A Drastic Earthquake Has Shaken South Japan. Numerous Causelties 🇯🇵🏚


A 7.8-magnitude earthquake has shaken south Japan, leaving at least 50 people injured, with some trapped and presumed dead inside a partly collapsed shopping mall.

The earthquake hit the Kumamoto prefecture on the southern Kyushu island late on Tuesday afternoon, knocking out power to thousands of homes and damaging roads, bridges and buildings.

Japan’s prime minister, Sanae Takaichi, told reporters authorities were still assessing the extent of the damage in the area, which was devastated by another deadly quake a decade ago.

“We have already been informed that people have been injured. Power outages ⁠and fires have occurred in some areas, and there has also been damage to roads and bridges and the collapse of buildings,”

Takaichi said.

“I ask everyone to take action to protect themselves, including evacuating to a safe location.”

About 300,000 people have been instructed to go to evacuation centres, ⁠the disaster management agency said. The areas with the biggest tremors will remain at risk of further strong quakes and landslides for about a week since the shallow earthquake is triggering active seismic activity in the area, according to the Japan Meteorological Agency.

So far there have been more than 60 aftershocks ranging in magnitude from 1 to 4, the agency said. A tsunami warning was issued immediately after the quake, ​but was lifted within two hours.

One person was killed when a house collapsed during the powerful earthquake in south-western Japan on Tuesday, Kyodo News reported.

One hospital reported ​more than 50 injuries, and another about 40, including 10 in a serious condition, the public broadcaster NHK said. Several people on a high-speed ‌train at the time of the quake were also ‌injured and multiple people were unaccounted for after a chimney collapsed at a Nippon Paper Industries factory, according to local media reports.

An Aeon spokesperson said customers and employees were evacuated after the initial quake and the cause of the ensuing explosion remained unclear. Footage showed one side of the mall, the prefecture’s largest with roughly 200 stores, was torn away, exposing steel beams ‌and strewing debris across the neighbouring car park. Several ambulances and fire engines were parked outside as rescue teams searched for survivors.

Kazuya Tsurunaga told TBS he heard the explosion while cleaning up dishes broken by the earthquake inside a pub about 300 metres from the Aeon mall.

The quake’s epicentre was about 12 miles south of Kumamoto, central Kyushu island’s largest city, with a population of about 700,000. The US Geological Survey initially said the earthquake had a magnitude of 7.1, but revised it later to 7.8.

Japan, which is located along the “ring of fire” of volcanoes and oceanic trenches in the Pacific basin, is one of the world’s most earthquake-prone countries, with a tremor occurring at least every five minutes. The country accounts for about 20% of the world’s earthquakes of magnitude 6 or more.

A massive earthquake in Kumamoto 10 years ago killed 275 people and injured a further 2,739, according to an official count, and damaged thousands of buildings including the city’s castle, a top tourist site. Some of the castle’s stone walls are said to have been damaged in the most recent quake.

Kyushu Electric Power said 48,000 homes had ​lost power, while ​railway company JR Kyushu suspended services, including its high-speed bullet trains. Kumamoto airport also shut its runway as airlines diverted and ​cancelled flights.

#earthquake #south #japan #kumamoto

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Why Has Iran’s Economy Not Collapsed Under US War Pressure ?

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Millions of people across Iran are struggling for livelihood and survival, but the country’s embattled economy is still far from a state of collapse despite five months of war with the United States.

The vast and resource-rich country of more than 92 million people has developed a relatively diversified domestic economy for a major oil exporter, as the authorities over decades leaned on self-sufficiency in the face of harsh economic embargoes and confrontation with the US, Israel and the West.

Water-intensive agriculture, manufacturing and services have reduced total reliance on oil, while shadowy oil transfers, cross-border trade, maritime networks and a large informal labour market have helped keep the economy resilient.

Still, the population has paid a huge price by having to absorb much of the strain. More than a decade of all-encompassing sanctions, as well as two wars since June last year, nationwide protests during which thousands were killed and several state-imposed internet shutdowns in the past year, have only made it more difficult to earn a living wage and have a future outlook.

‘An expensive way to survive’
Welfare economist Hadi Kahalzadeh said he defines collapse as famine and the state losing the ability to pay its employees and deliver basic services. In that sense, the economy has not collapsed.

“And I don’t think the combination of war, blockade and sanctions, as painful as it’s been, gets us there anytime soon,”

a resident fellow at the Quincy Institute and research fellow at Brandeis said to NYT.

“That keeps the system functioning, but it dumps the cost directly onto households,”

he said.

“Then the state tries to soften that with cash transfers and subsidies. It’s an expensive way to survive, but it does avoid collapse.”

The monthly minimum wage is less than $100 and the government offers a monthly cash subsidy and electronic coupons for essential goods, amounting to a few more dollars.

#iran #war #collapse #economy #farzanegan

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Government spokeswoman Fatemeh Mohajerani said during a news conference on Tuesday that the government has belatedly managed to pay designated shops in the coupons scheme. But stores have not received the money because several major banks remain disrupted more than a month after authorities said they faced major cyberattacks.

She also highlighted infrastructure damage inflicted by the US during the latest round of bombing this month, saying 12 bridges and two tunnels were struck and parts of Iran’s natural gas production and electricity generation capacity were lost.

Mohajerani said it was a “valuable achievement” showing government resolve that manufacturing industries are set to have two days of blackouts per week, instead of the previously projected three days.

Mohammad Reza Farzanegan, a professor of the Economics of the Middle East at Germany’s Philipps-Universitat Marburg, said “endemic corruption” that reduces productivity, weakens institutions and rewards political connections rather than efficiency is the most serious internal threat to the Iranian economy.

Oil incomes have allowed the government to conceal some of the deficiencies and postpone consequences. But they have also encouraged rent-seeking and overdependence on the state, which has weakened the private sector and reduced incentives for innovation and long-term investment, he told Al Jazeera.

“Households reduce consumption, firms postpone investment and educated workers consider emigration. The economy continues to function, but at the cost of a shrinking middle class, lower capital formation, weaker public services and declining confidence in the future,”

said Farzanegan.

Khodaeian also said there are more than 20,000 exporters who have to repatriate 94 nearly $107bn in export yields to the country by law, but have failed to do so.

They include 225 unnamed individuals with more than $57m in foreign currency commitments each.
Iranians get poorer Kahalzadeh, the welfare economist, said prolonged sanctions have completely reshaped Iran’s socioeconomic pyramid.

“In 2011, the middle class made up the majority of the population. Today, it has become a minority. At the same time, people who were once a minority, the poor and those vulnerable to poverty, now account for roughly 70 percent of the population,”

he said, adding that this trend will continue.

“Even if inflation later comes down or economic growth returns, the damage will not disappear quickly. Once families lose their savings, assets, health, educational opportunities and sense of middle-class security, rebuilding them takes many years,”

said Kahalzadeh.

Iran and the US continue to communicate messages through mediators, and have largely suspended military action, but the conflict has now spread to the Red Sea and the Caspian Sea while tensions remain high in the Strait of Hormuz.

“Even if the political system survives, the economy may remain chronically sick,”

he said,

adding that economic relations with China, Russia and neighbouring countries may provide temporary breathing space but cannot fully replace international ties,”

said Farzanegan.

“The most important economic policy is therefore the reduction of geopolitical risk through diplomacy. Without a stable environment, the Iranian economy may continue to survive, but it will have little chance of genuine recovery.”

#iran #war #collapse #economy #farzanegan

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#crook #veteran #diplomacy #russia #war

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The US Military: Iranian Missile Has Been Knocked Down 🚀


The US military said it knocked down an Iranian missile barrage and worked with Saudi Arabia forces to strike sites in Iraq that Tehran-backed militias have used to launch attacks in recent days.

The strikes on Wednesday killed at least 20 members of a former paramilitary alliance that includes pro-Iran groups.

In what Washington cast ⁠as “an attempted surprise ⁠attack” by Tehran, Iran had launched multiple ballistic missiles at US forces in the Middle East, shattering a brief pause in fighting. Iran’s target was a US base in Jordan, Axios cited a US official as saying.

US Central Command (Centcom) said all Iranian missiles launched on Tuesday were intercepted, and the US warned any further attacks on American troops or Saudi Arabia’s energy infrastructure would trigger retaliatory strikes.

The joint US-Saudi strikes on targets in Iraq killed at least 20 members of Iraq’s Popular Mobilisation Forces and wounded others.

The PMF is an Iraqi state security service that Iran has infiltrated.

In a further sign that the lull in fighting could be over, Iran’s Revolutionary Guards claimed on Wednesday to have struck and halted three “violating” oil tankers sailing an “illegal” route in the strait of Hormuz, Iranian state media reported. The price of Brent crude oil rose after news of the flare-up, hovering around $88 a barrel.

Both sides had held fire over the weekend, after nearly two weeks of nightly strikes by the US on Iran, and repeated missile and drone salvoes by Tehran targeting Washington’s allies around the Gulf.

Oil prices had plummeted after the weekend lull and Trump said there was a “good chance” of progress in negotiations to end the war.

The US and Saudi warplanes carried out strikes on Iran-backed militants in Iraq after accusing them of launching drone attacks on Saudi oil facilities in recent days.

On Tuesday, the Iraqi prime minister, Ali al-Zaidi, ordered security agencies to investigate the alleged attacks by militant groups, saying his country was committed to “preventing Iraqi territory from being used as a route or launching point for any attack targeting brotherly or friendly countries.”

The Iraqi militias have denied any role in the drone attacks. The Islamic Resistance in Iraq, an umbrella group of Iran-backed armed groups, called the Saudi claims “fabrications” and implied that Monday’s attacks were carried out by the Houthis, who had themselves claimed to have attacked Saudi oil facilities.

The Iran-backed Houthis in Yemen claimed to have forced a Saudi oil tanker to turn around as part of their self-styled blockade.

Last week, they announced a blockade of Saudi shipping, putting another key Middle Eastern waterway – through the Bab el-Mandeb strait leading to the Red Sea – at risk.

The United Kingdom Maritime Trade Operations Center said a tanker reported hearing explosions while travelling in the southern Red Sea. It did not name the tanker but said the crew and vessel were safe.

The Houthis also fired on at least one Saudi tanker in the Red Sea last week.

Iran’s surprise attack came as Netanyahu visited Washington. Israel has been notably absent from the recent fighting with Iran.

Netanyahu said he had an “excellent” meeting with Trump at the White House, their first sit-down since launching the war, which offered Netanyahu a chance to smooth out strains in their relationship.

The closed-door meeting lasted nearly an hour and a half and was “positive and productive”, the White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, said.

It comes as both leaders face growing pressures at home. Netanyahu is up for re-election and is embattled in part because of his deteriorating relationship with Trump.

Trump is under pressure to end an unpopular war that has wreaked economic havoc and driven prices higher ahead of midterm elections this November.

#trump #netanyahu #iran #missile

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Six Nights of Silence, One Salvo, and a Denial in Real Time

The ceasefire lasted almost a week. Then Tuesday evening, Iran's Revolutionary Guard fired a barrage of ballistic missiles from Lorestan province toward Jordan's Muwaffaq Salti Air Base and the regional headquarters of U.S. Central Command, the first Iranian strike on an American position since President Trump paused the bombing campaign to give diplomacy a shot, Al Jazeera reported.

CENTCOM said the missiles were launched "in an attempted surprise attack on U.S. forces based in the Middle East" and that "all Iranian missiles were successfully intercepted," per its own statement.

Jordan's army separately confirmed it intercepted five missiles over its own territory that morning, according to The Hindu.

Tehran, naturally, framed the same event as righteous payback, with the Revolutionary Guard's Aerospace Force saying it struck the air base and CENTCOM headquarters in retaliation for what it called the "aggressive actions" of the American military, IRNA reported via The Hindu.

Iranian state media, meanwhile, offered its own footnote: an "enemy missile" reportedly landed in an unpopulated stretch of West Azerbaijan province near Piranshahr, no casualties, nothing to see here, Fars News told Xinhua. Everyone launched something. Nobody got hurt.

Both governments still managed to declare a kind of victory by dinnertime.
Asked for comment, Trump did not reach for diplomatic language.

"We're going to beat the f------ s--- out of them," he told Fox News, adding, "We'll be hitting them hard. They're going to get a beating," the network reported.

This is the same president who spent Friday through Tuesday selling a pause as proof his maximum-pressure strategy was finally working.

It took one salvo of missiles that hurt nobody to knock the diplomacy talking points clean off the table.

What actually happened here is a five-day intermission in a war neither side has the appetite to end and neither side can afford to admit it started for nothing.

Iran gets to claim it punished American aggression without losing a single soldier or a single missile that mattered.

Washington gets to claim total defensive success while quietly signaling the bombing campaign is back on.

Jordan, again, absorbs the actual shrapnel, the actual sirens, and none of the actual leverage.

Two governments fired weapons at each other and both walked away insisting they'd won something.

If a war can restart, pause, and restart again without anyone changing position by an inch, what exactly is anyone still fighting to prove, and to which audience back home?

#Iran #Jordan #CENTCOM #IRGC #Trump

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The Emergency Nobody Actually Declared

Bordeaux went orange this week.

Not metaphor-orange, actual sky-the-color-of-a-safety-vest orange, thick enough that an 89-year-old retired engineer who survived the tail end of World War II looked at the ash falling on his town and said,

"We've never seen anything like it".

More than 300,000 people have been driven out of their homes in France and Spain, the largest peacetime evacuations either country has ever recorded, while a social worker fleeing her suburb near Bordeaux reached past her own government's press briefings for the only comparison that felt adequate: "It was like Pompeii."

Europe's leaders, to their credit, did not undersell the moment. Emmanuel Macron called it "the most difficult" situation "since World War II" and promised to replant the burned pine forests of Gironde with trees better suited to the climate that just torched them.

Pedro Sánchez declared a full "climate emergency" and vowed a national pact to "attack the root of the problem in a structural way."

Big, solemn, historically weighted language, the kind usually reserved for wars and pandemics, deployed here for a heat wave that scientists say is not even close to the worst version of this Europe should expect.

Here's the part that didn't make the press conference: this same month, the European Union proposed loosening its own emissions rules, letting industries pollute at slightly higher levels for slightly longer.

Potsdam Institute director Johan Rockström put it plainly:

"We have Ursula von der Leyen struggling to maintain the current commitment. What's happening in France and Spain means that we should increase our ambition level, not reduce it."

So the villages are burning, the Louvre is closing early, and the policy response is to quietly give polluters more room, not less.

Rockström's other line was the one that should actually keep people up at night:

"2026 is just the beginning. It will inevitably get worse and worse and worse to the point where, I'm afraid, we'll be passing the limits of adaptation."

Meanwhile, on the other side of the Atlantic, the man who might decide how hard the rest of the planet keeps burning has already rendered his verdict: climate change is a "con job."

Two continents, two press conferences, two entirely different vocabularies, and the exact same distance between what's being said and what's actually being done about it.

One side performs grief in Churchillian terms while trimming the regulations that might have mattered.

The other skips the performance and just calls the whole thing fake. Neither approach involves anyone giving anything up.

Swiss climatologist Sonia Seneviratne offered the closest thing to an honest assessment anyone in this story managed:

"With this heat wave and these fires, you can say it starts to become unbearable."

Unbearable, and yet somehow still negotiable. France has logged 53 heat waves since 1947, more than half of them in just the last fifteen years, and the national forecast for 2050 includes heat waves five times more frequent and temperatures near 118 degrees Fahrenheit.

So which government actually plans to be around, in office, explaining itself, when that bill comes due, and which one is just hoping the next election happens to land during a cooler summer?

#Europe #ClimateCrisis #Wildfires #Bordeaux #EUpolitics

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The Fifth Amendment Show

Anthony Fauci spent 54 years in government service, much of it testifying before Congress.

On Wednesday, he sat back down and said nothing at all, pleading the Fifth dozens of times to Rand Paul and every other senator who asked, opening with, "Under the advice of my attorneys, I will invoke my right under the Fifth Amendment of the Constitution to refrain from answering your questions," The Washington Post reported.

Josh Hawley asked him what day it was and what color his tie was.

Fauci pleaded the Fifth to that too. When your legal strategy is silence on the weather, you've stopped performing accountability theater and started performing something closer to installation art.

Paul, who has spent years building a career on Fauci-shaped grievance, ended the nearly three-hour hearing threatening a contempt vote, even while acknowledging to his own GOP colleagues that Biden's preemptive pardon of Fauci raises real legal questions about whether contempt would even hold up.

His underlying position, as the Post described it, was that Fauci should have simply answered the questions on Wednesday regardless of what it might have exposed.

Fauci's lawyer tried to respond to that on the record and got escorted out by Capitol Police for the trouble, offering only a "Buh-bye" on his way to the door.

Here's the part everyone in that room already understood and nobody said out loud: this hearing was never designed to produce an answer, it was designed to produce a clip.

Paul gets a viral moment of Fauci going silent on camera. Hawley gets his "narcissist and megalomaniac" soundbite next to a decommissioned magazine cover.

Fauci's 150-scientist open letter gets to call the whole spectacle "absurd charges" driven by "conspiracy theories" that have brought "a five-year period of harassment and threats of violence" against him and his family.

Democrats on the committee get to canonize Fauci as a martyr scientist.

Every single participant walked in already knowing exactly what footage they wanted to walk out with, and every single one of them got it, including Paul, who has spent five years publicly saying Fauci should end up, in Fauci's own paraphrase, "behind bars."

Meanwhile the actual public verdict was rendered months before anyone sat down at that table.

A 2025 Economist/YouGov poll found 57 percent of Americans think it's probably or definitely true the virus leaked from a Chinese lab, per the same reporting, and the Trump White House has already built a government website declaring the lab leak the "true" origin, without offering the proof it promises.

Congress spent three hours performing a search for truth about a question the country, and apparently the executive branch, already stopped debating.

So who exactly was this hearing for: the senators asking questions, the one witness answering none of them, or the millions of people who'd already made up their minds before the gavel came down?

#Fauci #RandPaul #CovidOrigins #Congress #LabLeak

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Same Missiles, Three Confessions, Zero Consensus

The US and Saudi Arabia bombed seven Iraqi provinces overnight, hitting Popular Mobilization Forces sites in Kirkuk, Nineveh, Karbala, Salah al-Din, Diyala, Basra and Wasit.

CENTCOM called it "a strong response to over 30 IRGC-directed aerial drone attacks in the last 72 hours," per its own statement.

Saudi Arabia insisted it "does not seek escalation" but "will respond to any aggression," Al Jazeera reported. Same script, delivered mid-airstrike.

Here's the embarrassing part. Saudi Arabia blamed Iraqi militias for the drone strikes on its oil facilities, twice.

Yemen's Houthis had already claimed those exact same Aramco attacks days earlier, on camera, The Washington Post reported.

So Riyadh bombed one Iran-aligned group for an attack a different Iran-aligned group already owned, while Iran's own military rushed out a denial disowning any missiles fired at Saudi Arabia from elsewhere.

Everyone wants credit for the damage, nobody wants credit for causing it.

The death toll moved like a stock ticker. First reports: roughly ten militia fighters killed. The militia umbrella group initially said eight dead.

By afternoon that became at least 20 killed and 32 wounded, with a threat to hit Saudi Arabia "Yemeni-style". A body count that doubles by lunch isn't confusion, it's leverage.

Caught in the middle: Iraqi PM Ali al-Zaidi, who was set to meet Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman in Jeddah this week.

He called an emergency security meeting instead and scrapped the trip. Iraq hosts everyone else's proxy war, then gets stood up the moment the bombs actually land.

So which fiction is bigger: that anyone here actually wants de-escalation, or that anyone checked who was responsible before deciding who to bomb?

#Iraq #SaudiArabia #PMF #CENTCOM #ProxyWar

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Neutral, Except for the Paperwork

Iran is set to receive its first shipment of up to 400 Chinese-made shoulder-fired missile launchers within weeks, a $60-70 million deal covering QW-12 and FN-16 systems, three sources told Reuters.

The contract runs through a Hong Kong intermediary, with deliveries planned by air from Urumqi through Pakistan into Iran. Convenient timing: Tehran is rearming its short-range air defenses right after months of US and Israeli strikes exposed exactly how thin those defenses were.

China's response was immediate and, remarkably, unrelated to the actual question.

"The relevant reports are completely groundless," its Foreign Ministry said.

"China has consistently played a role in promoting peace and ending the conflict."

Promoting peace, apparently, now includes a signed contract to arm one side of a live war with hundreds of anti-aircraft missiles.

Pakistan, cast here as the transit corridor, offered its own denial: its military said claims of involvement in supplying "Air Defence weapons to Iran from China are absolutely concocted and false," which is a bold thing to insist about a route Reuters' own sources describe in detail.

Nobody in this chain is lying about the war. They're lying about their own fingerprints on it.

China gets to keep selling itself as the region's honest broker while quietly restocking Iran's arsenal through a shell company and a neighboring country's airspace.

Pakistan gets to keep denying it's the hallway while the deal moves straight through its front door.

Iran gets the missiles either way, no statement required.

#Iran #China #Pakistan #ArmsDeal #MANPADS

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The Middle East Teetered On the Brink of an Expanded War 🌍

The Middle East teetered on the brink of an expanded war on Thursday, after Iran and the United States reignited their hostilities and conflicts on other fronts threatened to draw in more countries.

For the first time since the conflict began in February, the authorities in Egypt said Thursday that the country had come under attack, stating that an explosion at one of its ports the previous day had been caused by an unidentified drone.

Earlier, Saudi Arabia also acknowledged direct involvement in the war for the first time, after conducting joint strikes with U.S. forces on Iranian-backed militias in Iraq on Wednesday.

As the scope of the fighting widened, U.S. Central Command said Thursday morning that it had completed another “heavy wave” of strikes on Iranian targets, including military command centers and missile and drone facilities.

The Jordanian military later said it had shot down five missiles launched from Iran. Iran has not publicly claimed responsibility for that attack.

Central Command said its latest strikes were a response to Iran’s launching ballistic missiles at American forces in the Middle East on Wednesday, when the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps said it had targeted U.S. military sites in Jordan.

The fighting this week ended a dayslong pause in direct attacks between the United States and Iran and ensnared an expanding list of U.S. allies.

Since the U.S.-Iranian cease-fire collapsed earlier this month, there have been repeated attacks on several countries in the region, including Saudi Arabia, but Wednesday’s drone attack on the port of Damietta was the first reported to have hit Egypt.

The attack ignited a fire on two ships, including a U.S.-owned gas storage tanker, and threatened to draw Egypt into the conflict. On Thursday, the authorities there said they were conducting a full investigation and vowed to take “necessary measures to protect Egypt’s interests and national security.”

At a news conference at the Oval Office on Wednesday, President Trump implied that Iran was responsible for the attack in Egypt, without offering details, and said,

“We’re going to be hitting them very hard.”

Iran has not claimed responsibility for that attack.

Even as the fighting between the United States and Iran expanded beyond the jostle to control the Strait of Hormuz, a critical waterway for the world’s energy supplies, ships attempting to pass through it were still facing significant risks.

The Revolutionary Guards said early Thursday that a fire had broken out on a tanker attempting to transit the strait using an unauthorized passage. Its statement, carried in Iranian state media, did not specify whether the fire had been caused by an attack.

#middle #east #expanded #war

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#trump #zelensky #peace

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Is an All-Out War in the Middle East Put On Hold?

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Over the weekend, Trump rejected a return to full-scale war. But as he tries to find a way out of a conflict he started, Iran has proved a stubborn enemy.

On Tuesday evening, Iran fired multiple missiles on American bases in Jordan. The U.S. military intercepted the missiles with apparent ease, but the incident has drawn Trump once again back into fighting.

The United States struck back in a “powerful response” against Iran on Wednesday evening, U.S. Central Command said on social media. “We’re going to be hitting them very hard, because it’s our turn to hit them,” Trump told reporters earlier in the day.

The Iranian and U.S. moves come as the war has widened quickly, with Saudi Arabia joining U.S. forces in striking Iranian proxies in Iraq, an American tanker in Egypt set ablaze from an apparent drone strike and tensions rising between Ukraine and Iran.

The war, which Trump has been trying to bring to a diplomatic conclusion since April, is now threatening to grow bigger at the very moment the United States wants to move past it.

“When Trump started the war, he thought he could control it,” said Vali Nasr, a professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. “The Iranian response is to extend the battlefield much, much wider, so the United States has to defend a broader battlefield.”

Experts said that at this stage in the war, which the United States launched with Israel five months ago, Iran wants to demonstrate the military adage that the enemy always gets a vote.

Iran wanted to demonstrate that they are not going to sit back and wait for the U.S. or Israel to strike at a time of their preference,” said Jason Campbell of the Middle East Institute. “They are trying to seize the initiative, or at the very least keep the U.S. and Israel on their back foot.”

U.S. military commanders prepared a plan for Mr. Trump that would have started another days-long bombing campaign. U.S. forces had moved air assets to Israel in preparation for those attacks, and those planes remain in place should Trump change his mind in the face of the Iranian action.

In the deliberations over that plan, Gen. Dan Caine, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, cautioned privately that resuming major combat operations against Iran was doable but would dangerously deplete interceptors available to the military’s Central Command, according to two people briefed on the discussions.

Adm. Brad Cooper, the head of Central Command, said that if Trump did not resume major combat operations, the United States should stop the bombing campaign around the Strait of Hormuz because it has reached the limit of its effectiveness, the two officials said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss operational matters.

#war #middle #east #trump #iran

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The U.S. strikes in the strait are aimed at reopening the international waterway, which the conflict effectively closed. As a result, oil prices have increased overall since the start of the war.

A spokesman for Admiral Cooper declined to comment, citing the confidential discussions.

On Wednesday, U.S. Central Command said it struck dozens of Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps targets in Iran, “including military command centers, missile and drone facilities, coastal surveillance and defense sites and maritime capabilities.”

Trump had recently seemed intent on bringing Iran back to the negotiating table. Some of the countries that have been mediating talks, including Pakistan and Qatar, are trying to do the preparatory work to restart such discussions.

Officials in the Trump administration now rarely discuss the list of priorities they had at the beginning of the war, which included eliminating Iran’s nuclear program but also eroding Tehran’s missile capability and curbing its proxy forces.

“The justification for the war has fluctuated considerably over the last few months,” Campbell said.

“It has been months since you have heard Trump or any other senior official mention anything other than the nuclear program.”

For Trump, the single most important goal is reopening the Strait of Hormuz, and to do it in a way that does not look like a loss for the United States.

But unless traffic can begin to flow through the waterway, without being cut off by an Iranian attack on a tanker or insurance companies’ doubts about safety, oil prices will rise, not recede.

“As long as issues such as who controls the Strait of Hormuz remain unresolved, let alone concerns regarding Iran’s nuclear ambitions and other initial drivers of the war, the cycle of hostilities and temporary pauses will continue,” said Mona Yacoubian, director of the Middle East Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

In an odd way, the Trump administration’s current struggles with Iran are at least partly the result of the U.S. success at the start of the war.

Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader for nearly 37 years, was killed in the opening strike by an Israeli attack based on American intelligence.

He was quickly succeeded by his son, Mojtaba Khamenei, a far more hard-line leader who does not share his father’s caution. U.S. intelligence agencies have assessed the son is more open to pursuing a nuclear weapon than his father, who had long renounced their use.

#war #middle #east #trump #iran

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The Ring, the Paprika, and a Tariff Wall With a Diamond-Sized Hole

Weeks after Antwerp's diamond guild handed Donald Trump an 18-karat gold ring stacked with 321 diamonds for America's 250th birthday, the White House quietly exempted natural diamonds from its newest round of tariffs.

"A very special thank you to my friends from Antwerp for the magnificent Freedom 250 ring," Trump said in a recorded message played at a Brussels party featuring Budweiser, bourbon, and the FBI director's girlfriend singing the anthem. Nobody is alleging a bribe. Everybody noticed the timing anyway, The New York Times reports.

White House spokesman Kush Desai insists the exemption just honors last year's EU trade deal, adding, "the only special interest guiding the Trump administration's decision-making is the best interest of the American people."

The Trade Representative's office says it never even heard about the ring. So the diamond industry spent "months of sustained advocacy" chasing "exactly this outcome," commissioned a custom Superman-logo ring engraved "Crafted in Antwerp for Donald John Trump," and got the outcome, purely on the merits.

Diamonds aren't the only forced-labor flashpoint that walked away clean. Paprika, a MAHA-movement favorite as a red-dye substitute, also got exempted, despite testing showing much of the "Made in USA" supply actually traces back to Xinjiang and a Chinese producer already on the U.S. forced-labor blacklist.

"The exemptions list practically reads like a list of products we know to be made with forced and child labor," says Sheffield Hallam professor Laura Murphy.

Trade analyst Dan Anthony puts it more bluntly: "You can't address forced labor concerns when giving a Get Out of Tariffs Free card to the most problematic areas and products." Meanwhile gold, cobalt, and tantalum from the Democratic Republic of Congo, also flagged repeatedly for forced labor, sit untouched by tariffs entirely.

So the policy sold as America's toughest-ever stand against forced labor exempts the diamond that got a president a ring and the paprika that seasons his base's ketchup substitute, while leaving the actual mining conflict zones off the list. Whose supply chain gets punished here, and whose just needs better gift-giving?

#Tariffs #Trump #Diamonds #ForcedLabor #Lobbying

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Ukraine's New Pitch Deck: "The Israel of Europe"

Volodymyr Zelensky landed in Washington this week with a fresh sales pitch, days after Ukraine launched a missile strike on an Iranian cargo ship in the Caspian Sea, Responsible Statecraft reports.

The timing is not a coincidence, it's a cover letter. George Beebe of the Quincy Institute says the goal is to "convince President Trump that Ukraine will be an Israel-type partner for the United States in Eastern Europe," one that's "even more valuable than America's NATO allies," the same allies Trump keeps trashing for going soft on his war with Iran.

Enter Laura Loomer, MAGA's own weathervane, who spent years bashing Ukraine and then reversed course overnight the moment Iran entered the conversation.

"The reality is that the Iranians are using Russian weapons to kill American soldiers and to attack the United States," she told Ukrainian media, before flying home to lobby Trump on Kyiv's behalf.

Zelensky, for his part, has been pushing the claim that Russia is feeding Iran satellite imagery to help kill American troops. Trump's response to that one: "We'll find out if that's true," followed by a plan to just ask Putin directly, presumably the single most reliable fact-checking method available to a sitting US president.

Beebe isn't buying any of it. "I think that's simply false," he says of the intelligence claim, noting Ukraine has no better satellite-tracking capability than the US already possesses.

He calls the whole campaign an effort "aimed largely at convincing the U.S. public and at convincing the White House that Russia is working closely with Iran," with "the end goal" being to drag Washington deeper into Ukraine's war under Iran's cover, a strategy he says doesn't serve America's interests.

Zelensky wants faster missile interceptors and a return to blank-check backing; Loomer wants relevance; Trump wants leverage over everyone simultaneously. Nobody here is fighting for a principle, they're fighting for a seat at Trump's table, and Iran just handed out free invitations.

If the label "Israel of Europe" is what it takes to get American weapons flowing again, what does that make Israel?

#Ukraine #Zelensky #Trump #Iran #Geopolitics

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The Last Safe Detour for Oil Just Took a Drone Hit

Nobody has claimed responsibility for Wednesday's drone strike that set two gas tankers ablaze at Egypt's Damietta port, and nobody needs to, the oil market already knows exactly what it's worth.

"The passage through the Red Sea, even via the longer Mediterranean route, could be put at risk, which threatens up to five million barrels per day of oil supply that can currently bypass the Strait of Hormuz," said Saul Kavonic of MST Marquee, Reuters reports.

Hormuz is already effectively closed. Bab el-Mandeb is now half-empty after Houthi threats. Suez and the Sumed pipeline were the last detour left, and someone just put a drone through it.

The scramble is already visible on the water. Roughly 30 ships are now clustered at the Port Said anchorage, up from 20 earlier in the week, and crude moving through Sumed has jumped from 19.5 million barrels in April to nearly 29 million in July.

"We've seen a clear increase in crude/condensate tankers heading north after loading in the Red Sea," said Vortexa's George Morris, attributing the shift directly to Houthi threats.

Some vessels are getting explicit Houthi permission to pass Bab el-Mandeb anyway, including Chinese ships, while a growing number are simply switching off their trackers and hoping.

And yet oil prices fell on Thursday, the same day a chokepoint tanker route got hit by an unclaimed drone, because traders were more interested in Iranian-Omani talks over Hormuz.

"The market isn't pricing in disruption to the canal at this stage," said S&P Global's Aly Blakeway, which is either remarkable discipline or remarkable denial.

The insurance side isn't nearly as relaxed: "Insurers may also command higher Additional War Risk Premiums for Suez in light of the attack, given the increased risk to shipping and energy infrastructure in the region," warned Argus's Martin Senior.

Someone is going to profit off this uncertainty either way, it just won't be the tanker crews rerouting around Africa for an extra month of transit time.

So the last working oil corridor in the region just absorbed a drone strike nobody owns, prices dropped anyway, and the only people moving with real urgency are the insurers calculating the premium. Who exactly is pricing this war, the traders watching diplomacy in Oman, or the underwriters watching the drones?

#OilMarkets #SuezCanal #Egypt #EnergySecurity #MiddleEast

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Fourteen for Fourteen: The Sanctions Duel Nobody Actually Wins

On Thursday, the EU adopted its 21st sanctions package against Russia, its biggest in four years, hitting 218 individuals and entities, dozens of banks, crypto platforms, and 51 companies accused of funneling banned tech to Moscow, 14 of them Chinese or Hong Kong-based, Reuters reports.

Brussels barely had time to enjoy the press release. Twenty-four hours later, China's Commerce Ministry answered with a mirror-image list: 14 EU entities banned from receiving Chinese dual-use goods, effective immediately.

The symmetry is the point. Beijing framed it as pure procedure, "to safeguard national security and interests, and to fulfill international obligations such as non-proliferation, in response to the E.U.'s egregious actions," a ministry spokesperson said, per ABC News.

But look at who got hit on each side. The EU's list is mostly logistics and trading firms accused of moving banned chips.

China's list goes straight for the jugular: German defense giant Rheinmetall, Czech military-truck maker Tatra, French drone manufacturer Cavok UAS, and a Dutch naval shipbuilder, Bloomberg reports. Fourteen against fourteen on paper. Middlemen against arms manufacturers in practice.

Polish think tank OSW calls the speed and precision of China's response "unprecedented," and notes the real target isn't this week's sanctions at all, it's the EU's planned autumn rollout of new single-market defense protections against Chinese industrial pressure, OSW's analysis explains.

Beijing has already run this play once, quietly talking Germany out of backing tariffs on Chinese electric vehicles. Meanwhile Brussels keeps announcing record-breaking sanctions rounds while its own defense contractors discover they can't source the rare-earth magnets those sanctions were supposed to protect.

So the EU gets to call this its toughest crackdown yet, and China gets to call this just following the law, and somewhere between those two press releases, Europe's actual defense industry is the one running short on parts.

#EU #China #Sanctions #Russia #Defense

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The Iran War Now Runs on Vibes and Depleted Interceptors

Five months into the war on Iran, the US struck "dozens" of IRGC-linked targets Wednesday night, and Washington still can't say whether that's the start of a bigger campaign or the last gasp of one, Bloomberg reports.

Asked what the administration's strategy actually is, White House spokeswoman Anna Kelly offered the tautology of the year: "only the Commander-in-Chief knows what he will do next." At least she's honest that nobody else does either.

What's remarkable is who's now openly skeptical. Not the doves, the hawks. John Hannah of the Jewish Institute for National Security of America, an organization not exactly known for restraint, said, "I'm skeptical that further escalation has a high chance of achieving US objectives in Hormuz, which for better or worse has become the war's new center of gravity.
Certainly not at a cost that Trump, the American people, or the world economy are prepared to pay."

A former CIA Iran analyst, Jim Lamson, added that the strikes won't stop the IRGC from hitting shipping in Hormuz and won't make Tehran "cry uncle and commit to anything that is not in its national interests." When the people who usually cheer for more bombs start doing the math out loud, that's not caution, that's an exit sign nobody's willing to read.

The real constraint isn't strategy, it's inventory. Commercial crude stockpiles are at their lowest since 2018, and General Dan Caine reportedly warned Trump last week that continued strikes would strain munitions reserves, particularly the air defense interceptors protecting US bases.

Defense analyst Jennifer Kavanagh cut through the euphemisms: "I don't think that there's a shortage of munitions to fight this war. The question is, what strategic costs are you willing to pay to continue this war? Yes, we could escalate, but the gains might be marginal, and the costs might be high."

The war isn't being paused for ethics, it's being paused for supply chain math, with China's rise in the background as the actual bill collector.

So the president who promised no quagmire is now running a war where his own spokeswoman won't predict his next move, his allies are quietly begging him to stop, and the interceptors are running low faster than the rhetoric is.

Is this a war being fought to win, or a war being fought until the warehouse runs empty?

#Iran #Trump #Hormuz #MiddleEastWar #Pentagon

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The AG Nomination on a Layaway Plan

Todd Blanche wants to be attorney general, and Donald Trump has found the cleanest workaround yet for two Republican senators standing in the way: just wait for them to leave office.

"I have no objection to temporarily withdrawing Todd's name, if they do not do the right thing, and putting him back after Cornyn and Tillis are out of office," Trump posted, naming Sens. John Cornyn and Thom Tillis, both retiring, as the obstacles, The Washington Post reports. It's less a nomination strategy than a countdown clock.

What Cornyn and Tillis actually want in writing is almost quaint: proof that the president isn't getting a better tax deal than everyone else.

The underlying settlement, resolving Trump's lawsuit against the IRS over his leaked returns, includes a nearly $1.8 billion taxpayer-funded payout pool and blanket tax protections shielding Trump, his family, and their businesses from past claims.

A federal judge already called the whole arrangement an attempt to "manipulate" the court, since both sides of the "lawsuit" answer to the same boss.

Cornyn puts the ask plainly: "This is about making sure that even if you're the president of the United States, you don't get favorable terms from the government in the settlement of a lawsuit that ordinary citizens would not get."

Trump's own framing gives the game away. He didn't dispute the senators' concerns, he dismissed the senators, noting he "refused to Endorse" either of them and that their "political careers have been ended by my action."

Translation: their objections don't need answering, just outlasting. Cornyn isn't buying the innocent-bystander act either, telling MS NOW he suspects someone close to Trump is whispering "don't agree to those terms."

His retort to the president: he "is mistaken if he believes concerns about the provisions in his tax lawsuit settlement are limited to me and Senator Tillis."

So the sitting president is publicly floating a plan to shelve his own attorney general nominee until the two senators auditing his tax settlement are gone, and calling that patience rather than what it actually looks like: waiting out the only people currently positioned to ask real questions.

If the deal is as clean as the White House claims, why does it only need two more retirements to pass?

#Trump #Blanche #IRS #Senate #Justice

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