u/icymirss

Israel's National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir boasted on Tuesday about the construction of a facility intended for the execution of Palestinian prisoners. ...

In the video, Ben Gvir points towards what appears to be an active construction site and says the complex will include "viewing chambers where crime victims will be able to come and watch" Palestinians being hanged.

"We are fulfilling what we promised," the minister added.

Ben Gvir also celebrated what he described as a victory over his opponents, saying those who "ridiculed" and "giggled" at his plan to execute Palestinians could now see that "this place is starting to be built". ...

Human rights groups have long accused Israel of pursuing a de facto policy of executing Palestinians.

In March, before the death penalty law was passed, Yuli Novak, executive director of Israeli human rights group B'Tselem, said Israel "already kills Palestinians systematically and faces no demands for accountability".

B'Tselem has said that under Ben Gvir's leadership, IPS detention facilities have become "a network of torture camps where inmates are subjected to continuous abuse and violence".

The group added that the death penalty law "adds another official killing mechanism to the existing practices".

As of June, at least 104 Palestinian prisoners have died in Israeli custody since 2023.

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Israeli airstrikes in Gaza on Wednesday killed at least ten Palestinians, as the IDF continues its constant violations of the US-backed ceasefire deal despite the US announcing a Hamas disarmament plan.

Nine of the victims were killed by an Israeli strike against a police station in Gaza City, marking the second large-scale massacre in two days. On Tuesday, the IDF bombed Gaza City's crowded seaport, killing at least six people, including a child....

The ramped-up Israeli attacks in Gaza came after Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu met with his long-time family friend, Jared Kushner, who has been leading the Trump administration's efforts on Gaza. According to Israeli media, the meeting ended with an agreement that Israel would continue striking Gaza even though Hamas said it was committed to the US-proposed disarmament plan, which Netanyahu has rejected.

The strike on the police station on Wednesday killed multiple police officials, including Faten Al-Sahhar, the head of Gaza's women's police department....

A separate Israeli strike killed a Palestinian in the Nuseirat refugee camp in central Gaza. Israel claimed without evidence that it targeted a "Hamas platoon commander," but regardless of who Israel targets, each strike is a violation of the October 2025 ceasefire deal.

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Last week Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent promised more severe Iran sanctions...

The 'next week' is here but no new measures have been announced.

Rumors has it that the U.S. would apply secondary sanctions on anyone buying Iranian oil. China would have been the prime target. But the Chinese have the means to retaliate. Additionally Trump is hoping for a visit by President Xi next month which, the Chinese probably let know, is unlikely to happen if he were to introduce new sanctions.

Bessent may also be busy with other problems.

Over the last six months crude future prices were obviously manipulated. The large physical deficit on the market due to the blockade of the Strait of Hormuz should have led to much higher oil prices. But talked down by the administration the prices hardly budged.

Crude prices are still too low but product prices, diesel and jet fuel, are reaching new heights. The 'crack price' -- i.e. the difference between raw crude oil and diesel/heating oil -- has reached an unprecedented spread of more than $100.

The average price of diesel in the U.S. is now at $5.47/gal.

As diesel is the main cost for transportation its high price will soon leak into all other products. It is a main source of inflation.

There is also this tiny issue Bessent will have to (but lacks the means to) tackle...

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Murdering foreign leaders is not something any American president should ever do. How can the US uphold its claim to be a champion of laws and political decency while committing murder and sabotage?

Alas, Donald Trump is not the first US president to stoop so low. The Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations enlisted gangsters in attempts to remove the irksome Cuban strongman, Fidel Castro. Sixty-eight or more years later, the US is still trying to strangle long-suffering Cuba by blockading its food and oil and sabotaging its electrical system.

How did the US get into this sordid business? The US government has been largely usurped by Israel's extremist far right government and its American fifth column -- what the late renowned Israeli journalist Uri Avnery used to call 'Jewish fascists.' Most of the US media dares not use this term, however appropriate. Israel's current rightwing government has fallen completely in thrall to extreme rightist groups, many in league with US-based ultra-Zionist groups agitating for an ever-greater Israel from the Nile to the Euphrates. ...

Violent nationalism is a poison. Unfortunately, many Israelis who are a very gifted, intelligent people, are inebriated by the same kind of toxic nationalism that gripped parts of Europe in the last century. As the far-sighted Rabbi Elmer Berger warned in the 1950's, the Arab-Israeli conflict would one day make its way into North America and infest American politics. This is happening today as the powerful Israel lobby and its minions in Congress and the media are coming under attack by Americans angry at being led around by the nose by Israel's extremist regime whose power base is the wild-eye settler movement. ...

Now, the world knows that the US went into an unproved, unjustified multi-billion war against Iran. Likely to stop Israel from releasing blackmail information from its agent Jeffrey Epstein and his highly placed friends and fifth column in Washington and New York.

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The Pentagon is evaluating its military footprint in the Middle East in an early sign of the Iran war's potential to transform the U.S. presence in the region, according to eight people, including officials and others familiar with the matter.

One of the key areas the Defense Department is assessing is whether to pull back troops from the Persian Gulf, where America's large overseas military bases have been battered by months of Iranian strikes, two people familiar with the ongoing analysis said.

The damage to these facilities has prompted a once-in-a-generation chance for the Pentagon to reconsider its presence in the region. The Defense Department has already signaled that it might not rebuild its bases...

People familiar with the Pentagon's analysis said the issue is likely to intensify a debate between camps within the administration that support military interventions and others that have argued the Pentagon should curtail some of its security commitments to refocus on defending the U.S. homeland or deterring more powerful adversaries, like China.

The discussions have also involved Adm. Bradley Cooper, the head of U.S. Central Command, who supports deliberations about potentially moving U.S. troops west from the Persian Gulf, said a U.S. official. ...

Before the start of the war in February, U.S. Central Command evacuated many of its bases, judging them too vulnerable to Iranian missile and drone attacks to maintain normal staffing levels. Some of the shifts away from the major Gulf facilities might last after the war, a person familiar with the posture adjustments said. ...

"The war really did highlight the vulnerability ... of U.S. forces in the region," said Michael Ratney, a former diplomat who served as the U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia and the deputy chief of mission in Qatar.

Moving troops and equipment further west to Jordan, Israel or the Red Sea coast of Saudi Arabia could help alleviate some of the pressure, he argued, while noting the added distance wasn't a "perfect solution to this problem."

Iran has already demonstrated it can strike faraway targets in Jordan and Israel. Last month an Iranian attack on Jordan killed four U.S. service members.

Tehran's retaliatory attacks against bases in the Persian Gulf plunged the region into crisis and are stoking frustration among core U.S. allies there, who feel they were not properly consulted by the Trump administration before starting the war. ...

More hawkish voices in Washington have sought to influence the Pentagon's planning by proposing the movement of U.S. troops in the region to Israel. A report by the pro-Israel group Jewish Institute for National Security of America in March called for more U.S. military assets to be moved to Israel's Ovda Airbase.

This winter, in the run-up to Operation Epic Fury, Washington sent F-22 Raptor fighter jets to the base in a sign of deepening U.S.-Israel military relations.

There is disagreement within the Trump administration over that recommendation given concerns that an expanded U.S. presence there could pose a counterintelligence vulnerability amid the Pentagon's growing concern about Israeli espionage.

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[Rep. Randy Fine (R-FL)] is a vocal Zionist who has repeatedly called for the total destruction of Gaza, has dehumanized Palestinians, has said all Muslims must be "destroyed," and dismissed the deaths of innocent non-combatants such as women and children. ...

When a Twitter/X user shared a photo of a dead baby... in June 2021 with Fine, then a member of the Florida State House, asking how he sleeps at night, Fine responded: "Quite well, actually! Thanks for the pic!"

"Thanks" for showing him a dead child.

Fine has called to attack Gaza's schoolchildren in the name of targeting Hamas...

He's described Palestinians as less than animals and used it as justification for the blanket bombing of Gaza; implied mass extermination of Palestinians and called for genocide more times than I can probably chronicle here.

Targeting an ethnic or religious population en masse for his own political agenda.

There's a name for that.

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A meeting between Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and President Trump's son-in-law, Jared Kushner, a long-time family friend of the Israeli leader, ended with an agreement that Israel will continue so-called "targeted strikes" in Gaza, Haaretz reported on Monday.

The reported agreement to allow Israel to continue attacks in Gaza comes despite Kushner holding a meeting a day earlier with Hamas officials, who said they were committed to the disarmament plan announced by President Trump and the so-called "Board of Peace." ...

President Trump said that Israel should "stop striking Gaza" because Hamas agreed to "lay down their weapons," comments that Hamas welcomed, though the results of the Kushner-Netanyahu meeting suggest Trump isn't serious about putting pressure on Israel to halt all of its attacks. ...

Israel's attacks in Gaza since the so-called ceasefire deal was signed in October 2025 have killed at least 1,265 Palestinians and wounded 4,198...

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America's emergency oil stockpile has dropped to its lowest level in 40 years, with experts warning that ongoing withdrawals for the war with Iran could permanently damage the underground caverns holding the crude.

The warnings arrive as American drivers face unprecedented gas prices for late summer. Today's AAA National Average for a gallon of regular gasoline sits at $4.07, marking the highest levels on record for mid-August.

Concerns over the physical limits of the Strategic Petroleum Reserve center on the unique geology of its storage network. The crude is held within 60 salt caverns thousands of feet below ground at four sites across Texas and Louisiana.

To extract crude, operators pump fresh water into the bottom of a cavern to force oil up to pipeline intakes. However, petroleum engineering professor Siddharth Misra of Texas A&M University told CNBC that repeated rapid drawdowns wash away salt walls. ...

Misra noted that while 70 million barrels is the absolute threshold needed to keep intake pipes under oil rather than water, "the practical operational floor for the crude inventory is between 250 million and 300 million barrels." ...

The reserve was designed to handle five full drawdowns over its lifespan. Instead, it has undergone dozens of cycles over 40 years. ...

Department of Energy data released Monday showed SPR inventories dropping below 300 million barrels for the first time since the initial fill in the early 1980s. The current release of 172 million barrels will leave the reserve at roughly 243 million barrels upon completion.

Market analysts at Rapidan Energy estimated the reserve's functional minimum sits around 170 million barrels, after which "cavern integrity and pumping infrastructure limitations argue against further draws." ...

Energy Department officials previously told the accountability office they were "holding the SPR infrastructure together with 'Band-Aids,' and that it is uncertain how long they will hold."

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Vessel traffic through the Strait of Hormuz fell 19.5% last week, with 95 crossings recorded compared with 118 the previous week, according to global ship-tracking and maritime analytics service MarineTraffic.

Daily traffic declined sharply, from a peak of 19 crossings on August 11 to just three on August 16, according to MarineTraffic data.

Of the 95 crossings recorded last week, 51 vessels used the Iranian Unilateral Scheme, while 44 were classified as having an undetermined route. No crossings were recorded through the Hormuz traffic separation scheme or the Omani route.

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Iranian Foreign Minister Seyed Abbas Araghchi has strongly condemned a drone attack targeting the office of Iraqi Kurdistan Region Prime Minister Masrour Barzani, describing the incident as reckless and urging Kurdish authorities to remain vigilant against false-flag plots designed to sow discord between neighbors.

In a post on X on Monday, Araghchi wrote, "Nothing justifies the reckless attack on PM Barzani's office. Kurdish friends should be vigilant against false-flag ploys to sow discord between neighbors." ...

Earlier, Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Esmaeil Baqaei also addressed the matter, calling the attack a "highly suspicious development."

Baqaei said Iran condemns the reported strike on Barzani's office in Erbil and believes it could be a false-flag operation intended to incriminate the Islamic Republic.

Reports earlier on Monday indicated that two explosive-laden drones targeted the personal office of Barzani and the residence of the head of the Kurdistan Region's Security and Intelligence Agency in the Pirmam district of Erbil. No casualties were reported.

The Kurdistan Counter-Terrorism Service claimed the drones had been launched from Iranian territory, an assertion that Iranian officials have firmly rejected.

A senior Iranian source told Lebanon's Al-Mayadeen network that the incident was another example of a false-flag operation and that Iran had no connection to it. The source emphasized that Iranian military operations are always officially and openly announced...

In a telephone conversation with his Iraqi counterpart Fuad Hussein, Araghchi expressed surprise at the attack and stated that he had no information indicating the drones originated from Iranian territory.

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Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) on Monday rejected US President Donald Trump's claim that his administration has maintained a backchannel with Iranian officials, as diplomatic efforts to end the conflict between the two countries remained deadlocked. ...

"There are no talks between IRGC officials and Americans," [IRGC spokesperson Brigadier General Hossein] Mohammadi told the state-run Tasnim news agency.

His comments came hours after Trump told Fox News that his administration had been in contact with members of the IRGC and said Washington was in no rush to reach an agreement with Tehran. ...

Mohammadi said the IRGC had no intention of negotiating with Washington, citing what he described as repeated US violations of agreements and broken promises.

"This lie from Trump is simply fantasies that he is experiencing due to delusions and nightmares resulting from defeat and desperation in the war," Al Jazeera quoted him as saying.

Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Esmaeil Baghaei separately said the expiry of the MoU was effectively meaningless because of what he called "gross" US violations. ...

The Iran-US MoU, signed in June, expired on Monday after efforts to secure a broader agreement to end the conflict failed to make progress.

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Underneath a painting of Jesus and his disciples, Sandra Basir brought out what she and her husband, Roland, now keep to protect their home: a couple of fire extinguishers.

They keep them because the last time Israeli settlers set fire to a neighbour's car outside their house, no one else came....

The couple's nightly routine in their Palestinian Christian town is now similar to the majority-Muslim rural Palestinian communities besieged by settler attacks and nighttime military raids for years. Sandra checks the doors more than once before bed. They got a dog to stay outside to alert them of any trespassers. Sandra is, by her own description, always half-awake -- listening for whoever might be coming for her four small children while they sleep.

Their seven-year-old son has stopped playing outside, Sandra says, and for months, the little boy told his father not to go to work -- scared he might not return. "That's what our life has become," says Sandra, who was on the verge of tears throughout the conversation. "A child that age should just be playing."

For more than 20 years, Roland built up a stone quarry and concrete-block factory on the edge of town, investing an estimated $5m in the business. After employing 40 local Palestinians, he has found his life's work snatched by marauding settlers, both armed adults and some barely teenagers.

In the past three years -- and with the situation deteriorating even more severely this past year -- he and his workers were frequently chased off by settlers at gunpoint, with his quarry's heavy-machinery equipment set on fire. The most brazen attack came in March, when Roland says some 30 to 40 settlers stormed the quarry site in a coordinated mass incursion. Videos and photos show them raising Israeli flags over the grounds and performing prayers on the land. Before leaving, they smashed his office, destroyed electrical panels, and pulled cameras from the walls.

Roland documented everything on video, filed complaints with the liaison office, the police, and every institution he could reach. All his efforts to mobilise help to protect his land, however, were for naught. The settlers were back the next day, with their attacks continuing ever since.

Meanwhile, Roland showed Al Jazeera donation pages online for the settlers that he says carried out the attacks. He also alleges that stone taken from his land was registered under a settler's name and resold.

This past week, he finally stopped trying to continue operations, leaving his stone quarry business all but abandoned.

"They've taken the quarry, taken the factory, taken the land," Roland says. "What's left for them to take? My children? My house?" ...

Madees Khoury, who runs the Taybeh Brewery her family founded in 1994, lived in Taybeh through the second Intifada, the Arab Spring, and every war on Gaza -- but none of it ever really touched the quaint town filled with centuries-old churches, well-built homes, and street-corner statues of Mother Mary and Jesus....

The town is traditionally identified with biblical Ephraim -- the place Jesus is said to have withdrawn to before his final journey to Jerusalem -- and is the last Palestinian town left in the West Bank whose population is entirely Christian, home now to roughly 1,200 people and to the ruins of the fifth-century Church of St George, one of the oldest Christian sites in the Holy Land.

Things began to change as Israeli settlers, after driving Bedouin and herding communities from areas to the east, increasingly turned their attention to the hills around Taybeh itself, commencing attacks within the town last year. Mayor Suleiman Khourieh estimates roughly seven settler outposts now surround the town -- four or five, by his count, sitting directly on Taybeh's municipal land. ...

The newest outpost, established just last week, sits on the western edge of town, in Area B of the West Bank -- nominally under Palestinian civil administration, though security in these hills has long since fallen to whoever is willing to enforce it on the ground.

On his own land in Area B, Mayor Khourieh has watched a settler take over his vineyard and its well over the past month, following the establishment of a settler outpost nearby...

Fifteen families have already left Taybeh in the past two years, according to Father Bashar, along with dozens of individuals who left parents behind and moved on alone, mostly to the United States and Europe.

And yet almost no one who spoke to Al Jazeera described leaving as a real option for themselves. "Where is there to go?" asks Roland Basir, reiterating a common refrain heard across the West Bank these days.

"This land is ours," says Father Bashar. "We cannot leave it easily ... we want to resist by staying rooted in this land, to be part of this land, for dignity, for security, for peace, and for justice."

Mayor Khourieh, whose own vineyard now sits behind a settler's fence, put it in starker terms. "We are Palestinian Christians," he says. "We have been in this town since the Lord Christ walked in it. This is our town. We will not leave it. Even if we die, we'll be buried in it, because it's holy ground."

These days, Father Bashar frames the threats to this bastion of the wider Palestinian Christian community in the context of the suffering that Jesus endured. "For me, our cause, our problems, are the cross we have to carry on our shoulders," he says.

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The Wall Street Journal has unearthed a big secret! ...

Funny how this blogger, without any contacts to 'Arab intelligence officials' (i.e. Israeli sources), could read Iranian media and publish a similar finding two days before the WSJ's 'secret'...

The reason Trump is giving for reducing the military maneuvers with South Korea is not serious. No country but Israel has seriously joined the U.S. in its War on Iran.

There is something else going on.

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Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir has called for Israel to kill 30 to 40 Palestinians every night in Gaza...

Ben Gvir made the comments when discussing the reduction in Israeli attacks in Gaza, though the IDF hasn't fully stopped its strikes and continues to violate the US-backed October 2025 ceasefire deal. ...

"I think targeted assassinations should be carried out in Gaza, taking down 30 to 40 every night. Not just those who pose an immediate threat -- there are people there who are not worthy of life. They shouldn't live. They're not even people," he added.

Ben Gvir, leader of the Jewish Power party, is known as an outspoken proponent of the ethnic cleansing of Gaza and the establishment of Jewish settlements in the Palestinian territory, views that he reaffirmed in the podcast interview.

"I see all of Gaza as ours," he said....

While often portrayed as a fringe figure, Ben Gvir has significant influence in the government and holds a powerful position, as he oversees police and prisons, where nearly 100 Palestinians have died since October 7, 2026, due to increasingly worse conditions, which Ben Gvir has boasted about implementing.

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Naval families with loved ones deployed for months on US warships amid the Iran war have reacted with fury to Donald Trump and the defense secretary Pete Hegseth's dismissal of their concerns about the extreme pressures and dire conditions they are enduring.

The Guardian has talked to three naval families who have been following the physical and mental stresses bearing down on their relatives with mounting alarm. The families, with loved ones on board the USS Abraham Lincoln and USS Tripoli, all spoke anonymously for fear of retribution against their active duty relatives.

They spoke of insufficient nourishment that has led to close relatives losing 20-30lbs in weight since they were sent to the Middle East five months ago, leaving one sailor "emaciated", according to his mother. They spoke also of low-quality drinking water and scarce mental health counseling and support despite the intense burden of being at sea for months on end without making land.

The USS Abraham Lincoln, an aircraft carrier with more than 5,000 sailors and marines onboard, has been at sea for nearly nine months, having begun its deployment in November. There have been reports of multiple suicide attempts including jumping overboard.

When Trump was asked on Friday whether naval families were worried about conditions on board, he replied: "No, they're not." He said that the Lincoln's deployment, now in its ninth month, was "not nearly long enough".

Earlier, Hegseth also swatted away families' concerns, saying that the reality onboard the Lincoln had been "completely misrepresented".

The sister of a Lincoln crew member in his late 30s said that the remarks made her want to grab Trump and Hegseth and shake them. "I grew up in a United States where you have to be very respectful of the military, as they're making the ultimate sacrifice and protecting their country, and now you have the commander-in-chief and defense secretary dismissing their experiences and calling them liars. I'm really angry," she said. ...

The sister of the Lincoln crew member shared text messages she has received in recent days from her brother. In one he said that "the water is so bad that they took out the scuttlebutts", referring to the drinking containers on the carrier. ...

She said that in the months of deployment her brother had lost 20lbs. An even more extreme picture was painted by the mother of a sailor on board the USS Tripoli, an amphibious assault ship with 3,500 sailors and marines from the 31st Marine Expeditionary Unit onboard.

The Tripoli was redeployed from its base in Sasebo, Japan, on 11 March, and returned to base last month. Over the five months of active deployment, the mother's son lost more than 30lbs in weight.

The mother, herself a naval veteran with six years service, showed the Guardian photos of her child before and after deployment. Before he had a fleshy round face and muscular arms; after, in a photo in which he is seen holding a placard saying "The wait is over, welcome home daddy," he is markedly skinny with thin arms and scrawny neck.

"He's emaciated," the mother said. "This is so insane -- he didn't deserve this. When I saw that photo I was livid. It should not have gotten this far." ...

The mother said that her son had been on many deployments with the navy. This was the first time that he had ever indicated a lack of food and other basic supplies. "Something genuinely wrong has happened," she said.

As warships eventually return to base after historically long deployments in the Middle East, there are growing concerns about long-term consequences of inadequate supplies. Janessa Goldbeck, a Marine Corps veteran and CEO of the advocacy group Vet Voice Foundation, said that there was "longer-term damage to the sailors and marines serving, and their families waiting for them at home".

She added: "You cannot keep extending deployments, grinding down crews, and gaslighting families without destroying trust in the institution and its leaders."

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Guided-missile destroyer USS Benfold (DDG-65) spent four days in the South China Sea without power after an engineering failure, USNI News has learned.

Benfold suffered the engineering casualty resulting in a loss of power last month, Cmdr. Matthew Comer, spokesperson with U.S. 7th Fleet, told USNI News in a statement.

"On July 24, 2026, while conducting routine operations in the Indo-Pacific, Arleigh Burke-class guided-missile destroyer USS Benfold (DDG 65) reported an engineering casualty involving its generators, causing a loss of power," reads the statement. "There were no injuries to the crew, who demonstrated resilience, grit, professionalism and unwavering steadiness in their response."

The loss of power meant sailors were without galley services, toilets and air conditioning. Potable water was also affected, Comer said. He did not respond to a question about how sailors handled waste. ...

Contractor tugboats towed Benfold to Subic Bay where it was met by personnel from the Ship Repair Facility -- Japan Regional Maintenance Center on July 28, with crew receiving contracted lodging off the ship the next day. Power was restored on July 30, Comer said. ...

Benfold, which had been sailing with the George Washington Carrier Strike Group,... did not transit the Malacca Strait with the other ships of the GW CSG, which are likely heading toward the Middle East.

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Internal records obtained by WIRED reveal how, for years, United States Customs and Border Protection employees and contractors were accused of abusing sensitive government databases for reasons that had nothing to do with their jobs. The records contain hundreds of allegations of misuse of law enforcement databases, including federal agents querying data to look up romantic interests, monitor family members, expose various personal information and, in some cases, provide intelligence to suspected smugglers or drug-trafficking organizations.

Acquired through Freedom of Information Act requests to CBP's Office of Professional Responsibility and the Department of Homeland Security's Office of Inspector General, the records reveal the breadth of alleged database abuse by CBP employees spanning more than a decade. As immigration and border authorities expand their surveillance through facial recognition, license plate readers, mobile-device searches, and commercially purchased location information generated by ordinary apps, the sheer range of these records, which date from 2009 through 2022, highlights how US residents can be -- and have been -- targeted by federal government employees with access to highly sensitive data and powerful tools.

In one case, a CBP officer allegedly used government databases to contact a flight attendant. In another, an officer was accused of pulling information from trusted-traveler applications to ask people out. Other CBP employees were accused of providing border-crossing data to someone involved in a "heated divorce." And yet another DHS employee allegedly used controversial ad-tech-derived location data to track several coworkers' cell phones -- which appears to be the first known internal abuse case involving DHS use of ad-tech-derived mobile location data. ...

The 2009-2022 dataset shines light on what officers did with the access they already had prior to gaining even more access. According to CBP, digital surveillance tools are supposed to help officers screen travelers and investigate crimes more efficiently. The records, however, reveal how, in case after case, sensitive data collected for law-enforcement purposes was weaponized against private individuals. ...

The records land at a moment when immigration authorities have more visibility into private citizens' lives than ever before. Over the past two decades, DHS has built one of the largest surveillance systems in the world -- an extensive set of databases that store everything from fingerprints to travel records to case files. ...

Then there is Palantir's Investigative Case Management system, which serves as a case-management platform for Homeland Security Investigations. CBP taps into ICM's shared case files data through its links to CBP's in-house identity-management systems and joint operations with ICE. CBP also draws on data from FALCON, a Palantir analytics tool, to search and link records pulled from across government and commercial sources. (Although direct access to FALCON is officially largely restricted to ICE officers, data-sharing across DHS departments allows federal agents to access many of the same databases.) Agents also have access to commercial tools like Thomson Reuters' Consolidated Lead Evaluation and Reporting, which repackages disparate data sources like utility records and license-plate data, originally collected by private companies, into a surveillance tool for law enforcement.

A newer tool, DHS's Mobile Fortify, is a facial-recognition app deployed on agents' phones and tied to a number of databases containing hundreds of millions of records, including passport photos. Released in May of 2025, Mobile Fortify has already drawn reports of being used against people engaged in constitutionally protected activity, like protest.

The databases that agents allegedly misused are only part of their toolkit; CBP also taps mobile-extraction software from Cellebrite, Grayshift, and Magnet Forensics to pull data straight off a person's phone.

Commercial telemetry data has become one of the most controversial forms of law-enforcement surveillance because it lets the government buy access to location information generated by ordinary apps, rather than obtaining it directly from phone companies with a court-approved search warrant, effectively circumventing Fourth Amendment protections....

A 2023 DHS inspector general report found that CBP, ICE, and the US Secret Service had bought and used this kind of data without fully complying with department privacy rules or developing sufficient policies for its use. When WIRED filed a FOIA request with the Office of Inspector General for the case file behind the report, the agency handed over an ICE Office of Professional Responsibility file instead. The document describes an employee who allegedly "inappropriately utilized private software to track the location of several coworkers' cell phones." The file, which has not previously been reported, appears to be the first known internal abuse case involving commercial location-tracking software used by DHS. ...

WIRED previously found that ICE employees had been investigated for abusing access to sensitive government databases to look up ex-lovers and coworkers, run searches for friends and neighbors, and in some cases share protected information with others. ...

Driven by an increasingly privatized approach, the government's surveillance apparatus is becoming unprecedentedly omnipresent...

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Israel has launched a new campaign to influence how large-language models like ChatGPT are answering questions about Gaza and the Israel Defense Forces amid declining public support for the country across the U.S. political spectrum.

French PR firm Havas Media, which runs the lion's share of Israel's FARA-registered foreign influence work in the U.S., appears to have stood up an "institute" aimed at feeding LLMs positive information about Israel via one of its subcontractors, boutique ad agency Piro, Inc.

In a trove of FARA documents filed with the Justice Department in the last week -- which have not previously been reported -- Piro disclosed that over a dozen articles on the Hanover Institute for Public Policy's website were part of a $100,000 campaign focused on "the creation and dissemination of factual, source-supported informational materials intended to educate the U.S. public regarding Israel and related issues through publicly distributed content."

The institute's website features dozens of "data reports" with no named authors, each of which features questions like "Is the IDF the World's Most Moral Army?" and "Is There a Policy of Starvation in Gaza?" -- a telltale sign that the articles are designed to feed data to LLMs. The site's "About" page says "The Hanover Institute for Public Policy studies the inputs fueling antisemitism in the United States, and publishes what the evidence shows," adding that its unidentified founder "traces this work to a moment in childhood."

It appears to be working: ChatGPT and Perplexity both cited the Hanover Institute's material in response to neutral tests run by PI, referring to the site's content on Gaza, anti-Zionism and antisemitism.

The site also features a disclosure tucked at the bottom: "This material is distributed by Piro, Inc. on behalf of Havas Media Germany GmbH on behalf of the Israel Government Advertising Agency (LaPam)." Technical markers reviewed by PI indicate that the site was built or hosted using Res, a Seattle-based AI startup that boasts about its work helping clients like Nike and Intel get recommended by AI models. An identical version of the institute's homepage hosted on Res' site became unavailable after PI reached out to the company for comment.

It's not the first time Israel has leaned on the Havas network to try and influence chatbots. Havas disclosed hiring former Trump campaign manager Brad Parscale last year via his firm Clock Tower X to undertake a $46.5 million influence campaign that included "deployment of websites and content to deliver GPT framing results" on behalf of Israel, per FARA filings. ...

Res CEO and Founder Hai Tran said in an email that his role in the project is "disclosed in the short-form registration filed with the Department of Justice, which is publicly available." Unlike Clock Tower X's filings, Piro's FARA filings do not explicitly cite influencing LLMs as a goal of the foreign influence campaign.

Havas Media and the Hanover Institute did not respond to a request for comment; nor did spokespersons for LaPam and the Israeli embassy.

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The future of Israel-Lebanon talks were already in significant doubt last week, with Israel openly talking about a long-term occupation and the talks apparently adjourned until September. Saturday's attack adds substantially to the questions.

On Saturday, Israeli forces attacked and killed at least 11 people and wounded 19 others. Women and children were among the slain in the attacks, which targeted a civilian home in Ansar and a two-storey building in Deir al-Zahrani. ...

On Sunday, the hawkish Israeli National Security Minister said it was time for Israel to stop settling for merely "neutralizing threats" and that Israel should instead just "crush Beirut" outright.

Defense Minister Israel Katz defending the Saturday killings as a retaliation against Hezbollah over a drone strike which injured occupation soldiers [who were attempting to seize the Ali al-Taher hills in southern Lebanon] earlier on Saturday....

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So far the U.S. has lost all phases of its war on Iran. ...

While the heavily manipulated future crude prices hardly budge, the price of real products, diesel and jet fuel, are steadily increasing. U.S. refineries are making record profits while running at full capacity. They try to avoid the yearly maintenance shutdown, a necessity that will later come back to bite them.

The U.S. has no answer to Iran's blockade of the Strait. Its Air Force lacks the munitions to hold down Iranian air defenses and to hunt its ballistic missiles. Its Navy lacks the numbers to keep the Strait open. Its army is too small to launch the necessary land campaign. Its allies are strictly against an escalation of the conflict. Iran's revenge to any renewed U.S. bombing campaign would devastate the infrastructure of its Gulf allies.

The U.S. is thus resorting to economic pressure. Its trying to uphold a sea blockade against Iran. And yesterday Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent announced a new economic war campaign...

The Secretary did not explain how the new campaign would differ from Trump's failed 2018 campaign of "maximum pressure". Trump had renewed that campaign in February 2025 without it showing any result. ...

Iran's economy is mostly autarkic. It produces enough food, energy and weapons to survive a long campaign. It has lots of land based lines of communication. And, unlike Iraq in the 1990s, it can shot back.

When Trump attempted his maximum pressure campaign Iran did little to defend itself. The situation has changed since. Any renewed economic war campaign against Iran is likely to be countered by active measures.

Iran has announced that it is new strategy is to go offensive...

Its options to do so?

It could finally start to directly attack those U.S. ships which try to blockade the country. It could launch drones against any place in the Middle East that houses U.S. military. There are also many U.S. companies which operate in the Gulf countries.

A containment strategy assumes that Iran, or any of its friends and allies, will not hit back or take aggressive counter measures. It also presumes that the U.S. can sustain a lack of hydrocarbon for a longer time than its experts think.

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