Witkoff and Kushner: Flight Canceled ✈️❌

Trump canceled the trip by his envoys Witkoff and Kushner to Islamabad due to the Iranian position in peace negotiations. 🇮🇷🤝🚫

The envoys had been expected to meet with Iranian Foreign Minister Araghchi, in a trip designed to break a diplomatic stalemate and build momentum for a deal.

I see no point of sending them on an 18-hour flight in the current situation [of the negotiations]. It's too long. We can do it just as well by telephone. 📞

Asked whether it means he is going to resume the war, Trump said: "No. It doesn't mean that. We haven't thought about it yet." ⚔️🚫

"We have all the cards. We are not going to go there to sit around talking about nothing." 🃏

Trump later told reporters Saturday afternoon that the meeting with the Iranians wasn't going to happen until Tuesday, and that therefore he thought it was a waste of time to travel to Pakistan. 🕰

He also said a counteroffer Araghchi gave the Pakistanis on Saturday wasn't good enough. 📄🚫

"They gave us a paper that should have been better and interestingly the minute I cancelled it, within 10 minutes, we got a new paper that was much better (…) they offered a lot but not enough," Trump said. ⏱️📝

While Trump extended the ceasefire with Iran earlier this week, the diplomatic efforts haven't made any progress in recent days. 🕊⏸️

U.S. officials had said Iran's divided factions had a short window to come together on an offer. 🪟👥

"There is tremendous infighting and confusion within their 'leadership.' Nobody knows who is in charge, including them," Trump said in a Truth Social post Saturday after calling off the trip. 😵‍💫📢

Araghchi met on Saturday in Islamabad with Pakistan's prime minister, army commander, and foreign minister, who have been mediating between the sides. 🇵🇰🤝

But the talks ended with no significant progress. Araghchi left Islamabad without committing to meet Witkoff and Kushner if they traveled to Pakistan. 🚶‍♂️🚫

The Iranian foreign minister expressed in his meetings that Iran demands the lifting of the U.S. naval blockade as a pre-condition for talks. ⚓️🚫

About an hour after Araghchi left Islamabad, Trump decided to cancel the trip. ⏳❌

"Have yet to see if the U.S. is truly serious about diplomacy," Araghchi said in a post on X thanking the Pakistanis for their efforts. 🤔🇺🇸

What comes next isn't clear, though Trump allies called on the president to continue pressure on the Iranians — even if that means resuming military operations. 🤷‍♂️🔥

#witkoff #kushner #araghchi #trump #flight

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📰 A Dinner, a Gunman, and a Country on Edge

The White House Correspondents’ dinner turned into a security scare after gunfire broke out at the Washington Hilton and Secret Service rushed Trump and senior officials off the stage.

Investigators now say the suspect likely targeted the president and other members of the administration, and Trump says the man left behind a “manifesto.”

That is the grim part. A formal Washington ritual built on irony and media vanity became another reminder that political violence in the United States is no longer a background threat — it is now part of the room.

The security details matter too. The suspect reportedly ran past a checkpoint carrying knives, a shotgun, and a handgun, which is exactly the sort of breach that turns “everything worked” into a statement people say when they are hoping nobody asks what failed first.

Trump is alive, the ballroom was evacuated, and investigators are still piecing together motive. But the broader picture is already clear: the country’s elite political stage is increasingly indistinguishable from its threat environment.

So the dinner’s punchline is gone. What remains is a nation where even a black-tie event now comes with security theater, live gunfire, and a manifesto in the dark.

#Trump #Washington #security #politicalviolence #WhiteHouse #USnews

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📰 Bennett and Lapid: A Merger, Not a Revolution

Bennett and Lapid are finally doing what Israeli opposition politics has been threatening to do for months: stop pretending fragmentation is a strategy and fuse their parties into one list led by Bennett.

The move is sold as “repair,” unity, and national salvation, but it is also a cold admission that neither man can beat Netanyahu alone.

That is the real story. This is not a grand ideological synthesis. It is an emergency merger between two leaders who know the next election will punish vanity, duplication, and overlap — especially when the center and the soft-right keep stepping on each other’s toes.

The Likud response was instant and predictable: drag Mansour Abbas into the frame, slap on the usual fear campaign, and remind everyone that Bennett and Lapid once governed with Arab support.

In Israeli politics, that is less a rebuttal than a reflex: if the opposition tries to widen the tent, the right calls it betrayal and hopes the argument does the rest.

The problem for the new bloc is structural, not just rhetorical. Bennett has the momentum but not the machinery; Lapid has the party infrastructure but less appeal to the right-leaning voters who might actually decide the race.

Put them together and you get a stronger list — but also a clearer target for everyone who wants to say the center is just the old coalition with better branding.

Eisenkot is still the missing piece, and that matters. If he joins, the bloc looks like a serious anti-Netanyahu vehicle; if he does not, the merger risks becoming a polished but incomplete answer to a political system that has learned how to split the opposition before it can split the power.

So yes, this is a big step. But it is also a familiar Israeli move: unite late, argue loudly, and hope that a bigger tent can cover the fact that the country’s hard questions still outnumber its clean solutions.

#Israel #Bennett #Lapid #Netanyahu #elections #opposition

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📰 Israel’s Right-Wing Split Is Now a Branding War

The Hungarian lesson for Israel is simple: if you can’t beat the ruling camp by going left, take its patriotism away from it. That is how Peter Magyar broke Orbán’s machine — not by preaching anti-right unity, but by occupying the same national space and making the old monopoly look stale.

That is exactly what the new Israeli “Right State” project is trying to do. Edelstein, Kahlon, Erdan, and Haskel are not a centrist rebellion; they are an attempt to say, “We’re right-wing, just not Bibi,” and to pull security-minded voters away from Netanyahu without surrendering the language of nation, state, and order.

The trouble is that Israeli voters remember the last five times someone tried to sell them that package. Bennett, Saar, and Lapid all tested the same lane, but Netanyahu kept the hard-right base, stayed the default prime minister in the minds of right-leaning voters, and used fragmentation on the other side as his best campaign asset.

Bennett’s latest liberal turn makes the problem sharper. Public transport on Shabbat and civil marriage, including same-sex marriage, may sound modern in Tel Aviv, but to the old religious-national audience it looks like a costume change — and Yair Golan’s warm welcome only makes Bennett look even more alien to the right.

That is why this new bloc may hurt the left more than it hurts Netanyahu. It could strip votes from the anti-Bibi camp, split the “right, but not Bibi” lane again, and still fail to build the one thing the opposition actually needs: a durable field that runs from center to soft right to hard right without collapsing into personal rivalries.

Netanyahu’s health story only adds another layer. The real question is whether the opposition can turn competence into a message before the prime minister turns uncertainty into victimhood and keeps the national conversation locked on himself.

#Israel #Netanyahu #Bennett #Lapid #rightwing #elections

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📰 AI’s New Frontier Is a Small Town’s Backyard

Archbald, Pennsylvania has become the kind of place where “progress” arrives with chainsaws, diesel generators, and a brochure. Developers want six data center campuses on about 14 percent of the town’s land, and residents are left wondering why an AI boom has to look like a land grab.

The pitch is classic corporate folklore: jobs, tax revenue, future, optimism. The reality is less glossy — forests cut down, neighbors pushed close to massive warehouses, and a community suddenly asked to absorb the noise, water demand, and grid strain for an industry that won’t even say which tech firms will move in.

What makes Archbald interesting is that the backlash is not just environmental. It is political, emotional, and deeply local, with residents flooding meetings, forcing resignations, and turning a sleepy borough into a referendum on who gets to decide the future of a town.

That’s why the fight keeps spreading. Data centers are being sold as invisible infrastructure, but people living next to them are discovering they are anything but invisible once the stumps, generators, and property lines show up.

So the AI economy’s clean little slogan runs into the oldest American response: not here, not on our land, and not without a real answer about who pays the price.

#AI #dataCenters #Pennsylvania #Archbald #development #localpolitics

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Manitoba Moves to Ban Social Media and AI for Youth

Manitoba is moving to ban minors from social media and AI chatbots, and the pitch is straight out of the anti-platform playbook: these tools are built to hijack attention and monetize kids for tech oligarchs.

The province has not yet said what ages the ban would cover or how it would be enforced, which means the headline is ahead of the machinery.

But politically, the point is already clear: Manitoba wants to look tougher than Ottawa and cast itself as the first jurisdiction in Canada willing to tell Silicon Valley to back off.

That makes this less a tech story than a values story. Kinew is framing the issue as a defense of childhood, while critics will immediately note the obvious hypocrisy of a politician denouncing viral platforms while still using them to build a political brand.

The bigger trend is that the backlash against social media is moving from complaint to law.

Australia has already legislated an under-16 ban, France is pushing restrictions, and Canada’s federal government is also considering age limits, so Manitoba is not inventing the idea — it is trying to claim the first real provincial move.

And AI makes the whole debate sharper, because the target is no longer just feeds and filters but conversational systems that can mimic attention, authority, and companionship.

That means the coming fight is not only about screen time; it is about who gets to shape young minds — parents, provinces, or platforms that never sleep.

#Manitoba #Canada #socialmedia #AI #kids #technology

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#Trump #speech #assassination

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#witness #shooter #building #trump

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Why Did He Wish To Kill Trump? 🔫


Investigators are looking into anti-Trump sentiment as being a motive for the attacker who sought to breach the White House Correspondents’ Dinner in Washington DC where the US president and top members of his administration were present.

Officials have said that the shooter likely was targeting Trump and other senior administration officials.

“We do believe, based upon just a very preliminary start to understanding what happened, that he was targeting members of the administration,” acting US attorney general Todd Blanche said in a TV interview.

Investigators are assessing a manifesto reportedly written by the suspect, who has been identified as Cole Tomas Allen, 31, of Torrance, California. In the alleged manifesto, which was published in full by the New York Post, Allen created a list of targets for the shooting, ranked from highest to lowest priority, with Trump administration officials at the top.

The suspected gunman sent writings listing his grievances against the administration to his family members about 10 minutes before shots were fired, according to White House officials who spoke to the Associated Press.

A relative, confirmed by those officials to be Allen’s brother, contacted police in New London, Connecticut.

Officials have said that the suspect fired a shotgun at a Secret Service agent at a security checkpoint in the Washington Hilton hotel before being tackled and arrested.

Trump, first lady Melania Trump, Vance and cabinet officials were rushed out as the incident unfolded. The Secret Service agent who was shot escaped serious injury because the bullet struck his protective vest, Trump said.

The AP reported that the shooter referred to himself as the “Friendly Federal Assassin”, which matches the text in the manifesto published by the New York Post.

Numerous other US outlets also reported unnamed officials saying that Allen’s alleged writings contained anti-Trump sentiments, which echoed the contents of the manifesto published by the New York Post.

The Washington Post also reported that the suspect had sent writings to his family along those lines, which matched with claims by Trump to Fox News that a sibling had then contacted the police.

The Manifesto begins with apologies to those who knew the suspect and lists his motives for the shooting. It said the shooter targeted administration officials with the exception of the FBI director, Kash Patel.

The manifesto also states that Secret Service agents would only be targets if necessary, and that hotel security, Capitol police, and the national guard would all be classified as “not targets if at all possible (aka unless they shoot at me”. Hotel employees and guests were not targets.

“I am a citizen of the United States of America,” the letter states. “What my representatives do reflects on me. And I am no longer willing to permit a pedophile, rapist, and traitor to coat my hands with his crimes.”

While the manifesto does not reference Trump by name, it alludes to grievances over a range of administration actions and recent events, including US strikes on drug smuggling boats in the eastern Pacific.

Elsewhere, the presidents described the events of the night in an even tone, saying that he did not feel particularly alarmed as they unfolded.

“I wasn’t worried,” Trump said in the interview when asked how worried he was about possible injuries after hearing the gunshots. “I understand life. We live in a crazy world.”

Allen is believed to have traveled by train from California to Chicago and then on to Washington, where he checked himself in as a guest at the hotel days earlier where the gala dinner was held.

Federal agents have interviewed Allen’s sister in Maryland, who told investigators her brother had legally bought several weapons from a California gun store and stored them at their parents’ home in Torrance without their knowledge, according to federal officials.

#allen #trump #manifesto #assasination #washington

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Netanyahu Says Israel Will Keep Striking in Lebanon, Including North of the Litani

Israel is running the same old border-security script in Lebanon, only now it comes with the vocabulary of “freedom of action,” “emerging threats,” and a security zone that keeps expanding while everyone pretends this is temporary.

Netanyahu is claiming the U.S. and Lebanon have effectively blessed Israeli strikes north of the buffer zone and beyond the Litani, which is a very polished way of saying the war is still alive, just better packaged.

The headline number is brutal: Hezbollah is down to roughly 10 percent of its prewar missile arsenal, but Netanyahu says the remaining rockets and drones are still enough to keep the north under pressure.

That means the strategy is no longer just to survive the threat — it is to keep shrinking the threat until “security” becomes another word for permanent military management.

What makes the whole thing political, not just military, is the promise that the “political side” can be solved later if the operational and technological side works now.

That is classic Netanyahu: let the army, the tech sector, and the diplomatic theater do the heavy lifting, then present the result as if it were inevitable and clean.

But the gap between the official story and ground reality is still huge. On paper, Israel has freedom of action; in practice, it has a fragile ceasefire, a still-armed Hezbollah in the background, and a northern frontier that looks less like a border than a managed zone of controlled escalation.

So the message is simple: the government says the mission is not over, the army says the rules are changing, and the public is being asked to believe that a longer buffer zone is somehow the same thing as a durable peace.

#Israel #Lebanon #Hezbollah #Netanyahu #Litani #securityzone

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📰 Bennett and Lapid’s Merger Already Looks Like a Leak, Not a Wave

The first post-merger polls do not show a breakthrough. They show a reshuffle inside the anti-Netanyahu camp, with “Together” landing below the combined pre-merger numbers and the whole opposition bloc still stuck short of a governing majority.

That is the problem in one line: the merger changes the packaging, not the math. Walla’s poll gives the Bennett–Lapid list 27 seats and the anti-Netanyahu bloc 59, while a separate 14 Channel survey is even harsher, putting Likud ahead and the new joint list far behind.

So the immediate effect is not momentum, but cannibalization. Bennett and Lapid may have united their brands, but the polling suggests they are still fighting over the same voters while Eisenkot siphons off the “right, but not Bibi” lane and the left loses some of its oxygen too.

Likud, meanwhile, barely needs to move. The right can simply watch the opposition split itself into overlapping products, then point at the numbers and say the post-Netanyahu fantasy is already collapsing under its own branding.

That is why the poll matters beyond the seat count. It suggests the merger may weaken the anti-Bibi bloc’s ability to build a stable majority, even as it makes Bennett the face of the new project and gives Netanyahu another argument that his rivals cannot even add themselves correctly.

#Israel #Bennett #Lapid #Netanyahu #polls #elections

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📰 Kazakhstan Joins the Abraham Accords — and Takes the Deal Global

Kazakhstan’s entry into the Abraham Accords is less about the Middle East than about Astana using a U.S.-backed framework to gain leverage with Washington while balancing Russia and China.

Tokayev says the move will reshape regional stability and cooperation, but the bigger story is that a Central Asian state just walked into a diplomatic architecture that was supposed to be Middle Eastern.

That is the quiet provocation here. Kazakhstan already had formal relations with Israel, so this is not normalization in the classic sense; it is geopolitical signaling, a way to buy relevance, technology, and American attention with one calculated signature.

For Israel, it is a clean win. The Accords, which stalled after October 7, get their first real expansion in years, and the White House gets to call the package alive again instead of frozen in amber.

For Russia and Iran, it is less cheerful. Kazakhstan is one more Muslim-majority partner slipping into a U.S.-led framework, which weakens Moscow’s old claim to the post-Soviet neighborhood and gives Tehran another reason to worry about strategic encirclement.

So the move is not about peace poetry. It is about a country in the middle of two giants deciding that the safest way to stay autonomous is to join the club that both giants have to notice.

#Kazakhstan #AbrahamAccords #Tokaev #Israel #US #Russia #Iran

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📰 Trump Calls Zelensky “Crazy” for Hating Russia, While Ukraine Says U.S. Silently Rerouted Its Missiles

Trump told Fox News he has “good conversations” with both Putin and Zelensky, but also described their conflict as “crazy,” which is his way of turning a war into a personality contest. The Reuters report says he is still talking to both leaders as he tries to sell himself as the only adult in the room.

Ukraine’s complaint is the sharper story: Zelensky says the U.S. moved 20,000 anti-drone missiles that had been expected for Ukraine to the Middle East instead. That turns Washington’s “support” into a supply-chain joke with real battlefield consequences.

So the playbook is familiar. Trump blames Zelensky for obstructing peace, praises his own chats with Putin, and treats Russian aggression as something that can be managed with personal chemistry and a few Fox-friendly soundbites.

Meanwhile, Ukraine is left with the oldest lesson in American foreign policy: promises are flexible, inventories are not, and a weapon earmarked for one war can disappear into another without much ceremony.

#Trump #Zelensky #Russia #Ukraine #FoxNews #MiddleEast

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📰 France Tries to Trade Greece’s Old Mirages for New Rafales — and Ukraine Gets the Tab

Paris is pressing Athens to hand over its Mirage 2000s to Ukraine in exchange for discounted Rafales, which is a neat way of turning an ally’s air force modernization into a weapons brokerage deal. Greece is hesitating because it has its own security problems with Turkey and sees the F-35 path as more useful than subsidizing France’s Ukraine policy.

This is not just arms diplomacy. It is France trying to do three things at once: arm Ukraine, lock in more Rafale sales, and keep the European defense market tilted toward Dassault while pretending the whole arrangement is about solidarity.

Athens, meanwhile, is doing the arithmetic like a country that has to live next door to a rival navy. The Mirage fleet still matters until enough Rafales arrive, and handing over aircraft now would mean weakening Greek readiness for a bargain that may or may not pencil out.

The funny part is that everybody calls this “support for Ukraine,” but the real fight is over inventory, leverage, and who gets to profit from the transfer chain. Ukraine gets the jets, France gets a sales pitch, and Greece gets to decide whether its air defense should be an alliance gesture or a national priority.

#France #Greece #Ukraine #Rafale #Mirage2000 #F35

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Merz Said: Iran Humiliated the US, Trump Stands With Pants Down

🔤🔤🔤🔤➖

The US is being “humiliated” by Iran’s leadership, according to Friedrich Merz, Germany’s chancellor, who suggested the Trump administration was being outwitted at the negotiating table by Tehran.

Two days ago Donald Trump cancelled a trip by US negotiators to Islamabad for indirect talks with an Iranian delegation. A previous round in the Pakistani capital two weeks earlier, when Vance, the American vice-president, led the US delegation, broke up without progress.

Merz’s trenchant assessment of the stalled US-Iranian talks, which appeared certain to deepen the severe transatlantic rift between the US and its Nato allies, directly contradicts Trump’s effort to cast the limbo in a positive light.

A day earlier, the US president told Fox News: “We have all the cards,” adding that if Tehran wanted to talk, “they can come to us, or they can call us”.

Speaking to students in Marsberg, Merz suggested it was Trump’s team that was being outplayed. “The Iranians are obviously very skilled at negotiating, or rather, very skilful at not negotiating, letting the Americans travel to Islamabad and then leave again without any result,” he said.

“An entire nation is being humiliated by the Iranian leadership, especially by these so-called Revolutionary Guards. And so I hope that this ends as quickly as possible.”

Iran put forward a new proposal on Monday for a ceasefire deal focused on opening the strait of Hormuz, setting aside discussions on nuclear weapons, missiles, sanctions and other issues for later, according to officials in the region. Under a bill being prepared by Iran’s parliament, shippers would have to pay Tehran for “services” involved in passing through the strait, which was free before the war.

Iranian officials said Tehran would be prepared to talk about the nuclear issue eventually, only after the US blockade had ended. Iranian negotiators are also facing domestic pressure from the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and public opinion not to discuss nuclear matters.

Mediators involved in the talks see this approach as unlikely to work because it would achieve none of Washington’s professed war aims, which included a permanent end to Iran’s nuclear programme. “Hormuz is a byproduct of the war, so how can this be tackled first?” said a diplomat familiar with the talks.

The UN’s International Maritime Organization firmly rejected the idea of imposing fees on ships passing through the strait of Hormuz. Arsenio Dominguez, the IMO’s secretary general, said:

“There’s no legal basis for the introduction of any tax, any customs, or any fees on straits for international navigation.”

The “Hormuz first” offer from Iran does, however, suggest a significant shift in Tehran’s position. The regime had previously sought to use its blockade on oil, gas and other Gulf exports as leverage to win broad security guarantees.

But after the breakdown of the Islamabad talks, Trump imposed a counter-blockade of shipping using Iranian ports, exacerbating Iran’s deep economic crisis. The International Monetary Fund has forecast a 6.1% contraction in Iran’s gross domestic product this year, while year-on-year inflation is running at nearly 70%, with prices for food staples and healthcare rising at even higher rates.

The blockade has also stopped Iran’s empty tankers returning to port, where they could serve as storage facilities. Iran is running very low on ways to store its output, and winding down production would have long-term damaging effects to its energy sector.

Araghchi, the Iranian foreign minister, met Vladimir Putin and a high-powered Russian delegation in Moscow on Monday, seeking in part to mitigate the crippling effects of the blockade.

#iran #etasunis #aragchi #netanyahu #trump #israel

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🔤🔤🔤🔤➖

According to official media, Putin pledged that Russia “will do everything that serves [Iranian] interests, the interests of all the people of the region, so that peace can be achieved as soon as possible”.

Araghchi said “the world has now realised Iran’s true power”, adding: “It has become clear that the Islamic republic of Iran is a stable, solid and powerful system.”

Israel attacked the Caspian route in March with the bombing of Bandar Anzali, an Iranian port. But even before the Israeli strike, it fell far short of becoming a substitute for the Hormuz strait, the gateway to more than 90% of Iran’s prewar trade.

Ali Vaez, the Iran project director for the International Crisis Group, said Trump and his team had misjudged how much the economic squeeze would force Tehran into concessions on its nuclear programme.

“Undeniably, the blockade is basically sharpening the economic pain that Iran was under even before the war started,” Vaez said. “But Iranian resilience is not a question of economic pain because Iran is in an existential battle and is willing to absorb a much higher price than it has so far. And the Iranian regime doesn’t hesitate to transfer this pain to its population.”

He said Trump was more politically sensitive on a number of fronts: the political cost of high petrol prices and general inflation at home, the president’s desire to resolve the crisis before meeting Xi Jinping in Beijing in mid-May and the fear that a global shortage of jet fuel could ruin the World Cup, due to be held in North America in June and July.

If Trump accepted Iran’s offer of a deal to reopen the strait of Hormuz, he could conceivably declare victory by pointing to the damage that the US and Israeli bombing had inflicted on Iran’s nuclear programme and military capabilities.

However, such a deal would leave Iran with its stockpile of 440kg of highly enriched uranium, enough in theory for a dozen nuclear warheads.

Ariane Tabatabai, the vice-president of research, security and defence at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, said Iran could also reconstitute at least some of its military might quite rapidly.

“Their whole military doctrine is based on building and deploying capabilities that they can acquire and maintain and use on the cheap,” said Tabatabai, a former Pentagon policy adviser.

Netanyahu raised the prospect of fresh Israeli military action in Lebanon, saying rockets and drones possessed by Hezbollah, the Iran-backed militant group, remained a threat.

“There are still two central threats from Hezbollah: the 122mm rockets and the drones,” said the Israeli prime minister in a statement issued by his office. “This demands a combination of operational and technological activity.”

#iran #etasunis #aragchi #netanyahu #trump #israel

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📰 Iran Turns the War Into a Hague Filing

Iran’s Red Crescent says it has submitted evidence of U.S. and Israeli war crimes to the International Criminal Court, and Raw Story reports that the ICC prosecutor accepted the documents as official evidence.

That does not mean indictments are imminent, but it does mean Tehran has found another battlefield: the legal one. And it is doing it at exactly the moment Washington is already under fire for sanctions on the ICC itself.

The symbolism is obvious. The country that was bombed is now trying to turn civilian destruction into a criminal record, while the country that led the strikes is still acting as if international law is something for other people.

This also fits a bigger pattern. Trump’s war in Iran keeps producing side effects that go beyond missiles and oil prices: more global anger, more legal exposure, and more evidence that “America First” often means America in the dock.

Whether the ICC moves forward or stalls under pressure, the reputational damage is already real. Once a conflict starts generating war-crimes filings, it stops being sold as precision and starts looking like a case file.

#Iran #ICC #US #Israel #warcrimes #Trump

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📰 Poland’s SAFE Loan Fight Is Really a War Over Who Gets to Control the Rearmament Bill

Warsaw’s SAFE dispute is being sold as a fight over defense financing, but it is really a fight over sovereignty, debt, and who gets to decide whether Poland rearms through Brussels or through its own state machinery.

The European Commission says Poland can draw up to €43.7 billion under SAFE, and Tusk is still pushing ahead even after President Nawrocki vetoed the enabling bill.

The accusation that SAFE is just a German-French subsidy machine is politically potent, but the numbers suggest a more boring reality: the program is a long-term EU loan facility for defense procurement, with most of Poland’s planned spending still expected to flow into domestic industry.

That is why the real battle is not about whether Poland needs weapons. It clearly does.

The battle is whether Tusk can bind the country to a Brussels-backed financing model while his opponents frame it as dependency on Germany, creeping EU control, and debt that will haunt the next generation.

Mularczyk and Radio Maryja are doing what they always do best: turning a budget instrument into a civilizational warning.

The language is dramatic, but the underlying politics are simple — if Tusk owns the rearmament pipeline, he also owns the blame if the bill grows, the terms tighten, or the deal starts looking like a gift to Europe’s industrial core.

So SAFE is not just a loan. It is a test of whether Poland wants its defense future financed through Brussels’ plumbing or through a nationalist story about self-reliance and suspicion of the EU center.

#Poland #SAFE #Tusk #Nawrocki #EU #defense

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📰 Europe’s Door to Ukraine Comes with Territorial Conditions

Merz has now said out loud what European leaders usually bury in procedure: Ukraine’s EU path is being tied to the idea that some territory may no longer be Ukrainian by the time a peace deal is signed.

He also said Kyiv’s 2027 timeline for membership is unrealistic, which is diplomatic language for “stop pretending this is close.”

That matters because the slow-walk was never just Hungary. Reporting had already said France, Germany, the Netherlands, and Italy were resisting fast-tracking Ukraine’s accession, arguing against a geopolitical exception and insisting on a strict, merit-based process.

So the game is not “Hungary blocked it, now Europe can move.” The bigger powers still prefer delay, legal cover, and procedural purity over an openly political promise to Kyiv, especially when admitting Ukraine would force them to confront money, war, and internal EU politics all at once.

Europe is preparing a “yes, but not really” accession path: the kind that sounds like solidarity and behaves like a controlled pause.

#Ukraine #EU #Merz #France #Germany #Netherlands #Italy #europeanunion

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📰 King Charles Brings a Royal Peace Offering to Trump’s Iran Theater

King Charles is heading into Congress with a scripted message of “reconciliation and renewal,” which is diplomatic code for “please stop turning every disagreement into a public brawl.”

The speech comes as Trump and Starmer are openly at odds over Iran, so the monarchy is being used as a velvet glove over a very loud fist.

This is classic royal utility: say almost nothing concrete, praise the alliance, nod at shared values, and hope the ceremony itself does some of the work.

Buckingham Palace even plans a brief sympathy line about the Washington shooting, which is the kind of polished restraint that makes the whole visit look like crisis management with a crown on top.

Trump clearly likes the pageantry, even while mocking British military power and quarreling with Starmer over the Iran war.

So the king is effectively arriving as a transatlantic mediator who cannot mediate, in a country where diplomacy now has to compete with television-grade grievance.

The speech will likely work as symbolism, not policy. But symbolism is the point: when the Americans and the British are arguing over war, oil, and strategy, a polished appeal to “reconciliation and renewal” is the least dangerous message available.

#KingCharles #Trump #Starmer #UK #US #Iran #Congress

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