Obligated by bot to post.

In 2007 the IAF struck a site in Syria, which the Israeli government said was being set up by the Assad regime as a secret nuclear reactor.

The attack was widely condemned, especially by Arab states and members of the non-aligned movement, as a pretextous rogue action in violation of international law.

Now almost two decades later, the IAEA has been able to inspect the site following the fall of the Assad regime. Its preliminary findings indicate that the site was indeed a secret nuclear reactor under construction. A separate investigation following the new Syrian government's warning to the IAEA identified a separate site with tons of nuclear material; previously Israeli intelligence had claimed that the Assad regime had several tons of uranium and had managed to fabricate or procure several tons of nuclear fuel rods.

Notably, the reactor site had briefly falled into the hands of ISIS during the Syrian Civil War.

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/09/mamdani-pied-a-terre-tax/688482/

New York City’s new pied-à-terre tax provokes strong opinions. Supporters argue that the nation’s first tax on luxury second homes will help balance the city’s budget and improve “a fundamentally unfair system” that “hurts working New Yorkers,” as Mayor Zohran Mamdani has put it. Opponents warn that the tax will alienate the rich people who power the city’s economy. Some homeowners fear that the new tax treats them as “guilty until proven resident.”

But Mamdani’s backers and detractors alike are missing the bigger picture. The new tax was created because the city has been spending more than it takes in. That problem has not gone away. Neither has the dysfunctional property-tax system that made the tax so enticing in the first place. New York’s political class would do well to focus on solving these long-term financial challenges before they metastasize into a crisis. By spending political capital on a controversial but largely symbolic policy change, Mamdani has made that task even more difficult.

For more than a decade, New York lawmakers had noodled around with creating a tax on pieds-à-terre, high-end residential units that don’t serve as year-round homes. A pied-à-terre tax, already used in London and Vancouver, was tossed around to fund city government and, later, to shore up the Metropolitan Transit Authority’s perennially strained finances. The idea gained new attention earlier this year as Mamdani stared down a significant budget gap. State lawmakers authorized the tax, which will apply to about 10,000 properties, to help city hall balance this year’s budget. Nonresident owners of condos and co-ops worth at least $1 million or houses worth at least $5 million will owe an extra tax in the neighborhood of 1 percent of their property’s market value.

The new policy has triggered some overheated reactions. (Mamdani Derangement Syndrome is real.) One pundit described the mere act of listing the properties subject to the tax as “a call to violence,” even though local governments have let the public inspect the official list of property valuations and owners since colonial times. Other critics claim that the tax will cause wealthy New Yorkers to relocate. The revenue raised by the tax “is very little compared to to [sic] the TAXES PAID by the tens of thousands of people who are fleeing the City, never to return,” Donald Trump, a notable pied-à-terre owner, declared on Truth Social. “This dangerous political ‘experiment’ in New York will destroy what was once a great City and State.” In fact, the people subject to the tax can’t leave New York, because they are already, by definition, not residents.

Still, these histrionic critiques are responding to a real shift in New York City politics. Bill de Blasio, for example—nobody’s idea of a fiscal conservative—sought to raise income taxes on the city’s highest earners in order to finance universal prekindergarten. Mayor Mamdani, in contrast, seems to view certain tax increases as virtuous unto themselves. His campaign slogan, “Tax the rich,” was a policy goal, not a mechanism. He unveiled the pied-à-terre-tax proposal with a video singling out the hedge-fund billionaire Ken Griffin and his Central Park South condo.

Mamdani’s approach makes for good political theater. But the drama around the pied-à-terre tax, along with its turbulent implementation, has distracted from the underlying problem that made co-ops and condos so attractive in the first place: their inequitable tax treatment.

Under state law, the property tax on these units isn’t based on their market value, but rather on the city’s estimate of the rent that a similar unit would fetch if it were an apartment. The result is that many are wildly undertaxed. A Bloomberg analysis of pre-COVID data found that the median sales price of a New York City condo was more than five times the city’s property-tax valuation. The journalists found an example of a Bronx home with an effective tax rate more than 200 times higher than one in Brooklyn. One of the more compelling examples of the disconnect between property values and property taxes was the condo that Mamdani cited in his video: The city considers Griffin’s unit, which sold for $238 million in 2019, to have a market value of just $15.5 million (and a taxable value, a separate city calculation, of less than $7 million).

The gulf between assessed and market value is just one issue. New York City, with the state’s blessing, has since the 1980s used gimmicks to shield homeowners (otherwise known as voters) from property-tax increases. But the benefits have flowed more to some properties than to others. By law, the share of tax paid by each of four classes of properties (essentially: single-family homes, apartment buildings, utilities, and commercial or industrial sites) can change only by a certain amount in a year. This creates huge distortions. Over decades, the restriction has had the practical effect of preventing the property tax on homes in higher-demand neighborhoods from rising as quickly as their market value. That has left certain areas with significantly lower effective property-tax rates and smaller tax bills. One of the most regressive consequences of this system is the way it translates into higher gas and electric bills: The city has raised property taxes on utilities knowing they would pass the expense along to ratepayers.

The pied-à-terre tax does nothing to address these issues. State and city officials could have put a dent in the city’s property-tax inequities, and even produced a windfall for the city, by simplifying the city tax system in a way that makes all property-tax bills more reflective of property values. That would mean allowing the share of tax coming from different types of property to shift with market conditions, and ending the different tax treatment of residences. None of this can, or should, happen overnight—the system was highly dysfunctional before Mamdani was even born—but the mayor has missed an opportunity to make a down payment on a generations-overdue reform.

The pied-à-terre tax came into being only because the city faced a cash crunch and turned to onetime moves to deal with it (most notably postponing more than $2 billion a year in pension payments). Unfortunately, it still faces one: The tax is expected to cover less than one-half of 1 percent of the city’s budget. Even if it raises $500 million next year, as the Mamdani administration hopes, the city will still have a $6.4 billion gap in the 2028 fiscal-year budget, which the mayor must present this winter. Mamdani’s focus has generally been on the revenue side of the ledger, instead of looking critically at what the city already gets for its spending. That strategy is unsustainable. Both the city and, to an even greater extent, the state rely on volatile income-tax revenues that can drop suddenly in a recession or an emergency. New York City’s income-tax receipts plunged 21 percent from its 2009 fiscal year to its 2010 fiscal year, and didn’t recover until 2013. The city doesn’t have anywhere close to the level of reserves it would need to weather a similar downturn without deep and sudden spending cuts.

Putting New York City’s finances on a stable long-term footing is impossible without reining in spending. The city’s biggest expense by far is its public-school system. Enrollment has fallen 17 percent citywide since 2015, but officials bristle at the prospect of consolidation. Might the mayor perhaps shoot a TikTok video in front of the city’s half-empty schools? Beyond the education system, the city gives its workforce, including retirees, no-cost health-insurance coverage. (Even the state government requires employees to pay at least 12 percent toward their coverage.) Put another way, city taxpayers absorbed this century’s explosive growth in health-care costs in a way few other employers did. They did this even as unionized employees enjoyed automatic pay raises—which continue even after their next contract expires, regardless of the city’s financial condition.

Mamdani has tapped agency “savings officers,” but his failure to push for structural changes, either to the property-tax system or to the budget itself, has appropriately left people wondering how, not if, they’ll next be asked to pay the city more. If he doesn’t do more to stretch every dollar in the good times, he risks finding that the bad times will arrive sooner—and last longer.

American Rheinmetall delivered the first Lynx XM30 prototype to the Army this week, the company said in a Tuesday statement, the latest move in the service’s yearslong effort to replace the M2 Bradley Fighting Vehicle.

The vehicle is slated to start testing, while seven additional prototypes are scheduled for delivery later this year. The evaluation is part of a roughly $764 million Engineering and Manufacturing Development contract intended to take the vehicle from digital design through validation.

The Lynx XM30 was created for a battlefield increasingly shaped by drones and electronic warfare, according to the company, and its design features modular, open architecture to enable the quick integration of new technology while it is in service. Rheinmetall said the prototype has a first-of-its-kind hybrid-electric powertrain that combines a traditional engine with electric power.

Once the prototypes clear safety checks, soldiers will put them through exercises that simulate combat. The Army plans to do technical testing while troops simultaneously train with additional prototypes in what Matt Warnick, American Rheinmetall’s CEO, called a “parallel evaluation timeline.”

In 2023, the Army selected American Rheinmetall and General Dynamics Land Systems for the XM30 design phase. The prototypes are meant to supersede the Bradley, which entered service in the 1980s.

The XM30 model is built off of Rheinmetall’s Lynx KF41.

Despite a recent block on new proposed rules for mail in voting, a whistleblower report, published through Senator Blumenthal’s office, alleges that the postal service is continuing to implement a system to comply with the executive order.

The report indicates that the implementation of the new system has been rushed by postal service leadership, and that the system design choices, particularly a zero fail policy when inspecting ballots, made by USPS will likely result in significant delays in accepting and counting mail in ballots.

‘The Whistleblower is aware of three critical aspects that USPS fails to mention in its Final Rule, which make the second barcode scanning verification another potential point of failure for ballot mail:

a. that the USPS is adopting a zero-percent failure policy;

b. that a zero-percent failure policy means that if a barcode scanner fails to correctly read one barcode in a batch, the entire batch is rejected and returned to the state;

c. that even in the week before the new system is meant to be ready, USPS
does not have a clear policy as to how many ballots will be sampled in ballot mail batches.

1. Given states often deliver ballots to the USPS in large ballot batches, a zero percent
   failure rate during verification can derail vast numbers of ballots. The new scanning
   verification process is designed so that after a single failed bar code verification, USPS will stop the sample scanning and refuse to accept the entire batch of ballots.

2. Instead, as best as the Whistleblower understands, when a scanned ballot IMb is
   not found in the statewide list, USPS expects the state to take back the entire batch
   to cure the issue with the single ballot that failed verification. Only after a state
   cures the problem ballot, are they permitted to restart the process by uploading a
   new batch manifest to start the automated barcode verification over again. As
   designed, the process is entirely unforgiving. It could delay ballots by the thousands
   in repeated verification cycles - and thus prevent states from mailing enormous numbers of ballots. These issues would only be compounded if potential IT failures identified herein were added to the mix.

3. USPS has not adopted such strict verification regimes with other large mailing
   contexts.

4. Even under ordinary circumstances, a zero percent failure rate when spot checking
   in a batch of thousands or tens of thousands of mailings would be problematic. Based on information provided by the Whistleblower it is unclear whether other errors that occur during the barcode scanning verification could result in the
   verification to fail and the batch to be rejected.

5. Of course such technical issues are predictable - and likely. In 2017 the USPS Office of Inspector General (“OIG”) audited mail scanning problems finding that for package tracking specifically, scanner problems were caused by GPS signal
   obstruction. Another scanner issue, redacted from the report, contributed to errors in 5% of the audited scans. Information made available to the Whistleblower also seems to allude to apparent concerns about potential limitations of scanners used to validate samples of ballots, such that not all sampling can occur in real time due
   to connectivity and cradling needs for certain scanners at mail acceptance facilities.’

In which the authors claim that obsession with reuse and recycling has far outstripped the evidence and we might be better off literally using more landfills and more single-use materials.

The Trump administration decided that support for transgender people belonged in the nation’s counterterrorism apparatus. Months later, it commissioned a study that appears designed to tell the government it was right.

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services on Wednesday released a 24-page report claiming that people who support transgender identities, chosen names, pronouns, and parental acceptance are more likely to hold “left-wing authoritarian” beliefs and consider certain acts of political violence justified.

HHS promoted the findings under a headline declaring that people associated with “radical gender ideology” are more likely to justify political violence. Assistant Secretary for Health Adm. Brian Christine said the study raises questions about “what happens when ideology is given the authority of medicine.”

The report does not establish that affirming transgender people causes violent attitudes. It does not measure whether anyone committed, planned, or intended to commit violence. It does not compare left- and right-wing violence. It does not demonstrate that transgender people are disproportionately violent. Only 13 of its 1,208 respondents identified as transgender or gender-nonconforming.

And its authors acknowledge that the correlations they found cannot establish causation. A person’s politics could influence both sets of answers, authoritarian tendencies could influence their views about transgender people, or some unmeasured factor could affect both.

In other words, the study cannot answer the inflammatory question its title poses: “Does Gender Ideology Arm Left-Wing Authoritarian Psychology?”

Researchers affiliated with Rutgers University, the conservative Manhattan Institute, and the Network Contagion Research Institute created their own five-question “Clinical Gender Affirmation Scale."

The questions asked respondents whether failing to affirm a transgender person could cause psychological distress, whether transgender people should be supported in expressing their identities, whether using a person’s chosen name and pronouns is necessary support, and whether parents should support children exploring their gender.

None of the questions asked about puberty blockers, hormones, surgery, or any other medical intervention. The supposedly radical clinical positions largely amounted to treating transgender people respectfully and supporting families as they navigate a child’s questions about gender.

Those positions are also supported by research. A peer-reviewed Journal of Adolescent Health study found that transgender youth who could use their chosen names in more settings reported lower levels of depression, suicidal ideation, and suicidal behavior. Research has likewise linked parental support with greater life satisfaction, fewer depressive symptoms, and a lower perceived burden among transgender adolescents.

The American Academy of Pediatrics has said discrimination based on gender identity or expression harms children’s social and emotional health. Its policy supporting comprehensive care for transgender and gender-diverse young people was reaffirmed in 2023.

“These are not scales that have ever been validated. They just made them up on their own,” Andrew Flores, an American University political scientist and distinguished visiting scholar at the Williams Institute, told Erin in the Morning. Flores said the design was “stacking the deck in favor of trying to find these correlations.”

The report was not published in an academic journal or subjected to conventional peer review before HHS released it. It identifies no institutional review board approval and provides no conflict-of-interest statement. It says only that HHS commissioned the work.

The report’s six violence scenarios asked respondents about killing Donald Trump, killing conservative activist Charlie Kirk, killing UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, setting fire to Immigration and Customs Enforcement buildings, damaging wealthy people’s property and committing violence against police.

There were no parallel questions about right-wing violence: attacking the Capitol to overturn an election, bombing an abortion clinic, assaulting immigrants, targeting Black or Jewish Americans, or attacking LGBTQ+ people and Pride events.

The broader concept of “left-wing authoritarianism” is itself disputed. A 2024 review in Political Psychology warned that some research conflates authoritarianism with the much broader category of antidemocratic attitudes, obscuring meaningful differences between political movements.

Survey findings about political violence also require particular caution. A 2022 study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, based on four survey experiments involving 4,904 respondents, found that ambiguous questions and disengaged participants can substantially inflate apparent support for violence.

Left-wing violence exists, and credible researchers say its recent increase deserves attention. But the longer record does not resemble the threat picture HHS presented.

The Center for Strategic and International Studies found that left-wing attacks and plots rose from a very low baseline and, through July 4, 2025, outnumbered far-right incidents for the first time in more than 30 years. That amounted to five left-wing attacks or plots in the first half of 2025, amid a sharp decline in far-right activity.

The same CSIS analysis found that left-wing attacks remained far less lethal. From 2016 through mid-2025, left-wing terrorist attacks killed 13 people. Right-wing attacks killed 112, while jihadist attacks killed 82.

The Anti-Defamation League’s Center on Extremism separately found that all 13 extremist-related murders identified in 2024 were connected to right-wing extremism. Over the decade covered by its report, far-right extremists committed 328 of 429 extremist-related killings, or 76 percent.

The violence surrounding transgender people also runs predominantly in the other direction.

As The Advocate reported in January, GLAAD documented 1,042 anti-LGBTQ+ incidents in 2025, including 76 assaults, 22 threats of mass violence and 15 arson attempts. More than half — 532 — targeted transgender and gender-nonconforming people.

FBI data for 2024 recorded 2,278 single-bias hate crimes motivated by sexual orientation and 527 motivated by gender identity. Nearly three-quarters of the gender-identity offenses were specifically anti-transgender.

The administration has repeatedly tried to reverse the victim-and-perpetrator reality. In September 2025, White House counterterrorism official Sebastian Gorka falsely suggested transgender people were disproportionately responsible for mass shootings. Among more than 4,600 mass shootings documented from 2014 through 2024, at most six involved transgender suspects, or about 0.13 percent.

After Kirk’s killing in September 2025, the Heritage Foundation urged the FBI to create a category called “Transgender Ideology-Inspired Violent Extremism,” The Advocate reported.

By December, Attorney General Pam Bondi had directed the FBI to explore cash rewards for information leading to leaders of organizations the Justice Department labeled domestic terrorist groups. The department’s list of suspect beliefs included “radical gender ideology."

In April, Trump requested an additional $166 million for FBI counterterrorism programs targeting what his administration called extremism involving migration, race and gender. The proposal also sought a new federal center focused partly on left-wing political violence.

In May, the White House explicitly placed “radically pro-transgender” organizations within its counterterrorism strategy, citing Kirk’s assassination even though the defendants and shooters it named did not appear to belong to a transgender political organization.

HHS has also used government reports to attack transgender health care. A previous department document promoted a rebranded form of conversion therapy and rejected mainstream clinical guidance. Experts told The Advocate in December that the earlier report was “a political document pretending to be science.”

The new survey supplies the same campaign with a scientific-looking bridge between accepting transgender people and treating their supporters as security threats.

“This so-called study, sponsored by an extreme right-wing advocacy organization, is another example of the outcome leading the research - MAGA Republicans want to sow hatred against our fellow Americans in a desperate attempt to distract from their failures ahead of the midterms,” Human Rights Campaign President Kelley Robinson said in a statement.

In which the SNP insists on a stupid policy by making it even dumber and more destructive. Empty shelves by legislative fiat.

According to media reports, a key installation near the Jänschwalde coal plant in Brandenburg was repeatedly targeted with rockets, which emergency crews later found and defused.

Several improvised explosive devices were found at a substation near a coal-fired power plant in Germany on Tuesday and several power lines were damaged, police and a grid operator said.

Operator 50Hertz said there was a "brief interruption of service" but all lines are now back in operation at the Preilack substation, which distributes power from the nearby Jänschwalde power plant.

Police said no one was hurt.

The apparent aim was to trigger a large-scale power outage in the area around the nearby coal-fired power plant. According to initial findings, however, this did not happen.

The Cottbus police directorate stated that the police headquarters in Potsdam had taken over communications regarding the incident. The Brandenburg Interior Ministry also referred enquiries there.

There was initially no official statement from the police or from the grid operator 50Hertz, which runs the substation.

The Turnow/Preilack substation is located in the municipality of Turnow-Preilack in the Spree-Neiße district of Brandenburg. The facility is an important hub in the Lausitz power grid and is connected to the nearby Jänschwalde coal-fired power plant.

Government bond yields jumped across major markets Tuesday, with borrowing costs in Japan and the U.K. touching multi-decade highs, and U.S. Treasury yields surging, as renewed Middle East hostilities reignite inflation concerns.

The key U.S. 10-year Treasury note yield moved to a 20-month high, rising 3 basis points to trade at 4.7880%.

Japan’s benchmark 10-year bond yield jumped more than 6 basis points, moving to 3% for the first time since 1996. Japan’s short-term 2-year government bond yield also touched a 31-year high of 1.81%.

Elsewhere, yields on U.K. 10-year government bonds, known as Gilts, rose more than 9 basis points to 5.2341%, their highest level since June 2008 in the midst of the Global Financial Crisis. The U.K. 30-year Gilt yield, meanwhile, soared 9 basis points to 5.8856%, its highest level since March 1998.

German government bonds — typically seen as a barometer for euro zone borrowing costs — also rose. The 10-year bund yield was up more than 3 basis points at 3.3546%, a new 52-week high, as the 2-year bund yield reached 2.9496%, its highest level since July 2024. France’s 2-year government bond yield rose to its highest level since April 2024.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent shrugged off concerns over rising U.S. yields in an interview with CNBC on Monday.

Speaking on the sidelines of the G20 finance ministers’ meeting in Asheville, North Carolina, Bessent said the U.S. bond market remains “the best performing market” in the world, noting that Fitch Ratings last month reaffirmed its AA+ rating on government debt.

The jump in borrowing costs came after the U.S. and Iran launched retaliatory strikes around the Strait of Hormuz in recent days, driving energy prices higher and putting inflation pressures back on investors’ radars.

Brent crude, the global price benchmark, was last seen about 2.2% higher at $92.38 per barrel, while West Texas Intermediate futures were up 2.61% at $88.05.

Steve Englander, head of global G10 FX research and North America macro strategy at Standard Chartered, said the six-month conflict, combined with a Supreme Court tariff ruling that he said removed roughly 40% of additional tariff revenue, had added to pressure on bonds.

Englander told CNBC’s “Squawk Box Europe” Tuesday that yields across the curve will remain under upward pressure, adding that the U.S. is not alone in facing a deficit problem.

“I think ‘best performing’, as Bessent said, isn’t the same as well performing,” Englander said. “Everybody has a deficit problem — I don’t think there’s any reason to cheer.”

The rise in the cost of British government debt comes as U.K. Prime Minister Andy Burnham is reportedly set to tell lawmakers later that greater public control is the only way to boost the country’s growth.

Burnham, who in July became the U.K.’s seventh prime minister in 10 years, is said to be mulling legislation which would make it easier to take struggling utilities into public ownership, The Guardian reported Tuesday. U.K. bond yields are also playing catch-up with global peers after a public holiday on Monday.

SINGAPORE, Sept 1 (Reuters) - Two supertankers carrying Saudi ​oil were struck by unknown projectiles within minutes of each other while ‌transiting outbound through the Strait of Hormuz late on Monday, according to shipping intelligence and tracking firms Marisks and Kpler.

"The near-simultaneous incidents represent a further escalation in the threat environment within ​the Omani corridor," Marisks said.

The Reuters Power Up newsletter by columnist Ron Bousso provides everything you need to know about the global energy industry. Sign up here.

The tankers each loaded 2 million barrels of ​Saudi crude at the Juaymah terminal last week, Kpler data showed. Saudi ⁠Aramco resumed oil loadings and sales from inside the strait in August.

Iranian and ​U.S. blockades of the Strait of Hormuz have sharply curbed energy exports from the ​Gulf as both sides tried to assert their authority over the waterway.

Efforts by mediators including Qatar and Oman to broker a deal to reopen the strait, which carried about a fifth of ​global oil supplies before the U.S. and Israel launched strikes on Iran more than ​six months ago, have so far proven inconclusive.

Oil prices gained on Tuesday after U.S. President Donald Trump threatened further ‌strikes ⁠against Iran, following the first exchanges of fire since late July.

In the latest attacks on shipping, the Saudi Arabian-flagged very large crude carrier Sidr was struck by unknown projectiles about 16.6 nautical miles northeast of Khasab, Oman at about 1952 UTC (GMT), Marisks ​said.

Minutes later, the ​Liberian-flagged VLCC Senegal ⁠Prosperity was reportedly struck by three unknown projectiles approximately 17 nautical miles east of Khasab, Marisks said. All crew aboard were ​reported safe, it added.

The United Kingdom Maritime Trade Operations agency reported ​three projectiles ⁠striking a tanker in the same location as it sailed out of the Strait of Hormuz, in what appeared to be the same incident.

Bahri, operator of Sidr, and Sinokor, ⁠operator ​of Senegal Prosperity, did not immediately respond to ​requests for comment.

Earlier on Tuesday, Iranian media reported that a Saudi oil tanker was stopped while transiting through the ​southern corridor of the Strait of Hormuz.

I cannot possibly disagree more. The survival of the world certainly didn't matter in 2024 to the Left, and frankly, Jews sacrificing themselves for the Greater Good is a ghoulish idea. Tikkun Olam has never required Jews to suffer--how can we repair the world if we're gone?

Israel agreed to build a multilayered air-defense network for Greece in a new €3 billion defense deal published on Monday.

“This is the largest defense export deal in the history of Israel-Greece relations, and one of the largest in the history of the State of Israel,” Israel’s Defense Ministry wrote in a statement.

The “Achilles Shield” deal represents the largest defense export agreement in the history of relations between the two countries, combining David’s Sling, BARAK MX and SPYDER interceptors with Israeli-made radars and a national command system designed to counter ballistic missiles, aircraft and drones.

Greece put the deal’s total value at €3.035 billion, adding that 19 Greek companies are already involved, accounting for more than €750 million of the program, with plans to build a domestic production base capable of exporting equipment. Defense Minister Nikos Dendias said Greece would become “the first country in the European Union to adopt a similar system.”

The deal caps a fast-deepening security partnership between the two countries.

In January, Greece and Israel agreed to expand cooperation on drone and underwater-vehicle swarms, cyber threats, military exercises and defense technology. The push feeds into Greece’s “Agenda 2030,” a sweeping military overhaul aimed at modernizing the armed forces and building more weapons at home.

Athens is going further than some other European buyers of Israeli air defenses. Germany bought the Arrow 3 system in 2023 and Finland acquired David’s Sling in 2024. Greece says it will be the first EU country to stitch several Israeli platforms together into a single national shield against ballistic missiles, aircraft and drones.

The U.S. airstrikes against Iran overnight Monday targeted two Iranian rocket launchers that the military said could have dispensed small naval mines.

But such a weapon — an artillery rocket that releases a mine into the water — would be unusual and could mean that Iran has created yet another way to potentially cause chaos in the Strait of Hormuz.

“Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps forces were observed preparing to launch rockets with sea mines into Strait of Hormuz,” said Capt. Tim Hawkins, a spokesman for U.S. Central Command, which directs military operations in the Middle East.

After the strikes, the first acknowledged attacks on Iran since July 29, Iran fired a barrage of medium-range ballistic missiles at bases in Jordan and the United Arab Emirates that host U.S. troops. There were no reports of damage or casualties from the Iranian counterattack.

The Strait of Hormuz, through which a significant portion of the world’s oil flows to the marketplace via tankers, has been under constant threat since the United States and Israel launched a combined assault against Iran on Feb. 28.

The war has forced many shipping companies to bypass the strait. Saudi Arabia, the region’s biggest oil producer, has shifted to export more crude via the Red Sea.

Iran has long been known to maintain a robust arsenal of naval mines of various types, from small limpet mines that are attached to a ship’s hull by swimmers, to far larger weapons deployed by boats or ships that can potentially sink a targeted vessel. But little is publicly known about Iran’s land-based rocket-delivered mines.

It was not possible to confirm the military’s report independently, but it would mean that Iran has added a new type of mine to its arsenal — though probably not a very powerful one.

In March, U.S. intelligence officials reported that Iran had laid a number of mines in the strait. On Aug. 25, President Trump said in a social media post that all naval mines in the strait had been cleared from “International Waters” — probably a reference to the traditional route through the strait that commercial ships have had access to for decades under international law.

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The Maritime Executive, a shipping and maritime industry news outlet, reported in January 2025 that during military exercises at sea, Iran had demonstrated a variant of its Fajr-5 rocket that could dispense “a single free-floating mine” into the water.

Such a weapon would not cause much damage to merchant ships in the region, many of which are double-hulled tankers that are designed to sustain punctures without leaking their payload of oil.

It could, however, pose a more substantial threat to small fishing boats operating in the Persian Gulf.

The Fajr-5 would be able to carry a mine that is no wider than the rocket’s 333-millimeter diameter and contains perhaps just dozens of pounds of explosives. By comparison, the mines of greatest concern contain many hundreds of pounds of explosives. Those mines are anchored in place and float just beneath the water, or lie on the seafloor.

The small mines described by Central Command could make a small hole in the hull of a warship and cause flooding in perhaps a single watertight compartment within the vessel.

These rocket-delivered munitions, or “drifting mines,” are pushed by winds and currents as soon as they land in the water. Each would eventually make its way into the open ocean or possibly wash up on shore, where it could harm anyone who picked one up.

In 2019, Iranian forces attached limpet mines to the hulls of oil tankers in the Gulf of Oman, some of which exploded and caused minor damage, according to the U.S. military. But since the war began in February, Central Command has not provided details about which kinds of mines it has cleared from the Strait of Hormuz, nor how many.

Greta Thunberg was detained last month in Germany, during a sit-in at a munitions factory that sells weapons to Israel. She was wearing a Yalla Intifada T-shirt. Perhaps you thought Thunberg was a climate activist. She used to be. Thunberg gained fame by warning that greenhouse-gas emissions posed a threat to human life so urgent and existential that the world must put aside trifling concerns to solve it immediately. “I want you to panic. I want you to feel the fear I feel every day. And then I want you to act. I want you to act as you would in a crisis. I want you to act as if the house was on fire. Because it is,” she told the World Economic Forum in 2019. But someone else will have to put out the fire, because these days, Thunberg is possibly the planet’s most famous anti-Israel protester.

Much of the climate movement—particularly its most radical elements—has pivoted to Palestine. The Climate Justice Alliance, Extinction Rebellion, and Climate Defiance, among other green organizations, participate regularly in Free Palestine demonstrations. Most of the campus groups that were previously organized around demanding that their universities divest from fossil-fuel companies now demand that they divest from companies that do business with Israel. The same holds true across swaths of the left. Activists who previously treated racial justice, public health, or trans rights as the cause of a lifetime have determined that Gaza is now the cause of their lifetime.

Some of the pre-Gaza activism yielded tangible successes. Climate activists, for example, built a movement that persuaded Democrats to make their cause the party’s highest legislative priority, which is why the Biden administration expended so much effort passing green-energy subsidies. These gains were temporary: Donald Trump proceeded to repeal most of those policies. But instead of continuing to try to put out the blaze, many activists have simply moved on.

The draining of energy away from issues that once seemed so urgent has been slightly disorienting, even humorous. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez recently repeated a catchphrase that has circulated on the left, “Woke 1 was crazy,” which simultaneously laughs off the excesses of the social-justice left while implicitly assuming that a Woke 2 is just around the corner. The reality, however, is that Woke 2 is already here, and Gaza is its current preoccupation.

Woke 2 exhibits nearly all of the same behaviors as its predecessor—the fervent demands that society concentrate all of its attention on an apocalyptic crisis, the importation of academic jargon, and the reshaping of the social relationships and everyday decisions of its adherents.

To see these characteristics reappear in a completely different context from their original incarnation casts the woke phenomenon in sharp relief. Wokeness is not concern about a particular issue or issues, or even an ideology. It is, instead, a political style, a form of apocalyptic obsession that is serially fixated on different issues, waxing and waning in intensity. It offers the comfort of Manichaean morality—telling adherents that they alone can see the world in its true horror. But what it doesn’t offer, by design, is any practical resolution.

Unlike what the historian Richard Hofstadter once called “the paranoid style in American politics,” which dwelled on imaginary plots, the woke apocalyptic style concerns itself with actual social crises. Greenhouse-gas emissions really do pose a threat to posterity. Israel really has killed thousands of Palestinian civilians. Racism and police brutality, and the coronavirus pandemic—two other causes that inspired apocalyptic forms of activism—were likewise anything but a figment of the left’s imagination.

So what distinguishes the woke apocalyptic style from the understandable urgency one would expect activists to feel about any important social problem? The mindset has three defining traits.

First, its adherents gravitate toward the purest version of whatever position they select. They are facing down not just climate change, police bias, or a pandemic, but human extinction, racism, eugenics, and other existential perils. Only questions that can be reduced to a pure conflict between good and evil interest them. They generally reject any nuanced view of these issues as an effort to distract from the question at hand and drain the necessary moral fervor (though they prefer to call it “moral clarity.”) Beliefs they themselves held until very recently can become not just wrong but so abhorrent that anybody still endorsing them must be shunned.

A 2024 New York profile of the former Atlantic writer Ta-Nehisi Coates, a seminal figure in both Woke 1 and Woke 2, explained his newfound focus on Palestine as a product of the revelation that the issue was actually quite simple. The profile frames this aspect of his thinking about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in vivid terms: “That it was complicated, he now understood, was ‘horseshit.’ ‘Complicated’ was how people had described slavery and then segregation. ‘It’s complicated,’ he said, ‘when you want to take something from somebody.’”

Second, as a way of counterbalancing its tendency toward serial fixations, woke apocalypticism frequently asserts that every worthy cause is linked. During the 2014 protests against police abuse, Free Palestine activists persuaded racial-justice activists that their causes were the same. When COVID-19 seized the attention of the protest community, these same activists emphasized the racial-injustice aspect of the pandemic. “Palestinian Liberation is a disability justice issue,” the “People’s CDC,” a left-wing public-health group, has proclaimed. In the green activist community, the slogan “There is no climate justice without Palestinian liberation” has become almost a ritual incantation.

In June, trans-rights activists chased California State Senator Scott Wiener from a trans-rights rally, screaming, “You do not belong here,” because they deemed his position on Israel unacceptably Zionist. (Weiner has accused Israel of “genocide” and called for cutting off U.S. aid for offensive weapons, but continues to support Israel’s right to exist.) All political coalitions try to emphasize links among single-issue activists, but it is nearly impossible to imagine, say, a Republican legislator being ejected from an anti-abortion rally because he supported a gun-control law.

The substantive basis for linking every cause together ranges from tenuous (the pandemic did harm minorities somewhat disproportionately) to nonexistent (Palestinian liberation has no bearing on climate change whatsoever). Yet insisting on a relationship upholds the bonds of solidarity among single-issue organizations, giving them permission to operate outside their domain and pursue whatever cause is presently animating their supporters. And it reinforces a sense of omnicrisis, that their project is not a series of discrete policy changes but the healing of a broken world.

The third characteristic of this activism is that its demands are irresolvable. The crisis is perceived as literally existential, a form of damnation that a response as small as legislation cannot dispel. Many racial-justice activists have directed their energy into tarring the United States as the sinful product of colonialism and slavery—a diagnosis that, while containing elements of truth, offers little practical redress. Unlike Marxism’s postrevolutionary paradise, woke politics has no end point beyond despair.

The Biden administration tried to address racial justice and climate change, two causes that preoccupied left-wing activists at the time of the 2020 election. Yet the impressive array of legislative and executive steps designed to advance both causes did nothing to placate activists, who by 2024 had decided that Gaza was all that mattered. They were not wrong to care deeply about the suffering in Gaza, but the amnesiac way in which they dropped causes that they had very recently proclaimed to be matters of literal life and death suggests that their stated motives cannot be taken purely at face value.

What seems to propel these activists is not the specific issue that at any given moment is causing them to feel—as Thunberg once demanded in response to the climate crisis—panic and fear, but instead the need to experience these sensations constantly.

Woke 1 was a tidal wave that crashed over blue America. Nearly anybody who resided in a deep-blue space—academia, publishing, Hollywood, the arts, news media, nonprofits—experienced an onslaught of new terminology and rituals. Some of this (land acknowledgments, for example) has survived as a sort of residue. Other elements (Robin DiAngelo) have receded into embarrassing memory.

Woke 2, so far, is more of a ripple. Opposition to Israel has long held a place in the firmament of left-wing causes, but it reached preeminence only after October 7, 2023. A network of pro-Palestinian student activist groups sprang into action immediately after the attack, which they characterized as an act of liberatory defiance. The key dynamic that enabled their cause to expand beyond committed anti-Zionists was the intensity and duration of Israel’s response to October 7, which played directly into the attackers’ goal of creating a humanitarian crisis that would turn Israel into a pariah, elevating opposition to its very existence into a social cause.

The cultural manifestation of this movement is most evident in progressive capitals such as San Francisco and New York City. In June, a Brooklyn coffee shop announced on social media that Dan Goldman, a Democratic member of Congress, was a “genocide enabler” and no longer welcome there. The most recent cover story of New York putatively celebrates the coolness of the Southwest Asian and North African (SWANA) community, but defines it in ideological, not ethnic, terms. “To be in SWANA community,” it states, “meant embracing a set of shared beliefs: that Palestinians deserve human rights. That what happened in Gaza in the aftermath of October 7 constitutes a genocide. That social justice and social welfare override capitalist concerns.”

A companion article describes how this dynamic has seeped into the dining scene. “In the three years since October 7, awareness of Israel’s genocide of Palestinians and the wars that keep proliferating have turned eating out into just one more way people are expressing their views on Israel, on Gaza, on Lebanon, on Iran.” It reports that one Middle Eastern restaurateur’s “decision not to speak or post about the war publicly has left many fans of his restaurants Miss Ada and Theodora confused about where he stands,” as if café owners, like presidential candidates, should be expected to articulate a foreign policy.

In political terms, Woke 1 had a profound effect on the Democratic Party. Demands by activists and staffers pushed candidates to adopt left-wing positions on crime, immigration, trans rights, and climate change that placed them out of step with the majority of the electorate. Woke 2 has had a similar effect, providing left-wing activists with a tool to discredit mainstream Democrats.

The movement’s insistence on calling Israel’s mistreatment of Palestinians a “genocide” is its most important demand. Scholars do not agree on what this term means or whether it applies to Israel’s conduct, and resolving the question is unnecessary to establish a consensus that Israel’s response to October 7 was excessively punitive, or even that its military has violated the laws of warfare. But the tactic of demanding that Democrats label the conflict a genocide, and treating anybody who refuses as complicit in the murder of children, is not aimed at exposing supporters of Israel’s policy. It instead targets liberals who have traditionally viewed the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as a cycle of violence for which both sides bear responsibility. Describing the conflict as a genocide frames the problem not as a matter of shared guilt and shared responsibility to compromise, but as the straightforward oppression of an innocent people by a guilty one.

The term brings together the perspective of Palestinian nationalists, who see Israel as a source of unique evil in the world, with the apocalyptic left’s orientation toward generalized despair. The left-wing writer Noah Berlatsky recently argued  not only that the case that Israel had committed genocide was “open and shut,” but also that genocide is a routine occurrence. Other examples include British treatment of trans people (“The UK is moving towards, or already in process of committing, a genocide against trans and intersex people”) and Elon Musk’s cuts to USAID.

Leftists have discovered that requiring the term is a useful way to discredit Democrats who oppose them on other issues. “This is a moral Rorschach test,” the Democratic U.S. Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed said during his primary campaign in Michigan. “If you can’t identify the systematic murder of tens of thousands of kids as a genocide, and then you want to say that you’re a fighter for human rights and dignity, that’s just hypocrisy.”

Democrats who refuse to embrace the movement’s preferred term are, by and large, those who hold more nuanced positions on other issues. The demand to use the term genocide has broad application as an ideological sorting device. David Purucker, a sociology graduate student at the University of Oregon and a Democratic Socialists of America activist, recently illuminated the dynamic on a podcast from the centrist Niskanen Center. “And then just on the Palestine question, even though it’s not super salient to the broad Democratic electorate, it is, I think, is a really powerful signal of who is willing to take on the most sort of powerful parts of the establishment and really fight for the economic issues that are your priority,” he said. “I guess the sort of mental process would be like, Okay, if this person isn’t willing to call it a genocide in Gaza, how can I trust them really to stand up to the health-insurance lobby, for example?”

The Nation’s president, Bhaskar Sunkara, also a DSA member, likewise told Ross Douthat on a New York Times podcast that Gaza is “being used to separate Democrats who are committed to an old political establishment, including the foreign-policy establishment, and Democrats who are better.”

The Palestinian-nationalist movement has long sought to place Israel in a special category of evil. The woke apocalyptic left has assimilated many concepts and terms from that struggle, but its interest in the subject is slightly different. It uses the issue to affirm the pervasive horror of the modern world. Berlatsky’s Substack is titled, fittingly, Everything Is Horrible.

Despite the effort by some leftists to shrug off the craziness of the Woke 1 era, several left-wing candidates who have benefited from the energy of Woke 2 have found themselves haunted by their Woke 1 messaging. El-Sayed, the former candidate for Wisconsin governor Francesca Hong, and Democratic House candidates Darializa Chevalier of New York and William Lawrence of Michigan have all had to explain away or apologize for social-media posts using the left-wing academic jargon that was in vogue half a decade ago, some of them endorsing abolition of the police, Thanksgiving, or other well-liked institutions.

Any movement built on anti-Zionism as an organizing principle will tend to attract anti-Semites.When the British Labour Party under Jeremy Corbyn elevated a left-wing faction that was similarly motivated by intense anti-Zionism, it resulted in “a culture within the Party which, at best, did not do enough to prevent antisemitism and, at worst, could be seen to accept it,” a report by the Equality and Human Rights Commission found. The Democratic Party might be facing an equally grim future, in which what happened to Weiner and Goldman—experiences that Jewish liberals have had with increasing frequency since October 7—grows routine.

But there is also reason to expect, or at least hope for, a more constructive outcome. Woke 2 has generated fewer cancellations, firings, and acts of terrified self-censorship. There is no 2026 Harper’s letter defending the right of intellectuals to openly debate Israel, because such a letter is not necessary.

Perhaps this is because progressives have learned from their past censoriousness. Perhaps even they find it too implausible to claim that exposure to contrary beliefs about a conflict on the other side of the globe is a form of harm from which they require protection. Or maybe progressive institutions are simply too split over the morality of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict for woke activists to easily impose a new consensus and ostracize all dissenters. Whatever the explanation, Woke 2, with a handful of exceptions, has taken the form not of a silencing campaign but of a debate—angry and frequently stupid, but engaged energetically.

In an atmosphere that permits deliberation, rage may give way to reason. Liberal supporters of Israel may concede to the Free Palestine movement that Israel’s current government has no strategy other than endless use of force, that it has willingly enabled settlers to terrorize Palestinians in the West Bank, and that American policy has done too little to alter these choices. The Palestine activists might be made to acknowledge that the carnage in Gaza would not have occurred but for Hamas’s desire to murder as many Israeli Jews as possible, and that the group deliberately maximizes deaths among Palestinian civilians by embedding their fighters in schools and hospitals.

In other words, the Middle East is complicated. Bringing the moralistic fervor of Western progressives entirely onto one side of a generations-long conflict between warring religious sects claiming mutually exclusive historical and divinely granted rights to control a sliver of land is unlikely to result in peaceful coexistence.

Pro-Palestinian activists are correct to argue that American support has enabled Israel to pursue a one-state solution and to rely on military force in place of diplomacy. What they have yet to grasp is that the Western left’s inability to repudiate Hamas has had a pernicious effect on the conflict: reinforcing a co-belligerent in a cycle of violence. The American civil-rights movement is not, in fact, the proper moral lens with which to understand a terrorist group that murders not only Jewish civilians but also dissident Palestinians, and whose objective is not the right to vote and sit at lunch counters but to impose sectarian theocracy. An effective and humane Western form of activism would recognize that disregard for Palestinian well-being is a trait shared by Hamas and Israel, and would challenge both accordingly.

The American influence on this intractable conflict can be exercised more constructively. What Middle East policy cannot accomplish—what no reforms in any policy domain can accomplish—is resolving the existential angst caused by a political style that cannot tolerate moral ambiguity.

Over the course of the second Trump term, the court system has increasingly concluded that the Trump administration has forfeited the presumption of regularity, which assumes that the federal government’s presentation of the facts can be taken at face value, barring compelling evidence brought by the opposing side. The authors examine how the Court advanced this trend in Trump v Cook (the attempt to remove Lisa Cook from the Federal Reserve Board), in part by referring to a previous Supreme Court case (Department of Commerce v. New York) in which Chief Justice Roberts had articulated an anti-naïveté principle.