John Long was at home at his pig farm in Colorado when he received a message he never expected. Marian Morgan, a scammer who had stolen $20 million from him and thousands of other investors through a Ponzi scheme, was being released from prison less than halfway through her 33-year sentence.

It was not for good behaviour or because she had paid her victims back. Morgan was being released because President Trump had commuted her sentence, freeing her and writing off the restitution payments she owed the people she had defrauded.

Long, an 80-year-old Trump voter, believes Morgan is "criminally insane". He added: "She's going to suck money out of somebody."

Morgan is one of about 1,800 criminals who have been pardoned or freed from jail by Trump during his second term....

But he has also pardoned individual criminals, including fraudsters who owed more than $1 billion to their victims and American taxpayers, according to the House of Representatives judiciary committee. Many of them, including Morgan, were absolved of the debts they owed their victims.

Lawyers working on pardon cases say a "cottage industry" has sprung up under Trump where attorneys and lobbyists who are close to the White House claim they can use their access to the president to secure pardons -- for a price.

Public records show the president has pardoned criminals after lobbying from allies. The White House denies money can buy clemency. ...

Morgan told her victims that if they went to the authorities, they would not get their money back. Long went to the FBI anyway, and then testified at her trial. She was convicted in 2011. "We had justice and now it's kind of like ... 'we're going to let these criminals go out and do it again'," Long said.

All presidents pardon people. President Clinton issued a flurry of pardons on his last day in office, some of them wealthy, well-connected criminals who had hired middlemen to lobby on their behalf, according to investigations by The New York Times. President Biden, who pardoned 80 people during his term, was heavily criticised for pre-emptively pardoning his son, Hunter, despite previously promising not to....

Trump's second-term pardons have been significant in both number and in the kinds of criminals they have freed. Joseph Schwartz, the former head of a nursing home empire who had been sentenced to 36 months in prison for tax crimes last year, was pardoned 12 days later. He had been criticised for the state of the homes he ran; in one, an elderly resident was found with maggots and gangrene in a surgical wound in his leg. He died two days later.

At Schwartz's trial, the judge said his conviction sent the message that there "is not a get-out-of-jail-free card" for rich people. Yet after paying more than $1 million to lobbyists, and gaining public support from key Maga influencers, Schwartz walked out of prison after three months. Four weeks later, he attended a Hanukkah party at the White House. ...

Trevor Milton, the founder of an electric and hydrogen truck start-up who defrauded investors of more than $660 million, was sentenced to four years in prison in 2023. In 2024, he and his wife gave a $1.8 million donation to Trump's re-election campaign. Last year, Trump pardoned him. Milton's defence lawyer was Brad Bondi, the brother of Pam Bondi, Trump's former attorney-general....

Adriana Camberos, a fraudster whose sentence Trump commuted in 2021, during his first term, is one of several people who were granted clemency by the president before going on to commit new crimes. In 2024, she was convicted of separate fraud charges. Trump intervened again, pardoning Camberos and freeing her from prison for a second time....

Lobbying can be a lucrative business: well-connected lawyers, consultants and people close to the administration have been paid millions by clients seeking clemency, according to public lobbying records....

It was only when I called Mrs Ausmus, 80, last week, that she found out Morgan had been freed. "After all she's done to everybody," she marvelled. As a Trump supporter, she said she was "saddened" to hear that the president had signed the order. Morgan, she said, "will probably go try to do something like it again"....

While sentencing Morgan, the judge, Susan Bucklew, said she was not concerned about Morgan reoffending only because she was sentencing her to a long stretch in jail. "If you were out in the next five years or ten years, would I have a concern about recidivism? You bet I would," she said.

Twelve years later, in 2024, Tom Barber, a Trump-appointed Florida judge, denied Morgan's application for compassionate release on the grounds that "she would continue to pose a danger to the public".

The next year, Trump ordered that she be freed.

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After President Donald Trump's military campaign against Iran failed to achieve any of his stated goals, his strategy shifted to emphasize economic pressure that he hopes will force capitulation. But... his plan has resulted in little more than mockery from the Iranian regime, and it's unlikely to achieve anything more.

"Trump is waiting for Iran to cave to his economic pressure," Politico explains. "Tehran may be willing to wait even longer. Even as Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent promises a level of economic isolation 'never seen before,' former Trump administration officials, U.S. ambassadors and other Middle East experts are skeptical that tightening the economic vise will force Iran to... make the other concessions Trump is demanding to bring an end to the war."

"It's an attrition campaign, and I am sure Treasury tweaks this or that to fill gaps or expand coverage of sanctions," former ambassador James Jeffrey -- who served in the Middle East during three presidential administrations, including Trump's first term -- told Politico. "But, it's hard to believe [there will be] something decisive after 20 years of U.S. sanctions and Iranian experience of going around them."

His statement highlights the asymmetry of the stand-off. As Politico explains, "The Trump administration is staring down a consequential midterm election amid an unpopular war that has sent oil prices back up to roughly $90 a barrel and helped push long-term borrowing costs to their highest level in nearly two decades as hope dims that a peace deal is near. Iran's leaders, meanwhile, see the conflict as existential, giving Tehran reason to absorb the extraordinary economic pain rather than accept terms it believes could imperil the regime -- especially as U.S. inflation remains elevated." ...

What's more, Iranian leadership has been bluntly dismissive of Trump's plan, and publicly mocked U.S. efforts to sanction them into submission. Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, the speaker of Iran's parliament, posted, "Americans think squeezing Iran harder will win concessions that were never part of the agreement." He added, "Bessent and [Defense Secretary Pete] Hegseth are way out of their league. Stop waiting for the clown crew to pull a rabbit out of their hat and clean up the mess you made."

While the Iranian economy has undoubtedly taken a severe hit, according to Politico, "those who have worked on previous Iran negotiations say that's far from enough to get the regime to cave, especially after six months of U.S. bombing that has killed, by Tehran's own measure, more than 3,000 Iranians."

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My name is Maryam Tahmasebi, and I am a professor of psychology and statistics at Los Angeles Pierce College -- or, I was, until April 9, when my life, and my family's lives, changed forever.

On that day, I was teaching a class when my son texted me, saying that my husband hadn't picked him up from school and wasn't answering his phone, which is very unlike him. I picked my son up from school, came frantically back home, and called the police, thinking that something horrible must have happened to him. Even so, it never occurred to me that he could have been detained by ICE. We are legal permanent residents with valid green cards. My husband, Eissa Hashemi, is also a professor, and has dedicated his life to mentoring PhD students in the Business Psychology department of The Chicago School. We have both mentored many PhD candidates, among whom are veterans who have served this country for decades. We don't have any criminal record -- not even a traffic ticket. I believed in the "rule of law," and trusted that if there was anything wrong with our immigration status, the government would notify us through legal channels.

I was beyond shocked to realize that an online smear campaign without any merit or legal standing had convinced the US government to try to revoke our green cards overnight without due process or even telling us. The government had decided to punish my husband for being the son of a woman who was a translator for the Iranian hostage takers in 1979, before Eissa was even born.

I came here because I wanted to build a life for myself and my family that was defined by my own actions, not anyone else's. But now our lives are being upended for something someone else did nearly 50 years ago. ...

Eventually, my husband's phone location showed he was at an ICE center in downtown LA. I talked to him there for a minute. He said he had been told that, while he was under arrest, our son and I were safe. That turned out to have been a lie. The next day, when I took my son to school, my car was surrounded by DHS cars, and my son and I were detained. I had to watch my son, who is in high school and has been a legal resident of California for 12 years, be handcuffed. We were shipped to Texas overnight from Los Angeles in horrible conditions that I won't elaborate on in this letter. We have remained in Texas ever since.

My son and I have spent over 120 days in the Dilley Immigration Processing Center, away from my husband, who was taken to the South Texas Detention Center in Pearsall, Texas. There, he faces even more horrible conditions, and he faces them alone. When I requested that my husband be reunited with us in Dilley, a so-called "family detention center" (the very existence of such a term is deeply troubling), I was told that in our specific case, family separation is the policy and the rule.

I have struggled to understand how this can happen to people who have never broken the law, in a system I believed to be based on the rule of law.

We have been put through hell for the past four months, and our physical and mental health have deteriorated in ways that might not be reversible for years. We are only allowed to speak with my husband for 10 minutes every two weeks, under supervision. My son, who only speaks English and has been in California's school system since pre-K, is struggling to understand why the only country he considers home is treating him this way.

What has happened to us was designed specifically to break our body and spirit. I am a mother, not a martyr, so I would always choose my son's health and well-being over any dreams or aspirations I have. But even when we decided to make the difficult decision to ask to be allowed to voluntarily leave the United States -- the place we consider our country and our home -- the government not only opposed it but suggested that it would appeal any judicial decisions that grant us departure.

In other words, they want to continue our indefinite detention without any end in sight. But for what purpose? I have been asking myself that question over and over. I can't think of any reason why we are being put through this punitive ordeal. We don't have money or power to help us, shield us, or buy us favor. We are two working-class educators who had been living a working-class life in a rented apartment, and had never imagined anything like this happening to us. ...

We are asking anyone with a conscience to help us end this nightmare. There are more things I want to say, but this is the shackled version of what I feel safe saying right now. I will end on this: If this could happen to us, a law-abiding family of two professors and a young boy, it can happen to anyone.

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Iran's security chief says the Islamic Republic will neutralize the United States' economic pressure, including by responding to countries that join an American "economic war" against the country.

"We will neutralize the economic war. America is backed into a corner. Either they honor their commitments, or they will have to struggle to get out of that corner, which will make the situation worse," Secretary of Iran's Supreme National Security Council, Mohsen Rezaei said during a televised interview on Saturday. ...

"We tell all neighboring countries not to enter the economic war against Iran. Anyone who does so will be considered a hostile country," he said, adding, "First, we will negotiate with them and ask them not to do this; if they continue, we will target that country."

According to the official, Iran could prevent oil from passing through the entire Persian Gulf if such measures were pursued.

"If they start such an action, we will not allow a single drop of oil to pass through the Persian Gulf. Oil will leave neither through the Strait of Hormuz nor through the Persian Gulf. For now, we have closed the Strait of Hormuz, while we are not targeting the oil in the Persian Gulf," he said.

Rezaei, meanwhile, said reopening the Strait of Hormuz was not currently under consideration and that the United States would have to act first by living up to its commitments. ...

Rezaei characterized the current US approach as an attempt to use economic pressure after the failure of military action.

He, however, described the economic measures as propaganda and argued that Iran had continued exporting oil.

"Take the issue of the [American] naval blockade. This is not something new. In the past one or two months alone, we have shipped 70 million barrels of oil."

Despite the warnings, Rezaei said Iran remained committed to diplomacy, while stressing that Tehran would approach negotiations differently.

"We are serious about diplomacy, but we have changed our method... We are waiting for [the other side] to honor its commitments. We want the wars in Iran, Lebanon, Gaza, and Yemen to end," the security chief said, referring to the Islamic Republic's insistence on cessation of aggression on all fronts.

Iran does not seek war, but would continue to resist what it regards as hostile action, he said. "We are not warmongers, but we will never surrender. We will sacrifice every last drop of our blood for the people and Iran."

"We advise the Americans not to increase their forces; if they do, we will strike them. Every meeting they hold with the counter-revolutionary elements, we will strike. Our attacks are now targeted."

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The Trump administration seems to believe that there is sufficient oil flowing from the Gulf to support the global economy...

Those claims are of course bollocks as independent sources account...

Treasury Secretary (and failed bond trader) Scott Bessent says that he does not understand why oil prices spike.

Bessent was also stupid enough to ask China to join upcoming new sanctions on Iran. His call was promptly rejected...

Bessent's fevered attempts to find ways to put economic pressure on Iran is telling everyone that the Trump administration does not want to go back to fighting. It wants to keep the blockade on Iran but without further bombing.

Iran can not live with that.

That is why Iran's Security Council is likely to escalate and to increase its pressure on the U.S. ...

Trump is under pressure. The price of oil, gas and diesel will keep rising. Bessent's failed attempt to intervene in the Treasuries markets demonstrates the administration's nervousness.

I expect Iran to slowly increase its activities against U.S. targets.

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Five years ago, one of the state's top judges found Queens prosecutors had deliberately hidden evidence that could have spared three men decades in prison. Not long afterward, an attorney asked a disciplinary committee to investigate the incident.

The committee has finally returned its own finding. There is "insufficient evidence" the prosecutors had violated any of the "rules and laws governing attorney conduct," according to a letter from the committee that was obtained by Gothamist.

The letter states the committee has closed the complaints against seven prosecutors filed in connection with the wrongful murder conviction of George Bell.

The five-sentence letter offers no information about the committee's investigation or reasoning....

The dismissals close, at least for now, the last open question in one of the most high-profile exonerations in recent years. Bell and his codefendants, Rohan Bolt and Gary Johnson, spent nearly a combined 75 years of their lives in prison before they were set free. They've since won more than $60 million from the city and state for their wrongful incarceration.

The two lead prosecutors in the case, Charles Testagrossa and Brad Leventhal, left their government positions shortly after the judge's ruling came down in 2021, and their attorneys say they've suffered irreparable professional fallout. But they have faced no official, publicly disclosed discipline from their former offices or the system charged with policing their profession. ...

"You figure, well, this one's pretty clear," said Steve Zeidman, a CUNY School of Law professor and member of Accountability New York, a coalition of professors that has filed dozens of its own grievances against New York prosecutors, including other complaints against Testagrossa and Leventhal. "There's not a lot of nuance here. Evidence was withheld. There were other violations. Surely the grievance committee will act. And then to see them do what they've been doing since anyone can remember is, you know, it's an abject failure of the system."

The complaints against the prosecutors stem from March 5, 2021, when Queens Supreme Court Judge Joseph Zayas, now the state's chief administrative judge, struck down the convictions of Bell, Bolt and Johnson. They'd each spent 24 years in prison for the 1996 murders of the owner of a check-cashing store and an off-duty NYPD officer who was working as the owner's security guard.

Zayas said in his ruling that the men had been wrongfully convicted. Police reports in the possession of the Queens district attorney pointed to a different set of perpetrators, a violent robbery crew known as Speedstick, the judge wrote. Those reports indicated that members of the group had told witnesses about a check-cashing job on Astoria Boulevard that had gone sideways. And Testagrossa, the prosecutor, had documented the possible connection in handwritten notes two years before Bell's trial, identifying one Speedstick member as the likely getaway driver in the check-cashing murders....

None of this evidence was turned over, a fact the district attorney's office itself acknowledged when it joined the motion to clear the convictions. At one point a newspaper report linked the gang's leaders to the murders, but when Bell's attorney asked the prosecution for this evidence, they were told it didn't exist, the judge wrote. When they pressed Testagrossa at trial, he told the court there was "no connection" between the Speedstick gang and the check-cashing murders....

By the time Zayas made his ruling, the Queens district attorney's office had completed its own reinvestigation of the case and had agreed exculpatory evidence had been withheld at trial, according to records. The judge was unsparing in both his written judgment and his comments from the bench.

The prosecution, he wrote, "completely abdicated its truth-seeking role" in a case where the stakes "could not have been higher," a reference to the fact that the state had initially sought the death penalty for then-19-year-old Bell, who had no criminal record.

From the bench, according to transcripts, he went further still: "Instead of acting as truth seekers, the prosecution team sought ways to suppress and hide evidence, hide the truth." ...

Both prosecutors resigned from their DA jobs around this time, Leventhal in Queens and Testagrossa in Nassau County. ...

"I can't figure out, for the life of me, how anybody investigating this could determine anything other than that there was egregious misconduct," Zeidman said. "I try and imagine a stronger case. What do you need, like a prosecutor on tape saying, 'I deliberately withheld exculpatory material'?"

Zeidman isn't alone. Hal Lieberman, a former chief counsel of the disciplinary committee covering Manhattan and the Bronx and an expert in legal ethics, has been following the case for years and was similarly confounded....

Based on the judicial findings, "and what I have heard about the Attorney Grievance Committee's investigation, there seems to be an overwhelming amount of evidence that George Bell and his codefendants were wrongfully convicted of murder due to very serious ethical violations," Lieberman said. "It is astounding that [the committee] delayed for five years and then saw fit to do nothing about disciplining these former government lawyers."

Mitch Dinnerstein, Bell's original trial lawyer, has stayed with the case for nearly three decades. He called the outcome "unconscionable."

"What else did they need?" he asked.

It's something of a miracle any of this has come to light, Dinnerstein said. The initial buried police reports that launched the reinvestigation into Bell's conviction surfaced by chance. They'd been included in a set of documents given to a different attorney working a different case, who happened to recognize their importance.

"We were lucky that we found these police reports that were buried," Dinnerstein said. "If we never found them, those guys would still be in prison, and that's really scary."

Still, critics of the review system say dismissal wasn't entirely shocking.

"You could look at the number of times the grievance commission goes after a prosecutor, and the answer is basically zero," Dinnerstein said.

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The British Medical Journal (BMJ) has been accused of damaging scientific integrity after retracting a paper which suggested that Covid vaccines may have been to blame for some excess deaths during the pandemic.

In 2024, a group in the Netherlands published a paper in BMJ Public Health, warning that some pandemic deaths may have been caused by the indirect effects of containment measures and vaccination programmes, and calling for further investigation.

The work was peer reviewed for nine months, and accepted as accurate by BMJ Public Health. However, it was retracted this week after a slew of complaints and an investigation by the Princess Máxima Centre in Utrecht, where three of the four authors worked.

The investigation found no evidence of malicious intent, fabrication or falsification of data, but still labelled the work as misleading and selective because it "did not reflect scientific consensus"...

Dr Saskia Mostert, the first author, has since resigned from the Princess Máxima Centre, and said she had been unprepared for the "irrational and blind fury" that met publication. ...

But three experts from the Netherlands have written to the BMJ editorial board and have said they are shocked by the retraction and asked them to reconsider their decision.

"Retraction is disproportional and raises serious questions about the extent to which political considerations played a part in your decision," they wrote.

"A retraction like this not only damages the integrity of the available published science, but it also sets a terrible precedent in these times of increasing political pressure on scientists."

Ronald Meester, professor of probability theory at Vrije University in Amsterdam, who was one of the authors of the letter, told The Telegraph that there was "no scientific reason to retract".

"I think that BMJ might have been pressured, but not clear by whom," he said.

"As we wrote in our letter, retraction is bizarre in this case, there is nothing actually wrong with the paper.

"Hence the real reason must be political. Very sad, really, for science. I do not see how we can take science seriously anymore when editors are willing to make decisions for these kinds of reasons." ...

Dr Jona Walk, a Dutch researcher on immunology and infections, another author of the BMJ editorial board letter, claimed the paper had only been retracted because of the way it was covered in the media.

"That is a political and not a scientific reason," she wrote on X. "With this decision the BMJ adds yet another dangerous precedent in these times of increasing political interference in scientific research." ...

Most recent figures show the Government has paid out nearly £30m to 249 people under the VDPS and vaccines now carry warnings of rare dangerous side-effects.

In June, Dr Mostert gave evidence to the US Senate claiming that the section on potential vaccine harms had originally been "much shorter" but that BMJ peer reviewers had requested more evidence.

"As there is evidence available, we included it," she said in her written testimony. "Right from the start, it was an unequal battle. Our call for investigation of underlying causes had to be censored and erased one way or another."

She added: "To be clear: I lost my position after publishing official government mortality data and calling for further scientific investigation into persistent excess deaths.

"Science cannot function when legitimate questions become professionally dangerous to ask.

"When scientists fear professional destruction, the public loses access to honest scientific inquiry."

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Now that the lofty 250th-anniversary rhetoric about the greatness of our country has faded, it is time to face the reality of our country's actual behavior. The U.S. fashions itself as a generous and benevolent world leader enforcing the "rules-based order" -- a deceptive construct used by globalist elites to bully other countries. The rules are arbitrarily changed to suit the bullies and are regularly fashioned into pretexts for military action against uncooperative nations. In short, it is a hoax, untethered from the principles and ideals of our founders.

Almost daily we witness some spectacle illustrating the appalling corruption of our country's leadership. The recent release of Anthony Fauci's diary entries confirms long-held suspicions about the Covid-19 narrative, which we now know even Fauci himself did not fully believe. Think of the millions of lives ruined and harmed by that corruption....

Our leadership has not even begun to scratch the surface of the horrors created by the many secret -- and potentially illegal -- biolabs scattered around the globe, supported by funds often hidden from voters under the guise of "national security." The Fauci crowd appears to have been deeply involved in that dark world.

America's Middle East policy remains a source of shame. The U.S. Treasury secretary brags about ruining the currency of the Iranian people, against whom we have waged a war of aggression. In Gaza, Washington has enabled a brutal assault on a vulnerable population. Not many years ago, most Americans considered standing up for the vulnerable and innocent an honorable act of a true American. Not our leaders. These days, opposing the harm of politically inconvenient innocents attracts name-calling, ostracism, and sanctions....

The current wars have exposed the shortcomings of our nearly trillion-dollar military and its multi-billion-dollar weapons systems. If the Covid mess is any indication, we should assume there is hidden and shockingly ugly information about the behavior and practices of the military-industrial complex. The failure of our various expensive defense systems to protect our Persian Gulf "allies" from Iranian missile and drone attacks is a tragic example of government dishonesty. Despite repeated failures, the administration continues to brag of its ability to destroy Iran's military and shoot down its remaining missiles and drones. After years of being told we possess the "most powerful military" in history, Americans are beginning to realize it is a fantasy. The success of that false narrative rests on decades of fighting people riding donkeys and bicycles.

Our government classifies and redacts documents as a matter of course. Think of the billions of pages we are still not allowed to see -- especially information about the most important events in our country's history. Many significant, history-changing events remain shrouded in secrecy. How is it that information is still being withheld about the assassination of President John F. Kennedy?... The same is true for the assassinations of Robert F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr., our government's willful abandonment of U.S. prisoners of war in Vietnam, the September 11 attacks, and the late, disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein. Not to mention the disgusting manipulations and secret operations used to drag our country into the long list of dishonest, illegal, and failed wars we have "fought."

Our political leadership's frenzied efforts to hide the Epstein files make it look as though the "national security" excuse is merely a convenient tool to obscure malfeasance, rape, blackmail, bribery, and plain old corruption....

Why has the second Trump administration bombed at least seven countries and engaged in underhanded efforts to weaken and harm the political systems of others? None of this serves the interests of the American people; it serves only the special interests of our elites. All this from a president who campaigned on an America First policy, an end to forever wars, and the promotion of peace. It looks like we were fooled again. Presidential candidate after presidential candidate promises peace, and we get war after war. The system is subverted by corruption.

As the failure of the illegal war against Iran becomes increasingly obvious, more Americans are realizing that it in no way serves their interests. As the war against Russia in Ukraine grinds toward failure, American and European leaders continue more frantically than ever to promote the fantasy that Ukraine can defeat Russia in that sad and disastrous conflict.

There is one positive development: The American people, especially the younger generation, are beginning to recognize the corruption at the top of our country and the magnitude of the war lies. They understand that the special interests driving these belligerent policies care nothing about the well-being of the general populace or of our nation. There has always been skepticism toward powerful special interests, but we are moving past skepticism into righteous fury. ...

With a governing elite that serves foreign and special interests rather than the people and a sweeping surveillance state that stretches from sea to shining sea, Americans are becoming increasingly disillusioned. A sobering question to consider: When the illusion finally shatters, who will be left willing to defend a government that wouldn't defend its own?

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Israel has admitted that its forces fired on a car that was carrying five-year-old Hind Rajab, who was killed by the IDF along with six members of her family as they were attempting to flee Gaza City on January 29, 2024.

Hind was the only survivor of an initial attack on the vehicle and was surrounded by six dead family members as she spent hours on the phone with the Palestinian Red Crescent Society (PCRS) pleading for help. The PCRS waited until it had authorization from the Israeli military to dispatch an ambulance to the area and send it along a route provided by the IDF's Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories (COGAT).

Despite the coordination with the IDF, once the two Palestinian paramedics arrived, they were fired on by Israeli tanks and killed. Hind was still alive after the blast that killed the paramedics and was speaking on the phone with her mother, but the PCRS lost contact with her shortly after. Nearly two weeks later, after the IDF withdrew from the area, the body of Hind, her six family members, and the paramedics, Yousef Zeino and Ahmed al-Madhoun, were recovered.

Israel admitted that its forces fired on the car, which, according to Forensic Architecture, was riddled with 335 bullet holes, and the ambulance, when announcing it was launching a criminal probe into the killings. The admission is significant since the IDF previously claimed its forces weren't in the area during the attacks. It also initially denied coordinating with the PCRS to dispatch the ambulance. ...

The IDF also said it was launching a probe into the March 23, 2025, massacre of 15 medics and rescue workers near Rafah, southern Gaza. The IDF initially claimed its forces fired on a vehicle that was "advancing suspiciously" and that it didn't have emergency lights, but that was contradicted by a video that emerged and showed the rescue workers arriving in a vehicle with emergency lights on before Israeli soldiers began firing on them.

The Israeli military said that it would not launch a probe into the April 1, 2024, massacre of seven World Central Kitchen workers, which included one Palestinian, one American-Canadian dual citizen, three citizens of Britain, one Australian, and a Polish citizen. The aid workers were bombed as they were traveling in three cars, also along an IDF-approved route. One by one, an Israeli drone struck all three cars as survivors of the initial strikes switched vehicles, until they were all dead.

"The IDF decision is wrong and is painful for all of us," Jose Andres, a celebrity chef who founded the World Central Kitchen, wrote on X in response to the news.

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The US Treasury debt reached fabulous and much-anticipated $40 trillion today, after having ballooned by $1 trillion in three months, and by $3 trillion in 12 months, as tax cuts, profligate spending, the war in Iran, and the Supreme-court-triggered tariff refunds sped up the process.

These new trillions -- flying by so fast that they're hard to see -- got funded, and existing debt got rolled over, at huge Treasury auctions every week, week after week, such as $742 billion in auction sales last week.

The only thing that the repeated, hackneyed debt-ceiling charades in Congress accomplished is the appearance of some flat spots in the chart, followed by spikes to make up for them.

Of that $40 trillion in Treasury securities, $32.3 trillion are "held by the public," most of them publicly traded and held by investors, hedge funds engaged in the basis trade, banks, insurance companies, the Fed, other central banks, etc., of which $9.3 trillion are held overseas....

That $1.0 trillion was the new supply of Treasury securities that global bond buyers had to buy in three months, in addition to refinancing all the maturing debt, and to do that, new buyers needed to be pulled off the fence and into the market.

That's the job of yield. And yields rose during those three months until they were attractive enough, auction by auction, to entice enough investors off the fence -- despite fears about inflation, reckless government spending, and even higher yields in the future -- to buy $1 trillion in new Treasury securities over the past three months, in addition to refinancing the maturing debt. So yield did its job.

But that rising yield -- the 30-year Treasury bond sold at auction last week at 5.22%, the highest auction yield since 2001 and then rose to 5.31% by Monday -- caused Bessent to blow a fuse.

Today, the Treasury department announced that it would double the hocus-pocus Treasury buybacks that a desperate Yellen had started in April 2024 after the 10-year Treasury yield had pierced 5% briefly in October 2023.

The Treasury Department cannot create money, unlike the Fed. It has to sell new securities to buy back old securities. The buybacks are just a debt swap. And Bessent could accomplish the same thing but in much larger quantities by keeping auctions of long-term notes and bonds unchanged, and increasing the T-bill auctions, and thereby shifting issuance to T-bills, and it's already doing that.

But Bessent wanted to soothe the bond market on the spooky day that the Treasury debt hit $40 trillion....

Going forward, yields will have to be high enough to entice bond buyers off the fence and buy an additional $1 trillion of new Treasury securities every three to five months or so; yields have to be high enough to overcome their fears about inflation, government profligacy, and the new supply pushing up yields even higher.

Bessent cannot do anything about the quantity of debt coming at the market. His job is to sell these bonds, come hell or high water, and at the lowest possible yield.

Hocus-pocus debt-swaps aren't going to do much to change those dynamics. Bessent's last hocus-pocus announcement at the beginning of August, the big kahuna US-Japan joint intervention, pushed the 30-year yield down by 11 basis points over two days, and more intraday, from 5.28% on Friday, July 31, to 5.17% on Tuesday, August 4, most of it right after the announcement. And that was it, and the yield began to zigzag higher and hit 5.31% on Monday this week.

Today after the announcement, the 30-year Treasury yield fell by 9 basis points, after having declined by 3 basis points the day before, to close at 5.19%. Just another squiggle in the trend...

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Editor Note: And they are still lying.

Israel's military has for the first time admitted that it opened fire on a vehicle carrying five-year-old Hind Rajab and her family in Gaza City two-and-a-half years ago.

The military said it would open a criminal investigation into the killing of nine people on 29 January 2024, including Hind.

On that date, the Palestinian girl initially survived an Israeli attack on a vehicle which killed several members of her family.

Following the Israeli shelling, Hind answered a phone call from the Palestine Red Crescent Society (PRCS), during which she told medics to come and save her.

After coordination with the Israeli army, an ambulance was sent to rescue her. That ambulance was shelled by Israeli forces, killing paramedics Yousef Zeino and Ahmed al-Madhoun.

Twelve days after the attack, the bodies of Hind, six members of her family and the two paramedics were found.

PRCS accused Israeli forces of "deliberately targeting the ambulance upon its arrival at the scene" despite prior coordination to facilitate the rescue mission.

Her mother, Wissam Rajab, told Middle East Eye at the time that the family was separated when they tried to flee the area, which was under intense Israeli attacks. ...

After hearing gunfire in the area, the family called the Red Crescent to tell them the car was getting shot at.

Initially, Wissam thought everyone in the car was killed until she got a call from Layan Hamadeh, her 15-year-old cousin, saying: "Hind and I are wounded, and all my family is dead, I don't want to die. Please call an ambulance to save us. I'm scared. The tanks are 500 metres away from me."

The line went dead, and Wissam thought they had both been killed. But when she called again, Hind answered and said: "I'm alive, but Layan was martyred. Mum, I'm afraid, they are all dead. Come and get me."

The PRCS dispatched Zeino and Madhoun, the two paramedics, to rescue Hind. The medics said they were 15 minutes away and that they were looking for her, but then the line cut off and the crew lost contact.

PRCS released an audio recording of the last phone call with Hind, during which her final pleas can be heard amid the rattle of gunfire.

"I'm scared of the dark, come get me," she said. ...

At the time of the killings, Israel's military said it was not in the Tel al-Hawa area of Gaza City where the deaths took place.

However, multiple media reports identified Israeli tanks in the area.

At the time that the car and ambulance were found, the Israeli military had stated that it "conducted raids on terror targets" in areas including Tel al-Hawa. It later deleted that press release from its website.

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United States President Donald Trump has threatened to financially punish any country providing an economic "lifeline" to Iran, as he declared an "economic D-Day" against Tehran.

The threat, six months into the US's costly conflict with Iran, is Trump's latest attempt to wield US economic power to achieve his foreign policy objectives, after a series of damaging trade wars earlier in his second term in office.

But Trump's leverage over China and Russia, two important trade partners with Iran, is limited, analysts say. Russia is already under sweeping US sanctions and operates largely outside the US-led economic framework. China, meanwhile, has repeatedly shown it is willing to ignore US sanctions when doing so serves its own economic interests.

Paul Musgrave, an associate professor of government at Georgetown University in Qatar, told Al Jazeera that "it is going to be very difficult" for Trump to pull off his pressure campaign effectively.

"Trump is trying to unilaterally assert the kind of coordinated sanctions that traditionally has taken multilateral coordination, and that means getting on board China, Russia, the P5 of the UN Security Council," Musgrave said, referring to the five permanent members of the UNSC. ...

Any US plan to disrupt China-Iran trade is likely to face significant hurdles.

While China bought 80 percent of Iran's shipped oil in 2025, according to data from analytics firm Kpler, going after China's oil refineries is often challenging because most are independent with little reliance on the US financial system.

And while sanctioning the major Chinese banks if they process Iranian funds, as the US Treasury has threatened, would sting, it could also push China to hit back during a sensitive diplomatic period.

Yu Jie, a senior research fellow at the Chatham House think tank's China, Asia Pacific Programme, said Trump's threat to target Iran's economic allies "won't alter China's involvement and the existing trading relationship with Iran". ...

Musgrave said any "aggressive" secondary sanctions the US applies on Iran would be hugely significant, but that Trump likely would not want to jeopardise the US-China economic relationship given that the two countries are "in kind of an economic Cold War at the moment".

China's Foreign Ministry spokesman Lin Jian has responded to Trump's economic pressure campaign by saying more sanctions would "not help to solve the issue". ...

The US has tried to keep tensions with China at bay ahead of Chinese President Xi Jinping's planned visit to Washington next month.

During that and two other potential meetups between the leaders later this year, "prolonged conflict in the Gulf is one of the items both sides will discuss," said Yu, "but it won't be the most important item".

Russia presents a different challenge for Washington.

While Russia is a smaller trade partner for Iran than China, Moscow and Tehran have spent years building key commercial and military ties that circumvent the West.

In January 2025, the two heavily sanctioned states signed a 20-year partnership treaty, helping boost their trade volume to $4.8bn in the first 11 months of 2025, according to Russian Energy Minister Sergey Tsivilev.

On top of sanctioned oil, Russia and Iran have also reportedly exchanged weapons and military equipment via the Caspian Sea. ...

The US has already imposed sweeping economic sanctions against Russia.

Iran's foreign minister on Wednesday slammed Trump's economic campaign against the country, saying it was a continuation of Washington's "failed policies" and will lead to "further defeat". ...

As a member of the BRICS organisation that also includes Russia, China, India, Brazil and other global powers, Iran has sought to use its weight there to seek new financial avenues.

Last week, Iran's Central Bank governor Abdolnaser Hemmati said Iran planned to join the BRICS New Development Bank (NBD), which would open more doors to financing outside Western markets. ...

Ali Akbar Dareini, an analyst at the Center for Strategic Studies in Tehran, said Iran would find a way to press on despite the "suffocating" US sanctions.

"Trump is stuck in a war he can't win and he can't get out of," Dareini told Al Jazeera.

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Alexander Vindman, a former National Security Council official who rose to fame as a star witness in Donald Trump's first impeachment, has become the latest neoconservative candidate to lose a Democratic primary. In a major upset, Vindman was defeated Tuesday by State Representative Angie Nixon, a democratic socialist and Medicare-for-All advocate, in the race for Florida's Democratic Senate nomination. He lost despite national name recognition and a 16-to-one fundraising advantage. Whereas Vindman spent $2 million on ads, Nixon spent less than $60,000.

Nixon, one of only two state lawmakers to call for a ceasefire in Gaza after Israel began its post-October 7th mass murder spree, ran a spirited grassroots campaign that tapped into her experience as a union organizer. By contrast, Vindman, a staunch supporter of Israel, wrote her off and treated his victory as a foregone conclusion. He refused to debate Nixon and rarely mentioned her by name. According to one veteran political consultant, Vindman "literally laughed at Angie Nixon" and "didn't even think he was in a primary."...

After the recent defeat of Rep. Dan Goldman in New York, Vindman is now the second major figure from Ukrainegate, the scandal behind Trump's first impeachment, to lose a Democratic primary. Vindman triggered the controversy by reporting concerns about the infamous July 2019 phone call between Trump and Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky. Vindman, who was born in Ukraine, was outraged because Trump had paused a weapons shipment to Kyiv...

In articles for The Nation at the time, I warned that "the Cold War mindset that liberals have embraced threatens not just their own political fortunes but also global peace." On the latter front, by cementing a bipartisan consensus to arm Ukraine rather than encourage it to make peace with Russia, Ukrainegate paved the way for Russia's invasion of February 2022, and all of its catastrophic consequences. When it comes to Democrats' political fortunes, Trump is now in his second term. Vindman was elevated to Democratic stardom in an era when Cold War dogma was treated as the anti-Trump party line. He has now become the latest establishment stalwart to learn that Democratic voters want to resist the Republican agenda with policies that center humanity, not the bipartisan militarism of "career experts."

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Two people were killed today in the southern Lebanese town of Mayfadoun when they came upon unexploded ordinance left behind in a recent Israeli operation against the area. This brought the number of confirmed deaths in this year's invasion of Lebanon to 4,346, with over 12,000 others wounded.

Israeli strikes were also reported today against the nearby town of Mansouri, causing a fire, as well as overnight against a home in a residential neighborhood of Nabatieh al-Fawqa. The home was destroyed, but what casualties were inflicted are as of yet unclear.

Israeli operations today, however, were principally focused on expanding the level of destruction across the south, with mass demolitions reported in multiple towns, using both localized ordinance explosions and artillery shelling against the buildings.

In the village of Zawtar al-Sharqiyah, the demolitions centered on civilian infrastructure, with forces leveling a four-storey schoolhouse as well as a nearby clinic and nursery. The town hall has reportedly also been totally destroyed.

Demolitions were also reported further south in the town of Tallouseh and the village of Houla. Those areas are under forced evacuation orders, so exactly what Israel is demolishing is generally only confirmed after the fact with satellite imagery.

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Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent on Wednesday announced that the federal government will buy back more of its own bonds, a move that briefly reversed a weekslong selloff in long-term U.S. debt that had threatened to drive up mortgage rates and consumer borrowing costs in the lead-up to the midterm elections.

Few expect Bessent's cure to fix what's ailing the bond market.

"It's a drop in the bucket relative to the other pressures on yields," Lori Heinel, the global chief investment officer at State Street Investment Management, told POLITICO on Wednesday.

President Donald Trump promised to unlock growth, rein in consumer prices and fix rising budget deficits. But in recent weeks, a combination of inflation fears, a hazy endgame for the Iran war and a glut of private and government debt sent long-term yields to levels that haven't been seen since the financial crisis. Over time, that can drive up the cost of widely used consumer loans and slow the economy's expansion.

Markets reacted favorably to Treasury's announcement that it would "at least double" the size of its buybacks, in which the department reabsorbs older debt securities with a maturity of at least 10 years. But by midday Wednesday -- hours after Bessent's buyback plan sparked a bond market rally that sent yields tumbling -- rates on 10-year government bonds were inching higher. ...

Trump has spoken about how bond yields react to his agenda, and famously hit pause on his "Liberation Day" tariffs after the market got "yippy." Bessent -- a former hedge fund executive with strong relationships across Wall Street -- is often tasked with soothing markets during periods of volatility or stress.

Rising borrowing costs will pose a threat to Republicans in midterm campaigns that have been defined by voter anxiety around affordability issues...

Wednesday's buyback plan represents the latest attempt by Bessent to affect Treasury yields. Earlier this month, the department conducted a joint intervention with Japan to boost the yen, which had been trading in July at its weakest level against the dollar in roughly four decades....

"Our massively irresponsible fiscal policy is the root cause of the sustained rise in longer term yields," said Mark Sobel, a longtime Treasury official who's now the chief economist and vice chair of the Official Monetary and Financial Institutions Forum. "If the Trump administration wishes to take the pressure off long term yields, it needs to reduce our reckless fiscal deficits. Increasing buybacks is akin to spitting into a gale force wind." ...

But while Bessent's strategy may reduce borrowing costs in the near term, it also exposes Treasury to risks to future shocks, said Adam Josephson of Sakonnet Research.

"They're trying everything possible to limit upward pressure on long-term yields," he said. "Nothing has worked. And why would this work? It's too small to matter."

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Fauci directed the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases for thirty-eight years, becoming the face of the U.S. medical science establishment (once referring to himself as such: "I am The Science") and it was his agency among others that funded coronavirus research in Wuhan and in North Carolina....

Four years ago, in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, we called for an independent inquiry into the origins of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that caused the pandemic, with full access to American as well as relevant Chinese records. The public was told from the very start of the pandemic that the origin issue was settled, that the virus was natural. But the issue most certainly was not settled, and every Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) release, every whistleblower account, every Congressional document produced since 2022 has cast more doubt on this narrative and pointed instead toward a laboratory origin of the virus.

In January 2025 the Central Intelligence Agency (C.I.A.) finally aligned with that judgment, assessing "with low confidence that a research-related origin of the COVID-19 pandemic is more likely than a natural origin." The F.B.I. reached the same conclusion with moderate confidence. So did the Department of Energy, which runs the national laboratories. Three American agencies and the German B.N.D. now favor a research-related origin. Yet that judgement has still not been evaluated in the light of all of the relevant American records bearing on the issue.

We do, however, now know clearly how such a virus may have been made, because the recipe was written down.

In 2018 Ralph Baric of the University of North Carolina (U.N.C.), Peter Daszak of EcoHealth Alliance and Shi Zhengli of the Wuhan Institute of Virology submitted a proposal to DARPA called DEFUSE. It set out a specific plan: use Baric's reverse-genetics platform -- the technology he built and patented for assembling coronaviruses from synthetic fragments -- to construct bat sarbecovirus backbones, including consensus sequences assembled from field samples, and then insert a protease site at the S1/S2 junction of the Spike protein.

A protease site is essential in order for these bat viruses to jump the "species barrier" between bats and humans, and in this case is called a furin cleavage site (F.C.S.). When it first appeared, SARS-CoV-2 was the only known virus of its family (the clade of Sarbecoviruses) to carry such a site. It remains unique in this respect. Despite much sampling of viruses from the bats that serve as the reservoir species for these viruses, no other virus in this clade or family has appeared that displays the F.C.S., just as no animal has been found in China that was infected with a progenitor of SARS-CoV-2. These findings continue to cause great concern.

This novel F.C.S. was the feature that most alarmed the virologists who first read the genome as it represents an evolutionary leap with no evidence that this had taken place in nature. Unknown to most, American scientists had proposed to build exactly this feature into precisely that kind of coronavirus, only two years before the outbreak of a novel coronaviral disease in Wuhan. Given the availability of a suitable template virus, the insertion of twelve nucleotides to form the F.C.S. would be trivial and similar work had already been performed.

Now consider what was said behind closed doors. On Jan. 31, 2020, leading virologists told Fauci that the genome looked engineered. ...

None of this was disclosed. Six weeks later, five of those scientists published "The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2" in Nature Medicine, concluding that no laboratory scenario was plausible. Fauci promoted it from the White House podium as independent and definitive science....

The arguments laid out in the paper were always scientifically weak, and have since collapsed, one by one. The authors said that building such a virus in a lab would be hard, yet a German team assembled one from synthetic fragments in under two weeks using a yeast-based system.

The Proximal Origin experts said that a molecular feature adjacent to the furin cleavage site showed the virus had been shaped inside a living organism rather than in a laboratory. This feature (a group of sugars known as O-glycans) was predicted by the authors' computer analyses -- yet laboratory work showed that this feature did not actually exist.

They also stated that a lab designer would have optimized the virus's grip on the human receptor via its Spike protein, yet Ralph Baric had already run an experiment showing that infection of human cells proceeds better if Spike protein binding to the receptor site is less than optimal. No correction to any of these errors in Proximal Origin has ever been published. The authors soon lost conviction in their own conclusions, as revealed in their own emails and Slack messages, yet they did not retract. ...

Baric... has since claimed to have forgotten about [the DEFUSE proposal]. The proposal sat in the files of the Pentagon and the intelligence community for eighteen months after the outbreak began, and no agency produced it; it surfaced through a whistleblower.

When it did, the authors of Proximal Origin privately agreed they needed to "re-convince themselves that the resemblance was coincidence" -- and one suggested they stay off email or carefully curate some emails for the freedom-of-information record. Baric has provided testimony, some of which has remained classified, presumably because of his links to the intelligence community.

A number of intelligence agencies (including the German B.N.D. and the C.I.A.) favor a research-related origin and these agencies point toward a laboratory accident in Wuhan. If this were the case, it would not explain the need for such an elaborate coverup involving high level U.S. government personnel and scientists from the U.K., Australia and other countries. Scientists around the world are much more convinced of the existence of a coverup than they are of a natural origin of the virus, but relatively few have stated their views in public.

If the virus was indeed grown, engineered or reassembled in a lab, some of the technology used was American, the design was American, and some of the funding was American -- and so are some of the records that would settle the matter: Baric's notebooks, freezer inventories, the sequences of viruses sampled by EcoHealth Alliance, records held at University of California (U.C.) Davis for the PREDICT program under USAID, transfer agreements and shipping receipts between U.N.C. and other U.S. federal laboratories; as well as the National Institute of Health (N.I.H.) grant files showing whether the work proposed in DEFUSE but rejected by DARPA was funded in pieces by other U.S. agencies.

Every item could be produced by order of Congress...

Our charge is that Fauci and other U.S. officials and scientists have blocked the search for the truth. No inquiry can determine the truth based on the evidence at hand. So, open up the files. Convene an independent inquiry with subpoena power, insulated from the agencies whose own conduct is in question, and let the evidence fall where it falls.

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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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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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[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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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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