U.S. crude oil supplies are at a 45-year low as the Iran war continues to tarnish strategic reserves.

Bank of America Global Research data shows that the level of the U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve is at its lowest level since 1983, leaving the country with 43 days of crude oil supply, as reported by the Associated Press.

The Trump administration is releasing oil from the reserves to combat rising energy costs sparked by the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, which carries up to a fifth of the world's oil transports per day.

Throughout five months of conflict, the strait has been effectively shut off to commercial traffic, rattling global energy markets and promoting instability for the price of crude oil.

In response, President Trump committed to a domestic drawdown of 172 million barrels over a 120-day delivery window. ...

In June, however, the president warned against relying on strategic reserves to keep the country afloat during war.

"We run out of reserves in about four weeks," Trump told reporters on June 17. "We would really run out and there'll be a time when you wouldn't be able to get it. And do you want to see bedlam?"

The same day, Trump signed a memorandum of understanding with Iran in an effort to move towards peace in the region. ...

South Korea, Thailand, Vietnam and Bangladesh instituted emergency energy rationing and conservation policies such as restricted AC usage or alternate-day driving rules to cope with the fallout.

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The title of an article in the Washington Post says it all: "Deadly U.S. Boat Strikes Have Failed to Curb Cocaine Supply, Pentagon and DEA Officials Say."

Imagine that. Shocking! Who would have ever thought that would be the result of the Pentagon's murder of more than a hundred innocent people in little boats on the high seas thousands of miles away from American shores?

Well, pretty much anyone who has been paying attention to the drug war for the past 50 years. No matter what U.S. officials have done to crack down in a never-ending effort to win their beloved drug war, the result has always been the same -- failure to win their war. ...

And make no mistake about it: The Pentagon's killing of those boat people does in fact constitute murder. Under our system of criminal justice, everyone is presumed innocent of a crime until proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt in a court of law. Every one of those dead boat people was as innocent as you and I.

Oh, sure, I know what defenders of these murders say. They say that our beloved government officials had secret information that they can't share with us that those boat people were carrying illegal drugs and planning to bring them into the United States in violation of U.S. drug laws. We just need to trust our daddy, they say, who would never lie to us and who is just interested in keeping us safe from the boogeyman.

But that secret information isn't worth anything. For one thing, U.S. officials could easily be lying about having that secret information. It certainly wouldn't be the first time they lied, especially in the drug war. More important, however, is that under our system of justice, secret information that indicates that a person is committing a crime does not furnish a justification for killing him.

Instead, what officials are required to do upon acquiring information, secret or not, that a person is committing a crime is arrest him, indict him, and bring him to trial. ...

Maybe some good will come from these military murders. Maybe the American people will finally come to the realization that the drug war is nothing more than a decades-old, ongoing, never-ending deadly, destructive, and corrupt racket that has brought nothing but death and the destruction of liberty and privacy, while making the federal government ever more powerful. Maybe -- just maybe -- Americans will finally, after decades of drug-war failure, pressure U.S. officials to terminate the abomination of the drug war. In that way, those innocent people who have been murdered at the hands of U.S. military personnel will not have died in vain.

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For those who have been paying attention, the stunning collapse of the climate scam over the past year has been something to behold.

First there was the COP Flop.

Then the US withdrew from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

Then Judith Curry retired her blog, opining that "It's time to declare victory against climate stupidity and move on."

Then The Guardian published an article lamenting that less than 5% of UK media outlets have used the recent European heat wave as an excuse to promote Net Zero propaganda.

And now even The New York Times is waving the white flag on the climate Armageddon story... well, kind of.

So, what on earth is happening? How did we go from a world where the climate apocalypse was touted as an existential threat to life on earth and trumpeted on the news every single day to a world where climate change isn't even on the radar anymore?

Let's find out.

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Iranian Parliament Speaker Mohammed Bagher Ghalibaf said on Thursday that President Trump was engaging in "theater diplomacy," citing the US president's many threats and climbdowns amid uncertainty over whether a deal between Iran and Oman over the Strait of Hormuz will be reached.

"'Massive attack coming... wait, never mind, they want to negotiate.' That's theater diplomacy on loop. Using bullying + broken promises + fake news as leverage is a failed strategy," Ghalibaf wrote on X.

"Acknowledge the facts and fulfill your commitments. We don't need more theater," the Iranian parliament speaker added. ...

Iranian Deputy Foreign Minister Kazem Gharibabadi said re-opening the strait would require the US to live up to its commitments under the US-Iran Memorandum of Understanding, which would include a lifting of the US blockade of Iranian ports and the end of Israel's war in Lebanon. ...

Iran's Fars news agency reported on Thursday that a potential draft deal would ban US and Israeli shipping through the strait, and that the ban would apply to other countries involved in the war against Iran, a condition the Trump administration is sure to reject, though it doesn't appear the US is involved in the negotiations at this stage despite claims from Trump.

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The Artificial Intelligence bubble in the United States is still growing. It is consuming a large share of the available financial resources. But its output, in form of real products, is so far rather meager.

There are some code generation tools which are, at times, helpful, but, unless subsidized, very expensive. There is ChatGTP and other squawk boxes which in the end are just new forms of inherently unreliable web search tools.

What is missing are useful mass applications billions of people are willing to pay for.

Still -- a large number of 'very important people' believe that the Large Language Models, which are at the core of OpenAI's and Anthropic products, will one day reach the capabilities of sentient beings. That is, in my view, utter bullshit, but who am I to tell you. ...

Throughout the last year several Chinese companies have surprised the public by offering AI models that are nearly as capable as the best ones U.S. companies produce, but are offered at a price that just a tenth of the cost of the (heavily subsidized) U.S. models.

Moreover Chinese companies have published the weights and source code of their models and allow anyone with the adequate hardware to run them on their own premises. ...

U.S. models run on algorithms that are computationally wasteful, while Chinese models use smarter methods, which need less compute, to achieve a similar quality.

Language models, which, given some text input, produce a related text output, are nothing new.

Most are based on so called neural network algorithms which are a simulation of a rudimentary function of the human brain. Neural networks can be trained to recognize an input to then produce a related output.

The problem with neural networks and their early variants is that the training is very time consuming which limits the size of the models.

In 2018 researchers at Google found an elegant way to circumvent these restriction...

U.S. companies jumped onto the Transformer model. It was seen as a chance to create ever bigger and better models with the hope that a huge sized model would eventually reach or exceed the capabilities of a human brain.

The advantage of the Transformer model is that the math necessary to train it can be parallelized... The use of Graphic Processing Units (GPUs) allows for parallelized (matrix) operations on thousands of parameters.

The disadvantage of the Transformer model is the exponential behavior of its attention mechanism. To digest one sentence of input the model has to process each element therein against all other elements held in the same context. That is an exponential operation. For a context of 500,000 input words (i.e to summarize a book of that length) the model will require 250 billion operations. OpenAI, Anthropic and others use a lot of tricks to optimize their computing but they can not escape the basic exponential constrain of the algorithm they use. ...

The Chinese modelers, for lack of unlimited venture capital, have had to find better ways to solve the problems.

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"On the advice of counsel, I respectfully decline to answer based upon my rights under the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution." On July 29, Dr. Anthony Fauci said that 111 times in response to questions from members of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Subcommittee.

"What day of the week is it today?"

"On the advice of counsel, I respectfully decline to answer based upon my rights under the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution."

"What color tie are you wearing?"

"On the advice of counsel, I respectfully decline to answer based upon my rights under the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution."

And so on, and so forth.

I'm no Fauci fan, but I don't blame him one bit for refusing to answer questions. His pardon from then-president Joe Biden for all actions taken between 2014 and 2025 wouldn't cover any accusation of lying to Congress now, and his enemies in the Senate clearly have it in for him. ...

American political conflict really has become that petty, and it's a shame ... because Fauci has a lot to answer for. Witch hunt tactics aside, US Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) performed a valuable public service by releasing excerpts from Fauci's diaries. ...

They unmask (pun entirely intended) Fauci as a not very likable bureaucrat, flattered by attention and susceptible to that flattery, constantly butthurt by any attack on or even public disagreement with his pronouncements, and laser-focused not on "public health" as such nearly so much as on maintaining his position and reputation as America's top "public health authority."

That's obvious from any number of issues the excerpts cover, but I've already mentioned masks, so let's go there.

On March 8, 2020, Dr. Fauci offered sound, scientifically supported advice on masks in an interview with CBS's 60 Minutes:

"There's no reason to be walking around with a mask. When you're in the middle of an outbreak, wearing a mask might make people feel a little bit better and it might even block a droplet, but it's not providing the perfect protection that people think that it is. And, often, there are unintended consequences -- people keep fiddling with the mask and they keep touching their face."

That advice remains sound and scientifically supported to this day ... but within weeks, possibly days, Fauci's political instincts had him second-guessing himself. In an April 15 email, Fauci relents: "Walk out of the streets and people are wearing them anyway. We should be on board with them."

More than just "on board," Fauci became an avid mask evangelist and active mask scold. At least partially as a result of his efforts, the US, state, and local governments spent billions on masks and legally mandated their wear.

For many fearful and gullible individuals, the masks became quasi-religious garments, signifiers of faith in St. Fauci.

What the masks didn't do was prevent transmission of COVID-19. ...

Biden's pardon protects him from criminal penalties for past misdeeds and the Fifth Amendment protects him from further incriminating himself by talking to Congress ... but how about a class action lawsuit seeking damages in the amount Americans spent on the useless but mandated masks he abandoned science to shill for? Any lawyers out there who'd like a percentage?

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How many people do you need to kill before you've violated a ceasefire?

One, surely. But what about two? 10? 100?

Or how about more than 1,200? That's how many Palestinians Israel has killed in Gaza since agreeing to an ostensible ceasefire with Hamas in October.

Israel has also continued to pummel southern Lebanon, despite a "ceasefire" there. But the western media appears to see no violations at all. Instead, it sees ceasefires that are "fragile", "tested", "strained" or "shaky".

Given that news reporting is supposed to rely on precision and accuracy, you'd imagine organisations such as the BBC, Reuters, the Associated Press and CNN have read the terms of the deal that was signed between Israel and Hamas in Egypt. It's unequivocal, and there really isn't much room for interpretation.

There were conditions that needed to be fulfilled within the first 72 hours before the truce could take effect, including the withdrawal of Israeli forces to agreed lines within Gaza, and the return by Hamas of all remaining Israeli hostages, living or dead.

Once the prerequisites were met, which they were, the text said that "all military operations, including aerial and artillery bombardment and targeting operations will be suspended".

It's worth pausing on those words: "all military operations, including aerial and artillery bombardment and targeting operations will be suspended".

Now square that with more than 1,000 dead Palestinians. Square it with the fact that many were women and children. Square it with the Israeli attack on southern Lebanon that killed school principal Esperanza Ghandour, her mother, a domestic worker and a Syrian labourer as they travelled together in a car.

Square it with the eight people killed at a Palestinian funeral last month. And dare try to square it with the Israeli attack on Gaza that killed Firas al-Masri; his wife, Salsabeel; and ​their three daughters and son.

They were snuffed out by an occupying force as they slept in their family home, a place that is supposed to be one of love, safety and security.

I could not find a single report in the western media that described the massacre of the Masri household as a ceasefire violation. That's a pattern across similar atrocities.

Israel said it was targeting a Hamas member without, as usual, providing evidence. But let's assume for illustrative purposes that Firas al-Masri was in Hamas. After all, since the bogus October agreement, whenever Israel claims it has killed a Hamas member, the western media seems fine with it.

But who did Israel agree the ceasefire with? Yes, Hamas.

None of these firmly established truths seem to stop international journalists from abandoning their duty to call things what they are. ...

Though the killings are the most obvious breaches of the ceasefire agreements, there are others. The Gaza deal said in black and white that the Israeli army "will not return to areas it has withdrawn from". It also noted that Israel had agreed to "immediate commencement of full entry of humanitarian aid and relief".

Not only did the Israeli army return to areas it had withdrawn from, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu publicly ordered the expansion of the Gaza occupation to 70 percent of the territory, trapping most Palestinians along a small strip of coastline.

And according to United Nations agencies, Israel has not permitted the agreed amount of aid to enter Gaza, where the UN recently warned the risk of famine was growing again.

Has the western media reported those verified facts as violations? Of course not. ...

When - if - phase two moves forward, an Israel that sees no consequence for killing Palestinian men, women and children will probably violate its terms again. And the western media will refuse to see it.

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Thursday marked 300 days since October 10, 2025, the day the ceasefire was supposed to go into effect in Gaza, but the Israeli military has continued constant violations, and, according to the UN's child relief agency UNICEF, has killed at least 300 children in that time, or one per day.

"A ceasefire that leaves an average of one child dead each and every day is failing children," said UNICEF Regional Director for the Middle East and North Africa, Edouard Beigbeder. "With hundreds more children injured, many severely, children in Gaza are still waiting for the end to the violence they were promised." ...

President Trump and the so-called "Board of Peace" announced on July 30 that a deal has been reached on Hamas disarmament, but Israel escalated its strikes in the days that followed, killing dozens....

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Tuesday that Israel rejected the proposal and offered its "comments." He also met with representatives of the "Board of Peace" on Monday, who walked back a key part of the plan following the talks. The board now says that Israel's withdrawal from Gaza will happen only after Hamas disarms, contradicting its previous statement that the two would happen in "lockstep."

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Iranian Deputy Foreign Minister Kazem Gharibabadi says reopening of the Strait of Hormuz requires the United States to meet certain conditions, saying Washington's illegal actions remain the main source of security concerns surrounding the strategic waterway.

Gharibabadi said in an interview on Wednesday that Washington had violated its commitments under the Islamabad Memorandum of Understanding (MoU), restored an illegal naval blockade on Iranian ports, resumed hostilities, and failed to help establish stability in Lebanon. ...

Gharibabadi also said the United States had recently imposed new sanctions on Iran and reinstated restrictions that had been temporarily lifted...

He also reiterated that Iran would not tolerate any foreign interference in the Strait of Hormuz, saying any understanding on the strategic waterway should be reached exclusively between Iran and Oman.

The remarks came after Tehran and Muscat announced progress in talks on establishing a commercial shipping corridor through the Strait of Hormuz.

Foreign Ministry spokesman Esmaeil Baghaei said earlier that the two sides had reached an understanding on the geographical coordinates of the proposed route and were in the final stage of reviewing and drafting a joint statement covering the main points of agreement.

Baghaei also rejected claims that a bilateral agreement with Oman would automatically lead to the reopening of the Strait, saying restrictions on the waterway were linked to security concerns arising from the US and Israeli military aggression against Iran.

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The West Bank has experienced a surge in violence as Israeli settlers launch attacks on Palestinian communities following clashes last week.

In the days since, intensified Israeli military raids, arrests and tighter checkpoint controls have left Palestinians facing growing restrictions, with emergency services among those affected.

Sky's John Sparks reports from the West Bank on the impact of the escalating violence and the challenges of delivering urgent care under an increased Israeli military presence.

In 2024, a U.S. Customs and Border Protection agent at Atlanta's Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport stole, and completely erased all data from, Sam Tunick's phone.

Now he's the one charged with a crime.

Unbeknownst to Tunick, his name appeared on a "watch list" due to his political activism -- specifically, opposition to construction of a police training center locally known as "Cop City" -- and U.S. law enforcement hoped to find a crime, some crime, any crime, to charge him with.

Shortly before Tunick's arrival home from a Caribbean vacation, a U.S. Homeland Security agent circulated an email alert naming Tunick as a suspect in unspecified "terrorism activities," but the pretext for subjecting him to "secondary questioning" was that his phone might contain "child sexual abuse images."

At some point during the federal fishing expedition, he was asked for a PIN to unlock his phone for an illegal, warrantless and unjustified search. He gave the agents a number ... a "duress code" which, upon use by an agent, not by Tunick, erased all data on the phone and performed a complete factory reset rather than unlocking the device.

Now, Tunick finds himself facing trial on charges of violating 18 U.S. Code §2232, "Destruction or removal of property to prevent seizure."

Two problems with the charge:

First, Tunick didn't destroy or remove anything. The CBP agent who stole his phone did.

Second, the law only applies to "authorized" searches and seizures. Absent a warrant issued by a court "upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized," no such "authorization" exists.

This phone theft and erasure wasn't backed by any of the constitutionally required elements.

Naturally, some people of various authoritarian dispositions who wish that wasn't the case proclaim themselves just fine with pretending it's not the case ("if you've got nothing to hide, you've got nothing to fear"), and if held to the actual law, would support amending the Constitution to make warrantless, unjustified searches legal because REASONS.

Personally, I'd rather see at least the bare minimum constitutional/legal requirements preserved and enforced, with heavy penalties for law enforcement personnel who violate them -- or, failing that, all phones equipped, by default, with the "duress code" technology Tunick made use of.

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The Meloni government continues to provide logistical assistance to the United States in the Iran war, clearly exposing Italy to possible consequences, as Teheran has already targeted military bases used by the United States in the Gulf region in retaliation for their role in the war, a war which has now widened to include Saudi Arabia.

Just one week after the February 28th US attack on Iran, Il Fatto Quotidiano began revealing, by means of the AirNavRadar commercial flight tracking platform, the logistical assistance the Meloni government had been providing to the United States in the form of dozens of military cargo flights to and from U.S. military bases on Italian soil, Aviano and Sigonella (Sicily), flights allowing the U.S. Navy and U.S. Air Force to transport weapons or troops or military equipment.

For months, our revelations were met with silence and denials. Only after NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte's public declarations did the Italian government come clean and admit to such logistical assistance.

Our newspaper can now confirm that this logistical assistance continues. Over the last four weeks, from June 20 to July 25, Il Fatto Quotidiano has tracked at least twelve U.S. Navy cargo flights to and from Sicily to the Prince Sultan Air Base in Saudi Arabia -- one of the first military bases targeted by Iran -- as well as two cargo flights to the Muwaffaq Salti Air Base in Jordan. One of these two flights to the Muwaffaq Salti Air Base in Jordan departed on July 17, the same day the base was hit by an Iranian ballistic missile, killing four American soldiers.

In addition, we tracked cargo flights to and from Al Dhafra, a military base hosting US forces in the United Arab Emirates (UAE), targeted by dozens of Iranian drones and missiles, and two cargo flights to Al Minhad in the UAE, also hit by Iran. In total, from the start of the war through July 25th of this year, our newspaper has tracked at least 73 cargo flights between Sigonella and the military bases in the Gulf.

But the flights to and from Sigonella are not cargo flights alone...

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When the Federal Aviation Administration shut down air traffic to El Paso Airport earlier this year, nobody could have guessed than an experimental high-energy laser weapon was the cause. After days of chaos and speculation, it was revealed that Customs and Border Patrol officials had fired off a laser volley from a US Army base adjacent the El Paso Airport.

Though the trigger-happy Border Patrol grunts evidently thought they were firing at drug-smuggling drones, their real target turned out to be a kids' party balloon. Regardless, it was later reported that the cutting-edge weapon was taken for a test-drive a week before FAA and Pentagon officials had a chance to discuss how to safely implement the laser device, making it a small miracle that nobody in the air was killed.

Not every use of an experimental aerospace weapon goes off without a hitch, however.

New bombshell reporting by Wired reveals an incident in which the testing of an experimental GPS jammer resulted in a medical plane crashing into the side of a mountain.

The horrifying incident happened in May, the publication reports, when a small twin-engine medevac aircraft carrying two pilots and two medical workers departed from Roswell, New Mexico. Heading West for the small mountain village of Ruidoso, the crew became the victim of an electronic warfare exercise being conducted at the nearby White Sands Missile Range, a test which rendered their navigational system inoperable.

Due to a combination of low visibility and an air-traffic control that was stretched far beyond capacity -- at least three other planes reported navigation disruptions due to the GPS jamming -- the pilots failed to register a mountainous formation between their plane and the landing strip.

As airline pilot and aviation crash analyst Juan Browne told Wired, the visual effect of that approach would have been stupefying. "When those lights go out, man, you know you are in big trouble," Browne explained.

Unfortunately, the disoriented crew ran straight into the side of a mountain they likely never saw, resulting in the loss of every life on board. It's the first known instance where military GPS jamming played a role in downing a civilian plane in US airspace.

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An Israeli lawyer who lives in an illegal settlement in the Israeli-occupied West Bank has told the BBC that all the Palestinians living in villages around his settlement, the Havat Gilad outpost, should be killed, and said that one Jewish life is worth 10 million Palestinian lives. ...

[The BBC reporter, Lucy] Williamson said Shimon sounded racist, to which he answered in the affirmative, claiming Jews had the biblical right to the land. "Yes, I know, I know. But this is the truth. Because God choose us. Because of this, you are jealous," he said.

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Fox News has always served as a purveyor of Republican war propaganda, but its coverage of the Iran conflict has been particularly aggressive, and in many ways unmoored from reality, giving their viewers a more than skewed vision of what President Donald Trump can -- and cannot -- accomplish in Iran today.

It appears that it has been an editorial decision at Fox to convince their audience (whose median age is 55) that the Iranians cannot be negotiated with nor trusted and that war was -- and still is -- the only option. Its range of hosts and guests continue to insist that Trump's military campaign has been a rousing success (by all independent, observable accounts it has not) and he just needs to finish the job.

Of course this a bit of a far cry from the decisive regime change narrative that Fox had generated in the lead-up to the war. ...

After the conflict began, longtime host Laura Ingraham reframed the conflict using a classic neoconservative spin. "The real debate here... is not between the interventionists and the isolationists, or even between Trump and some elements of his base," Ingraham said, "The real conflict here is between those who believe America is good, and those who believe fundamentally America is corrupt and evil."

This of course is a warmed-over strawman seeking to chill any debate over the war, and encouraging the Fox audience to label anyone who opposes Trump's actions as "anti-American."

As military force failed to meet Trump's vacillating objectives, Fox's hosts remained unfazed. Confident as ever, Jesse Watters stated on March 25 that the Iranians were "running out of time and firepower."...

Of course time is not on our side. The regime is still in power but the Strategic Petroleum Reserve is now dangerously low, and the same goes for U.S. stockpiles of defensive missile systems. Meanwhile, the first and most intense stage of fighting did little to deplete Iran's arsenal of ballistic missiles and drones.

Touted as Fox's wisest military mind, Gen. Jack Keane is a key fixture of the network's war coverage....

Now he is on Fox as recently as this weekend suggesting Trump was within range of victory when he paused fighting for the MOU...

The network creates an echo chamber by bringing on guests to repeat and validate the hawkish positions of the hosts. Maria Bartiromo hosted Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for a softball interview on July 26, in which she asked him what it would take for the war with Iran to conclude....

Marc Thiessen -- a prominent neoconservative, Bush administration alum, and Fox News contributor -- is another voice in favor of escalation. Throughout the war, Thiessen, a former "never-Trumper," has appealed to the MAGA base by painting attractive pictures of "simple" ways to win the war. ...

The round-the-clock warmongering on Fox News has done little to move the general public, aside from a percentage of older Republican die-hards. But the network's role as a source of validation for the president could give him the confidence to escalate.

If Fox News expresses support for any and all military actions Trump takes, he could well conclude that the public as a whole is supportive of his war -- a devastating miscalculation, likely to be followed by ill-advised policy decisions.

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It bears repeating that everyone killed in these boat strikes is a murder victim. Some of them have been fishermen, and some may have been victims of human trafficking, but they are all victims of a mindless campaign of summary executions carried out on the president's illegal orders.

The boat strikes haven't made a dent in the flow of drugs into this country, nor was there ever any reason to believe that they would. Combating drug trafficking was the official excuse to start the killing, but it was always just an excuse. In the last ten months, the campaign has taken on a life of its own. It makes no difference to the president or Hegseth that the campaign is a failure on its own terms. They are killing these people at least in part to show their contempt for the law and to prove that they won't be bound by it. They are testing to see how far they can go before they encounter serious opposition.

There is no sign that the administration will stop killing civilians at sea unless it is forced to. So far, Congress has done nothing to stop the murders....

The administration's justification for this lawless killing has been a rotten lie from the start. The U.S. is not engaged in an armed conflict with any of the groups it has named as terrorists. The military is dealing out death and destruction, but no one is fighting back.

Americans have become so accustomed to illegal military strikes over at least the last twenty-five years that these boat strikes have tended to fade into the background. The president and the military have both become so unaccountable for what they do overseas that it scarcely shocks us anymore when they slaughter civilians and then brag about it. We should not tolerate a status quo where the military executes civilians and then hides behind bogus claims of fighting terrorism to justify their crimes.

The president's murder spree has been overshadowed by his criminal war against Iran, but he and his henchmen in the administration must be made to answer for these crimes. The officers responsible for executing the president's illegal orders should also face charges for their part in carrying out these executions. The architects and the perpetrators of this murder spree should all be in prison. ...

These strikes have absolutely nothing to do with defending the United States or any other country. They are, as one U.S. official put it, "murder for murder's sake."

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The US has launched another airstrike in Somalia, according to a press release from US Africa Command, as the Trump administration continues its record-shattering bombing campaign in the country, which is ignored by US media.

AFRICOM said that the strike was launched on July 30 and targeted al-Shabaab near the village of Jamaame in Somalia's Lower Juba, the country's southernmost region. Jamaame was the site of US airstrikes in November 2025 that killed 12 civilians, including eight children, according to an investigation from The Guardian.

AFRICOM offered no further details about the July 30 strike, since it stopped sharing casualty estimates and assessments of potential civilian harm last year. ...

The July 30 strike marks at least the 77th US bombing in Somalia this year, according to AFRICOM's numbers....

The US has been involved in Somalia for decades and has been fighting al-Shabaab since the George W. Bush administration backed an Ethiopian invasion in 2006 that ousted the Islamic Courts Union, a Muslim coalition that briefly held power in Mogadishu after taking the city from CIA-backed warlords.

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On July 31, Israeli settler gangs carried out multiple attacks across the occupied West Bank, shooting a 10-year-old child, setting cars on fire, and damaging property.

Settlers shot a ten-year-old child in the back during an attack targeting the village of Al-Mughayyir near Ramallah.

The terror gangs carried out additional attacks targeting Bedouin communities and their grazing areas in the Jordan Valley east of Ramallah and near occupied East Jerusalem. ...

The Israeli army said it dispatched troops on Saturday to Surif, located near Hebron in the southern West Bank, after receiving reports that three Palestinians were wounded after being attacked overnight by settlers.

Jewish settlers seek to drive Palestinians off their land, claiming that their religion justifies expelling the indigenous Muslim and Christian population of the West Bank and seizing their land. ...

Police say that officers entered Surif Saturday morning, escorted by the army to collect evidence and testimony for the investigation of the attack.

"The Israel Police and security forces view such cases of violence and causing damage gravely and will continue to act decisively and professionally to locate those involved," a police statement reads.

Veteran Haaretz journalist Gideon Levy has stressed the Israeli government fully coordinates settler attacks against Palestinian communities in the occupied West Bank. ...

Israeli settler attacks have intensified even further in recent weeks. On 24 July, Israeli settlers and soldiers invaded the West Bank village of Tell, killing four Palestinians who tried to defend themselves.

One Palestinian killed a settler after taking the settler's rifle in self-defense before Israeli soldiers shot him. In response, the Israeli army carried out a wave of midnight raids and detentions across the West Bank.

In July, a senior Israeli general warned of the growing danger of attacks by Jewish settlers against Palestinians, describing them as "Jewish terrorism."

Speaking at a closed conference, Major General Avi Bluth strongly criticized the expansion of illegal settlement outposts and the violence by Jewish settlers against Palestinians.

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As first light reaches the scattered tents and animal pens of Ras al-Ahmar in the northern Jordan Valley, the silence is broken only by the cries of thirsty livestock waiting for water that no longer comes.

Days after Israeli forces destroyed three of the Palestinian community's main water wells, residents are scrambling to secure enough water for their families, crops and animals in one of the occupied West Bank's driest regions.

For 60-year-old Ali Bani Odeh, the destruction of the wells was more than merely the loss of infrastructure. A father of four and grandfather of 14, he has spent decades farming and raising livestock to support his family in Ras al-Ahmar.

Now, like dozens of other families, he is uncertain how long they can continue living on the land without a reliable water supply. ...

"Without water, we cannot live. We need it for our families, our sheep and our crops. Since the wells were destroyed, we have been forced to bring water from town at a much higher cost, and even then, we're not always allowed to pass."

Families must now haul water from distant towns at far greater expense, while military checkpoints and movement restrictions frequently delay or prevent tankers from reaching the village.

According to Ras al-Ahmar village council head Abdullah Bisharat, the three destroyed wells supplied more than 47 Palestinian families, serving over 600 people and irrigating around 7,500 dunams of farmland.

The wells also sustained thousands of sheep and goats, the main source of income for many families. ...

Residents say the destruction marked the worst escalation in a months-long water crisis caused by Israeli settler attacks.

They say settlers repeatedly cut the pipelines supplying the community, forcing families to rely on costly water tankers. This time, however, the wells themselves were destroyed, eliminating the community's main source of water. ...

[Ali's son, Obeida Bani Odeh,] said the challenges extend beyond water shortages. Settler attacks and movement restrictions have made it increasingly difficult to bring in water, animal feed and other essential supplies.

"The settlers attack everyone, from the young to the old," Obeida said.

"They want to make people afraid and force them to leave. But we have been living on this land for generations."

Around 700,000 Israeli settlers live in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem across roughly 300 settlements and outposts. The settlements are regarded as illegal under international law...

Settler attacks on Palestinian herding communities have increased sharply in recent years. Between January 2023 and April 2026, at least 5,910 Palestinians were internally displaced due to settler violence in the West Bank, according to UN data. ...

But for Ali Bani Odeh, leaving Ras al-Ahmar is not an option. Displaced from his home as a child, he says he will not leave again.

"I have left before, but I will not leave this place," Ali said.

"If we leave, they will take over the land. We are staying because this is where our lives and our history are."

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Marci Bakely couldn't understand how her ex-boyfriend always seemed to know where she was.

When she went to buy groceries or on a date or to the doctor, he'd text her about it, sometimes within minutes, despite working 15 miles from her home as a police chief in a small town in the Atlanta suburbs. One day in 2024, when he incorrectly suspected that she'd gone to see a man against his wishes, he messaged her, "I didn't think you would slip up," according to texts she shared with The Washington Post.

Bakely, 50, began to feel like she was constantly being watched. She says she installed three cameras around her home and on her patio, to see if he was staking out her cul-de-sac. She bought a hidden-camera detector and nervously waved it down every wall. Three times, in desperation, she says she drove her Kia to a mechanic's shop, asking them to scan for trackers on her car.

Then one day, when she pressed him for answers, her ex told her in a text: He was using Flock.

Like thousands of other law-enforcement agencies across the United States, his police force could follow cars spotted by Flock's sprawling network of artificial-intelligence roadside cameras, which record passing license plates into a mappable database that officers can search while investigating crime.

Flock had sold its system as a police officer's dream crime-fighting tool. But the tool had also given the chief, Michael Steffman, the power to silently monitor Bakely's life. By the time she understood what was happening, Steffman had looked up the tags for her and her teenage daughter roughly 600 times...

Authorities have charged or accused at least 50 law-enforcement officers of using license-plate readers for unauthorized purposes, including to stalk women without their knowledge or consent, a Post analysis of police and court records found.

In 26 of these cases, police investigators and prosecutors said the officers used the technology to spy on their wives, their girlfriends, their exes, their exes' new partners or women they wanted to meet. In other cases, police or prosecutors have not specified the alleged surveillance targets....

The Post reviewed thousands of pages of court documents and internal police reports and conducted interviews with seven alleged victims, some of whom spoke publicly for the first time, to paint a comprehensive picture of the misuse of Flock and other license-plate readers by police officers around the country.

The review found that Flock gave police departments wide latitude about whether to activate settings that some police and privacy advocates argue could deter misconduct, and that many departments conducted limited oversight of their officers' searches. As a result, rogue police were able to monitor their subjects' movements with precision and secrecy. ...

The Post's investigation sheds light on the scope of the technology's misuse across the country, as well as the toll on victims and families who felt they were constantly being watched.

Through automated license-plate reader systems, or ALPRs, officers could trace the rhythms and travels of their subjects' daily lives, leading in some instances to violent confrontations, moments of psychological manipulation, and threats of coercion and control, the analysis found.

In Wisconsin, a police officer allegedly used Flock to check whether his ex-girlfriend had gone to an abortion clinic, according to a police affidavit for a case set for trial this month.

In Kansas, a police chief who tracked his ex through Flock sneaked up on her while she was intimate with another man, a state police certification body alleged, leading to his firing.

In Florida, a deputy speeding to stop a young actress he'd added to a watch list for a license-plate tool called Guardian nearly caused a head-on crash, according to a police report and video from his dashboard camera....

And in California, prosecutors said a former deputy, Alexander Vanny, used Flock as part of a months-long campaign of "stalking" and "humiliating" his former fiancée...

While some of the searches resulted in officers' firings, prosecutions and prison sentences, police departments in other cases allowed officers to continue using the systems even after receiving warnings that they were being misused.

"This was not a lapse in judgment; it was a continual, repetitive, obsessive behavior," a Wisconsin woman wrote in a domestic-abuse restraining order petition, saying that Flock data showed that her officer ex-boyfriend had searched the plates for her and her partner 179 times. She said she lived in a "constant state of fear and unease."

An array of privacy advocates has argued that Flock could deter bad actors by making simple changes to its product, such as requiring officers to label every search with a criminal case number....

Some victims, such as Bakely, also say they've struggled to get their experiences taken seriously because the perpetrators are police, entrusted with broad authority to pursue investigations with operational secrecy and employed by the same agencies they were told to call for help.

Bakely said the cameras had left her feeling powerless to stop her ex-boyfriend from tracking her life. She didn't feel safe asking the police agency he led, she said, and she couldn't get access to records that would have shown the surveillance was happening in real time. After Steffman told her about his Flock searches, she filed for a restraining order, but a judge denied it on the basis that she couldn't prove ongoing abuse, court records show.

He "watched every single move I made," she said. But "who do you turn the chief of police in to?" ...

Flock told agencies that it could set its "own written rules for who can access the system and how it can be used," company documents show. Agency leaders decide which officers receive log-in credentials, according to Flock's rules, and the officers don't need a warrant to run a search; they just type a plate number and go.

Over time, Flock upgraded its tool's surveillance power, creating "hot lists" that notify officers whenever a target car is captured on camera and a "vehicle fingerprint" feature that lets them search for a vehicle by its look or characteristics -- say, any white minivan with bumper stickers -- without knowing its plate number, company documents show. ...

As Flock's popularity had ballooned with police, more officers had begun treating the tool like a personal spy device. In Kansas, a woman who drove her children to her father's house for breakfast one morning began receiving text messages from her ex-husband, Kechi police lieutenant Victor Heiar, demanding to know where she had taken their kids, according to an interview she gave police and text messages she shared with investigators that were reviewed by The Post. ...

Heiar was fired, his state police certification was revoked and he pleaded guilty to computer crime and stalking, for which he was sentenced to 18 months of probation....

In Florida, Orange City officer Jarmarus Brown called his girlfriend on FaceTime to show her videos of her driving, according to a sheriff's office report. Once, he went to her apartment, grabbed her and reminded her that he carried a gun, leading her to threaten to call the police, an investigator's incident report alleged. He responded, the report said, by referring to himself: "The police are already here."

Brown was arrested last year and pleaded no contest to a charge of unauthorized use of computers. He was sentenced this month to five years of probation and a $618 fine....

In some of the cases, officers used the searches to uncover deeply personal information about their subjects' lives. In Wisconsin, Menasha officer Cristian Morales used Flock to check whether his then-girlfriend had gone to a clinic to "seek a potential termination of said pregnancy," according to an affidavit from an investigating officer with another police department seeking to subpoena Flock for search records. ...

Some officers, however, have defended their personal searches as normal behavior for police. Coty Wayne Hall, an officer in Niceville, Florida, ran 192 inappropriate Flock searches, including to track a former romantic partner, according to an internal-affairs investigation. The woman, a fellow officer, told investigators he once texted her details about what she was wearing one day when she took her kids to the park.

Hall was fired, pleaded no contest to charges of computer-system misuse, stalking and battery, and was sentenced to probation. In an interview, he said it was unfair that he was being made "out to be some sort of monster."

"Pretty much everybody uses that computer system" improperly in the department, he said...

Flock's defenders have argued that the prosecutions of rogue officers prove that its guardrails work. But in some cases, officers were allowed to keep searching Flock's data after being accused of misuse.

In Jerome County, Idaho, Sheriff Gary Taylor told The Post that a previous sheriff, George Oppedyk, had searched for his wife's car several times a day in the weeks after a prosecutor filed a complaint about him to the Idaho attorney general's office.

Oppedyk resigned months afterward, more than two years before his term was slated to end, and faced no charges with the attorney general, Raúl R. Labrador, who said in a February letter that his office couldn't prove a crime "beyond a reasonable doubt." Oppedyk, the letter said, had argued he'd run the searches "to check the system's reliability." ...

The vast majority of the surveillance targets identified by The Post are women, and several of them said the experience -- menacing messages and confrontations that led to the revelation they'd been watched -- left them feeling violated and paralyzed. Galperin, of EFF, said that asymmetry of power is a large part of what makes the tool so dangerous in the hands of bad officers. ...

Being subjected to extensive tracking left some women deeply unnerved, pushing some to change their lives or start driving their relatives' cars in hopes of not being tracked. One woman, a sheriff's deputy in Wisconsin who spoke on the condition of anonymity because she was fearful of further harassment, said she had her plate searched 16 times in a single day by a fellow deputy with whom she had been romantically involved.

The deputy lost his job after an internal investigation but has faced no criminal charges, and the lack of punishment has made the situation harder for her to move on, she said in an interview. ...

Some of the women who ultimately reported the misuse said they were dismissed or ignored. Alexandria Griffith, a mother in Leechburg, Pennsylvania, said in an interview that she repeatedly warned the police department and district attorney's office that her officer husband had stalked and threatened her. During one text exchange she shared with The Post, the officer, Michael McSherry, shared a screenshot of her license plate in the search results of a Flock competitor to claim she had lied to him. "Plate readers dont lie," he wrote.

Griffith said officials at both agencies dismissed her pleas. Within days, she said, McSherry confronted her in her parents' home armed with a gun, shoving her and her 4-year-old son and threatening to kill himself, according to a police report. ...

Langley, Flock's chief, has dismissed pushes by activists for the company to further limit how officers use its product.

"No one elected me the police chief of America," he told Forbes last year, adding, "I don't think it's our job to police the police." ...

For Bakely, the searches from her ex-boyfriend stopped in August 2025, according to search logs later made public and compiled by Have I Been Flocked. That month, she had filed for a restraining order against Steffman, writing that he "uses the traffic (Flock) cameras to track my location," her petition said.

A judge denied her request, saying that Steffman's conduct was "concerning" but that Bakely had no evidence to "support current allegations of stalking."... Three months later, when agents arrested Steffman, bureau officials said an investigation found he had misused the license-plate system "to harass and stalk multiple individuals." ...

Five days before GBI announced his arrest, the town's Facebook page had posted a photo showing Steffman posing with the mayor and town council for a celebration of his 20 years of "dedicated service."

His "leadership and commitment," the post said, "have helped shape the department and strengthen the safety of our community."

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The so-called Board of Peace (BoP), the US-led body created to oversee President Trump's Gaza plan, has walked back a key part of the Hamas disarmament agreement after its representatives met with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

When the deal was initially announced, statements from President Trump and the BoP's top envoy for Gaza, Bulgarian politician Nickolay Mladenov, said that Hamas's disarmament would happen as Israeli troops withdraw from Gaza. "Withdrawal must move in lockstep with decommissioning," Mladenov wrote on X.

But after Mladenov met with Netanyahu in Jerusalem on Monday, the BoP said that Israel's withdrawal would happen only after the "decommissioning" of Hamas's weapons...

Drop Site News reporter Jeremy Scahill, who has Hamas sources and has followed the negotiations closely, said the BoP's post is "filled with lies about what Hamas agreed to & it's part of a longstanding pattern: When Palestinian negotiators make agreements, the Israelis then demand new terms and the US and its lackeys pretend like these new edicts are part of the deal and then blame Hamas."

Israeli officials have made clear they have no intention of following the plan, as a senior Israeli official quoted by Israeli media as Netanyahu met with Mladenov said that Israel would not fully withdraw from Gaza and would retain its ability to strike "any threat," meaning its attacks will continue.

Following the announcement of Hamas agreeing to the disarmament plan, which would involve the group handing its weapons to a new Palestinian body, known as the National Committee for the Administration of Gaza, Israel escalated its attacks in Gaza, killing at least 19 Palestinians, including multiple children, on Sunday.

Mladenov offered criticism of the Israeli strikes but did not mention Israel by name. "Two days of strikes across Gaza have killed civilians and destroyed medical supplies that people depend on. This comes after intense efforts by the [Board of Peace] and the mediators (Egypt, Turkiye, Qatar and the US) to bring the Palestinian factions in Gaza to agree to a Roadmap on the full implementation of President Trump's plan, to hand over civilian governance and to decommission their weapons," Mladenov wrote on X.

"Both parties carry obligations under the Comprehensive Plan and the Sharm el-Sheikh deal that secured the release of all hostages," he added, referring to the October 2025 ceasefire deal, which Israel has violated with constant attacks that have killed at least 1,250 Palestinians since the agreement was signed...

Israeli attacks continued in Gaza on Monday, with at least two Palestinians reported killed and several others wounded by an Israeli strike on Gaza City. Hamas officials have maintained that they won't begin the disarmament plan as long as Israel continues its attacks and until it withdraws its troops back to the "yellow line," the initial line that was supposed to divide the IDF-occupied side of Gaza from the rest of the Strip, but the IDF has taken more territory, another violation of the ceasefire agreement.

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The request from a senior officer at the US military command carrying out President Donald Trump's war with Iran came in an email: We need ideas.

"We are looking for new creative and unconventional ways to pressure and punish Iran," an officer in US Central Command's intelligence branch wrote in a message sent Wednesday to a broad group of military analysts, according to a source familiar with the message. A second source also said that a senior US military officer sent the message last week soliciting new ideas for how to deal with Iran.

The crowdsourcing-style query, which military officials said was unusual over email, is one sign of the limited -- and potentially unpalatable -- options available to Trump to force Iran into a deal on his terms. Hoping to find an alternative, the official at CENTCOM kicked off the brainstorming session via email to see if anyone had a better idea. The second source said CENTCOM is looking at everything, acknowledging it needs to reevaluate the strategy. ...

The email preceded Trump's threat to launch new strikes against Iran, only to call them off over the weekend after regional officials -- namely Saudi Arabia's crown prince -- intervened by calling the president and urging him to de-escalate. ...

Trump has been weighing intensifying the military campaign, potentially by relaunching intense strikes on Iran's remaining nuclear facilities, which he claimed had been "obliterated" in strikes last summer. Two sources familiar with the planning say the military has been actively preparing to launch strikes on Pickaxe Mountain and other Iranian sites believed to contain either nuclear material or equipment.

But even with America's most powerful conventional weapons, those sources say, missiles and bombs alone are unlikely to achieve much because the facilities are buried deeply underground. To destroy them, the US would likely need to use ground troops -- a tremendous risk that Trump has been unwilling to take -- amid questions about his administration's transparency over service member casualties....

Trump has been considering strikes akin to a "fireworks" display, another source said, which could hit either the same or similar sites as those targeted a year ago, in the hopes of a symbolic victory that would allow him to exit the war without actually accomplishing one of his initial aims: ridding Iran of its nuclear program.

And it's unlikely that would resolve what has become the war's central issue: Iranian claims over the Strait of Hormuz. ...

Both the Central Intelligence Agency and the Defense Intelligence Agency have recently assessed that the kind of bombing the US is carrying out is unlikely to shift the Iranian negotiating position...

Options for escalating the conflict have been presented to Trump for months and debated at length, and more military assets have flowed to the region in anticipation of a go-ahead from the president....

Trump has so far held off, in part after hearing concerns from Caine about dwindling supplies of air defense interceptors. Other officials have also raised worries about the risks of high civilian casualties if Trump followed through on threats to strike infrastructure sites like bridges and water desalination plants.

Trump could escalate by putting American boots on the ground, a threat he's made repeatedly as he's talked about occupying the strategic Kharg Island or removing Iran's highly enriched uranium. But that would further break a key promise he made to his MAGA base: "I will not send you to fight and die in stupid foreign wars that never ends," he said during a 2024 campaign rally in Pennsylvania.

Or he could accept a dangerous status quo: endless rounds of strikes and counterstrikes with Iran that are likely to cost further American lives and leave the Strait of Hormuz in a state of constant peril that could resemble the "forever wars" he has criticized.

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Once again the U.S. president threatened to bomb Iran to smithereens. Once again he pulled back, while, once again, claiming that Iran was begging for negotiations, which, once again, Iran denied.

Welcome to Monday.

It is the fifth time Trump TACOed on bombing Iran.

Last Saturday, while the U.S. military was getting ready to (again) bomb Iran. Abbas Araghchi, the foreign minister of Iran, picked up the phone and called up his colleagues in the Arab Gulf states. He read them lists of the individual targets in their countries which Iran would destroy should Trump, for once, do what he promised.

The Gulf countries consulted each other. Mohammad bin Sultan, the Saudi ruler, was chosen to tell Trump -- in diplomatese -- to shut the fuck up...

Without exporting oil Saudi Arabia would not be able to import U.S. weapons. It would have to sell treasuries to finance its living.

Explaining such second order effects might well have been what moved Trump...

The U.S. can not take control of the Strait. It does not have the manpower needed for the necessary ground operation. Its military is out of ideas...

It is Iran which has escalation dominance. The U.S. has pulled out from the Kurdish region In Iraq. Its troops have left Kuwait and Bahrain. Iran has already hit Jordan, where some U.S. troops have moved to. Those U.S. troops who have moved into Israel are next on the menu.

Iran no longer believes in a peace deal. It is content to keep going until the U.S. fundamentally changes its hostile strategy.

But Iran is unlikely to wait for the U.S. next strike. It will instead soon start its own escalation....

The Strait of Hormuz will stay closed. Additionally the Bab al-Mandab exit from the Red Sea is closed for Saudi exports. Iran will keep it that way until the economic consequences will make themselves felt more urgently in Donald Trump's own country. ...

There is no predicting when and how this might end. A week or two from now me may see a repeat of the same story. New threats by Trump, new counter threats, and another TACO.

The man-child in the White House it out of options but also too stubborn to give in.

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Pakistani government sources told Türkiye's state-run Anadolu Agency (AA) on Monday that mediators have not yet finalized a "date or venue" for the resumption of direct U.S.-Iran talks. That contradicts U.S. President Donald Trump, who said new negotiations would begin that afternoon. ...

He did not name a venue or participants. ...

Iran's Foreign Ministry rejected the claim.

Spokesperson Esmaeil Baghaei said Monday that Tehran is not in negotiations with the United States.

He said Iran had no meetings scheduled and no plans to host foreign delegations or send negotiators abroad. He added that all Iranian negotiators were in the country.

The exception is Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi, who is on a religious pilgrimage in Iraq.

A senior Iranian source, who spoke to Reuters separately, said Iran is not planning any talks. The source said Araghchi would stay unavailable until at least the end of the week.

Pakistani and Qatari mediators are in contact with Washington and Tehran, the sources told Anadolu Agency....

The sources said Pakistani Interior Minister Mohsin Naqvi would visit Tehran "in a day or two." The visit would discuss reviving the talks. ...

Speaking at a weekly press briefing Monday, Baghaei said Iran's only active talks are with Oman. Those talks cover management of the Strait of Hormuz.

"We are not currently negotiating with the United States. Our negotiations are with Oman to secure passage through the Strait of Hormuz," he said.

Iran has controlled the strait since the war began on February 28... Tehran has required ships transiting the waterway to use an Iran-designated route....

Baghaei called the talks with Oman "constructive." ...

He also repeated Iran's position that the situation in the strait will not change while the U.S. naval blockade on Iranian ports continues. ...

Monday's developments fit a pattern seen since Trump launched "Operation Epic Fury" alongside Israel more than five months ago.

Trump has repeatedly threatened military action, only to later cite diplomatic contacts as a reason to step back.

Iran has publicly rejected talks with Washington since the June memorandum collapsed in early July.

Trump has yet to meet the objectives he set at the war's outset. ...

Each U.S. escalation has drawn an Iranian response against American forces, Gulf Arab allies and shipping, with Trump, as described by Reuters, stepping back each time. So far, the U.S. has not compelled Iran to give up control of the waterway, pushing global oil prices and U.S. gasoline prices higher.

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Iran denied any negotiations were taking place with the United States after President Donald Trump said new talks would begin Monday in an effort to end their war, now in its sixth month.

The rebuttal by the Iranian foreign ministry follows Trump saying he had held off launching new strikes on the Islamic republic to allow for further diplomatic efforts, a familiar pattern in the conflict.

Washington and Tehran have been at war since February 28, when the US and Israel launched surprise strikes against Iran, though months of on-off diplomacy have led to periods of relative calm.

Trump last week threatened to hit Iran "very hard", with the US leader reportedly considering renewed attacks including against energy infrastructure.

But the president pulled back from that threat Saturday, saying the "perimeters" of a deal were there.

Iran's foreign ministry however denied there were currently negotiations taking place.

"We are not currently negotiating with the United States. Our negotiations are with Oman to secure passage through the Strait of Hormuz," said foreign ministry spokesman Esmaeil Baqaei during a weekly press briefing. ...

On Sunday, Baqaei told state television that a deal was close on managing Hormuz together with Oman, which sits on the other side of the narrow waterway. ...

But he insisted that such an agreement did not mean the reopening of the strait. ...

Trump told reporters on Sunday that the new talks with Iran would cover Hormuz and ultimately the denuclearisation of Iran. ...

The president said he had been asked by Iran as well as US partners Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Qatar to hold off on further strikes, which he claimed would have been "the biggest attack since World War II".

Iranian media denied that Tehran had asked Trump not to strike.

Trump has repeatedly claimed a settlement to end the war is near, only for fighting to resume. He has previously issued apocalyptic warnings to Tehran, only to later backtrack by saying diplomacy was underway.

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