Mario Nawfal

🇺🇸 🇮🇷 The Air Force is creating a brand new kind of airman whose only job is shooting down what's coming at the base Chief of Staff Gen. Kenneth Wilsbach announced the career field at the Air, Space and Cyber Symposium, saying it becomes operational in two years and will go first to the bases most at risk, along with a new point defense weapon system pairing guns with non-kinetic tools. For decades the Air Force flew the planes and left protecting the runway to the Army. That ends now, and Wilsbach explained why bluntly: the era of American airpower operating from sanctuary is over, and point defense can no longer be treated as a side hustle. Two years is the number worth sitting with. Airmen are getting hit today, deployments already run into 2027, and the first trained defenders show up around the time the Army's Patriot stocks are still being rebuilt. Wilsbach also rejected hardened shelters, arguing anything above ground can be blown up and burying one 300 feet down costs too much. Iran tested that theory on the flight line at Muwaffaq Salti, where the jets parked in the open took the hits that got through. Source: The War Zone / Writer: Daniel t.co/S4y2bGgtop

🇺🇸 The House voted 417-3 to stop households from eating the power bill for giant data centers. The Ratepayer Protection Act tells states to consider making those 100-megawatt server farms pay the full extra cost of new plants and lines. AI buildings have been showing up next to suburbs and dragging rates with them, so both parties piled on. It still has to clear the Senate, and states can refuse the standard. That lopsided vote is the tell. People are done subsidizing someone else’s computer warehouse. Congress found the easy version of that fight and ran it through. Writer: Lucas t.co/vJux4hOQdO

🇺🇲🇵🇸 Robert Kraft is promising $2 MILLION to humanitarian aid in the Middle East region… but didn’t specify which groups will get the funds. The pledge allegedly came after Ed Sheeran asked Kraft to match his own $2 million commitment and before Macklemore’s $1 million donation challenge. Kraft also claimed he has supported efforts benefiting Palestinians for DECADES. “... I’d like the people who are speaking in support of the Palestinian people to know that for decades, I have supported efforts that create opportunity for Palestinians…” Even if the AIPAC-donating, pro-Israel billionaire has supported Palestinians, his ultimatum over Macklemore’s tour participation negates all that. It's Kraft's recent actions that expose his gestures of goodwill as being what they really are... merely performative. Source: @GilletteStadium / Writer: Marie

🇺🇸🇮🇷 Iran hasn't shipped a barrel past the American blockade since July, and twenty of its empty tankers sit off Sri Lanka waiting for a war that could sink them The satellites don't lie about tank lids. Sal Mercogliano watches the storage tanks at Kharg and Jask, and their floating roofs haven't risen in two months, which means Iran stopped filling them because nothing can leave. Meanwhile, Washington has hit fourteen tankers and sunk two, one after a three-hour warning to the crew, as a message to anyone carrying Iranian crude. Gulf oil, on the other hand, is moving again, eight to ten million barrels a day under night escorts, at charter rates twenty times what they were. So who breaks first? Sal's answer comes with a warning attached: "The U.S. is playing a very dangerous game with the Iranians" Iran has held back the one card Russia plays daily, hitting tankers in port while they load. A cornered economy might reach for it. @mercoglianos

🇺🇸🇸🇦 Senators from both parties want the classified side letters on the Saudi nuclear deal released Jeff Merkley and Ed Markey led the letter to Rubio and Chris Wright, joined by 13 more Democrats, an independent, and Republicans Rand Paul and John Kennedy. Their argument is that Washington has signed dozens of these civil nuclear agreements without hiding anything, and the Senate cannot judge commitments it has not been allowed to read. The 30-year deal builds AP1000 reactors worth tens of billions to Westinghouse, and unlike the UAE's 2009 agreement it does not bar Riyadh from enriching uranium or reprocessing waste, the two roads to a bomb. Trump says it only takes effect if Saudi Arabia recognizes Israel. Congressional aides say the text contains no such condition. Fifty-nine days remain in the review window, and a disapproval resolution needs a majority in both chambers plus enough votes to survive a veto. What happens if the letters stay sealed is the bigger question. The Senate either swallows a deal it never read or spends 2027 subpoenaing it, and by then the concrete for the first reactor is poured. Source: Reuters / Writer: Daniel

🇺🇸🇨🇦🇪🇺 Trump is threatening Europe with heavy tariffs if Canada gets pulled closer into the EU. That landed today after Von der Leyen invited Mark Carney to make Canada the bloc’s first associate member. The title does not even exist in EU law. It is a political hug after months of Trump’s trade war with Ottawa. He heard it as Europe poaching his neighbor and said if the intent is bad, the charges get ugly. Canada sells most of what it makes to the U.S., so Europe is offering a new clubhouse, taking advantage of the tensions. Writer: Lucas t.co/a5cLM6u79o

🇸🇦 🇾🇪 Satellite images showed Saudi pumping stations burned to a crisp, with one totaled outright. Rory Johnston, founder of Commodity Context, explains why the line restarting at half capacity within days matters more than the damage itself: the pipe underneath survived, and pipelines run fine with fewer stations at lower pressure. That East-West line was already doing 7 million barrels a day after the Houthi maritime ban pushed Saudi exports back toward the Gulf. Riyadh keeps discovering that every route it builds away from one chokepoint hands the Houthis a new target. @Rory_Johnston

🇺🇸🇮🇷 Trump sounds ready to be done with Iran... "Well hopefully we're toward the end of the war. They want to make a deal. We'll see how that works out." We've heard this same forecast for WEEKS now. Everyone can already sketch the deal: blockade off, Iran's money back, the strait reopening on terms Tehran helps write. What's left to settle is how much signing it costs him politically, and every week he waits, gas climbs another nickel. Writers: Daniel, Lucas t.co/zqfvREBXPn

Honey the TV is doing that again. It just jumped from our show to a goat auction. Writer: Daniyal t.co/X9GVf3e9pa

🇺🇸🇮🇱🇵🇸 Macklemore’s removal from Ed Sheeran’s tour has sparked a huge debate. Nick Fuentes says Macklemore should have been allowed to stay, arguing that artists shouldn’t lose access to major venues over political speech. He claims the episode shows that pro-Israel pressure has too much influence over American institutions. Which raises an important question: if an artist can be pulled from a tour over what he said about a foreign war, who else is one statement away from losing the stage? Writers: Sol, Daniel t.co/gog4zj5Jrt

🇺🇸🇷🇺 Congress just handed Trump the power to hit China and India with 100% tariffs over Russian oil The House sent it to his desk 262 to 159. It sanctions Russia's shadow fleet, Putin, his oligarchs and banks, extends the Iran Sanctions Act of 1996, and lets the president tariff the five biggest buyers of Russian crude and gas up to 100%, with China and India at the top of that list. The Senate cleared it 86 to 11 in August, named for Lindsey Graham, who pushed it for a year and died in July. Every tariff in there is optional. He meets Xi on September 24, has spent weeks saying Beijing is cooperating on Iran, and hitting Chinese and Indian purchases would drive crude even higher with 48 days until voters decide. Congress handed him a weapon he has every reason to leave holstered, and the man who would have hounded him to fire it has his name on the cover and is no longer around. Writer: Daniel t.co/1dIWOptdmh

🇺🇸 Miami’s immigration court killed virtual hearings, and the line now wraps the building before sunrise. Since September 8th, people with court dates have to show up in person downtown. Families are leaving the house at 3 a.m. because missing the door can mean a deportation order while you are still outside. Lawyers say the wait used to be 30 minutes. Now it can be 2 hours in the heat, with mega hearings packing 100-plus cases into one room. Writer: Lucas t.co/GuCF9m7Pi5

🇺🇸 Jet fuel is the one product America never ran short of, and that's why everything else is empty. When the war started and jet fuel spiked past $200 a barrel in Asia, refiners executed a shift in what they produce that Rory Johnston, founder of Commodity Context, says has never been seen before. They guessed right on jet and gutted diesel and gasoline getting there. The upside is they proved the blending works in both directions. The problem is winter arrives before any correction does, and heating oil comes out of the same pool they already drained. @Rory_Johnston

🚨🇮🇷🇺🇸 An Iran-linked group used Anthropic to find U.S. warships and recommend TARGETS Anthropic's report says the actor fed Claude publicly available material, satellite imagery, ship and aircraft tracking, even captions on military photos the Pentagon posted itself, and got back a picture of American naval movements with targeting recommendations. The account was banned and the government notified. Three Iranian state-aligned accounts were also caught running influence campaigns, inventing quotes from Brookings and RAND to make propaganda look credible. Claude is blocked in Iran. A VPN and a foreign phone number get around that. Georgetown's Sam Bresnick puts the problem plainly: it is getting much harder for the U.S. military to hide what it is doing. Nikita Shah at CSIS asks what anyone expected when models this capable were made this accessible. The countermeasure under review is the part to watch. CBS saw a proposal to build fake AI personas that mimic real life patterns and muddy the military's digital trail. Washington spent this war learning that its own public data, ad IDs, ship trackers, unit photos, is an intelligence feed for Tehran. Fixing that means an American military that lies about itself online by design, and nobody has thought through what that does to a free press or a public that already distrusts what the Pentagon says. Source: CBS News, Anthropic / Writer: Daniel

🇮🇹🇪🇸 Italy suspended Schengen rules with Spain and Madrid is furious Schengen is the agreement that lets people cross most European borders without passport checks, and any member can pause it temporarily when it argues security demands it. Meloni says those temporary controls have been invoked hundreds of times across Europe and that this one was about protecting Italy's security interests after the migration crisis in Ceuta, not targeting Spain. She also had a message for Sánchez's government, calling heated rhetoric and threats of retaliation "not exactly the most convincing argument." Writers: Sol, Daniel t.co/qn0jNg9433

🇺🇸 Diesel refining margins hit $115 a barrel. Normal is $20 to $30. Rory Johnston, founder of Commodity Context, has the prompt diesel contract sitting around $220 a barrel equivalent while Brent trades at $105, and physical crude delivered today commands a $25 premium over the same barrel two months out. Five or six times normal, on a market already running hot since 2022. Every refinery in America is maxed out, so the only thing that closes this gap is demand breaking first, which nobody wants to say out loud. @Rory_Johnston

🚨🇺🇸🇸🇦 U.S. intelligence warns China could steal F-35 secrets through the $24 billion jet sale to Saudi Arabia... A Defense Intelligence Agency report circulating through agencies and congressional offices flags Chinese military access to Saudi bases, Chinese gear inside Saudi telecom infrastructure, and doubts that the two countries can keep the jets' radar and surveillance technology secure. Analysts ask whether Riyadh would limit contact with Chinese military personnel at all, and whether it would strip Huawei and ZTE equipment out of its networks and defense sites. The administration is preparing to formally submit the package of 48 jets to Congress soon. Beijing is already helping the Saudis build ballistic missiles. Washington killed the identical deal with the UAE in 2021 for exactly these reasons. What happens next is the real test. If lawmakers balk, Rubio can invoke the same emergency powers he has used repeatedly for Israel and push it through anyway, and the Senate is already demanding the classified annexes on the Saudi nuclear deal. Two of the most sensitive transfers in American history, the stealth fighter and the reactor, are moving together toward a partner whose air force cannot stop Houthi drones and whose phone system runs on Chinese hardware. Source: The New York Times / Writer: Daniel

🇺🇸 Diddy hasn't spoken to his own lawyers in 4 months, and he's in prison with nothing but time. They filed to quit this week. The reasons given in court: more than 6 months of unpaid bills and "a total breakdown in cooperation and communication." His spokesperson says it went the other way, that he fired them for running up charges he never approved. The firm says that's false and that they worked efficiently under hard conditions. The case they were handling is his own $100 million defamation suit, now sitting there with nobody to argue it. Source: NBC News / Writer: Daniyal

🇺🇸 Jeffrey Epstein may have discovered that $500 could buy something far more valuable than consulting work: a place inside attorney-client privilege. Major law firms used so-called Kovel arrangements to bring Epstein in as an outside consultant, even though he wasn’t a lawyer and often wasn’t the client. In one 2012 deal tied to billionaire Leon Black, Epstein was retained for just $500, with the arrangement itself meant to remain confidential. And it wasn’t a one-off. The Epstein files include roughly 10 draft or signed consulting agreements built around similar privilege structures, while Black ultimately paid Epstein nearly $160 million for tax and estate advice. The wildest part is what we still can’t see: DOJ says about 200,000 pages were withheld or redacted on privilege grounds. For someone whose entire world ran on secrets, getting himself inside legally protected conversations was a hell of a place to be. Source: Bloomberg / Writer: Sol

🇬🇪🇺🇸 Topuria is medically cleared and suddenly Gaethje's gloves are the reason he lost Three months after the White House stoppage that left him with a broken face and foot, Topuria says next time officials should check Justin's gloves "so he doesn't put anything weird on them." Gaethje already addressed this on Rogan and treated it as flattery, saying people accusing him of bricks in his gloves were paying him a compliment. I guess two broken orbitals will make any man look for answers🤣 Writer: Daniel t.co/jurRzeunBa

🇺🇸🇮🇷 A barrel of oil delivered today costs $131 while the screen says $105, and the White House is weighing a diesel export ban that could push diesel to $300 Twelve million barrels a day are moving through Hormuz again, sixty percent of the old flow, and prices haven't budged. Rory Johnston explains the gap with one number. Futures for Brent sit near $105, but a physical barrel delivered this week closed at $131, a $25 premium for oil right now. That is what scarcity looks like on a screen. Diesel is worse. Refiners' margins are five times normal, Russia's exports are gone, and America is shipping out 1.5 million barrels a day to fill the hole while its own stocks sink. Which is why the talk in Washington has turned to banning those exports. It would drop pump prices in weeks. It would also do this: "the global diesel market would just break" Three hundred dollar diesel, refiners cutting runs, and a world running on fumes to buy one calm month at home. @Rory_Johnston

🇮🇱🇲🇦 Israel and Morocco are opening full embassies six years after the Abraham Accords Gideon Saar and Nasser Bourita met in New York with U.S. Ambassador Mike Waltz and agreed to raise their missions to embassy level, name ambassadors, expand flights, and finish deals on trade and investment. Morocco signed in 2020 alongside the UAE, Bahrain and Sudan, and this is the first real upgrade since. Rabat has spent the year collecting. The 2020 deal came with American recognition of its claim to Western Sahara, and in April a House Appropriations report used language friendly to Morocco's position on Ceuta and Melilla, the two Spanish enclaves on its northern coast. Morocco already showed in 2021 that it will open the border and let thousands walk into Ceuta when it wants leverage from Madrid. Full embassies with Israel while Washington nudges the Ceuta file is a country cashing in on both. Watch what this does to Riyadh. Trump says the Saudi nuclear deal takes effect only when Saudi Arabia recognizes Israel, and Morocco has just shown what recognition buys. Source: Reuters / Writer: Daniel

🇮🇱 🇵🇸 The map used in Palestinian schools doesn't have Israel on it. Yaakov Katz, former editor of the Jerusalem Post, rejects the idea that occupation and poverty explain October 7th on their own, and points at decades of Muslim Brotherhood ideology, mosque sermons and a curriculum built around erasure. "These are people who have nothing in common with you or me when it comes to our value system." @yaakovkatz

🇫🇷 A YouTuber filmed men on the edge of Lyon, France, firing a Kalashnikov into the air in Vénissieux... like totally normal. That is how comfortable some drug crews have gotten. One guy on camera talks like a hired shooter... another fires a pistol in the air. Bikes waiting like it is a shift change. That's a suburb of France’s second city, war guns on camera. But hey, don't miss the point. The only real problem in Europe is the far right 🤡 Writer: Lucas t.co/SZcmgw5OBb

🇺🇸 Veteran NBC4 reporter fighting back tears at the scene last night after NewsChopper 4 went down in Chatsworth. He was already on the ground covering a deadly Metro bus crash when the station’s own helicopter crashed nearby. The crash killed 2 of his colleagues, an aerial journalist and the pilot, along with a pedestrian. You can see how close this hit. These crews work together every day. Rest in peace to all three. Writer: Daniyal t.co/ofFCLVzQOa

🇮🇱 🇵🇸 Temporary housing for Gaza is sitting in Egypt because Netanyahu doesn't want to look weak before an election. Israel won't sign off until Hamas starts disarming. Yaakov Katz doesn't defend the calculation: "Leadership is also about leading your people, even if it's against what the sentiment of the people are. I don't think it looks weak. I think it's called being strong." Asked why 60% of aid is still blocked, he said he doesn't have a good answer. Nobody campaigning in Israel right now is going to find one either, which means the caravans likely wait until the ballots are counted. @yaakovkatz

🇺🇸🇵🇸 Macklemore said 'Free Palestine' on Ed Sheeran’s stage and the crowd answered. Days later he was off the tour. The billionaire who owns the New England Patriots and Gillette Stadium, took credit. Robert Kraft called it "hate speech." Sheeran says the promoter and the venues made the call. Other openers walked in solidarity. Kraft is one of Israel’s loudest American backers. A stadium owner threatened dates unless the opening act shut up about Gaza. That is a rich man deciding which words get a microphone. Writer: Sol t.co/Twy1i1fuTN

🇺🇸🇾🇪 Washington met the Houthis face to face in Oman and cut a deal that leaves only Saudi ships as targets, the same day the Houthis shot down a Saudi F-15 Reuters says American officials sat across from the Houthis in Oman and came out with terms. The Houthis won't touch any ship except Saudi ones, not even Israeli, and in return Washington won't bomb them. Within hours, a Saudi F-15 was in pieces on the ground, downed by a Yemeni-made air defense system. Riyadh signed a defense pact with Pakistan and Turkey this summer. Larry Johnson has advice for its lawyers: "they should have read the fine print, get better lawyers" The arithmetic behind Washington's choice is brutal. One night over Jordan cost around 80 Patriot and THAAD interceptors, about what a week of the war consumed at its peak, and nobody can build them faster than two years. America can't shield Saudi Arabia because it can barely shield itself. @NewSonof

🇺🇲 Macklemore is donating $1 MILLION to Palestinian relief groups and challenging Robert Kraft to MATCH HIM. The rapper announced today that he’s giving all of his earnings from the shows he performed on Ed Sheeran’s “LOOP" tour to 6 organizations supporting Palestinians. "Whatever we disagree about, perhaps we can agree on this: Palestinian lives are worth protecting." Patriots owner and AIPAC donor Kraft pressured Sheeran and other stadium owners to drop Macklemore from the tour.  Kraft confirmed he didn't want the rapper performing at Gillette Stadium, which he owns. Now the stage is set for Kraft to make a move... Source: TMZ / Writer: Marie t.co/SRv3UqP9P5

🇸🇾 Syria’s president told a Dubai media summit that news has to be independent, credible, and seen from more than one side. Wild message from the former Jolani. Same man who once ran Nusra, hid his face, and used the camera as part of the fight. Now he is in a suit, asking journalists to stay honest. Brutal shift. Writer: Lucas t.co/KyZr83KIHF