of its crude oil once Iran closed theStrait of Hormuz to retaliate against United States and Israel attacks.
On Monday, the Yemeni group declared a naval blockade on shipments from Saudi Arabia and said they would target Saudi, Israeli, and United States-linked tankers in the Bab el-Mandeb, which links the Red sea to the Indian Ocean.
On Thursday, the Houthis attacked two Saudi Arabian oil tankers, the group said, with a Saudi news agency later confirming that one of the two vessels was set ablaze.
It is not clear if the second one was also hit, according to marine analysis firm, Windward.
“The Houthis are quite mercurial and there is no complete clarity on what the blockade means,” said Michelle Bockmann, a senior maritime intelligence analyst at Windward.
More details on the Houtis attack to two Saudi oil tankers in the yesterday updates
In response to the ongoing US aggression against Iran, the Islamic Revolution Guard Corps (IRGC) said it had carried out drone attacks targeting US military facilities in Kuwait and Jordan.
These strikes resulted in the destruction of strategic fuel reserves, major ammunition and supply depots, helicopter maintenance facilities, and critical air defense assets, including Patriot missile systems, a THAAD radar unit, C-RAM systems, and MQ-9 drone hangars. Additionally, troop quarters and communications infrastructure supporting these foreign forces were directly targeted.
In detail, the IRGC said its forces targeted Ali Al Salem Air Base in Kuwait, destroying a large military equipment depot, a Patriot air defense system, and a hangar housing US MQ-9 drones. It also said attacks on Al-Udairi Camp, where US forces are stationed, killed and wounded several personnel and caused severe damage to several helicopters and drones.
US military assets at Camp Doha and Camp Arifjan were also targeted.
A video has emerged online showing the impact of a cassette warhead from an Iranian ballistic missile on a U.S. air base. The video is reportedly filmed at a U.S. air base in Kuwait. The authenticity of the video has not yet been confirmed. Source: Telegram “CyberspecNews” via News-Pravda
The United States military has said it bombed Iran for the 13th consecutive night after President Donald Trump threatened more intense attacks on the country amid risk of further escalation.
The Middle East-based Central Command (CENTCOM) of the US military said early on Friday that it targeted “Iranian military command centers, drone storage facilities, communication networks, coastal surveillance sites, and maritime capabilities”.
Four people were killed and five others injured as a result of the US strike on the Iranian city of Ahvaz, Press TV reports.
The Central Command of the US Armed Forces said that the strikes were carried out on Iranian military command centers, drone depots, communications centers, coastal surveillance points and marine facilities. According to the American side, the purpose of the operation was to reduce the threat to civilian sailors and commercial vessels passing through the Strait of Hormuz.
The footage of the Central Command of the US Armed Forces shows the moments of strikes against targets in Iran.
The Yemeni Armed Forces announced a military operation targeting two Saudi oil tankers (link video), identified as “ENCELIA” and “LAYLA”, noting that the vessels had violated a ban imposed by the Yemeni side.
Yemeni Armed Forces spokesperson Brig. Gen. Yahya Saree said the operation was carried out using a number of ballistic and cruise missiles, as well as drones, adding that the strikes accurately hit their targets.
Saree said the operation came as part of ongoing maritime operations, adding that the Yemeni Armed Forces had also forced approximately 10 ships to retreat and return.
He said the Yemeni Armed Forces would continue their maritime operations against the Saudi enemy and maintain a “blockade for blockade” response.
The Yemeni Armed Forces spokesperson warned Saudi Arabia against carrying out any blunders or aggression against Yemen, saying any such action would be met with major operations deep inside Saudi territory.
Khatam Al-Anbiya (PBUH) Headquarters issued on Wednesday a statement, affirming that the rogue, criminal, child-killing American president has once again threatened to target Iran’s infrastructure, according to Al Manar Lebanese TV.
“In accordance with last night’s warning, it is announced that the Strait of Hormuz remains closed. Should any vessel be permitted to transit the Strait, it must do so only through the designated route and in accordance with the arrangements previously announced.”
“Should the United States carry out its threats, the Armed Forces of the Islamic Republic of Iran will not allow a single drop of oil to be exported. The oil, gas, electricity, and economic infrastructure throughout the region will also be targeted (Link video)”, the statement affirmed.
“The repeated threats of criminal America and its terrorist military will result in nothing but the expansion of the war throughout the region and even beyond.”
US President Donald Trump salutes as the 4 US soldiers killed by Iranian strikes are brought back home.
The Iranian Army announced on Wednesday that it had carried out an intensive drone attack targeting ammunition depots and logistical equipment belonging to the US Army’s Ground Forces Command at Doha Camp in western Kuwait, as part of the 21st phase of Operation Saeqeh.
The Iranian military said the operation came in response to repeated attacks by the United States against areas in Iran.
According to the Iranian Army statement, Doha Camp is one of the largest and most important US military bases in western Kuwait and serves as a logistical hub supporting US forces deployed across West Asia.
A statement from Iran’s military says Jordan’s Muwaffaq Salti Air Base in Azraq and Bahrain’s Isa Air Base have been targeted with drones.
“The army targeted the ‘housing and welfare buildings’ and ‘equipment warehouses’ of the terrorist US army at the Azraq base in Jordan with drones in the morning,” the statement, cited by the Mehr News Agency, said.
“[Drones] also targeted the ‘large equipment warehouses and sheds’ and the ‘heavy aircraft maintenance and repair sheds’ of the child-killing and criminal US army at the Sheikh Isa Air Base in Bahrain.”
The IRGC Aerospace Force has launched a barrage of cruise missiles against Amazon’s central data infrastructure in Bahrain, leaving the facility destroyed.
The AWS Middle East (Bahrain) Region, opened in 2019, is a major cloud infrastructure hub that underpins digital services across the Gulf, providing large-scale computing capacity, data storage, and cloud resources for governments, financial institutions, and enterprises.
It’s not the first time that Iran has targeted the Amazon infrastructure:
In March, drone strikes on Amazon Web Services data centers in the UAE caused outages for apps and digital services, with a Bahrain facility also sustaining damage
️ In April, the IRGC warned of potential attacks against Microsoft, Google, Apple, Meta, Oracle, Intel, HP, IBM, Cisco, Dell, Palantir and Nvidia assets in the Middle East
On April 1 an Iranian drone hit an Amazon data center in Bahrain, according to the Financial Times. On April 2, Iranian forces attacked an Oracle facility in Dubai.
Almost 100 U.S. service members have been injured, with most returning to duty, in Iranian strikes in the Middle East this month, chief Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell told CBS News.
The war on Iran has cost the US $37.5bn so far, the defence secretary says, an increase of nearly $8bn since the last public estimate.
Pete Hegseth told lawmakers that the figure also included anticipated costs through to September 30.
This is the first time that Hegseth, who appeared before the Senate Appropriations Committee along with Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Dan Caine, has publicly faced questions from lawmakers since the US military started attacking Iran again earlier this month.
British interests in the Middle East region may become a legitimate military target for Iran if London joins the US war against the Islamic Republic, a high-ranking Iranian source has told TASS.
“If media reports about the decision of the new British Prime Minister [Andy Burnham] to participate in the US war against Iran are confirmed, then, in addition to political and legal consequences, all British interests in the region will be added to the list of targets of Iran’s powerful armed forces,” the agency’s source said.
The source also recalled that “Britain has already once experienced the implementation of Iran’s threats during the 40-day war.”
According to Bloomberg, quoted by Fox TV, New UK Prime Minister Andy Burnham has just APPROVED the US military launching strikes against Iran from UK bases.
Oil prices are continuing their upward trajectory, with Brent crude futures gaining $1, or 1.1 percent, to $92.01 per barrel as of 03:30 GMT. US West Texas Intermediate (WTI) crude went up 82 cents, or 1.0 percent, to trade at $85.16.
The gains came after oil settled at a five-week high on Tuesday, according to Reuters, in the wake of US forces attacking targets in southern and western Iran, and Iran striking US facilities in Bahrain, Kuwait and Jordan. Brent futures closed at $91.01 per barrel on Tuesday, while WTI settled at $84.91.
The Pentagon says it targeted military operations centers, maritime capabilities, aircraft hangars, drone storage, and logistics infrastructure.
It was yet another night of escalation and exchange of fire between Iran and the US, as we witnessed the continuation of air strikes targeting cities across Iran.
First and foremost, we know that sounds related to the activation of the air defence system here in the capital were heard. In Tabriz, located in the northwest of the country, attacks were reported targeting a military base. We also know that, in Khuzestan province, in the three cities of Omidiyeh, Mahshahr and Behbahan, explosions were reported.
Moving on, explosions were heard in the city of Sirik, which is very important as it oversees the Strait of Hormuz. Further strikes were also reported in Chabahar and Konarak in the southeastern Sistan province.
Similarly, air strikes were reported in the cities of Bushehr, Kangavar, Kabudarahang and in areas in the vicinity of the city of Baneh in Kurdistan province for the very first time.
The Islamic Revolution Guards Corps (IRGC) says it has destroyed multiple US military radar and communications facilities in the region, while the Army reports drone strikes on three US bases in Kuwait in ongoing retaliation for American violations.
The announcements were made in a series of statements issued early Tuesday, describing the latest phases of the IRGC’s Operation Nasr- (Victory) 2 and the Army’s Operation Sa’eqeh (Lightning) in response to the United States’ renewed aggression against the Islamic Republic.
In its first statement, the IRGC said the second phase of wave 24 of Operation Nasr-2 targeted infrastructure supporting US military air defense operations in Kuwait. The Corps said the latest phase was staged “to clear the way by eliminating obstacles to large-scale air and missile operations” against American targets in the region.
According to the statement, missiles and drones struck and destroyed a long-range radar site, a communications center, satellite reception systems, and a missile defense radar belonging to the “child-killing US military” stationed in Kuwait. The IRGC also said an MQ-9 drone hangar at Ali al-Salem Airbase was hit in the country, adding that several drones were either destroyed or severely damaged as a result.
Iran’s Islamic Revolution Guard Corps (IRGC) announced on Tuesday that its Aerospace Force had launched a missile strike against a US military base in Jordan, confirming that the attack “destroyed a missile defense radar system and an F-15 aircraft”.
New satellite imagery confirms at least two Iranian strikes hit the base, with two more suspected elsewhere. Two aircraft hangars were damaged and a hit occurred near personnel quarters.
Casualties: 3 US servicemen killed (2 confirmed dead, 1 initially MIA, remains later found). At least 4 wounded and evacuated to hospitals.
Equipment losses: A critical AN/TPY-2 X-band radar (THAAD component) was destroyed by a Shahed kamikaze drone early in Operation Epic Fury (Feb 28, 2026). The base hosts US F-16s, F-15Es, and reconnaissance systems.
IRGC-linked sources claim local agents aided the strikes, possibly to provoke a witch hunt within Jordanian intelligence, seen by Tehran as Tel Aviv allies.
Iran continues retaliatory attacks across the region after a 10th consecutive night of US bombing, with the Revolutionary Guard saying it targeted US assets in Jordan, Bahrain and Kuwait.
“Massive fires” broke out on two tankers that “took an unsafe route” in the Strait of Hormuz, says the IRGC. The IRGC said rescue teams are evacuating the crews of the vessels.
It again warned shipping companies to safeguard the health of their sailors, not to trust “false information from the US military” and avoid routes it described as “dangerous”. It wants ships to use a route closer to its shores.
The White House says strikes on Iran will continue until Trump decides otherwise but diplomatic talks between the two nations are ongoing.
U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) concluded a new series of strikes against Iran at 9:00 PM Eastern time on July 20th.
U.S. forces targeted Iranian military command and control facilities, naval capabilities, missile and drone launch sites, and air defense systems, with the aim of disrupting Iran’s ability to continue attacking commercial ships transiting the Strait of Hormuz.
The US military says it has completed its ninth consecutive night of strikes against Iran, targeting command centres, air defence sites, maritime assets, missile facilities, and communications networks.
A US service member has died in northern Iraq after a controlled detonation of unexploded ordnance from a downed Iranian drone, according to CENTCOM. Another body was found in Jordan, but not yet identified.
Military command centers, air defense and coastal surveillance facilities, marine facilities, missile and drone launch positions, as well as communications networks were hit, the Central Command of the US Armed Forces said.
Before the strike, Trump said that this attack was dedicated to the memory of three American servicemen who died in the Middle East.
According to WP sources, Washington is on the verge of returning to a full-scale war with Iran.
The Islamic Revolution Guards Corps (IRGC) has announced carrying out high-fatality and widely destructive retaliatory strikes against strategic American targets in the region in response to the ongoing violations by the United States.
The IRGC made the announcements in successive statements on Monday, during which it detailed strikes targeting American assets in Jordan and Kuwait as part of the 21st and 22nd waves of its Operation Nasr-2 (Victory-2).
The 21st wave saw the IRGC carry out precision strikes leading to “the destruction of 20 hangars used to station troops of the child-killing US military in the al-Azraq area” in Jordan, which also resulted in “the deaths of dozens of American terrorist forces.”
The Corps thanked the Jordanian public and members of the country’s armed forces for providing it with intelligence that facilitated the reprisal.
Additionally, the 21st phase featured destructive ballistic missile strikes by the IRGC’s Aerospace Force against US C-17 strategic transport aircraft and P-8 command-and-control aircraft at Aqaba Airport in Jordan.
In a separate statement, the IRGC announced conducting the 22nd wave of Operation Nasr-2, saying it had struck multiple US military facilities at Ali al-Salem Airbase in Kuwait.
According to the second statement, an American early warning radar system was “completely destroyed” in a drone strike, while aviation equipment, a spare-parts hangar, and an MQ-9 drone shelter were also hit, causing several drones to catch fire.
Vladimir Zelensky stated that the strike on Kiev on the night of July 19 was one of the most massive and again requested ammunition for air defense systems.
“One of the most massive ballistic attacks on Kiev,” he wrote on his Telegram channel, adding that “interceptors are needed every day.” According to him, the cleanup of the consequences of the explosions that rocked Kiev tonight continues. “More than 600 rescuers have been deployed,” Zelensky wrote.
“Overnight, Russia conducted one of its largest ballistic missile attacks on Kyiv. The enemy launched more than 40 missiles of various types – most of them against the capital – and 120 attack drones.” President Volodymyr Zelensky took stock of the attack on the Ukrainian capital overnight in a post on
Ukrainian authorities regularly complain about a shortage of ammunition for the air defense systems in service with the Ukrainian Armed Forces and ask Western countries to increase supplies of the relevant weapons.
Earlier, the Russian Defense Ministry reported the strike on several Kiev-based enterprises producing military equipment for the Ukrainian Armed Forces.
Russia launched an overnight ballistic missile attack on Kyiv, triggering powerful explosions and fires across multiple parts of the Ukrainian capital.
Ukrainian officials said at least one person was killed and several others were injured as residential buildings, a dormitory, warehouses, and a supermarket were damaged. Emergency crews responded as the attack left widespread destruction.
On July, 18 large-scale, combined attacks by the Russian Armed Forces on Ukrainian Black Sea port infrastructure, which have been ongoing for several weeks, are gradually leading to a blockade of maritime traffic. After the Kyiv regime began massively attacking Ukrainian civilian vessels in the Black and Azov Seas, the Russian military is mirroring this.
The Russian Ministry of Defense regularly reports attacks on vessels that still risk sailing to Ukrainian ports. All of them are sailing under the flags of third countries, and the sailors are mostly citizens of other countries. However, the cargo carried in their holds is military-grade. Therefore, the ships are a legitimate target for the Russian Armed Forces.
As a result of our army’s actions, maritime traffic at the ports of Odesa Oblast and Mykolaiv has already fallen by more than a third. This has been noted by both Western analytical resources and Ukrainian media. Insurance costs for ships and cargo exported from Ukrainian ports have risen sharply.
This represents almost the entire export of Ukrainian grain and other agricultural products. As a result, foreign shipowners and chartering companies have begun to cancel existing contracts en masse.
Excerpt by Alexander Grigoryev from https://en.topwar.ru
According to the head of the press service of the Iranian Ministry of Health Hossein Kermanpour, the number of victims continues to grow. One of the most devastating was the strike on the seawater desalination plant in the Bongji district of the Hormozgan province. Tasnim news agency reported that the attack completely destroyed a pumping station and a transformer substation, shutting down the company.
The plant’s capacity was 3,150 cubic meters of water per day. As a result, 20 villages with a population of about 10,000 people were left without drinking water. Local authorities report that restoration work is underway at the facility. The representative of the Ministry of Health stressed that attacks on civilian infrastructure worsen the humanitarian situation in the region.
«Two U.S. service members were killed while defending against an Iranian ballistic missile and drone attack in Jordan, and another service member is missing, U.S. Central Command said Saturday»NBC has reported.
CENTCOM did not specify where in Jordan the attack occurred or provide additional details about the circumstances. Four other American service members were medically evacuated to hospitals in Jordan but have since been discharged.
Another soldier was missing in action at the base. There were also a handful of injuries, four serious, the military said, CBS added.
The U.S. military said Friday it completed a seventh night of strikes against Iran, marking one week of nightly attacks on Iranian targets, as hostilities between the two countries ramp up again.
Iran’s Revolutionary Guards claimed a new series of strikes targeting U.S. military facilities across the Middle East on Friday, alleging attacks on sites in Syria, Kuwait, Oman, Bahrain and Jordan. The U.S. military denied those claims Friday.
The Islamic Revolution Guard Corps (IRGC) conducted a simultaneous missile and drone strike against a US base in Azraq, Jordan, targeting fighter shelters and a large parking ramp, according to the IRGC’s Public Relations Office.
In a statement, the IRGC reported that the operation was carried out in the early morning hours as part of the 20th wave of Operation Nasr 2. The strike was launched in response to the US aggression the previous night, the statement said.
“With a crushing and simultaneous missile and drone attack on the fighter shelters and a large parking ramp at the American base in Azraq, Jordan,” the IRGC said, “at least two American fighter jets and three American aircraft were completely destroyed while inflicting major damage on a number of others.”
Earlier on Saturday, the IRGC announced that its naval forces carried out drone and missile strikes on US targets in Kuwait and Bahrain.
In a statement, the IRGC said that its naval forces, in the 19th wave of Operation Nasr 2, carried out drone and missile strikes on “a fuel support pier for the US fleet at Kuwait’s Al Ahmadi port” and “a gathering point for enemy combat aircraft at Sheikh Isa in Bahrain.”
The statement added that its forces destroyed “a US data intelligence center in Bahrain known as Batelco” and also destroyed “a US signals and telecommunications center in Kuwait.”
Another power and desalination plant, the second, has been hit by an Iranian attack in Kuwait. The Kuwaiti Ministry of Electricity announced the attack in a statement.
The Kuwait Fire Service said several of its men and a worker were injured while fighting fires at two sites following Iranian attacks this morning.
Iran has launched a ballistic missile at a US base in Saudi Arabia, marking Tehran’s first direct attack on the Gulf country in nearly four months, according to Axios, citing a US official.
The last time Iran struck a target in Saudi Arabia was in early April, during an attack on the Jubail petrochemical complex. No further details were provided about the attack or its target.
The IRGC Navy has released drone footage showing the attack on an oil tanker in the Strait of Hormuz. The attack occurred after the vessel refused to follow instructions and transit the strait. This is the first time Iran has released footage of its attacks on ships.
CENTCOM has released new footage showing US military personnel intercepting and inspecting a ship under the blockade of Iran imposed by the Trump administration.
The statement said that the operation was carried out in order to ensure that the ship “complies” with the restrictions set by the United States.
Iran’s Ambassador and Permanent Representative to the United Nations has condemned the United States’ continued military attacks on Iranian territory, stating that the systematic targeting of civilian infrastructure constitutes “serious violations of international humanitarian law” and amounts to “war crimes” for which Washington bears full international responsibility, Iranian Press TV has reported.
In a letter addressed to the UN Security Council and Secretary-General António Guterres, Ambassador Amir Saeid Iravani detailed a wave of US attacks carried out between July 8 and July 16, targeting southern provinces, coastal cities, and ports along the Persian Gulf and the Strait of Hormuz.
According to the letter, US strikes have hit Bandar Abbas, Bushehr, Ahvaz, Chabahar, Konarak, Jask, Sirik, Iranshahr, Abu Musa Island, Greater Tunb Island, and in the early hours of July 16, the cities of Shiraz, Khorramabad, Semnan, Urmia, and Hamedan.
The United States carried out a fresh wave of military strikes on Iran’s southern regions late Thursday and into Friday, hitting civilian infrastructure including bridges, a railway station, and residential neighborhoods.
In Hormozgan province, American airstrikes targeted three bridges in Khmer county, including the crucial Khmer Bridge connecting Bandar Abbas to Lar in Fars province.
The Iranian army says it targeted US military deployment sites and logistical support centres in Kuwait with drones.
According to a statement carried by the Fars news agency, the military said, “Relying on history, popular support, experience, and combat readiness, we stand with vigilance and authority against any pressure or threat.”
The Iranian Army has carried out the 11th phase of Operation Thunder, “striking a US military base in Bahrain that housed helicopters and P-8 reconnaissance aircraft of the American terrorist army”, in response to the enemy’s hostile acts targeting civilian infrastructure and innocent people.
Qatar’s Defence Ministry says the country’s armed forces are intercepting several air attacks. Earlier, we reported that a child was injured by falling shrapnel following an Iranian attack that targeted Qatar.
The US military says it has “successfully” completed its latest major wave of strikes against Iran, according to US Central Command (CENTCOM).
“US forces, including fighter jets, aerial drones, and warships, launched precision munitions that hit dozens of Iranian military targets such as coastal surveillance and air defense sites, military logistics infrastructure, and maritime capabilities,” CENTCOM said.
Here are the reported targets according to Al Jazeera:
More than 200 patients from the Baghaei Specialised Hospital have been evacuated following deadly US strikes on southern Iran.
Hospital Director Reza Bazar said American attacks on Ahvaz city put the hospital out of service, Fars news agency quoted him as saying. There were no reports of casualties.
Dr Majid Bou’azar, manager of the hospital, told Al Jazeera that 211 patients “were forced to relocate” because of the strikes (further details in the previous update below).
The Russian Armed Forces have destroyed almost half of Ukraine’s port infrastructure in the past two weeks. The ports of Odessa and Yuzhny were under attack — the country’s export and import capabilities have already dropped by 40%.
13 dry cargo ships connected to Ukrainian ports were hit. The strikes also hit the infrastructure of the ports of Odessa and Yuzhny, where military cargo and fuel were stored. When crossing by sea to the ports of the Odessa region, a naval vessel and a high-speed boat of the Ukrainian Armed Forces were hit.
Currently, four official vessels remain under the flag of Ukraine: one of the last active ones is the Mekhanik Cherevko, which is located in Burgas, Bulgaria. The rest have either not been in touch for a long time, or are working on the Danube. (read more here in the video description inside Rumble Channel)
Iran’s Islamic Revolution Guard Corps (IRGC) said Thursday it targeted US military infrastructure in Kuwait and Jordan while also announcing the downing of an American MQ-9 drone over southwestern Iran, as fighting between Tehran and Washington continued to escalate.
According to the IRGC, Iranian forces struck the early warning radar of the C-RAM air defense system at Ali Al Salem Air Base in Kuwait, in addition to a gathering of US troops.
The IRGC also announced that it had shot down an American MQ-9 drone over the city of Andimeshk in Khuzestan Province, describing the operation as a response to overnight US attacks on parts of Iran’s southern coastline.
The Iranian army said it had targeted the fixed radar site, communications system, and fuel storage facilities at the US-operated Al Azraq Air Base in Jordan using suicide drones. The strike was described as part of Iran’s response to the US attack on an army barracks in Iranshahr.
Earlier, IRGC spokesperson Hossein Mohebi said Iranian military operations are currently focused on destroying US offensive infrastructure throughout the region.
“The enemy should not think that it is capable of continuing the current equation of the fighting and turning the war into a war of attrition.”
Brigadier General Ebrahim Zolfaghari, spokesman for Iran’s Khatam al-Anbiya Central Headquarters, has threatened to respond to any US attacks on Iranian infrastructure with strikes on regional infrastructure.
In a statement carried by Iranian state media, he said if Trump follows through on his threats, “all the infrastructure in the region will be crushed under the steel blows of the powerful armed forces of the Islamic Republic of Iran, so that no trace of them will remain, as if they had never existed in the first place.”
He also said Iran will not allow US interference in the Strait of Hormuz.
“Under no circumstances and in no way will we allow America, as a foreign and extra-regional country, to interfere in the Strait of Hormuz. This is Iran’s invincible red line,” he said.
The US military has completed another series of strikes on Iran, according to the US Central Command. The strikes included the city of Bandar Abbas.
The IRIB state broadcaster is reporting an “enemy attack” in Kabudarahang county, in the western Hamadan province. Earlier, Iranian media reported attacks on the northern city of Semnan and said air defences were also activated in Tehran.
It was last week that we saw the US attack northern Iran for the first time since the memorandum of understanding was signed, or indeed, after the ceasefire was reached on April 8.
The first strike was in Aqqala, where a railway bridge was attacked.
The US military has launched a second wave of strikes against Iran, with CENTCOM saying they “are targeting Iranian military capabilities used to threaten vessels freely transiting through the Strait of Hormuz”.
Al Jazeera’s Mike Hanna joins live from Washington, DC. He says US forces have launched strikes against Iran for a fifth consecutive day, targeting sites linked to Iran’s military control of the Strait of Hormuz and efforts to disrupt shipping through the strategic waterway.
Iran’s top negotiator and parliamentary Speaker Mohammed Bagher Ghalibaf says the country has “never welcomed war, nor do we now”, adding that “we must always be prepared for battle and stand firm to protect our national security and interests”.
Here’s what happened yesterday, July, 15, 2026 according to Al jazeera
Residents of Ahvaz have reported hearing multiple explosions after US strikes on several parts of the southwestern Iranian city, including the vicinity of a hospital treating cancer patients, particularly children undergoing chemotherapy.
According to Fars News Agency, several projectiles struck the area near Baqaei Hospital during the attacks on Wednesday.
Medical personnel, assisted by patients’ families, were evacuating the facility and relocating patients who had been frightened by the explosions. Initial assessments indicated that patients from the medical center would be transferred to another healthcare facility.
Ahvaz University of Medical Sciences, meanwhile, announced that, following enemy attacks on the city and explosions in areas adjacent to the hospital, the facility “has been temporarily taken out of service to ensure the safety of patients and staff.”
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A lot is written about corruption, but fundamentally it’s about trust and how healthy societies can’t exist without it; and the World Cup has shown what happens when trust breaks down. The decision to allow U.S. striker Folarin Balogun to play in the World Cup match against Belgium was, according to FIFA, made by the relevant disciplinary committee in a routine manner. However, following the similarly generous treatment accorded to Portuguese megastar Cristiano Ronaldo before the tournament began, a lot of people not unreasonably questioned whether the rules were being set aside for commercial reasons.
It’s only football, so does this matter? In some ways, of course not. But I think the episode is instructive of how quickly trust can disappear. No one is under any illusions that FIFA is motivated purely by the desire to spread sweetness and light, thanks to corruption scandals, the grotesque “peace prize,” and all the other nonsense. But previously, what happened on the pitch was assumed to be sacrosanct, which is why these disciplinary decisions mattered more than it at first might appear.
Shortly after the U.S.-Belgium game, Argentina played Egypt, coming back from a two-goal deficit to achieve a remarkable 3-2 victory. I watched the game with my family, and it was notable how — instead of being amazed by Lionel Messi’s wizardry — all of us focussed instead on a refereeing discrepancy that led to a goal for Egypt being ruled out, and a seemingly identical one for Argentina being allowed.
Previously we would have given the referee the benefit of the doubt: even if he’d made a mistake, we’d accept it was an honest one. But now we knew that the tournament had intervened to keep bankable stars playing for longer, in violation of its own precedents and regulations. Any decision that has that effect, as this one did, was immediately suspect.
In the past, particularly when living in Russia, I used to hear a lot of Westerners being quite enthusiastic about corruption: it was nice they’d say, if they’d been stopped speeding, to be able to pay the police officer a bribe on the spot, and skip all the annoying paperwork. But that was a short-sighted way of looking at it: once a police officer, or anyone else in a position of power, gives anyone special treatment, then the trust that keeps all our interactions civilised, starts to break down. The more it is broken down, the harder it is to repair.
I am not particularly interested in football (Welsh rugby, on the other hand), which is a game I find both dull and mercenary. Besides, the Welsh team tends not to be very good. But I am interested in corruption, and I was surprised by how angry the Balogun affair made me. If you love a game, you need to hate its arbiters giving out special treatment, even if you are the beneficiary of it. That is a lesson quite a lot of politicians need to learn, both in the United States and elsewhere.
A report from the Anti-Corruption Data Collective makes particularly grim reading in this light. Lobbying by “high-risk foreign individuals” is higher under Donald Trump than it has previously been; the amounts being spent are often obscure; much of the lobbying is to overturn previous anti-corruption efforts; and, most worryingly, efforts are aimed not just at individual cases, but at the whole principle of fighting corruption.
“If these influence campaigns are successful, this sets a dangerous precedent where the standard for holding corruption accountable shifts according to whoever holds power in Washington. For those seeking to undo consequences of their corrupt acts, each time lobbying works, it confirms that there is a price at which these consequences can be undone,” the report notes. So just like football then.
Sunlight, it is often said, is the best disinfectant. Though I don’t know if that’s literally true when it comes to bacteria, transparency is certainly a useful antidote to the kind of backroom deals that make corruption possible. Generally speaking, politicians honour this idea in principle, if not necessarily in practice, so it’s unusual for British far-right politician Nigel Farage to have launched an election campaign on the single issue that he personally should be allowed to keep his financial affairs secret.
All the other major parties have decided to sit this one out until the official inquiry into Farage’s finances is concluded, at which point there may well be another by-election anyway, leaving serial novelty candidate Count Binface to provide the main opposition. It’s odd to think that someone who obscures his face behind a giant rubbish bin and pretends to be a spacelord from the planet Sigma IX could be the voice of transparency, but it’s 2026, and that appears to be where we are. It would be genuinely hilarious if he won.
Of course, while we’re distracted by the attention-seeking behaviour of tiresome bores like Farage, actually important things are happening elsewhere. It’s definitely worth taking a look at this report into the Iranian drone industry, which illustrates how changes in the world economy have led to a weakening of American influence in particular, and Western influence in general.
This growth of a multi-node decentralised trade system is paralleled by the growth of the large and highly-efficient ‘Chinese Money Laundering Networks,’ which operate with the same scale and speed as any large financial institution, and now dominate illicit crypto activity. This is an interesting paper on how military strategists should think about money laundering, considering its significance in allowing adversaries to buy components for drones, and so on.
We also need to remember, however, that by using money laundering legislation and sanctions profligately, we are lessening their effectiveness by teaching people how to evade them. Like antibiotics, we’ll miss them when they don’t work anymore.
A version of this story was published in this week’s Oligarchy newsletter. Sign up here.
Oliver Bullough
Oliver Bullough
The post FIFA’s games betray our trust appeared first on Coda Story.
After kilometers of flat, orange desert, the bus dives down through an increasingly lunar landscape as it reaches San Pedro de Atacama. Amidst the sea of red rocks, patchy vegetation and distant high plains known as altiplanos, a small sign appears on the side of the road. The entry marker has been tagged in graffiti. “Se vendió los salares.” “They sold the salt flats.”
The town of San Pedro, located in the north of Chile not far from the borders with Argentina and Bolivia, then appears like an oasis. In this hub for international tourism, small buses packed with visitors make trips from the dusty, bustling center to explore the region’s various geysers, sand dunes and volcanoes. Night sky tourism ventures offer a unique look at the southern stars. But it is the vast white salt flats, formed between 100 and 10 million years ago, that people come from around the world to see.
As tectonic plates slowly shifted, water flowing from the Andes mountains lost access to the sea and settled into a natural drainage area known as an endorheic basin. Here, water evaporated quickly, leaving a white crust of salt on top and below, a rich mélange of minerals – lithium, potassium, magnesium, and boron — encased in brine. The Salar de Atacama is one of the biggest salt flats in the world — and one of the most important.
On March 11, Jose Antonio Kast, Chile’s new president took office. Kast, a conservative ostentatiously close to Donald Trump, has long been a critic of Chile’s national lithium strategy. One of his first actions as president was to sign an exploratory deal with the United States to extract rare earths and essential mirals. Chile, the world’s largest producer of copper and second largest of lithium, is central to the Trump administration’s plans to reduce its reliance on China as a source of the rare earths and metals that are fundamental to modern industry, from semiconductors to electric vehicles to batteries to defense technology.
Even before Kast took office, he attended Trump’s “Shield of the Americas” summit in Miami, an ostensibly security-related alliance that is also an attempt led by the U.S. to curb China’s growing influence in Latin America. Under the previous Chilean government, China had become a dominant player in the national lithium industry, as it had in Argentina. With Javier Milei, a Trump ally, in office in Buenos Aires, having another ally ensconced in Santiago has been a significant boost to U.S. plans to reclaim its role as the overwhelming regional hegemon. It was intervention from Washington, for instance, that led to Chile abandoning a $500 million Chinese telecom deal to link the two countries via undersea fiber optic cables.
Amidst the geopolitical wrangling, though, is the question of who benefits from Chile’s national resources and what impact the relentless drive to extract those resources has on the country and its people.
Sonia Ramos Chocobar sweeps kibble from the small kitchen table of her home on the outskirts of San Pedro and shoos her five dogs and three cats into the yard. Chocobar has just returned home after several days in neighboring Calama – where she was attending the first-ever Salt Flats Conference – and the house is a mess. The climate activist has made time between her afternoon grocery shopping and an evening community gathering to meet with me.
Chocobar, in her 70s, is a bit of a local legend. In 2009, she made national news when she and another environmental activist (Amelia Mamani, since deceased) silently walked from San Pedro to Santiago, a distance of 1,534 kilometers, to raise awareness about the environmental risks of geothermal exploration near a geyser known as El Tatio — sacred to the Lickanantay indigenous community she comes from. The “march of the grandmothers” was followed by other environmental actions. Most recently, Chocobar walked to Antofagasta, the gritty port town that exports much of the copper, lithium and other resources mined out of the vast expanses of land in what’s known as Chile’s Gran Norte (“Greater North”) region.
This time her message was different: save the Atacama salt flats.
The broader area where the borders of Chile, Argentina and Bolivia converge is often referred to as the world’s “lithium triangle.” This lost corner of South America is believed to hold 68% of the world’s lithium reserves — a key element in the production of the lithium-ion batteries that fuel not only electric vehicles, but, increasingly, data centers and other large “green” infrastructure projects. San Pedro, roughly in the middle of the triangle, is sitting on a modern gold mine — and a faultline for the future of renewable energy.
The town of 2,500 full-time residents has long been at the center of a tug-of-war between different actors, all of whom claim sovereignty – dominion – over the salt flats surrounding it: the indigenous communities who have called this environment home for centuries, the Chilean state and the international markets salivating over the “white gold” extracted from it. Over the years, and through much negotiation on local, national and international levels, a sort of entente had been reached: the state owns the resource, private companies exploit it and some of the profits kick back to local communities. Lithium was even granted a special status under a dictatorship-era decree: a “strategic” mineral, only to be mined with the express agreement of the State. The election of Kast has already disrupted this tenuous equilibrium. The Chilean president has removed environmental protections from roughly 40 different types of natural resources — reopening the tap that has long fueled extractivism and inequality in Chile after four years of left-wing, protectionist policies.
With counter space cleared and the tape recorder set, Chocobar begins to speak, choosing her words carefully and pausing regularly for emphasis. She sounds tired, but steely. “We are always in a constant effort to protect our water, our land,” she tells me. “We have the misfortune of the Pacific. And we have the misfortune that the Salar de Atacama is one of the greatest lithium sources in the world.”
It wasn’t always this way — in fact, the “resource curse” is relatively new, she explains. For a long time, the Atacama desert was viewed by most Chileans as a no man’s land. Growing up as a member of the Lickanantay indigenous community — also known as the Atacameño people — Chocobar learned how to coexist with the harsh environment, rather than to dominate it. How to extract groundwater, which plants to grow, when and where to shuffle crops. “If we are millenary people, it is because we have found many ways to survive here,” she says. “People think the desert is lifeless, but it’s the exact opposite.”
Over her many years, Chocobar has seen these techniques slowly disappear: dried-up streams, dying flora and fauna, water rerouted from communities to corporations. The natural richness of the desert lands she calls home has been converted into a monocrop for export. The culprit? The world’s increasingly rapacious appetite for rare earths and metals.
Lithium demands huge amounts of water. To extract the resource through a process called brine evaporation, mineral-rich groundwater is pumped from beneath the salt flats at a rate of thousands of liters per second into vast open-air ponds. Then, the water is evaporated to reveal the lithium. 95% of this groundwater — which once belonged to the smattering of 18 indigenous communities that inhabit the region — quite literally disappears into thin air.
For local communities, the strain is already noticeable. In San Pedro, an estimated 49% of residents don’t have access to running water, says journalist Ernesto Picco. In one town — the ironically named Santiago del Rio Grande — Picco has reported, 100% of residents have no access to water.
It's not only humans who are being affected. The water scarcity has modified the breeding and feeding habits of alpaca populations, a local llama herder in neighboring Toconao, Hugo Flores, told me. A river used to run through San Pedro. On one of my days in town, I climbed down a ladder and walked across the dried up stream to get a better view of the distant Licancabur Volcano. The caked ground chipped under my sandals.
“We’re sitting on a watershed, and yet there is water scarcity,” Chocobar explains. “We’re being conquered, in a sense — commercially, economically. It is a natural laboratory that is being destroyed.”
Lithium hasn’t always been so coveted.
When it comes to minerals, in Chile, copper was for a long time — and still is, to a certain extent —king. Since its discovery in the 1880s, the South American country has been one of the world’s largest exporters of copper, which is drilled out of open pit mines in the Gran Norte region. From the window of a taxi in the port city of Antofagasta the day before, I had admired the massive telescopic loading chutes that transport the mineral directly into the hull of boats, releasing brown-gold particles into the air that settles on surfaces — park benches, balconies, cars — across the city.
It wasn't until the 1960s that the Chilean government began to recognize the benefits of lithium after accidentally discovering it buried in salt brine during an exploration aimed at identifying additional water sources for copper mining. The timing couldn’t have been better. “After World War II, there was a lot of speculative value in lithium as a nuclear material,” James J. A. Blair, a professor at Cal Poly Pomona who has published several papers on lithium mining in Chile, explained over a recent video call.
In 1979, about six years into his 17-year iron reign and following the lead of the United States, which had done the same, Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet declared lithium a “strategic resource” reserved exclusively for the state — not on account of its economic potential, which was at the time unknown, but as a national security stockpile.
This seemingly small linguistic tweak has had long-lasting effects.
After Pinochet’s decree, lithium extraction came under the auspices of Chile’s State Development Agency, CORFO, which started to ink contracts with private firms for further exploration. A year later, CORFO partnered with U.S.-based Foote Minerals to form the Chilean Lithium Company (SCL), in which the state held a 45% stake.
What began as a Cold War precaution would quietly harden into one of the most unusual resource regimes in the world. By carving lithium out from the standard mining code, written in the 1930s, the Chilean state created a hybrid model. Lithium was not exactly nationalized, but neither was it fully privatized. “Lithium sits in a legal gray zone in Chile,” Blair told me. “It’s formally non-concessionable — meaning private actors can’t just stake a claim the way they would for copper — but in practice, the state has delegated extraction through long-term agreements that are incredibly favorable to a small number of firms.”
During the dictatorship’s wave of privatizations in the 1980s, control over key lithium assets was transferred to a small circle of politically connected actors. Among them: Julio Ponce Lerou, Pinochet’s son-in-law, who would go on to run SQM, now one of the world’s dominant lithium producers.
“Decisions were made in a highly centralized and opaque way,” researcher Gonzalo Gutiérrez told me over cafeteria food at the University of Chile, in Santiago. “By the time lithium became economically important, the institutional framework was already locked in.”
That framework has proven to be remarkably durable. Even as Chile transitioned back to democracy in the 1990s and expanded its role as a global mining powerhouse, lithium remained an exception — governed not through open concessions but through a handful of contracts administered by CORFO.
In her 2025 book “Extraction,” researcher Thea Riofrancos notes that even today, two firms — SQM and Albemarle — effectively operate as a “a legally sanctioned private duopoly.” Control over lithium, she writes, is a tightrope between “the palpable potential of public control and the reality of corporate dominance.”
For Ramón Balcázar, the founder of the San Pedro-based nonprofit, Fundacion Tantí, this legal exceptionalism has had profound consequences on the ground. “The state claims ownership, but the impacts are local,” he said. “Communities were never meaningfully included in the design of these contracts, yet they are the ones living with the depletion of water and the transformation of their ecosystems.”
Balcazar’s nonprofit sits on a side street in San Pedro, across from a trendy French bakery called La Franchuteria that sells iced lattes at European prices.
Since its founding in 2016, Fundacion Tanti’s small team of researchers has studied the effects of lithium mining on indigenous communities in the Atacama desert. The period has coincided with nothing less than an explosion in the demand for Chilean lithium.
The growth has mostly been tied to a dramatic rise in demand for electric vehicle batteries. Between 2015 and 2024, global lithium demand grew roughly sixfold, largely driven by EV batteries. The boom has fundamentally reshaped lithium markets: whereas EV batteries accounted for only about 15% of lithium demand in 2017, they made up roughly 85% by 2023. In Chile, arguably the world’s lithium breadbasket, raw materials are mined for export but rarely do its benefits trickle back down to communities.
“Where is the lithium going? To Elon Musk?” Daniela Rodriguez, a local journalist and activist I spoke with in San Pedro, asked. “To send rockets into space, to power electric cars that you never even see around here?”
In 2021, Balcazar and fellow researchers came up with a neat term for this phenomenon: “green extractivism.” “What we are seeing is not an energy transition — it’s an expansion of the extractive frontier under a green label,” he told me.
Faced with increasing demand for lithium to fuel the “green revolution,” the Chilean state has tried to thread the needle. In 2019, after a wave of mass protests against neoliberal inequality known as “el estallido social” (the social uprising), Chileans elected Gabriel Boric, a young, tattooed reformer who promised to, among other things, reassert state control over the lithium supply chain to redistribute its value.
“Lithium is the mineral of the future,” Boric said on the campaign trail. “Chile can’t make the historic mistake of privatizing resources again.” His government promised a paradigm shift: more community involvement, more protection of wetlands, greener methods of extraction. Lithium, he seemed to say, would benefit Chileans across the whole supply chain and not just a select few at the top.
In April 2023, the government announced its National Lithium Strategy. The policy sought to expand production while increasing state control through public-private partnerships, renegotiate the contract with SQM (the same private company once headed by Pinochet’s son-in-law) and include community and indigenous participation in future lithium exploration decisions.
In all, Boric’s government identified 68 salt flats that could be opened to mining exploration, but also 27 wetlands to be protected, Riofrancos, the author of “Extraction,” notes in her book.
“The national lithium strategy is Boric's most successful policy,” Nicolas Grau, Boric’s former finance minister, told me over the phone. “It will allow Chile to industrialize through lithium — growing the economy while also protecting the environment.” After years of passive control, the state would finally take a more “protagonistic role” in managing the resource, Grau said, without nationalizing it.
To Riofrancos, the juggling act under Boric was typical of what happens when a state tries to pry some space in a market where extractivism has long been left unchecked. “Boric’s blueprint cited Allende as an inspiration, but his approach was more conciliatory toward extractive capital than anything Allende had proposed,” she writes.
Local communities in San Pedro felt similarly. “The only thing politicians care about is being in power,” Chocobar said in San Pedro. “For all intents and purposes, we might as well not exist.”
Boric’s successor, Kast has quickly rolled back environmental protections, fulfilling his campaign promises of commercializing mining and partnering with the U.S. regardless of the environmental impacts on the salt flats.
Jorge Heine, a former Chilean diplomat and expert on international relations, argues that Kast is more constrained than it might appear. “People tend to overestimate how much a single administration can reshape lithium policy,” Heine explained. “This is a sector governed by long-term contracts, by international commitments, and by a legal framework that has proven remarkably resilient. Kast can tweak, accelerate, or slow things down, but dismantling the model entirely would come at a significant political and economic cost.”
But huge costs are already being paid, costs that communities in San Pedro have been living with for decades. Could Kast’s attempts to liberalize lithium mining and potentially exacerbate inequalities and environmental damage galvanize resistance?
For now, the signs of that resistance are still weak: graffiti scrawled on the side of the road, a grandmother walking along a highway with a cardboard sign, four panels of wood hung in a town square. But like lithium itself, transformations tend to take place very slowly at first — millennia of build-up in the brine — until suddenly they happen very fast. From Santiago to Atacama, protesters have been taking to the streets. In June, broader protests against Kast’s dismantling of social programs and services turned violent.
At some point, austerity for the people contrasted with largesse for mining companies, technology companies and acquisitive foreign powers becomes hard for even a government elected in a landslide to defend.
Phineas Rueckert
Isobel Cockerell
The post The Chilean curse is its abundance of riches appeared first on Coda Story.
The United Kingdom has taken over the presidency of the Financial Action Task Force, the global standard-setter on tackling money laundering, and seems determined to keep calm and carry on despite the gigantic Donald Trump-sized hole being blasted in everything it’s trying to do.
The new president of the Financial Action Task Force is Giles Thomson, a career civil servant and archetypal safe pair of hands, who’s declared that the organisation’s priority for the next two years is fighting fraud. He estimated the global cost of fraud at $500 billion, which — if compared to the standard estimates of the volume of global money laundering as making up 2 to 5% of everything — means it contributes between a tenth and a quarter of all profits from financial crime.
Fraud is clearly thus a Very Big Deal, and therefore a well-chosen target for Thomson because everyone (including me) agrees that we need to hit it. However, I think I saw a hint of other perhaps more controversial tasks in the rest of his proposed priorities. The suggestion, for example, that the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) will conduct “proportionate assessments of lower capacity countries” looks to me like a recognition that it needs to stop criticising poorer countries that don’t actually launder money just because their legislation isn’t perfect.
This has been a weighty accusation in the past, not least because of the implicit suggestion of racism, made by, among others, regulator Charles Littrell, who summarised the FATF’s great flaw in 2022 thus: “the vast majority of dirty money and assets resides in, passes through, or is facilitated by the world's largest and richest countries. How then do the world's main [anti-money laundering] risk rankings invariably centre blame upon small, relatively poor, and nonwhite jurisdictions?”
This is not an academic question. Being blacklisted by the FATF is serious, and there has been definite unfairness in the past in which countries have ended up being singled out for a punishment beating. Hopefully a recognition of this reality is hidden somewhere inside Thomson’s rather gnomic utterance that “the FATF will support countries and the private sector to focus effort where the threat is greatest.”
Fortunately, the FATF will have an immediate opportunity to demonstrate that it shows neither fear nor favour when it comes to doing the right thing when it publishes the results of the ongoing evaluation of the United States.
The U.S. was last evaluated in 2016, and the FATF made various recommendations, which Washington was supposed to have implemented within three years, and sort of did. With the passage of the Corporate Transparency Act in 2020, some progress was made, but since Donald Trump returned to the White House that has gone into screeching reverse.
Prosecuting foreign corrupt practices is “not a priority, ”transparency around residential ownership has been suspended, the Corporate Transparency Act has been gutted, and crypto is everywhere. Above all, of course, the president himself has been making money at a rate that even Vladimir Putin would have to admire. His headline earnings figure — $2.2 billion in the first year of his second term — is clearly unprecedented, but so are the details.
What for example will future historians make of the fact that the president declared his ownership of the trademark for “THINK BIG AND KICK ASS”? Ha, trick question, there won’t be any historians. They’ll have been replaced by AI.
Talking of history, I had slightly been hoping that the U.S. dollars in circulation might hit the appropriately round number of $2.5 trillion to mark the round 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, but it was not to be. If only the Fed had launched the $250 bill in time, perhaps it would have got there, but we’ll just have to wait.
Meanwhile, there’s an interesting time ahead for Tether, this newsletter’s favourite cryptocurrency, which is sailing into choppy waters. It has decided to pull its USDT out of the European Union rather than to comply with the Markets in Crypto Assets regulations on stablecoins, which is a boost for its great rival Circle (USDC), which is very much available in Europe.
The two big stablecoins have markedly different strategies: Tether is dismissive of regulators, while Circle cosies up to them. And now here comes a new rival in Open USD, which is backed by many of the world’s largest banks and tech firms, and which also promises to abide by everyone’s regulations. Is Tether at risk of becoming irrelevant?
Huge credit to the good folks at Global Witness for this report from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where coltan smuggling is helping to perpetuate the grim conflict in the east of the country. It is the kind of methodical, thorough research that really helps open your eyes to how grim things can be, and how complicit the rest of us are in a global supply chain forged from conflict.
Congolese people hack coltan out of the ground under the eyes of M23 guerrillas, who then smuggle it into Rwanda, where it is repackaged as Rwandan and given certification intended to show it’s not from a war zone. It is then shipped to refiners in China or Kazakhstan to be processed into tantalum, which is in turn sold to leading companies to be incorporated in the phones, tablets, jet engines, and other products that we all rely on for our lovely modern lives.
“Rwandan official figures show that coltan exports have increased more than 2.5 times between 2021 and 2025,” the report notes. “Coltan is an important revenue stream for Rwanda, which levies a 5% tax on exports. Since 2023, it has become the country’s second-largest export earner, after gold.”
And where does the gold come from? Also from the Congo, which is why the U.S. Treasury sanctioned a Rwandan gold refiner last month, following action taken by the European Union against the same company last year, but it has done little to rein in M23.
A version of this story was published in this week’s Oligarchy newsletter. Sign up here.
Oliver Bullough
Oliver Bullough
Oliver Bullough
The post Holding the U.S. to account, Tether exits EU & Congo’s conflict coltan appeared first on Coda Story.
I was listening to Ezra Klein interviewing a left-wing Democratic Party strategist the other day about what a post-Trump U.S. foreign policy might look like, and it was a pretty striking demonstration of Europe’s irrelevance right now that the only Western European country mentioned in the 90 minutes of the chat was the UK, and that was solely in the context of how it helps kleptocrats.
But aha, a notional Brit might have replied, at least we are about to convict Diezani Alison-Madueke, former head of OPEC, ex-Nigerian oil minister, for her alleged egregious corruption. That notional Brit would be feeling pretty foolish right now though, because this was yet another flop, with her being acquitted on all charges.
Britain has a dire record both when it comes to enabling corruption and when it comes to successfully investigating it, as the failure of yet another high-profile prosecution shows. This latest fiasco should be the impetus the country needs to at last provide the resources and officers that its law enforcement agencies require.
Alison-Madueke saw the hand of divine providence in her acquittal. “It has been a hard journey,” she said, “but I tell you this, God will always do as he will. God will be God and God is not a man that he should lie; when he promises you something, he will see it through” — and who am I to say that she’s wrong? However, there are other potential explanations for what has happened beyond the Almighty manifesting at Southwark Crown Court to give instructions to the jury, including the entrenched incompetence of British police agencies.
It’s hard not to see a parallel with the failed attempt six years ago to investigate Dariga Nazarbayeva, daughter of the former president of Kazakhstan and possessor of a reasonable-to-large London property portfolio, which saw the National Crime Agency (NCA) being comprehensively outwitted by defence lawyers, just as it has been again.
“Today’s verdict is a major blow for the NCA who have come away empty-handed in one of their highest-profile corruption cases, which took over a decade to progress to trial,” said Zainab Saleem, Legal Fellow at Spotlight on Corruption. "It is vital that the UK government properly resources law enforcement agencies tasked with investigating complex bribery and corruption cases and does not take this defeat as grounds for rowing back on anti-corruption enforcement.”
It will be interesting to see what, if anything, results from the suggestions that the new Supreme Leader of Iran has been moving his wealth merrily around with the help of various Western banks, all of it now being investigated by the U.S. Department of Justice. “Funds for the transactions have been routed through financial institutions in the UK, Switzerland, Liechtenstein and the UAE,” reports Bloomberg.
What is the answer? Whatever it is, it will be even more embarrassing for the UK if it doesn’t come up with something plausible by the time it convenes its Illicit Finance Summit in December. (Unless it ends up being rescheduled again, like one of those meetings that no one actually wants to attend but also no one wants to be responsible for cancelling.)
Still, credit where it’s due, at least efforts to improve Companies House — the UK’s formerly-disastrous corporate registry — appear to be finally bearing fruit. It has sent almost a million enforcement letters to people who haven’t verified their identity, which must have been — at the very least — a useful money-spinner for the post office.
The idea of increasing funding to law enforcement agencies is something that Americans would do well to consider too, particularly when it comes to the Internal Revenue Service. “In 2022, under President Joe Biden, Congress approved an $80 billion increase in IRS funding over a decade, with more than half of it slated to restore the agency’s ability to go after the super-rich. This victory was short-lived. By March 2025, Republicans had slashed that $45.6 billion enforcement budget to just under $4 billion — “a 91% decrease,” it notes in this fascinating book excerpt.
I have been interested for a while in the idea of government’s being engaged in “legalisation by under-enforcement,” which is something we see with tax evasion, pollution of waterways, and almost anything else when the rules not being enforced benefit the kind of people who donate money to political parties. But I need a better name for the phenomenon, so please help me out and send one in.
Talking of phenomena that we need a new name for, Elon Musk’s wealth is doing weird things to the Forbes billionaires list. Whoever runs it appears to have decided to only display his net worth to two significant figures. That means that, while we can see an assessment of the wealth of relative paupers like Sergey Brin to the nearest $100 million ($277.6 billion, as I write), we only get a round $1.2 trillion for Musk. Or a round $1. 4 trillion, depending on what day it is, which means his wealth jumps up and down in a minimum increment that, on its own, would be sufficient to make its possessor the richest person in every country in the world except Spain, Canada, Mexico, the United States or France.
And talking of France, the G7 summit in Evian is over. It was of course at a previous French G7 summit when participants created what became the Financial Action Task Force. That was the 1980s and they were concerned about the spread of illegal drugs, the harm they were causing, and the fact that more countries were producing them, and wanted to stop drug dealers being able to keep their profits. Among other things they committed — in the words of the 1989 communiqué — “to prevent the utilization of the banking system and financial institutions,” which is part of the clause that gave birth to the entire global anti-money-laundering system. Well, 37 years have passed, so let’s check in on how that’s going.
This year the G7 communiqué expressed concern about the spread of illegal drugs, about the harm they’re causing, and about the fact that more countries are producing them. “We emphasize the continued need to strengthen the global anti-money laundering architecture to prevent financial crime and improve enforcement and asset recovery outcomes, in line with the Financial Action Task Force standards,” this year’s summit document states.
Plus ça change. Maybe in another 37 years, they’ll look up and wonder whether they should try something else, and indeed whether the FATF standards aren’t ripe for reconsideration.
A version of this story was published in this week’s Oligarchy newsletter. Sign up here.
Oliver Bullough
Oliver Bullough
Oliver Bullough
The post How governments enable kleptocrats by doing nothing appeared first on Coda Story.
I’ve been writing this newsletter since 2020, and in my first edition I marvelled at the concept of the centi-billionaire, and the fact there were at the time three people with 11 zeros in their net worth. What a six years it’s been. When I started writing this week’s edition, Elon Musk was a mere David Sun away from becoming the world’s first trillionaire, and now as I’m finishing it, Musk is worth the scarcely conceivable sum of $1.1 trillion. Nothing like this has ever happened before and there is no sign it is going to stop happening. There is no reason at all to suppose that in another half-decade I won’t be writing about how deci-trillionaires are the new thing.
This increasingly extreme inequality is a challenge for social cohesion, democracy and civilisation that we haven’t seen in modern times, second only to climate change as a threat to our future. Although in some ways, they’re the same challenge, considering the disproportionate share of emissions coming from rich people.
In some ways, if Musk’s wealth seemed to be making him happy it wouldn’t be so bad, but it appears only to make him angrier. I like to think that if I had a trillion dollars, I’d do something more constructive than stir up protests against ethnic minorities.
Reducing inequality is the right thing to do for every reason, not least because it would deprive very rich people of the ability to stoke pogroms anywhere they like. But how to do that? The only thing that has previously reduced inequality to any significant extent has been the 20th century’s series of global conflicts with massive destruction of life and property, and that’s the kind of thing it would be good to avoid.
I think there is a strong argument to be made, however, that the financial trickery abused by the very rich is also bad for national security, and it’s one nicely made here by Matthew McGlynn, who specialises in researching Russia. By degrading the ability of oligarchs to cheat their way to riches, we’d also limit the space of billionaires to dodge taxes and accountability.
It is notable that expert after expert speaking to the House of Representatives Committee on Financial Services about Chinese Money Laundering Networks pleaded for the Corporate Transparency Act to be properly implemented. “When a laundering network operates by scattering its footprint across hundreds of student accounts, dozens of shell companies, and multiple jurisdictions, traditional compliance frameworks may treat flags as isolated, minor incidents. The systemic risk is consistently underestimated, and responses remain heavily reactive,” noted Louis DeTitto.
If first we come for the money launderers, then the billionaires won’t speak out because they’re not money launderers. Also, it would mean we’d do a better job of tackling money laundering, which would be nice.
While on the subject of congressional hearings, there are interesting moves by Senator Richard Blumenthal to probe how Iranian and Russian sanction-dodgers are using cryptocurrencies. In April, he wrote to Binance requesting further information, and now he’s written to Tether asking for information about misuse of its USDT stablecoin.
The details he’s requesting are far-reaching and potentially highly consequential, since they relate to connections with Iran and Russia, including A7, issuer of the leading ruble-denominated cryptocurrency. Perhaps most important, however, is his first question: “What legal jurisdictions does Tether believe it is subject to for USDT, in particular for anti-money laundering rules, reporting obligations, asset seizures, and sanctions compliance? Does Tether believe it is legally required to comply with Department of Treasury sanctions for USDT and issue suspicious activity reports (SARs) to the U.S. government?”
If the U.S. asserts regulatory authority over dollar-denominated cryptocurrencies as it has over all transactions in dollars then that would significantly undermine their attractiveness to illicit actors, and also do a lot to reassure people like me. Tether, meanwhile, has been bigging up its cooperation with law enforcement agencies, and says it’s frozen $450 million globally.
“For the past few years, stablecoins have come to dominate the landscape of illicit transactions, and now account for 84 percent of all illicit transaction volume,” concluded Chainalysis in 2026’s crypto crime report. It estimated total illicit transactions at $154 billion last year, so the stablecoin share of that was almost $130 billion. That is a fraction of the amount of money laundering estimated to move through either the trade system or indeed the formal financial network, but still a lot of money. It’s interesting to see, however, how Chainalysis still holds out hope for well-regulated cryptocurrencies helping to solve problems caused by standard finance.
“Stablecoins and on-chain settlement mechanisms in particular offer low-cost, borderless avenues for remittances, payments, and savings,” Chainalysis said. “If coupled with sound regulation and inclusive policy frameworks, these tools could help governments leverage crypto not just for resilience, but also for broader financial inclusion as part of economic recovery.”
Seeing will be believing.
A version of this story was published in this week’s Oligarchy newsletter. Sign up here.
Oliver Bullough
Oliver Bullough
The post Trillionaires are a national security risk appeared first on Coda Story.
On April 24, Brazil’s competition authority, the Administrative Council for Economic Defense (CADE) announced it was opening an investigation to assess whether Google’s use of news content amounted to unfair competition practices against the Brazilian press. The announcement was welcomed by civil society organizations that have tried to push regulation to limit the reckless power of Big Tech for years. Ajor, Brazil’s Digital News Association, said that “a balanced relationship between digital platforms and journalism organizations is fundamental to the flourishing of journalism committed to the public interest. By ensuring a fair competitive environment, Cade directly advances that goal.”
In spirit and intent, CADE’s investigation into Google is similar to legislation in Australia that recognized that value is being extracted from news publishers without proportionate recompense. In Brazil, the case has been debated since 2019, but the adoption of AI Overviews helped alter the perspective of Brazilian judges. The overviews are artificially generated summaries that synthesize information from several sources and appear at the top of Google Search results. They “raise potentially more concerns,” ruled Judge Camila Cabral Pires Alves, “as they may more profoundly alter the economic function of the interface and expand the ability to retain attention within the platform's own environment.”
CADE will now investigate whether Google should be sanctioned for “alleged abusive exploitation of a dominant position, in light of the technological evolution of the conduct.” While there is perhaps a greater global appetite to regulate the impacts of AI – even the Trump administration has recently acknowledged that some oversight may be necessary – the CADE judges have been under considerable pressure from Big Tech executives to stop investigations into how their control of the market harms Brazilian businesses.
For those of us who have reported on Big Tech, this aggressive lobbying is not surprising. Companies like Google, Meta, Twitter, TikTok, Amazon, and Microsoft have long attempted to interfere in any decision or legislation that can harm their interests in Latin America. According to a joint investigation by journalists across 13 countries, Big Tech lobbyists got away with convincing legislators in Colombia to weaken a rule meant to protect children’s mental health and prevent enforcement of privacy regulations in Ecuador. It took a team of over 40 journalists from 13 countries to uncover this while reporting on the ‘Big Tech Lobby’ in the continent and across the world.
Threats by the U.S. government to retaliate against any country or international entity that sought to regulate Big Tech added another layer to an already complicated and uneven relationship with Silicon Valley. “Digital Taxes, Digital Services Legislation, and Digital Markets Regulations are all designed to harm, or discriminate against, American Technology,” wrote Donald Trump on social media. “Show respect to America and our amazing Tech Companies or consider the consequences!” During the past year, Trump’s envoys have forced dozens of governments around the world to dilute or even shelve regulation in exchange for lifting tariffs.
In “Big Tech’s Invisible Hands,” which I coordinated alongside Maria Teresa Ronderos, from CLIP (Centro Latinoamericano de Investigación Periodistica), journalists mapped a total of 75 executives that were part of “public policy” or “government relations” teams in Brazil. Tech companies utilized a “revolving door” in which public sector employees could go straight into highly paid jobs leveraging their contacts and influence. Doors opened more easily. Invitations to hangouts and events were more likely to be accepted.
Lobbying in Brazil is dialed up to eleven. The country has 163 million internet users, with over 150 million on WhatsApp, and over 120 million on YouTube, Instagram and Facebook. With AI, Brazil is a similarly large, influential market. Portuguese is the sixth most widely-spoken language in the world, with 70% of speakers based in Brazil. Which means that, if an LLM has been trained in this language, it probably used content created by millions of Brazilians going about their business of making friends, debating politics and football online. It’s not just about journalists; we are all unpaid labor for Big Tech.
In the words of Arthur Lira, the Speaker in Brazil’s Congress who filed a criminal complaint against Big Tech executives in 2023, companies adopted a variety of tactics “to shut down democratic debate and intimidate lawmakers” and defeat any attempt at using legislation to force accountability. Google, he said, used its search homepage, used by over 85% of Brazilians, to spread fear that proposed laws would “make the internet worse” or “make it harder to know what is true or false on the internet.” A report by the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro found that Google invested in ads on its own platform so extensively that it tweaked the search, prominently featuring the word “censorship” in connection to the Brazilian bill. Google also hired Michael Temer, a lawyer and former President of Brazil, to influence lawmakers and Supreme Court Justices. Of course, it was not Google alone. Meta executives, for instance, even argued that proposed legislation in Brazil could lead to the Bible being censored.
But Brazilian lawmakers, the Supreme Court, and civil society have persisted. On August 28, 2025, the “Felca Law” was approved, after a video by the influencer Felca denounced the exploitation and exposure of children on social media. The law establishes that digital platforms must take measures like verifying user age, implementing parental controls, and preventing children's exposure to adult content, gambling, and pornography. They must create reporting channels and may face fines of up to 10% of their annual revenue in Brazil.
Brazil’s president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and Donald Trump have had a testy relationship, in part because of Lula’s criticism of Big Tech. In February, at the AI Impact Summit in New Delhi, Lula called for global governance of AI, warning: “When few control the algorithms, it is not innovation, but domination. Regulating the so-called Big Tech companies is linked to the imperative of safeguarding human rights in the digital sphere, promoting information integrity, and protecting our countries’ creative industries.”
By sticking to his guns, Lula may now be seeing the tide turn. He was in the White House on May 7, and though neither he nor Trump took questions, both appeared encouraged by the meeting. “Very dynamic,” was how Trump described Lula, while Lula said he was “very, very satisfied” with how the talks went. With a general election in Brazil approaching in October, Lula will be sensitive to how the White House, as it has done in other elections, and Big Tech might offer vocal support for right wing candidates.
But his willingness to stand up to Big Tech is popular with voters. A recent poll found that 78% of Brazilians want to see tech companies being held responsible for the content they publish. Another poll found that 55% of Brazilians defend regulating Big Tech, with 43.9% against it.
And as scams, fake news, and AI slop dominate ever larger swathes of all our digital space, in Brazil, as in much of the rest of the world, the entire experience of the internet is becoming more unappealing. Big Tech, with the assistance of the U.S. government, may be succeeding in slowing down the pace of regulation and watering down the content of that regulation, but in the long run its victories might be pyrrhic. People have had enough and their governments might be forced to listen.
Ines Vilares
Isobel Cockerell
Isobel Cockerell
The post How Brazil is starting to rein in Big Tech appeared first on Coda Story.
Inequality is bad for you, and new figures in the UK show that the number of years when people can live healthy lives have fallen everywhere and furthest in the country’s poorest areas. This is partly a lingering after-effect of COVID, but is mostly a result of cuts imposed on health services by the last government. The results are dramatic, with the average person in a wealthy area expected to enjoy almost 20 years more good health than someone in a more deprived area. The situation in the United States is similar, and declines in health have also been observed in Germany, Canada and the Netherlands.
“Reducing smoking and improving diet and physical activity can delay the onset of illness and improve day-to-day wellbeing,” notes this extremely commonsensical analysis from the UK healthcare think tank The Health Foundation. “Secure work, good-quality housing and supportive local environments all influence physical and mental health.”
Being unhealthy is just terrible in all ways, and the problem is clearly getting worse, so you would expect the disrupters of our new economy to be finding ways to respond to this challenge. And at first glance, the Sam Altman-backed Retro Biosciences — with its focus on targeting “aging mechanisms to increase healthy lifespan” — looks promising. So does Altos Labs, with its mission to reverse “disease, injury, and the disabilities that can occur throughout life.” And there’s Saudi Arabia’s Hevolution, which is catalysing “the shift from lifespan to healthspan.”
And that’s before we get to the start-ups operating in a “free city” off the coast of Honduras, which has the brave approach of basically letting people do whatever medical research they like (“Prospera is a unique place where we can do such things,” says one businessman) to help drive progress towards an illness-free future.
But don’t get your hopes up. They’re not looking at ways to help people to get vaccinated, eat healthily, stop smoking or do more exercise. Instead, they’re working on gene therapy, stem cells, and other extremely expensive treatments that will only benefit people who can afford them, and who are thus already likely to be doing well. In the UK meanwhile, Genflow is also aiming to slow the ageing process in dogs, to make sure the super-rich aren’t left without their pets in this artificially prolonged future.
It’s tempting to see this as a metaphor for late-stage capitalism in the West, with its focus on the needs of the few (and their pets) rather than of society as a whole, except that we’re seeing a similar pattern in other places too. In Russia, Moscovites live longer than people from the provinces (although the picture is complicated by the relatively good health of the non-drinkers from Muslim regions), so you would have expected Vladimir Putin to be concerned about how to close that gap. But when he was chatting with Xi Jinping last year in China (where inequality has also harmed health), they were instead more focused on how to live forever.
“Human organs can be continuously transplanted, and people can live younger and younger, and even achieve immortality,” Putin said. (Three important questions: firstly, does this mean he will be president of Russia literally forever, the world’s first un-dead head of state? Secondly, are they farming people as a source of organs for him? Thirdly, does he really believe this?)
“This century, there's a chance of also living to 150,” replied Xi, who could — under that scenario — rule China for another 77 years, which is longer than he’s been alive, by which time his nation’s population could well, according to UN estimates, have halved.
I, for one, wouldn’t mind having a vote on whether this is a future I want to be a part of.
Here’s a fascinating piece of research from the Anti-Corruption Data Collective about prediction markets, looking at how often “long shot” bets on military and security matters pay off compared to what you would expect: fully 52% succeed, compared to only 14% across Polymarket as a whole.
“Government officials and members of our military being able to turn a profit on insider information incentivises corrosive corruption in public office and undermines national security,” notes David Szakonyi, Co-Founder of the Anti-Corruption Data Collective.
The analysis follows the indictment of a U.S. serviceman who made $400,000 betting on the bid to capture Nicolas Maduro in Venezuela, with 13 “yes” wagers on various aspects of the operation in December and January. And that was only a comparatively small military campaign. Just imagine how much money privileged insiders could have made in the past, if only they’d had access to prediction markets before D-Day, before the first nuclear bomb test, or before the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand in Sarajevo.
I really enjoyed this recent episode of Planet Money about prediction markets, particularly with its clear explanation that — like so much “financial innovation” of the past — they’ve not invented anything new at all; they’ve just found a clever way around regulations that previously stopped people making bets in this way.
There is fierce competition between the two leading players — Kalshi and Polymarket — although they have common ground in one area: they both employ Donald Trump Jr.
There are so many things happening in the United States at the moment that it’s hard to keep track, but I did like this analysis from David Allen Green of a particularly strange lawsuit, in which President Trump is suing the federal government for $10 billion. The judge is, unsurprisingly, concerned about a situation where the president is basically suing himself, and wants more information about how that’s going to work.
This could, however, be a whole new money-making front for the first family, and why should the Trumps stop at just $10 billion? They could presumably take the government for every penny it’s got. I’m amazed no one has done this before.
A version of this story was published in this week’s Oligarchy newsletter. Sign up here.
Oliver Bullough
Oliver Bullough
Oliver Bullough
The post Wealth is health, Insider betting & Trump will see himself in court appeared first on Coda Story.
Donald Trump and the crypto world have done well out of each other. The Trump family has made profits of several billion dollars, and ‘cryptopreneurs’ have found the United States a newly supportive environment for their products. But the crypto world is not a single entity, and there are potential differences of opinion and approach between the parts that specialise in fraud, money laundering, and speculation (as well as the small number of societally beneficial uses), and a court case between billionaire Justin Sun and the Trump family’s World Liberty Financial threatens to blow those divides wide open.
Sun is a colourful gentleman and a firm favourite of this newsletter, thanks to his efforts to essentially buy the Pitcairn Islands, his voyage into kind-of space, his consumption of a $6.2 million banana, his stewardship of the Tron blockchain, his premiership of Liberland, and his frankly adorable continued usage of “H.E.” (his excellency) as a title despite losing his Grenadian ambassadorship three years ago after being accused of fraud by the Securities and Exchange Commission.
He also had a key role in transforming Trump from cryptosceptic into cryptoenthusiast after investing millions of dollars in World Liberty Financial in late 2024, which helped to persuade the president — then running for re-election — that there was money to be made on the blockchain.
Considering the improbability of the Trump family building an actually successful crypto company, and the strong likelihood World Liberty Financial would find a way to keep investors’ money as has happened with Trump ventures in the past, quite a lot of people assumed Sun’s money was in reality more of a gift than an investment. But it appears these doubters were wrong, at any rate that’s what it says in the suit that Sun has filed in California alleging that World Liberty Financial has abused his rights.
“Mr. Sun invested $45 million to purchase $WLFI tokens from World Liberty not only because of the project’s claims that it would promote adoption of decentralized finance… but also because of the Trump family’s association with the project,” his claim states. “But as Mr. Sun unfortunately has learned, World Liberty’s operators, including Chase Herro, see the project as a golden opportunity to leverage the Trump brand to profit through fraud.”
Sun has been careful to make clear this is not an attack on the president (“Unfortunately, certain individuals on the World Liberty project team have been operating the project in a manner that goes against President Trump’s values,” he posted on X), who is, he says, being betrayed by underlings — as autocrats have always been throughout history — but he is certainly airing a lot of dirty laundry, which is likely to upset influential people.
Perhaps the most significant allegations, which World Liberty Financial denies, is that the Trump family’s company is on the verge of collapse, having paid most of its money to its owners, and that it tried to extort money from Sun to keep it in business. This is not just significant for its investors but also for America’s diplomatic ties, since Abu Dhabi has invested $2 billion via World Liberty Financial’s USD1 stablecoin, and the United States can ill-afford to further irritate its allies in the Gulf right now.
The timing of the lawsuit is interesting. It was notable that, shortly after Trump returned to the White House, the Securities and Exchange Commission paused its investigation into Sun. In March, that investigation was finally wrapped up, with Sun paying $10 million but not admitting wrong-doing, so he is perhaps no longer concerned about facing legal action himself.
Sun was also a major investor in Trump’s memecoin, but is not the only person who seems to have soured on that particularly unlovely project. One of the perks of being an investor in the token is the right to have dinner with Trump, but the value of that ticket dropped this year to just $539,000 from $3.28 million in 2025, with the Financial Times quoting an expert as calling the friendship between Trump and the crypto-world “a shotgun marriage,” which seems fair.
The Trump family has, however, made $320 million in fees from the memecoin alone, so I suspect they’re not that bothered.
There was, hard though it is to imagine, a time when Trump was just a strangely-tinted TV personality with strong views on where Barack Obama was born. And back then, in those prelapsarian days, 2014’s billion-dollar Moldovan bank fraud was a big deal. It’s great to see that mega-oligarch Vlad Plahotniuc has been jailed for 19 years for his involvement in a crime that ruined his homeland.
Moldova has struggled through the resulting period of economic, financial, diplomatic and political turmoil, and it was great to see that Viktor Orbán’s defeat in Hungary has meant it can make progress on its movement towards membership of the European Union.
The other mastermind of the bank fraud is pro-Kremlin politician Ilan Shor who was convicted and sentenced in absentia. He remains, of course, at liberty. Though his A7A5 sanctions-evading cryptocurrency has still not recovered the trading volume it had before the recent hack of the Grinex trading platform where people bought and sold it. Grinex blamed the hack on Western intelligence agencies, but Chainalysis has an interesting alternative explanation, based on the fact that A7A5 is gradually being squeezed by Western sanctions (including the latest ones from the European Union).
“Faced with mounting international pressure and a shrinking operational footprint, actors associated with Grinex could be using the guise of an alleged hack to quietly siphon liquidity and execute an exit scam,” Chainalysis suggested. I’m not saying that is what happened and to be honest, I think it’s more likely that this was the handiwork of Ukrainian hackers or standard financial criminals. I mention it, however, because Shor does have a previous record when it comes to setting up a money laundering scheme and then defrauding everyone who was foolish enough to trust him with their money.
The billion-dollar bank fraud was a clever way to profit out of the ‘Moldovan Laundromat,’ which had been allowing Russians to smuggle money out of their homeland before Shor and his co-conspirators destroyed the Moldovan banking system and stole everyone’s cash. It would be remarkable if he had basically done the same thing for a second time with his stablecoin. Crypto people call it a rug pull.
A version of this story was published in this week’s Oligarchy newsletter. Sign up here.
Oliver Bullough
Oliver Bullough
Oliver Bullough
The post Why Trump-backer Justin Sun is suing the Trumps’ firm appeared first on Coda Story.
“They’re shooting smoke at protesters.”
“They broke doors.”
“They brought an armored vehicle.”
In Aarhus, Denmark, Hemad Nazari lay in bed, refreshing his phone.
It was early evening in Iran on January 8, when the messages began arriving from Rasht, the northern city where he grew up.
Nearly two hours later, another message appeared: “We are trapped in our home.”
Then the messages stopped.
For the next eight days, Hemad heard nothing from his family.
He wasn’t the only one. Several million Iranians are part of an educated, relatively prosperous diaspora spread across the world, particularly North America and Europe, a diaspora that grew from the mass emigration of professionals and intellectuals after the 1979 Iranian revolution.
Nazari lives in Aarhus, Denmark’s second-largest city. He works for a real estate company. He’s a photographer, an active part of the local climbing community, and over the past year, he has been cycling across the world with his girlfriend.
It looks and feels like freedom. And in many ways, it is.
But Nazari hasn’t set foot in Iran for eight years. In that time, he has met his parents three times — twice in Turkey, once in Nepal.
As for now, with a nationwide internet blackout still in effect amid a flickering, faltering peace process, he can, like everyone else around the world, only watch — and wait.
Hemad Nazari left Iran in 2016, at 27. He was not at the time a political exile. He was a civil engineer with a steady job and a passport that made most borders difficult to cross. He wanted to travel. To see the world. To live somewhere else for a while.
The sanction-ridden Iranian economy was in a state of collapse. Nazari’s salary, once worth a few hundred dollars a month, shrank rapidly as the currency fell. Saving money became meaningless. Planning a future felt abstract — a concept more than a tangible goal.
So he left. He went to Vietnam first. Then Nepal, Georgia, Turkey. What began as travel, slowly turned into something more permanent.
“I didn’t leave because I thought Iran would change,” he told me. “I left because I could see that it wouldn’t.”
And it wasn’t because people were satisfied, or afraid of change. The January protests, in which many thousands of Iranians were killed, were no eruption, no sudden flaring of anger.
Since 2019, Iran has experienced three major waves of mass protest. That year, demonstrations sparked by a sudden rise in fuel prices spread rapidly across the country. The response was immediate. There was, typically, a near-total internet shutdown and, according to a Reuters investigation, as many as 1,500 people may have been killed during the crackdown. Human rights groups said more than 10,000 people were arrested during and after the protests, with many of them held incommunicado and at risk of being tortured or facing capital punishment.
The demonstrations ultimately collapsed under isolation and fear.
For Nazari, whose travels had enabled him to put distance between himself and his homeland, the 2019 protests made it apparent that Iran was no longer an option for him, no longer a place he wanted to call home. He was not a persona non grata. There was no letter. No summons. No official declaration. Nothing that could be quoted or appealed.
Instead, he had changed.
When the internet inside Iran is shut down, information can only escape through fragments: phone calls, short videos, people with rare access still intact. From abroad, Iranians like Nazari become intermediaries by default. He translated. Shared. Verified. Some of his posts were picked up by Persian-language television channels broadcasting from outside Iran, including BBC Persian and Iran International. Channels watched closely by the authorities.
Nazari did not think much of it at first. He was not an activist by profession. He did not belong to an organization. He was simply using his name, his language, his access. But others who had said less had been detained on arrival in Iran. Cartoonists. Writers. Ordinary social media users. Some disappeared into prison for years. Some emerged broken. Some did not emerge at all.
“You don’t need to be told,” Hemad says about knowing he couldn’t go back. “You understand.”
In early 2020, after Iranian forces shot down a Ukrainian passenger plane and initially denied responsibility, crowds returned to the streets. Once again, arrests followed. So did the silence.
Hemad Nazari’s activity increased again. His real name was public. His face was visible; he didn’t hide. It was a choice he made despite the risk not just to himself, but to his family. “If they can’t get to you,” he told me, “they get to the people around you.”
Since then, eight years have passed.
“It’s not that I chose not to go to Iran,” he says. “It’s that every time I tried, the door closed again.” He does not refer to it as exile. But, in a manner of speaking, he had been made stateless, effectively stopped from going home, from seeing his family, from resuming the life he knew.
By late December 2025, daily life in Iran once again became untenable. Food prices surged, paychecks were worth less every day, and families thought only about short term survival, unable to think even a month ahead.
According to Nazari, official inflation figures — though already extremely high — failed to capture the reality on the ground. By February, he told me, the cost of basic goods rivaled those in Denmark. Wages, he said, stagnated “at around $110 or $120 a month, with many people earning much less than that.” The minimum wage, the official figures from Iran’s Supreme Labor Council show, increased by 45% and still only reached $110 per month.
“The protests were fuelled by the economy,” Hemad says. “When shopkeepers and traders joined, it was a sign that frustration had reached a boiling point. But people don’t just want better prices. They want freedom. They want new leadership.”
In Rasht, his hometown in northern Iran, even families with children took to the streets in protest. “In my city, a lot of mosques are gone,” he says. “They burned them down. That tells you something.” What struck Nazari most, though, was not only who was protesting, but what they were saying, what they appeared to want.
“For the first time, the main chant on the street was the name of the prince,” he told me. “The son of the former shah: Reza Pahlavi.” Nazari is quick to stress that he himself is “principally a believer in democracy.” But the chants were telling.
“For 40 years, only loyalists dared utter the name Pahlavi. Now it’s spoken openly across all layers of society,” It was not about restoring the past. Instead, suggests Nazari, “for the first time, we had a plan.” People, he says, “were asking, ‘what happens if the regime collapses?’ And for the first time, there was an answer.”
In January, there was, as Nazari describes it, a rare sense of readiness among people he knew inside Iran. Friends who had never protested before were sending messages saying they would go. Family members spoke with a kind of cautious hope. This time, it felt different. It felt like change was possible.
Two days earlier, the son of the former shah had issued a public call for people to take to the streets on January 8 and 9 — not to follow a detailed program, but to say openly what they had long been afraid to say.
From Denmark, Nazari watched the buildup hour by hour. On January 8, as protests reached their peak, the internet went dark. The blackout was not unprecedented. Iran’s authorities had used these tactics before. Inevitably, as access disappeared, reports of mass arrests and the use of live ammunition to dispel crowds spread through the few remaining channels still connected to the outside world.
In Rasht, Nazari’s close friends sent him a video from their apartment window. Smoke drifted through the street. Shouting echoed between buildings. Gunfire cut through the noise.
During the blackout, Nazari continued to receive fragments of information — through people with Starlink terminals, through friends who still had limited access. By January 10, the informal network of activists and diaspora Iranians he was part of believed that at least 2,000 people had been killed.
Eventually, his mother managed to call him. “We’ve been trying to reach you,” she said. With international charges for calls piling up every second, they had been trying to call him for days. Since that brief call, contact has been sporadic. A snatched few minutes. And then silence again.
“People showed everything they had,” Nazari says of the protests. “They did what they could do.” He’s trying not to romanticize what happened in January, he tells me. He’s not saying, he insists, that the protests were heroic. “Iranians,” he says, “are just desperate.” As for Nazari, he tells me up until the U.S. and Israel attacked Iran, he was “constantly debating whether to go home.” Right now, he adds, “it could have severe consequences, potentially a death sentence.” But, he pauses, “if it comes to civil war, I will go. My life doesn’t matter.”
For years, Nazari believed — as many Iranians did — that pressure, negotiations, sanctions, or appeals to international institutions might eventually force the regime to change. Over time, that belief had eroded. By January, he says, “it was gone.” It’s why he supported the attacks on Iran by Israel and the U.S., the execution of Ayatollah Khamenei and key regime figures.
“I’ve been saying for years that they are not going to leave peacefully,” he says. “They will fight. If the choice is that many people die, including me and my family, but the country becomes free — and then in 10 years we are back as a people, it will be worth it.”
He stops himself.
“I don’t say this because I like death, I say it because I don’t see another way. There is no peaceful path left.”
But the hope Nazari felt when Donald Trump said the United States would respond forcefully if Iranian authorities continued killing their own people, has also now died.
On February 28, when U.S. and Israeli strikes on Iranian leadership and critical infrastructure began, some diaspora Iranians gathered to celebrate what they saw as the fall of a regime figurehead they had opposed for decades. Others responded with shock, caution, or grief, warning of what might follow.
In Denmark, where roughly 25,000 people of Iranian origin live, that divide played out in public. In Aarhus, several hundred Iranian Danes gathered in the city center with flags, music and open calls for regime change. Some thanked the U.S. and Israel for the strikes. At the same time, a pro-regime memorial for Ayatollah Khamenei in Copenhagen drew around 200 participants.
Their response to U.S. actions were playing out in a country where the broad view of the U.S. as a friend and force for good in the world had shifted sharply. In Denmark, as war in Iran broke out, people were still thinking of Greenland and Trump’s threats to annex the territory. In a January 2026 poll, 60% of Danes said they now see the U.S. as an opponent rather than an ally, while just 17% still considered it an ally.
Among Iranians, inside Denmark as in the wider diaspora, this ambivalence towards the U.S. is all too familiar. In a recent article in the Dagbladet Information, Iranian-born activist Nahid Riazi warned against celebrating a war that seemed to have little to do with emancipation for Iranians.
“Who says that war brings freedom?” she wrote. “It is us who are being hit. It is our children who are being destroyed.”
Nezari says he has heard this argument. He does not dismiss it. But, he asks, “what is the alternative?” If the war stops, he says, “and the regime stays, how do you guarantee they won’t keep killing people like they have since 1979? How do you guarantee they won’t start the street executions again?”
Trump, despite the failure of the first 21 hours of peace talks in Pakistan, continues to say the war is “very close to over,” that the Iranian government wants to make a deal. A deal, presumably, that enables them to stay in power.
The Islamic Republic may have been dealt a devastating blow, but it remains intact. Its leadership structure has shifted but not collapsed. To Nazari, that does not show resilience so much as the nature of the system itself.
He rejects the idea that the Islamic Republic functions like a government in any conventional sense. It behaves, he says, more like a cartel or an armed network — something held together not by institutions, but by force and succession. Too many powerful men remain alive, still able to operate. And a system like this, he argues, does not surrender because its center has been hit. It keeps going until every center is removed.
“Not until all the heads are cut off,” he says.
But U.S. attempts to bully the world into joining a war where the goals remain so varied and nebulous have been unsuccessful. The popularity of the war inside the U.S., even among Trump supporters, is low. The uncomfortable question now is what comes next — and whether anything has truly changed.
Still, Nazari argues that the current state of purgatory, in which the war is neither ongoing nor over, is not evidence of failure, but of what was always going to happen.
“We were not living in Iran,” he says. “We were living in a military compound with cities in between.” Even if negotiations resume, he believes something irreversible has already happened. The fact that the regime’s leaders now have to hide underground means, to him, that there is no real return to the old order.
“There’s no going back to how it was,” he says. But for now, Nazari is still in Denmark. His family is still in Iran. He still holds his phone close, hoping for news. Any news. Like Iranian exiles everywhere, and like the war itself, he is trapped in stasis, caught between distance and a sense of responsibility to his homeland — deeply involved, fundamentally powerless, yet unable to look away.
This story is part of our Age of Exile series, which explores how displacement has evolved from historical punishment into a defining condition of our time—one that reveals profound transformations in how we construct identity, maintain community, and exercise power across borders. In an era where digital connection enables presence without physical proximity, exile has become more complex, more global, and more central to understanding our world. Explore The Age of Exile series
Sara Kontar
Nadia Beard
Garry Pierre-Pierre
The post An endless purgatory: How an exiled Iranian waits and watches appeared first on Coda Story.
Viktor Orbán, Hungary’s prime minister since 2010, faces an election dogfight. Behind in the polls, he has been effectively endorsed by both the Kremlin and the White House, and a host of conservative world leaders. As wars in Iran and Ukraine exacerbate the fissures that have weakened NATO, as well as the U.S.’s relationship with the European Union, this is an election that is being followed with bated breath in Washington, Moscow, Kyiv and Brussels.
Before the elections on April 12, a scandal engulfed the Hungarian government. On leaked recordings, foreign minister Péter Szijjártó can be heard deferentially acquiescing to his Russian counterpart Sergey Lavrov and passing on information from EU meetings. Szijjártó appeared willing to help the Kremlin’s cause in Brussels, to remove oligarchs and their relatives from the EU blacklist, and to block efforts to aid Ukraine. Hungary’s advocacy for the Kremlin’s agenda culminated in its recent veto of fresh sanctions on Russia and over $100 billion in loans to Ukraine. On X, Polish prime minister Donald Tusk wrote that while “Hungary is and will be in the European Union, Victor Orbán and his foreign minister left Europe long ago.” And the Irish taoiseach Micheál Martin described Szijjárto’s calls with Lavrov as both “sinister” and “alarming.”
Szijjárto alleged that “foreign intelligence services, with the active involvement of Hungarian journalists, have been intercepting my phone calls.” It is a plot, the Hungarian government claims, to influence the upcoming polls. Orbán directly blames Ukraine for seeking to unseat his government. The opposition, led by Peter Magyar, has a healthy lead in the polls and describes the Hungarian government’s closeness to the Kremlin as “treason.” According to European intelligence reports, Moscow sent a three-person team to Hungary, overseen by Putin confidant Sergei Kiriyenko who ran an operation to interfere in the Moldovan election back in September. His tactics encompassed “vote-buying networks, troll farms, and on-the-ground influence campaigns.” A Kremlin-linked media consultancy, facing EU sanctions, was hired to dismiss Magyar as a Brussels stooge and portray Orbán as the only candidate strong enough to to be treated as an equal by world leaders, as evidenced by the strength of his relationship with Trump.
Despite a war with Iran that doesn’t appear to be going entirely to plan, the U.S. president took time out to back Orbán with enthusiasm and at considerable length on Truth Social. Trump said Orbán was “a true friend, fighter, and WINNER.” JD Vance, the vice president, is scheduled to visit Hungary on April 7, just five days before the election. And secretary of state Marco Rubio went to Hungary in February. It is now part of the U.S. National Security Strategy to work towards “cultivating resistance to Europe’s current trajectory within European nations.” To that end, notes the U.S. government, “the growing influence of patriotic European parties indeed gives cause for great optimism.” Orbán speaks MAGA’s language on immigration, traditional values and the Christian essence of Western societies. He is, like Putin and Trump, in MAGA’s view, an implacable opponent of secular, progressive, globalist politics as symbolised by Brussels.
Orbán, the longest serving current head of government in the EU, has become a figurehead for populist, nationalist movements across the world. The recent CPAC Hungary summit was attended by several of these leaders including France’s Marine Le Pen, Italian deputy prime minister Matteo Salvini, and the Netherlands’ Geert Wilders,who called Orbán “a lion on a continent led by sheep.” Latin American leaders close to Trump , including Javier Milei of Argentina and Jose Antonio Kast of Chile, also attended. Milei, who gave the longest speech at the summit, said Orbán was “a beacon for all… who refuse to accept that the West's destiny is one of managed decline.” This international network, with the United States and Russia included, has a vested ideological interest in seeing Orban continue to remain a thorn in the EU's side.
But what can Brussels do? The answer, it appears, is not much. The EU is consensus driven; it needs all its parts to act in concert, giving holdouts like Orbán considerable power to hold the whole bloc hostage. But given Orbán’s prominence as an ideologue, when Hungary blocks sanctions or delays support for Ukraine, it is more than a single nation going rogue. Alice Weidler, co-chair of the far-right AfD, the largest opposition party in the German Bundestag, was among those who spoke at the CPAC Hungary conference last month. Robert Fico, prime minister of Slovakia, is an Orbán ally. On April 19, Bulgaria will have its eighth general election in just five years. Former president Rumen Radev’s new Progressive Party leads the polls and shares Orbán’s pro-Kremlin, anti-EU inclinations.
So polarized is the Hungarian election, that right wing groups are deploying their own observers from Argentina, Austria, the Czech Republic, Kenya, Poland, Germany, Italy, Spain, Serbia, Tanzania and the United States to monitor proceedings. EU observers have said the Hungarian government controls the national media and a recent documentary alleges that a desperate government is resorting to vote-buying, gerrymandering and intimidation tactics. It’s hard to see how either Orbán or Magyar will accept the election result without protest, unless the margin is crushing. But, given Trump’s disdain for NATO allies and the EU, an Orbán election defeat would be a much-needed victory for European unity.
A version of this story was published in this week’s Coda Currents newsletter. Sign up here.
John Shattuck
Phineas Rueckert
Katia Patin
The post How much longer will Orbán be Putin and Trump’s man in Brussels? appeared first on Coda Story.
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