attack

Iranian forces say five oil tankers and a tugboat have caught fire in several incidents in the Strait of Hormuz.

At least five tankers have been damaged in the Strait of Hormuz, Iranian forces said, making clear that shipping would remain in peril as long as the United States and Israel’s war on the country is unresolved.

Since the war on Iran began in late February, Tehran has severely restricted traffic through the strategic waterway, which normally carries about one-fifth of global oil consumption.

“Last night … a large oil tanker attempting to pass through the illegal passageway south of the Strait of Hormuz suffered a fire after striking a mine and was brought to a halt,” Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) told the Fars news agency on Thursday.

“Another supertanker was halted by a massive fire while exiting the eastern Strait of Hormuz. A tugboat that had approached the supertanker to extinguish the fire also caught fire,” the IRGC added.

The Iranian army later said three more tankers were hit by naval mines and caught fire.

“Early this morning, a violating oil tanker – navigating through an unsafe area east of the Strait of Hormuz – caught fire and came to a halt after striking a naval mine,” the army said, according to the official IRNA news agency.

“Today at around noon, two more oil tankers struck naval mines and caught fire in the unsafe waters east of the Strait of Hormuz,” said another army statement carried by IRNA.

Separately, the British military said a tanker was struck by two projectiles off Qatar’s coast.

The vessel was hit about 50 nautical miles (about 93 kilometres) north of Qatar’s ⁠Madinat ash-Shamal on Wednesday at 23:20 GMT, the ⁠United Kingdom Maritime Trade Operations (UKMTO) agency said on Thursday.

UKMTO did not identify the tanker or which country’s flag it was sailing under. There was no immediate claim of responsibility for the attack.

In an incident last week, a Qatari tanker was hit by “unidentified objects” while sailing in the Gulf.

The liquefied natural gas (LNG) carrier Al Mayeda was hit on October 30, the Qatar Gas Transport Company (Nakilat) said on Sunday.

No crew members were injured, and there ‌was no environmental impact, the company said, adding that the vessel remained ‌safe and ‌operational while the impact was being assessed.

Attacks on tankers in the Gulf are still running close to a record pace.

UKMTO said in a report last month that it was “struggling to accurately report” the true number of attacks as the majority of ships now refuse to report them.

Qatar has stepped up mediation efforts to resume talks on ending the war in recent days.

Qatar’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs’ spokesperson said on Tuesday that ⁠both sides were reviewing proposals ⁠put forward by mediators, with talks continuing.

But unnamed Pentagon officials and military commanders told The New York Times on Wednesday that thousands of US air and naval forces on more than a dozen ships and at bases around the Middle East and in the US are poised to resume major combat operations against Iran on President Donald Trump’s orders.

Iranian government and military leaders, however, have warned of repercussions if the US or Israel pursue further military action.

On Wednesday, Iranian Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei said there should not be “even the slightest inclination towards submission” to the US, which he said would remain hostile towards Iran no matter which party was in power.

IRGC Ground Force commander Brigadier General Mohammad Karami said on Wednesday that the continuation of “hostile and brutal actions by Iran’s enemies” would lead to “further Iranian victories and greater national pride”, while accelerating the expulsion of foreign powers from the region and the collapse of Israel.

Iran says a ‘maximum deterrence’ plan is ready against any new US attack, warning of an immediate response.

No Premier League side has lost more home games in 2026 than Newcastle (7), while they have now lost 16 of their past 18 league games when conceding first.

The Magpies have failed to keep a clean sheet in each of their past 14 home league games – the longest run in their league history.

It all points to worrying times, with Jaissle just three months into a four-year contract.

“I fear a little for Newcastle,” former Liverpool and England defender Jamie Carragher said on Sky Sports.

“They have a young manager and young players. You are always going to question the manager when the team is not winning.

“I think it is going to be a tough season. At home, especially, it feels flat and boring, and I never expected to say about Jaissle’s Newcastle. You expected it to be front-footed and exciting, coming from the Red Bull model.”

Newcastle are in the bottom half of the table, with 11 points from nine games.

It was always going to be a period of transition following Eddie Howe’s exit, after five years in charge, and the arrival of 38-year-old Jaissle, after successful spells in Saudi Arabia and Austria.

In addition, Newcastle lost a number of key players in the summer including Anthony Gordon, Sandro Tonali and Bruno Guimaraes.

At the start of the year, Newcastle United‘s chief executive David Hopkinson said he could put them “in the debate about being the top club in the world” by 2030.

That now seems a long way off amid suggestions the ambitions of the club’s Saudi Arabian owners, the Public Investment Fund, are running out of steam.

Jaissle was not helped on Monday by his goalkeeper, with Hornicek allowing a routine shot to squirm under his body for Thierno Barry to tap home the winner.

The Newcastle boss claimed Barry’s winner should have been disallowed for a foul on Fabian Schar in the build-up, but he conceded his players had struggled to show the bravery required to get back in the game.

“It’s almost like a negative spiral,” he said. “I’m not happy with the referee decision.

“Unfortunately we couldn’t deliver actually over the whole 90 minutes. It was not our game and our style of playing.

“That is something we are very frustrated and disappointed about. If you cannot deliver when it counts then you don’t deserve to win.

“We were not brave enough in possession, too many long balls.”

Jaissle admitted Newcastle are lacking belief in the midst of their miserable run.

“There are certain moments with not too much confidence, not only with the young lads but also with the more experienced ones,” he said.

“It’s a difficult period. We also know you can only overcome that as a unit. We worked hard and it looked good but unfortunately we couldn’t deliver.

“We will analyse in detail and try and make things better against Fulham.”

King tells parliament attackers ‘are not of us’ and warns that Israeli expansionism is greatest threat to the region.

Jordan’s King Abdullah II says the kingdom would not be shaken by a deadly attack on a church in the southern city of Karak last month.

Opening a new session of parliament in the capital, Amman, on Monday, Abdullah said “the treacherous hand of terrorism” had reached out “to test the resilience of our state and the resolve of our people”.

“They are not of us,” he said of the attackers. “There is no place for them among us, not today and not tomorrow.”

The attack about two weeks ago killed nine people and wounded dozens. The king asked lawmakers to stand for a minute of silence for the victims, whose relatives attended the session.

Al Jazeera’s Ahmed Jarrar, reporting from Amman, said Abdullah made clear that Jordan would confront “terrorism and extremism” by relying first on national unity and public awareness, backed by the army and security services, which would strike “with an iron fist”.

Abdullah also addressed regional tensions, warning that Israeli expansionism is the greatest threat to the Middle East.

“Israeli expansionist ambitions are the greatest threat to the future of the region and its security,” he said, adding: “The humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza continues, and successive assaults persist in the West Bank and Jerusalem.”

The king also pledged to protect Jordan’s scarce water supplies, Jarrar said.

“We will not allow the thirst of Jordanians to be held hostage by any party,” he said. Jarrar said this reflected concerns that Israeli projects threaten the kingdom’s water security.

Jordan, a close United States ally, signed a peace treaty with Israel in 1994, and millions of its citizens are of Palestinian origin.

Jarrar said the king’s third message was directed at lawmakers as he stressed that the nation is the source of authority and debate in parliament is healthy as long as it serves the national interest.

“Your differences of opinion are a strength so long as Jordan’s interest is the goal,” Abdullah said, urging the government to improve living conditions.

He also warned officials against abusing their positions. “The law knows no name, no position and no influence,” he said.

A small boat in the Strait of Hormuz approached a tanker and placed two explosive devices on the hull above the waterline, causing a blast that started a fire in the engine room, the United Kingdom Maritime Trade Operations (UKMTO) center reported. The attack on the Dubai-owned tanker Louise 1 was carried out by Iranians using limpet mines, Financial Times reported. The incident took place Thursday and was the first of its kind since June 2019, when a Japanese and a Norwegian ship were hit with limpets, the publication noted.

This is the first indication of the successful use of these mines during the current Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ (IRGC) wave of strikes against shipping in the Strait of Hormuz following Operation Epic Fury. The attack also highlights the challenges of keeping ships safe in a busy and complex littoral.

“The apparent ability of a small craft to approach a transiting tanker, deploy explosive devices and withdraw presents a significant security concern, particularly in the Strait’s congested shipping lanes,” Greece-based maritime ​risk management group Marisks said ​on ⁠Friday, Reuters reported.

TWZ covered the 2019 attacks extensively, including sharing the following video showing an Iranian Navy or IRGC fast boat going back to remove a dud limpet mine from the Japanese-owned Kokuka Courageous’s damaged hull.

Limpet Mine Attack in the Gulf of Oman: JUNE 13, 2019

Earlier Friday morning, U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) commander Adm. Brad Cooper said the waterway was cleared of sea mines. He was not addressing the limpet mine claim.

He stated on X that after “we sank Iran’s navy earlier this year, we also successfully cleared the strait’s internationally recognized primary transit routes of Iranian sea mines, and today U.S. forces remain highly vigilant and present to ensure that all primary transit routes in the Strait of Hormuz remain free and clear.”

“This week we reached a significant milestone, having now assisted Gulf partners in exporting more than 1.5 billion barrels of crude oil since summer,” Cooper added.

Recalling a recent flight over the Strait of Hormuz, Cooper noted that he “saw our U.S. assets in the air and on the water, including a squadron of advanced sea drones that were on patrol supporting a defensive layer. Here’s what I didn’t see: I didn’t see the IRGC out there at all.”

Also known as uncrewed surface vessels (USVs), the sea drones are part of an increasingly uncrewed armada of air, land and sea assets that are supporting the safe corridor through the Strait.

The USV type shown in the following video, a Saronic Corsair, made history twice in the battle against Iran. In July, the USVs were used as a strike weapon in combat for the first time by the U.S. A month earlier, a Saronic Corsair USV rescued the crew of a U.S. Army AH-64 Apache that crashed in the Gulf of Oman after it was downed by Iran.

Despite the heavy presence of CENTCOM forces, this month is turning out to be particularly dangerous for shipping in the region.

“October has seen the highest number of ship attacks on record,” Noam Raydan, a senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, said last week, according to the BOE Report, an oil industry publication. “Raydan, who maintains the institute’s interactive shipping incident map, has recorded 28 confirmed and reported attacks in the Strait of Hormuz and surrounding waterways in October and 113 since the US-Israeli war with Iran began on February 28.”

These strikes, combined with ongoing Houthi attacks on Saudi Arabia’s oil infrastructure, have already placed tremendous pressure on a global economy relying heavily on fossil fuel from the region. As of Friday morning, Brent crude topped $117 per barrel, the highest level in more than four years, according to OilPrice.com.

The American oil industry, meanwhile, is making a fortune on this situation.

“The war with Iran has been very lucrative for American oil companies, which have earned more than $130 billion in profit as people pay much higher prices for gasoline, diesel and other fuel,” The New York Times reported on Friday. “That is a conservative estimate based on the performance of more than 50 large U.S. oil and gas companies, most of them producers or refiners, in the six months from April through September. It does not reflect profits earned in March, the first month of the war, or in October.”

“The United States oil and gas business is making hundreds of billions of dollars,” Trump said at an Oct. 24 campaign rally, describing how the war is affecting the industry.

TRUMP on HIGH GAS PRICES: We’re making money like we’ve never made before. They’ll say: President Trump is bragging about all the money they’re making while people are suffering at the pump. I don’t give a damn. We’re making a freaking fortune. pic.twitter.com/KZ2pYsTPyR

— Acyn (@Acyn) October 25, 2026

The Latest

Qatari mediators returned to Tehran on Friday in another bid to try to pull the Middle East region back from the brink of war. The visit takes place as the U.S. and Israel are gearing up for a possible new round of strikes against Iran that could come as soon as next week after America’s midterm elections.

U.S. President Donald Trump has frequently stated that he could order new strikes, likely with Israeli assistance, after control of the next Congress is settled. While Trump could be gearing up to hit Iran again, leaks about war planning could also be messaging to compel Tehran back to the bargaining table.

“It’s going to get wrapped up soon,” Trump said Friday morning in an interview with Kansas City radio station KCMO. “We need a guarantee there’ll never be a nuclear weapon.”

Whether this latest Qatari effort can stop the clock winding down toward a resumption of hostilities remains questionable. Washington and Tehran seem far apart in their goals for achieving an agreement to stave off war.

The U.S. wants nuclear issues ​included from the start of negotiations while Tehran ​demands that the U.S. first end its port blockade ‌and ⁠lift oil export sanctions, Reuters reported on Friday.

A senior Iranian official has already dismissed a plan presented by Qatar as “unacceptable,” the outlet added. “The proposal presented by Qatar sets ​a seven-day timeline addressing both Tehran’s and Washington’s concerns, laying out daily confidence-building steps that each side must take,” the news outlet reported on Oct. 28, citing an official briefed on the negotiations.

The Qatari mediation is the latest diplomatic effort to prevent new fighting. On Monday, major regional powers met in Tehran to find a peaceful way forward.

Regardless, American forces are locked and loaded for a possible new round of strikes against Iran. Israel also continues ramping up attack plans in coordination with the U.S. in the wake of a so-far inconclusive national election that could result in the end of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s career.

“Cooper rarely briefs Trump in person, so the meeting could signal that the U.S. is moving closer to significant military operations,” the publication stated. “He met with the president in July, when the two huddled with Hegseth and Caine on Air Force One in Delaware.”

CENTCOM declined comment when we asked to confirm the meeting as described. The Pentagon referred us to the White House, and the White House did not respond to our request for comment.

While the Journal offered no specific details about the plans discussed at the White House meeting, previous reporting has suggested Trump is seeking a short, intense bombing campaign.

“According to several people familiar with the war plans, any new US-Israeli assault would be intense, lasting some three days and targeting nuclear facilities, regime assets and civilian infrastructure including power plants,” Financial Times reported on Thursday.

A top Democratic senator said he was briefed on plans and was shocked by what he heard.

“I will just say this: their plan is insane,” Sen. Chris Murphy of Connecticut said. “It will lead to devastating escalation and the likely destruction of our commitment to the rule of law.”

“There’s been open reporting as to what we may be planning and the civilian infrastructure that we may be targeting,” Murphy added. “The plan that they have developed will lead, in my view, to a prolongment and an escalation of this war that will be devastating for our security interests.”

Trump is reportedly planning to restart war with Iran after the election.

Some of us have been briefed on the war plan. And while I cannot disclose any details, I can say this: the plan is insane. It will not achieve objectives and will set off a new cycle of escalation. pic.twitter.com/adWJfHVIok

— Chris Murphy 🟧 (@ChrisMurphyCT) October 29, 2026

As the White House continues to put the finishing touches on new attack plans, the U.S. is bolstering its forces in the Middle East as we noted at the top of this story.

“The U.S. military is sending an additional Patriot system to Israel from Texas to beef up its missile defenses in the country, according to flight-tracking data and two officials with knowledge of the movement,” the Journal reported on Wednesday. “The U.S. has also moved troops off bases in the Middle East where they were vulnerable in preparation for an escalation.”

“U.S. forces in the region have been restocking their munitions, and bomber aircraft and jet fighters are preparing for strikes, some of the officials said.”

As we previously noted, there have been other signs that a major new round of U.S. and/or Israeli strikes on Iran might be looming on the horizon. Fox News reported that the Nimitz class aircraft carrier USS Theodore Roosevelt and the rest of its carrier strike group, as well as the Makin Island Amphibious Ready Group carrying the 13th Marine Expeditionary Unit (MEU), are heading to the Middle East, citing unnamed U.S. officials.

“The ships will arrive in the Middle East by the end of November,” the officials said, according to a post on X from Fox’s Jennifer Griffin on Tuesday. “These new deployments will add about 10,000 sailors and Marines to the Middle East.”

You can find out more about the locations of the U.S. Navy’s fleet of flattops in our “Where Are The Aircraft Carriers?” feature.

There have been indications of increased U.S. military air activity in the Middle East recently, as well. Observers have called attention to the particularly significant influx of aerial refueling tankers to bases in the region, as well as in Europe, which would be critical to any new major air campaign.

US Tanker Fleet Update 21/OCT/2026 #IranWar‌

Overall numbers across CENTCOM and Europe have now stabilised back to the levels they were at back at the start of September, around 190-195. There are a few tankers dotted around at other sites temporarily (Glasgow Prestwick and… pic.twitter.com/taKi8op7Tv

— DefenceGeek 🇬🇧 (@DefenceGeek) October 21, 2026

America and Israel struck hard at Iranian logistics during Operation Epic Fury, and the U.S. Navy maintains a blockade on Iranian ports. Still, the IRGC has managed to bring in materiel critical to its drone and missile programs.

A new Reuters investigation examines how.

“Iran has created a secret network of military agencies with global reach to import at least $2 billion in hardware, explosives and heavy-duty trucks since January 2025, evading both the US naval blockade and Western sanctions,” the investigation found. “Hidden behind names starting with the letters MOD, for the Ministry of Defense, are more than 5,000 agencies that form a formidable financial and military machine. Their financial footprints are on bills of lading and other shipping data dating back to 2016. Some are tied to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and to business conglomerates known as bonyads that are controlled by Iran’s elite.”

“The findings offer a window into one of the war’s great mysteries,” the outlet explained. “How is the IRGC replenishing its missile and drone arsenals while firing them in their thousands?”

Amid events in the Persian Gulf region, fighting between the Iranian-backed Houthi rebels of Yemen and Saudi Arabia rages on.

On Friday, Saudi Arabia said it intercepted and destroyed a Houthi drone near Islam’s holiest city, a claim the Houthis denied.

On Thursday, the Houthis claimed attacks on a half dozen targets across the kingdom, including oil facilities and airports. Saudi officials, for their part, said they intercepted ballistic missiles.

Adding to regional jitters, there were fresh reports of explosions near Iran’s Qeshm Island in the Strait of Hormuz Thursday night. However, these incidents often turn out to be air defense activity, warning shots fired at ships or nothing at all.

CENTCOM on Friday pushed back against claims that the command acknowledged attacks on Iranian targets.

“The reported notion that CENTCOM claimed any recent attacks is false,” Capt. Tim Hawkins, the command’s spokesman, told TWZ.

For now, the world is waiting nervously to see whether the Middle East again erupts into war. We should have a clearer picture in the coming days.

Contact the author: howard@twz.com

WASHINGTON — A federal judge on Thursday set a September 2027 trial date for a man charged with attempting to kill President Trump at the White House Correspondents’ Assn. dinner in April.

Cole Tomas Allen’s trial is scheduled to start with jury selection on Sept. 7 in Washington, D.C., and is expected to last approximately three to four weeks. Prosecutors had recommended starting the trial in May, but U.S. District Judge Trevor McFadden set the later date after one of Allen’s attorneys asked for more time to prepare.

Allen, of Torrance, is accused of storming the WHCA dinner while armed with guns and knives and firing a shotgun at a Secret Service officer who tried to stop the attack at the Washington Hilton hotel. The officer, who was struck once in a bullet-resistant vest, fired five shots but didn’t hit anybody, authorities said. Allen was injured but not from gunfire.

The attack led to an early end to one of the highest-profile annual events in the nation’s capital. Trump returned to speak at the rescheduled dinner three months later.

In writings that he sent to relatives before the attack, Allen railed against Trump administration policies and referred to himself as a “Friendly Federal Assassin,” authorities said.

Allen faces an attempted assassination charge that carries a maximum possible sentence of life in prison. He also is charged with assaulting a federal officer with a deadly weapon and two additional firearms counts.

Kunzelman writes for the Associated Press.

Public anger in Syria has threatened to boil over following disagreements between Amman and Damascus over Jordanian attacks on the southern Syrian regions of Deraa and Suwayda on Monday evening.

Jordan said its air force had killed more than 20 ISIL (ISIS) fighters in retaliatory strikes on what it called “dens of terrorist organisations in southern Syria”, linked to suspects accused of being behind last week’s attack on a Greek Orthodox church in the kingdom, which was claimed by the group.

But the next day, anger mounted in Syria as images spread of a slain grandmother and her three grandchildren.

While Jordan has launched attacks on Syria in the past, including assaults that led to civilian casualties, this latest episode seems to have captured public anger.

“The anger also reflects an expectation that the authorities in Damascus should now be able to protect Syrians and demand answers when they are killed or harmed,” Navvar Saban, a researcher in security and military affairs at the Arab Center for Contemporary Syrian Studies, told Al Jazeera.

“If people feel Damascus is more concerned with protecting the relationship with the Jordanians than accountability, some of the anger could turn inward.”

Contradicting accounts

Monday’s attack reportedly came in response to the assault on a Greek Orthodox church that killed nine people and wounded at least 34 others in the village of Hamoud in the Karak governorate, about 120km (75 miles) southwest of the capital, Amman.

Jordanian authorities said the attack was carried out by “extremist terrorists”.

Jordan’s King Abdullah II promised to respond with an “iron fist”.

“Jordan has absorbed many terrorist attacks before, but this one was especially brazen given the Christian church and the nature of the event being targeted,” Sean Yom, an expert on Jordan at Temple University in the United States, told Al Jazeera.

“Because of its unprecedented nature, explicitly targeting a protected Christian minority in the tribal heartland of Karak, the government instantly felt popular demands to show results from the investigation and arrest of the perpetrators. This pressure to be responsive is especially acute right now, because security and policing remain core strengths of the Jordanian state.”

Jordanian authorities arrested three men connected to the attack on the church on Monday. That evening, Jordan also launched the attack on southern Syria, which it said was carried out in coordination with authorities in Damascus.

But Damascus has contradicted that account.

The Syrian Ministry of Foreign Affairs said in a statement that it had informed Jordan of its “complete reservation” over the attacks, and said they took place “without prior coordination or notification with the Syrian side”. An official described the strikes as “treacherous”.

“Both governments have something to defend politically,” Saban said. “Amman wants to show that it acted against a serious threat through legitimate security channels. On the other hand, Damascus cannot afford to appear to have approved an operation that killed Syrian families. The investigation needs to establish who communicated with whom, when, and about which target. Until then, I would avoid either assuming Syria secretly approved everything or treating the coordination as a simple misunderstanding.”

The family’s bodies were recovered after they were killed by the Jordanian strike on a tent in the village of al-Taff, in the Lajat area of northeastern Deraa province. Syria’s civil defence said three other family members were wounded in the attack.

Meanwhile, in the al-Shayah farms near Nassib, in the Deraa countryside, an 80-year-old man named Riyad Karrad was also killed by a strike. Another man named Mutlaq Abu al-Khalil, 60, was killed in Shuhayb, in Suwayda’s northern countryside.

Syrian customs authorities closed the Nassib border crossing with Jordan on Tuesday, before reopening it to passenger and commercial traffic on Wednesday.

Syrian-Jordanian relations

Jordan has launched several air strikes on Syria since 2023. It says those strikes generally target arms or drug smugglers.

Under the regime of former President Bashar al-Assad, southern Syria became the site of cross-border drug smuggling, including the stimulant captagon. Some of those operations are believed to have continued after the fall of the Assad regime. At times, the Jordanian strikes have killed civilians, such as a January 2024 attack that Human Rights Watch said killed women and children.

Since the fall of the regime in December 2024, relations between Amman and Damascus have been lukewarm, though slowly improving. Analysts say this is down to shared interests.

“Syria needs healthy trading and commercial partners like Jordan, and Jordan wants Syria to become more secure and coherent for three reasons,” Yom said.

“A strong and friendly Syria can accept more repatriated refugees from Jordan, where there are still hundreds of thousands. It can also help seal the porous border and prevent arms and drug smuggling activities along their shared frontier. And lastly, a stronger allied Syria helps Jordan resist Israel’s creeping annexation, including the West Bank as well as more parts of Syria and Lebanon. So both have mutual interests tied to their sovereignty in maintaining good relations.”

Amman was also the site of a July 2025 trilateral agreement signing between Syria, the US and Jordan aimed at resolving internal disputes over violence in Suwayda.

“Only days before the strike, the two foreign ministers were discussing a strategic partnership and preparing another meeting of their High Coordination Council that is a significant investment in the relationship,” Saban said. “My expectation is that this is a serious strain rather than a rupture. Both governments have strong reasons to keep cooperation over the border, armed groups smuggling, etc. But this incident raises an uncomfortable question for Damascus.”

For its part, Syria’s Foreign Ministry condemned the strikes as a violation of the country’s sovereignty but seemed to indicate relations with Amman would continue to be strengthened. It said Damascus is coordinating with ⁠Amman to establish a joint security committee to strengthen border security and prevent similar incidents.

In the meantime, Saban said that regardless of coordination with Damascus, accountability is needed to subside public anger.

“Even if an investigation established that Damascus approved some part of the operation, that would not explain why those people were killed or remove the need for accountability,” he said. “Ultimately, the families deserve a specific answer about the strike that killed their relatives, their friends, their family. Syrians need to understand why their families got killed.”

No single Argentine capability shaped British planning during the 1982 South Atlantic conflict more than the pairing of the Dassault Super Étendard strike fighter and its deadly AM39 Exocet anti-ship missile. Against that threat, the British launched a series of special forces operations, all with the same objective: kill the Argentine pilots and destroy their aircraft and missiles before they could be used again. Together, the strike fighter and missile pairing had proven to be the biggest threat to the Royal Navy task force that had been sent to recapture the islands.

Five Super Étendard aircraft and five AM39 Exocet missiles had been delivered to Argentina before a French embargo took hold. The jets were flown by the Argentine Navy’s 2nd Naval Fighter and Attack Squadron out of Río Grande, on Tierra del Fuego, a region at South America’s southernmost tip, shared by Chile and Argentina. The Super Étendard/Exocet combination had already cost the British the destroyer HMS Sheffield on May 4 and the container ship Atlantic Conveyor on May 25.

The special forces operations were broken down into four phases — named PLUM DUFF, MIKADO, KETTLEDRUM, and IMPI — the last of which is the least well-documented, and the focus of this article.

PLUM DUFF was the insertion phase and was a reconnaissance mission. On May 16, an RAF Hercules airdropped eight special forces troops onto RFA Fort Austin to form a recce party. On the night of May 17/18, a Sea King HC4, ZA290, lifted off from the aircraft carrier HMS Invincible for a one-way flight to Tierra del Fuego, where the men were to observe Río Grande and report back. The patrol was set down far from the objective and never completed the reconnaissance; the helicopter crew flew on into Chile, where the aircraft was deliberately burnt to try and hide the evidence, while they tried to evade capture.

MIKADO was the planned attack phase, and it depended on that missing intelligence. Two Hercules were to air-land up to 70 men of B Squadron, 22 Special Air Service (SAS), directly on Río Grande — the air operation order of May 19 also named Río Gallegos, further up the Argentine coast, as an alternative. The men would destroy the Super Étendards and their Exocets on the ground, kill the pilots, and then withdraw overland into Chile. Commander Task Force 317, at Northwood, accepted from the outset that the mission could well cost both Hercules.

The aircrew did not refuse the task, but they were blunt about what it demanded: formation landing by two heavy transports on a possibly heavily defended, icy military runway, with a probable 20-knot tailwind, at night and on passive night-vision goggles in minimum light levels, with intelligence that was inadequate to support any air-land option at all. The RAF planning team recommended an airdrop as the better way to maintain a covert posture, and the Senior Air Staff Officer at Headquarters 38 Group warned the Air Commander to watch for overambitious schemes coming out of the SAS.

The U.K. Ministry of Defense formally cancelled MIKADO on June 4.

KETTLEDRUM was planned as the third of the set. It was aimed at Puerto Deseado, Santa Cruz Province of Argentina, and would have inserted a Special Boat Service party (SBS, the Royal Marines’ special forces unit) from the submarine HMS Onyx — a boat that will reappear before the end of this story.

None of the three was executed as planned.

Less well-known is that the cancellation of MIKADO produced a fourth project: Operation IMPI, named after a Zulu fighting force.

Cancelling MIKADO did not mean the wider operation was over. Also on June 4, the U.K. Ministry of Defense tasked CTF 317 to produce a new plan for special forces to destroy the combat effectiveness of the Super Étendards.

CTF 317’s staff went to work on what became IMPI. The planning document, Ops 1/3, is dated June 14 — the day of the Argentine surrender in the islands. In broad terms, the objective was to be attacked by special forces arriving both by air and by sea.

That much has been known, in fragments.

What has not been published until now is the fact that the operation had already been resourced.

At 2240Z on June 12, Maj. Gen. Jeremy Moore, commanding the land forces as CTG 317.1, signalled Rear Admiral Sandy Woodward’s battle group (CTG 317.8), with Admiral Sir John Fieldhouse at Northwood (CTF 317) and Commodore Michael Clapp’s amphibious group (CTG 317.0) as information addressees. The message called for B Squadron, 22 SAS, to be made available for operations as soon as possible: cover was needed against rapid developments of an unfavorable nature in West Falkland (Gran Malvina), and the theatre’s existing special forces assets were fully absorbed supporting the battle for Stanley — and IMPI. Operation IMPI, Moore noted in passing, was by then self-sufficient.

Examining two lines of routine signal traffic settles several things at once. Forty-eight hours before the surrender, IMPI was not a staff study but an operation that had been resourced, and that was enough to consume the theatre’s special forces and justify calling a fresh SAS squadron forward. It is also the only contemporary, operational-level reference to IMPI released so far: everything else comes from a narrative written years afterwards.

As that later narrative describes it, the concept behind IMPI was much leaner than MIKADO. Against two Hercules and 70 men, the air element of IMPI rested on a single RAF Hercules.

The aircraft was to fly from Ascension Island, refuel in flight, and then track east of the Falkland Islands and south of Cape Horn before making a low-level approach below Argentine radar cover for a night landing of special forces at the airfields codenamed San Jose and Arco Iris. Other special forces would have been inserted by sea. That air element, as will be seen, is the most questionable part of the entire file.

The routing is worth attention, because it rules out the intuitive picture of a direct run south from Ascension. Instead, the aircraft would have entered from the least-covered and least-expected direction, coming around the bottom of the continent rather than from the northeast.

The precise identities of San Jose and Arco Iris are not established in the declassified record.

The most likely reading is that they stand for Río Grande and Río Gallegos — the airfields at which the planned navigation ended, and the two named in MIKADO’s air operation order a month earlier. For a document circulating through restricted channels, encrypting the names of the two targets was an elementary precaution, although it should be noted that an operational order would more commonly have designated them simply as Target One and Target Two.

None of this rules out Chilean participation in other phases of the operation; if anything, it suggests it’s more likely. The narrative survives inside a folder classified Top Secret and restricted to the Chief of the Air Staff, whose declared subject is cooperation with Chile. That setting contrasts with the earlier stage of the planning, when mounting and recovering a special forces insertion from a Chilean airfield was considered and expressly discounted on political grounds — much as the use of an Antarctic strip was discounted after the New Zealand High Commission advised that the Antarctic winter precluded safe trans-polar flight.

The maritime half of IMPI can be traced in the records of those who were there.

Navigational support for the final phase was to come from the nuclear attack submarine HMS Conqueror. On June 9, 1982, Conqueror was off Bahía Camarones, working as an advanced picket and hunting targets of opportunity that ventured outside the 12-nautical-mile limit of Argentine territorial waters, with authority to sink any civilian vessel judged to be running to the Falklands/Malvinas; that same morning the sub had in fact entered Argentine territorial waters trying to locate the Argentine Navy’s Task Group 79.2.

That day, Conqueror received preparatory information on IMPI. The sub’s task was to come to periscope depth and act as a radio beacon, giving the Hercules a radio reference against which to refine a navigation that, low and at night, allowed no error. The resulting picture is an odd one: a nuclear submarine deployed on interdiction off the Patagonian coast, turned into a navigation aid for a transport aircraft.

The insertion itself fell to HMS Onyx, the Oberon class diesel-electric boat that had already taken part in Operation KETTLEDRUM and the only conventional submarine Britain deployed to the South Atlantic. On June 14, at 0815Z, lying in San Carlos Water, Onyx embarked a party of 10 men from B Squadron, 22 SAS and the SBS for the mission. The timing matches Moore’s signal of two days earlier almost exactly.

The plan called for the submarine to surface some two nautical miles offshore at night. The troops would close the beach in Gemini inflatables and destroy the objective — aircraft and missiles, if any were there — using anti-tank weapons and demolition charges.

What happened next illustrates the inertia of military machinery. The Argentine surrender in the islands came on that same June 14, hours after the party had gone aboard Onyx. Even so, preparations did not stop at once: on June 15 the embarked troops carried out practice landings from a Gemini. That does not mean IMPI was ever executed — it was not — but it does show that with the strategic outcome already settled, the machine was still rehearsing.

The British record closes the matter with administrative dryness: the surrender of the Argentine forces in the Falkland Islands and the cessation of hostile activity by Argentine aircraft resulted in the operation being cancelled.

The air part of the mission is another matter entirely and is where IMPI becomes more uncertain.

The only link between IMPI and an aircraft is a single paragraph in an RAF historical narrative. The folder that holds it was opened on April 18, 1986 — four years after the war — as an eyes-only briefing file for the Chief of the Air Staff, and the pages appear to be a working draft rather than a finished submission, carrying pencil amendments throughout.

Had a Hercules been earmarked, there is no doubt which unit would have provided it. The Special Forces Flight that runs through the whole chapter — five crews, commanded by a squadron leader, exercising regularly with SAS and SBS Sections — appears with its squadron number blanked out, yet the number surfaces a few paragraphs later, where two of its crews are described training on the probe-fitted Hercules C1P. The unit was No. 47 Squadron, RAF, home-based at Lyneham, and it would keep the special forces air support role for decades afterward.

The men who were at Ascension with that detachment, however, say they had nothing to do with it. Reliable sources with direct knowledge of the flight’s activity state that they never saw the codeword at the time, had never heard of the operation until this file surfaced, and consider it inconceivable that a special forces Hercules and crew could have been earmarked for a mission of this kind without the flight — a community of five crews that has stayed in touch ever since — learning of it at some point in the intervening four decades. By June 14, at most one aerial-refueling-qualified special forces crew was at Wideawake.

That skepticism is reinforced by the way the same narrative handles events those crews lived through. Its account of their own work-up does not survive contact with their logbooks.

For example, a practice infiltration into RAF Laarbruch in Germany that the narrative describes as successful had in fact been detected; the Hercules was notionally shot down about two miles out on the approach. The ramp toes (attachable extension plates located at the very end of the rear cargo ramp) it describes as droppable at 20 to 30 knots were never meant to be lowered with the aircraft moving, which would have been unsafe and risked the airframe. There are other anomalies, too.

A document that misstates the squadron’s own exercises is thin evidence on which to place that squadron over Tierra del Fuego.

What is not in question is what the Special Forces Flight could have done, had it been asked.

By mid-May the flight had two crews qualified in air-to-air refueling — one deployed to Ascension, the other held in the United Kingdom to train the others — flying Hercules C1s fitted with probes and, where the task required it, additional fuel tanks in the fuselage. It had rehearsed stream landings and rapid offloads, parachute insertion below radar cover to a pinpoint coastal feature, as well as flying on ANVIS goggles at 250 feet over sea and land. The goggles themselves were fitted to the crews’ helmets by RAE Farnborough specialists in a single day in mid-April. The reach was demonstrated on May 16, when the sortie that dropped the PLUM DUFF party stayed airborne for 24 hours and five minutes, with Victor tankers refueling some 1,800 miles from Ascension. Almost none of it was routine: nearly everything the force did during the conflict was improvised, at speed, in a matter of weeks.

What never had an answer — not for MIKADO, and not for whatever IMPI intended — was the other end of the problem. Putting men ashore deep inside Argentine territory was the solvable half. Getting an aircraft and its passengers out again after a direct action, from a strip in range of the Argentine Air Force, was not.

All of the above is reconstructed from lateral references: the RAF’s narrative in file AIR 20/13036 at the National Archives, unit records, submarine logs, operational signal traffic, and the accounts of participants.

The specific file — the one holding the complete plan with its annexes, the identification of the airfields and the execution sequence — remains closed. It is DEFE 71/980, titled Operation Corporate (Falklands Conflict): Operation IMPI, retained at the National Archives at Kew with no announced opening date. Until it is released, the air element of IMPI cannot be settled either way.

Forty-four years after the conflict, the last British special operation of the war is still, in essence, a document the British state is not prepared to show. That is not a trivial detail: the files touching on cooperation with Chile have consistently been the most reluctantly opened of all.

What remains is an operation of two halves. One of them is solid: a resourced plan, declared self-sufficient on June 12, with a nuclear submarine briefed to act as a beacon, 10 men of the SAS and the SBS embarked in a conventional submarine in San Carlos on the morning of the surrender, and rehearsals continuing the following day. The other half — a lone Hercules coming round Cape Horn to land on a codenamed strip — rests on one paragraph of a flawed staff narrative and is rejected by the only men who could have flown it.

Either way, the obsession is the same.

Between June 4 and June 14, 1982, while the final battle for Port Stanley/Puerto Argentino was being fought and the Argentine land campaign was collapsing, part of the British planning effort was still revolving around five French-built aircraft, their 10 aircrew, and their missiles. That the plan carries the date of the surrender itself, that it was still being rehearsed the following day, and that it remains classified today says a good deal about how far the British were prepared to go to destroy the Super Étendards and their Exocets.

Contact the editor: thomas@thewarzone.com

Mariano Sciaroni holds a master’s degree in Strategy and Geopolitics as well as a postgraduate diploma in Contemporary Military History, both earned at the Argentine Army’s Military Academy. Sciaroni has published five books and numerous articles on military and naval history. He is also an active member of the Argentine Institute of Military History and serves as a sub-lieutenant in the Argentine Army Reserve (Army Aviation Reserve Squadron). You can find out more about his books here.

El-Sayed’s opponents have sought to link him to the Muslim Brotherhood, an Islamist organisation that was founded in Egypt. Trump designated certain chapters of it as Foreign Terrorist Organisations earlier this year.

Some of the scrutiny of the affiliations of El-Sayed and his family members relates to their writings from more than a decade ago.

A social media post, external in 2012 by El-Sayed’s half-sister, Eman Abdelhadi, appeared to refer to the movement, saying “my family has long been MB”. El-Sayed’s team have previously distanced him from other comments by Abdelhadi.

Critics have also pointed to an opinion piece El-Sayed wrote in Huffington Post in 2011, external about pro-democracy protesters in Egypt. In it, he acknowledged concerns that “supporting democracy in Egypt might allow the country to fall to the hands of the Muslim Brotherhood”.

A year later he also allegedly signed an open letter by Egyptian Americans. In it, the group urged Mohamed Morsi, Egypt’s first democratically elected president and a leader of the Muslim Brotherhood, to “purge the media and police” following the toppling of the authoritarian regime in the Arab Spring. This letter has not been discussed by El-Sayed.

El-Sayed has previously denied any connection to the Muslim Brotherhood and has stressed his loyalty to the United States. Asked recently at a town hall event whether he would disavow the organisation, he responded: “Absolutely.”

Also in 2012, El-Sayed’s current opponent Rogers, who was then a US representative and chairing the House Intelligence Committee, appeared to call for cautious engagement with the Muslim Brotherhood, telling Reuters, external: “Do I think there are moderate Muslim Brotherhood individuals we are going to have to reach out to and talk to? Yes but we are going to have to watch it carefully.”

HA Hellyer, senior associate fellow at the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) and an expert on Egypt, says the row has more to do with Islamophobia on the political right in the US than with the Trump administration’s actual position on the Muslim Brotherhood.

“If the accusation is to be taken sincerely, then [Trump] should surely have a problem with engaging with any government that has engaged positively with the Brotherhood or with groups that are even more to the right of the Brotherhood,” Hellyer told the BBC. “He clearly has not done that.”

Jordan’s prime minister represents king at funeral for eight of the church attack victims as hunt for gunmen continues.

Thousands of mourners have gathered for the funerals of eight of the victims of a deadly attack on a church in southern Jordan, with Prime Minister Jafar Hassan also in attendance.

The burials on Sunday were beside St George’s Greek Orthodox Church in the village of Hamoud, southwest of the capital, Amman, two days after attackers opened fire during another funeral there.

Nine people were killed and dozens wounded in a rare attack on Jordan’s Christian minority, prompting three days of national mourning.

The ninth victim, Mohammed al-Qasous, is due to be buried on Monday, his family told the AFP news agency.

Coffins wrapped in Jordanian flags were carried through crowds gathered around the church in Karak province, as priests led prayers and security personnel stood guard.

Prime Minister Hassan attended the service alongside government ministers and senior military and civilian officials, according to Jordan’s state news agency, Petra.

Thousands of citizens also participated in the funeral procession, Petra said.

Among those caught in Friday’s shooting was Sahar al-Halsa, who told the Reuters news agency from her nearby home that she sheltered behind a pillar as gunfire erupted and people screamed.

When she rushed outside, she found her cousin Assem lying wounded.

“Assem, Assem, my darling, answer me,” she recalled calling to him. He briefly opened his eyes before dying, she said.

Father Yohanna Hamati told AFP that about 170 to 200 people were at the church for Friday’s funeral when firing began outside.

The mourners initially struggled to understand what was happening, he said, before people began rushing into the church to escape.

By Saturday, bullet holes remained in the walls and wooden pews, and windows had been shattered.

Church workers were cleaning away blood as villagers prepared to bury the dead. Jordanian authorities have described the attack as “extremist terrorism”.

King Abdullah, who visited some of the wounded in hospital on Friday, has promised a forceful response and the assailants are still being sought.

Officials say they have not established whether the attackers were connected to an armed group and no organisation has claimed responsibility.

The violence has also drawn expressions of solidarity across religious lines. Christians account for about 3 percent of Jordan’s largely Muslim population and AFP reported that Muslims were among those wounded.

Young volunteers visited a hospital in Karak with flowers and a message reading, “Our loss is one”.

The mourning reached Washington, DC, on Sunday, where members of the Jordanian community lit candles outside their country’s embassy.

Jordan’s ambassador to the US, Dina Kawar, told those gathered that efforts to stir religious division were “bound to fail”. Back in Hamoud, Father Hamati appealed for unity, stressing that Muslims had also suffered in the attack.

“We make no distinction between Muslim and Christian,” he told AFP.

Trump says the US is considering a possible attack on Iran as soon as Sunday, or it could reach a major deal with Tehran.

Global crude prices continue to climb, with Brent benchmark hitting $117.30 a barrel to build on four-year highs as market fears grow over a potential resumption of the US-Israeli war on Iran.

Foes of Gov. Gavin Newsom, who is widely viewed as a likely 2028 presidential candidate, are launching television and digital ads this weekend in early primary states that criticize the governor’s opposition to the proposed billionaire tax on California’s November ballot.

The ad, funded by backers of the wealth tax, castigates Newsom for opposing Proposition 40, the ballot measure that would impose a 5% tax on California billionaires’ assets to offset federal healthcare funding cuts approved by congressional Republicans and signed by President Trump last year.

“We’re all struggling with the high cost of healthcare. In California, Democrats are championing a one-time tax on billionaires that would save coverage for millions,” a narrator says in the 30-second ad. “So why [has] presidential hopeful Gavin Newsom betrayed his own supporters by trying to sabotage the billionaire tax? Maybe it’s because the same billionaires who oppose Prop. 40 also gave millions of dollars to Newsom. Gavin Newsom turned his back on working Californians. Will he do the same to you?”

The ad specifically calls out billionaires Stewart Resnick, who owns several businesses including Pom Wonderful, Fiji Water and Justin Wines; crypto executive Chris Larsen; former Google leader Eric Schmidt; and venture capitalist Michael Moritz, all of whom have backed Newsom’s political ambitions.

Newsom has argued that, although he supports wealth taxes, they ought to be enacted at the national level, rather than a state-by-state patchwork that could drive the rich to leave California, a state with a volatile budget heavily dependent on the state’s wealthiest residents.

The primary funders of the ad are the Service Employees International Union – United Healthcare Workers West, which crafted Proposition 40; Saikat Chakrabarti, a climate change warrior and political advisor who made his wealth in part as a founding engineer at Stripe; and Ross Boucher, an early engineer at Stripe.

The ad buy is six figures but could grow, according to its backers. Among the states where the ad is expected to air are South Carolina, Nevada, New Mexico, Virginia and New Hampshire.

Earlier this month, Newsom stumped for candidates in New Hampshire, his latest foray to early presidential primary states.

The ad launch comes amid a contentious, expensive battle over the proposed wealth tax, which has divided Democrats and their allies. Although Newsom is among Democrats who oppose it, the ballot measure was endorsed by the state Democratic Party and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.). Voters are closely divided about the measure.

All injured individuals were immediately transported to hospitals, civil aviation says updates to come.

One person has been killed and eight injured in an attack on Saudi Arabia’s King Fahd International Airport in the eastern city of Dammam, the country’s civil aviation authority announced.

All of the wounded, whose injuries range from minor to critical, were transported to hospitals to receive medical attention, the General Authority of Civil Aviation (GACA) said in a statement on Wednesday.

Earlier in the day, two people were killed after Saudi air defences intercepted a drone that was attempting to hit a facility at Saudi Aramco’s Shaybah oilfield, the Ministry of Energy said.

It was the latest in a series of assaults on Saudi airports as conflict intensifies between Houthi forces and the Saudi-backed internationally recognised Yemeni government.

Last week, the kingdom reported that a projectile strike on Riyadh’s King Khalid International Airport on October 11 killed one person and injured 11. On October 10, the civil aviation authority reported that a separate attack on the same airport claimed the lives of 12 people and injured more than 300.

On Wednesday, the US State Department ordered diplomats and family members to depart from its missions in Saudi Arabia amid the ongoing Houthi attacks. There are also plans to withdraw family members from a number of other US missions in the region, US officials told Reuters.

The US embassy in Riyadh issued a security alert on Wednesday about possible further attacks by the Houthis on Saudi Arabia.

BREAKINGBREAKING,

Smoke seen rising near airport in Aden as Houthis say they attacked a military camp with a ballistic missile.

A powerful explosion has been heard in the city of Aden in southern Yemen, an Al Jazeera journalist and police official said.

A police official said on Wednesday that smoke was rising near the airport in Aden, which is controlled by the internationally recognised Yemeni government.

Reporting from Yemen’s Taiz, Al Jazeera’s Maha Ali said “the Houthi group targeted Aden airport with a ballistic missile”.

Houthi spokesman Yahya Saree said the group targeted the Saudi-led coalition’s “military operation room at the Badr Camp in Aden with a ballistic missile”.

He said that “the strike was precise and direct”.

More to come…

This autumn, the Supreme Court will consider a question with potentially far-reaching consequences for civil rights in the United States: Who gets to enforce them? On November 30, the justices will hear a case over whether employees of federally funded universities can sue under Title IX over alleged workplace sex discrimination. The Trump administration has urged the court to rule that they cannot, arguing that Congress never gave university employees a private right to bring such claims.

The dispute is the latest front in a broader legal push to restrict the ability of individuals and advocacy groups to take rights violations to court themselves. In June, the Supreme Court declined to hear a challenge to a federal appeals court ruling that barred Arkansas United, an immigrant advocacy organisation, from suing to enforce protections for voters who need assistance at the polls. Across a growing number of cases, Republican-led states and the Trump administration are advancing the same basic principle: Unless Congress has clearly authorised private citizens to sue, enforcement should largely be left to the government.

That may sound like an arcane legal argument, but its implications are anything but. If individuals and civil rights groups cannot go to court when laws protecting them are violated, the power to decide which rights are actually enforced increasingly rests with the very government that may be violating, ignoring or choosing not to enforce them.

A private right of action allows individuals, or groups acting on their behalf, to file lawsuits to enforce rights protected by law. These lawsuits can seek compliance with the law or compensation for past violations. Private rights of action are not automatic under US federal and state law. Congress and state legislatures sometimes explicitly authorise private lawsuits. Where they have not, courts have had to determine whether a law implicitly allows individuals or groups to sue, or whether enforcement rests solely with government authorities.

In practice, private litigation has been an essential part of enforcing rights throughout much of US history. As University of Virginia School of Law Professor George Rutherglen writes in a 2015 law review article (PDF):

“The long history of civil rights, dating back to Reconstruction, makes them quintessentially private rights, whose exercise and enforcement should depend primarily on the initiative of the individuals who bear those rights. Public enforcement no doubt remains necessary, and it has an equally long and distinguished pedigree in civil rights law, but it cannot entirely displace individual control over individual rights.”

Proponents of private rights of action, such as AARP, consider them an effective tool for vulnerable individuals and groups to protect their rights when government agencies are unwilling or unable to act. Critics, such as the US Chamber of Commerce Institute for Legal Reform, however, argue that private lawsuits can encourage frivolous litigation.

These critics, often from the political right, have attempted to restrict private litigation through legal arguments against private causes of action. An example is the 2001 Alexander v Sandoval decision, in which a Supreme Court majority led by Justice Antonin Scalia ruled that Title VI did not provide a private right of action to enforce regulations prohibiting policies or practices with a disparate impact on protected groups – discrimination that can occur without clear evidence of intent.

The legal push against private rights of action has intensified in recent years. Republican-led states have increasingly challenged the doctrine of implied private rights of action, arguing that courts should reject private suits to enforce various types of rights. The Trump administration has also adopted this stance. When the court decided a 2021 voting rights case, Justice Neil Gorsuch submitted a one-paragraph concurrence, joined by Justice Clarence Thomas, questioning whether “the Voting Rights Act of 1965 furnishes an implied cause of action,” despite that issue not being raised in the case itself.

The conservative push to restrict private rights of action has extended to a variety of areas. In June, the Supreme Court ruled against Falun Gong practitioners who accused Cisco Systems of helping the Chinese government develop surveillance technology used to facilitate their persecution, concluding that they could not pursue those aiding-and-abetting claims under the federal laws they had invoked.

One of the most consequential implications of restricting private rights of action is the threat to voting rights. In the Arkansas United case, the Eighth Circuit ruled that the immigrant advocacy organisation did not have the right to sue on behalf of non-native English speakers over the right to have language assistance in the voting booth. The ruling concerned Section 208 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. But it extended a much broader argument already adopted by the Eighth Circuit: that private individuals and advocacy organisations cannot sue to enforce key provisions of the Voting Rights Act. The Supreme Court’s refusal in June to hear Arkansas United left that ruling in place.

This argument has also been pushed by Republican-led governments in two redistricting and vote-dilution cases: Board of Election Commissioners v NAACP in Mississippi and Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians v Howe in North Dakota. In May, the Supreme Court vacated judgments in both cases and sent them back for reconsideration in light of its ruling in Louisiana v Callais, without resolving the private-enforcement question. That decision sharply raised the bar for some racial vote-dilution claims, endangering the voting power of Black, Hispanic and Native American communities across the US. At the same time, conservative-controlled governments are attempting to deny members and advocates for these communities the right to even bring some of these cases before the courts, arguing that only the Department of Justice can initiate action over such voting rights violations.

The broader danger is that, as private rights of action are curtailed, enforcement of federal law increasingly depends on decisions made by the executive branch.

The Trump administration is now pursuing a different means of restricting private enforcement. The Clean Air Act explicitly gives private citizens the right to bring certain lawsuits, yet the Justice Department has sought to intervene and dismiss a case brought against xAI over allegations that gas turbines at its power facility in Southaven, Mississippi, are violating federal environmental law and polluting surrounding communities. The facility powers xAI’s Colossus 2 data centre in nearby Memphis. In September, the Justice Department appealed to the Fifth Circuit and sought to halt the case. The department has argued that allowing the suit to proceed would threaten national security and the US pursuit of global leadership in AI. Here, the issue is not whether Congress created a private right to sue – it did – but whether the executive branch can nevertheless step in to stop such a case when it conflicts with its priorities.

Relying solely on the Justice Department to pursue such cases at the federal level is a particularly dubious proposition under the current administration. The department has also been weaponised to target political foes of President Trump. Its Civil Rights Division has been steered away from defending the rights of racial and ethnic minorities and refocused on cases brought by white plaintiffs alleging so-called “reverse discrimination”.

The Justice Department’s current politicisation may be reversed under a future administration. But even then, the erosion of private rights of action would leave the enforcement of civil and political rights increasingly dependent on a federal agency with limited resources and subject to political direction. For example, as Democracy Docket noted in 2024, of the 216 active voting rights and redistricting cases it was tracking at the time, only five were cases brought by the Justice Department. As Professor Rutherglen noted in his article, to rely primarily on government actors to enforce rights “is to transform the nature of those rights: from private to public, from individuals to groups, from legal control by plaintiffs to political control by administrators.”

Private rights of action are now being eroded, case by case. Politicians, civil liberties advocates and organisations must challenge this trend before more avenues for enforcement are closed off. Otherwise, protections won over decades may become increasingly dependent on the willingness of government authorities to uphold them, leaving those whose rights are violated with fewer ways to seek redress.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.

“LAUGHING” Russell Brand sexually assaulted a radio worker in a “violent, sloppy and frenzied” attack as his entourage stood by and watched, a court heard.

The comedian, 51, is accused of forcing six women into sexual acts and kissing and groping them in an “obsessive” campaign to sleep with 5,000 women.

On the fifth day of his trial, jurors heard from a woman who was in her 20s working at a radio station in the mid-2000s when Brand allegedly sexually assaulted her.

She told Southwark Crown Court Brand was a “perfect stranger” to her at the time and said his alleged assault was “violent”, “sloppy” and “frenzied”.

Describing the alleged attack, she added: “It was hard, I would say it was sloppy, he kissed my mouth, he just was kissing me and it was hard, it was very hard.

“He was kissing me all down my neck, his hands at the same time were all over me.”

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Asked about where his hands were, she said: “He touched my bum, he touched my breast, he had his hand on my waist and his other hand was just pinning me against the wall, and his body was just pressed up against me.”

The woman added: “It was rough, it was very, very rough. It was hard, I would say that his whole body was pressed against me, the kisses were hard and sloppy, going down my neck

“The reason I used the word frenzied is because it was just, it was violent.”

She said four members of Brand’s entourage including a woman were in the room at the time but “did nothing”.

The woman wept as she told jurors: “I wonder why those people didn’t do anything to stop him.”

She also told the court she had locked eyes” with the other woman and was “pleading with her” to stop what was allegedly happening.

The woman said she was “stunned” and “in a haze” but managed to push Brand away and told him to “f*** off”.

She added: “I remember he made like a sound, that was like funny – ha ha – like that.”

Jurors heard Brand allegedly preyed on the complainants between 1999 and 2009 in a bid to satisfy his “voracious” sexual appetite.

One of the women was allegedly raped in a hotel room in Bournemouth in 1999 after a Labour conference.

The woman said Brand had suddenly “changed” from being “camp, friendly, and effeminate” to “monster-like”.

Jurors were also shown pictures that Brand allegedly made one of the women take moments before he raped her.

The images – released by police – show the comedian topless in a pair of white trousers blowing a kiss to the camera.

She told police she remembers feeling “frightened” after Brand forced her to take the pictures of him on her camera.

She added: “I took pictures of him on my camera – he made me take them.

“I was frightened. I remember feeling ‘what on earth have I got myself into’ – and then he did rape me.

“He pushed me onto the bed. He did take my trousers off.”

She previously claimed he emerged topless from the toilet and “was prancing around the room, a bit like an ostrich, doing silly walks like Basil Fawlty”.

The woman later added: “I found his body quite snake-like and disgusting. It made me feel sick, if I’m being honest.”

Another alleged victim who claimed she was targeted by Brand while working at MTV in 2001 also gave evidence.

At the time he was the flagship presenter at the video music channel, jurors heard.

The woman said Brand was “pleading” for her to join him in the toilet before he “grabbed me by the arm and started to pull me in, saying ‘come on, come in with me’.”

She described Brand as a “wild-eyed maniac” during the alleged assault and said she was left “bewildered” and “confused”.

Prosecutor Riel Karmy-Jones KC dubbed the comedian a “sexual predator” who was “ruthless, calculated and manipulative”.

She also said women have told police he was “childlike in his expectation that his every desire should be met”.

The court heard the alleged offences took place when Brand’s “public profile was taking off”.

He allegedly prayed on women in a number of locations – including workplaces, a toilet cubicle in a bar and at his home address.

The fifth alleged victim met Brand after seeing his show at the Hammersmith Apollo in London with a friend in 2009.

He allegedly told her his age range was from “16 to death” before she was invited to a backstage bar where they kissed and had a threesome.

The woman claims she went to his home the next day where Brand told her: “Your hair smells funny”.

He then made her take a shower and wash her hair while he watched through a glass shower cubicle, it was said.

Ms Karmy-Jones said once in the bedroom, they had consensual sex but afterwards Brand “flipped” the woman on to her front and on all fours and allegedly penetrated her anally.

Afterwards, jurors heard the comedian told her to “clean up the mess you have made”.

The sixth woman worked for Channel 4 when she met Brand while he was filming a project.

She said she was informed Brand was “unhappy” and the situation would not improve unless she gave him a massage, jurors were told.

The woman claimed he walked up to a chair she was sitting on and placed his head directly into her groin area.

Brand has denied three counts of rape, three of sexual assault and one count of indecent assault against six women.

The trial continues.

In what may be one of the most comical self-owns in recent politics, the esteemed attorneys of the U.S. Department of Justice announced Monday that despite the extravagant and terrifying misuse of their investigative power under the Trump administration, they have so far been able to identify only 28 people in all of California who may have voted illegally.

“The announcement today by the United States DOJ makes the point that there is no widespread voter fraud,” California Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta said after the news conference announcing the results of “Operation Protect the Vote.”

Twenty-eight people out of about 23 million registered voters in the state — and not all of them even tried to vote, according to the feds. That’s about 1 in 820,000 folks allegedly registering or voting illegally, a rate that roughly matches how often people in the United States get struck by lightning in a given year.

So much for Trump’s endless claims that there is a vast, organized conspiracy between Democrats and undocumented people to have them vote in large numbers to steal elections. I’ll point out here that none of those charged Monday have been accused of colluding with one another or with Democratic overlords.

All the power of the government — investigative, technological, legal — has been thrown at finding these mysterious, diabolically clever ballot baddies. And now, thanks to Bill Essayli, first assistant U.S. attorney for the Central District of California, and his colleagues across this great state, we now know that all 28 of them will be held accountable, if the government can prove wrongdoing. And let’s be clear — people who vote illegally should be held accountable.

But wait, there’s more, because this election-stealing plot by immigrants certainly doesn’t stop at the state line. Seamus Hughes of Court Watch, an excellent site that tracks federal litigation, reported Monday that since the start of this administration, 169 people have been charged federally with illegally registering or voting.

That number includes the new California cases, so it means an additional 141 potentially illegal voters have been charged across the U.S. — all told about 1 in 1.25 million registered voters being accused of illegally registering or voting, making this crime slightly less likely than guessing a six-digit pin code on the first try.

There. Is. No. Election. Stealing.

But that’s where the funny part ends, because this attack on California elections is serious and just getting started.

The federal government, you’ve probably read, is suing California, claiming it gave the state a janky thumb drive with 20,000 names of registered voters that it sort of strongly suspects maybe aren’t legal voters. Important note here: The government has been very careful not to claim that these people voted illegally, just that it might be so based on questionable data, which I’ll get to in a minute.

The feds gave the state a silly 48-hour deadline to agree to change constitutional law, dump common sense and sequester these 20,000 ballots, if they were even returned, to double-check they were cast by valid voters.

When California rightfully refused — because elections are run by states, not the federal government — the federal government sued on the thinnest of legal grounds. It basically claimed that voting illegally is illegal, and if California doesn’t do exactly what Trump wants, it could be violating the Supremacy Clause of the Constitution by impeding the feds from enforcing the crime of voter fraud.

First Assistant U.S. Atty. Bill Essayli speaks at a news conference Monday at which officials announced that 28 people in California had been charged with voter fraud.

(David Butow / For The Times)

Which is basically arguing that if the state government fails to stop voter fraud using the flawed methods Trump likes, then the state is somehow stopping federal authorities from prosecuting voter fraud themselves. But didn’t they just enforce it with 28 cases?

Get ready, because “state-facilitated voter fraud,” is a new right-wing thing.

California is “being complicit in non-citizens voting in our elections, and as they were warned last week, not only is it a civil violation, but they could also face criminal consequences,” Essayli said, which if it happened would give Trumped-up charges a whole new meaning.

Essayli said state officials are not being “good faith actors,” but I’ll argue that shoe is on the other foot. The list of 20,000 alleged, suspected, maybe-maybe-not illegal voters was likely drawn from the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE) program, created by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, if you can remember that unfortunate relic.

It sought to draw data from more than a dozen government databases that were not only not compatible with such information sharing, but which had been kept separate until now for privacy reasons. Americans in general did not want the government collecting unified, know-all records of every citizen.

Luckily for us, I guess, the SAVE system can’t actually create reliable, unified records. It confuses people, convolutes them, merges records of people with similar names, and in general has been deemed unreliable by data experts.

In September, the good folks at the UCLA Voting Rights Project joined with the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights to sue the federal government over its use of that system to target naturalized citizens for removal from voter rolls. Turns out, the government appears to be targeting immigrants who are now citizens with these voter fraud accusations.

As I wrote about a few weeks ago, naturalized citizens make up about 1 in 10 eligible voters, and nearly a quarter of them live in California. But they also live in swing states such as Michigan, where Democrat Abdul El-Sayed may draw such voters, and in other places such as Georgia and Nevada where races might be decided by only a few votes.

These arrests and lawsuits while voting is already underway in the midterms are a not-subtle form of voter suppression. Imagine being a naturalized citizen in the Central Valley, where ICE is driving rampant fear and where Republican Rep. David Valadao is running against Democrat Randy Villegas in California’s 22nd Congressional District — one of the nation’s most closely contested races.

Would you consider sitting this election out just in case your ballot draws the frightening eye of the federal government? Even knowing that your vote is legal, what if you lived in a mixed-status household? Would it be worth risking voting if it meant a knock at the door from immigration checking on your status, and maybe finding that family member who lacks it?

Why take the risk?

“Basically, what they’re doing now is just completely harassing and intimidating naturalized citizens who are legally eligible to vote through these actions,” said Matt Barreto, co-founder of the Voting Rights Project.

And if the vote isn’t suppressed enough to give Trump the results he wants, these prosecutions and lawsuits feed the beast of conspiracy, giving Trump fodder to claim the results are fake, the election stolen.

And round and round we go, reckoning with Trump’s claims that lightning is striking everyone, everywhere, all at once, because the vote didn’t go his way.

United States President Donald Trump has announced his official endorsement of Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s election campaign after previously refusing to endorse anyone.

Trump posted on his Truth Social platform on Sunday that Netanyahu had been a “great warrior prime minister and an even greater partner for peace”, adding that Iran had been “systematically destroyed both militarily and financially, and unless they change their ways, rapidly, we will soon finish the job.”

“If Israel has the wrong Leader, which would be anyone other than Bibi, America will have to do this work ourselves, and I am not inclined to do so,” Trump wrote.

“Bibi Netanyahu has been Strong, Brave, and Brilliant in the face of tremendous opposition, including that coming from even Israel, itself. Despite all of that, he has endured and, in fact, he has thrived!”.

The president added that normal men and women would have “wilted” under the pressure that Netanyahu was under, but the Israeli prime minister “got stronger”.

“This is the kind of Partner that the United States of America is demanding of Israel, a Country for which it has done so much. Please let this Letter serve to represent my Complete and Total Endorsement of Bibi Netanyahu in his upcoming Race for Re-Election as Prime Minister of Israel. BIBI NETANYAHU WILL NEVER LET YOU DOWN!”, he added.

The Israeli election will be on October 27 . According to Israeli news outlet Haaretz’s tracker, as of Sunday, the opposition alliance led by the Yashar party of Gadi Eisenkot is expected to win the most seats, at 52, with Netanyahu’s Likud party-led coalition taking 51 of the 120 seats in the Knesset.

So far, no party is projected to secure an outright majority.

But Trump’s endorsement comes after he had previously shied away from fully backing Netanyahu’s election campaign.

Earlier this month, when asked twice by TIME magazine if Netanyahu should be given another term, Trump pivoted to his own popularity in Israel and Washington’s actions supporting Israel.

When asked on Thursday by the right-wing US news outlet, Newsmax, if he was planning to get involved in the Israeli elections,  Trump said: “They’d like me to be. Yeah, they’d like me to be”.

When asked whether he trusted Netanyahu, Trump replied, “I don’t trust anybody, honestly”.

Still, Sanam Vakil, director of the Middle East North Africa programme at the British think tank Chatham House, explained that Trump’s endorsement of Netanyahu was “politically significant” because it comes after months of tension between the two leaders.

“It allows Netanyahu to reinforce his claim that he is indispensable to Israel’s relationship with Washington,” Vakil told Al Jazeera.

“However, its electoral impact should not be overstated. Israeli voters remain divided over Netanyahu’s leadership and the outcome of the Iran war. The endorsement may help consolidate his existing support, but it does not resolve the wider questions surrounding his record,” she added.

Andreas Krieg, senior lecturer at the school of security studies at King’s College London, said that Trump’s endorsement was a “political gift” to Netanyahu, whose electoral campaign is struggling.

But like Vakil, he cautioned against treating Trump’s endorsement as a game-changer.

“Netanyahu’s problems are structural, involving fragmented right-wing parties, disillusioned ultra-Orthodox voters and the legacy of October 7. Trump may mobilise reluctant Likud voters, potentially worth a seat or two in a close contest, but he cannot manufacture the coalition majority Netanyahu currently lacks,” Krieg told Al Jazeera.

What the endorsement means for the Iran war

Much of Trump’s endorsement has been heavily focused on the Iran war, at a time when many analysts suggest the US president might be looking to restart attacks, either before or after the midterm elections in early November.

The conflict, which began in February after the US and Israel launched attacks across Iran, is currently at a standstill.

The Strait of Hormuz, which once transported 20 percent of global crude, was effectively shut by Iran after the war started. A US naval blockade of Iranian vessels followed, as each country struck ships passing through the waterway that they accused of not complying with its orders. Oil traffic last month through the strait picked up to pre-war levels as the US Navy shepherded an increasing number of tankers. But a spate of Iranian attacks on vessels early this month has again hit crude exports through Hormuz.

On Monday morning, Brent crude futures stood at $107.57 a barrel, down slightly after reaching their highest since May 19 on Friday, when they briefly touched $110 a barrel.

Last month, Iran presented a proposal to Washington to reopen the waterway within seven days, but negotiations failed after the US did not address Tehran’s seven conditions, which included the lifting of sanctions and the ending of its naval blockade.

Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi told Iranian media outlets on Sunday that the proposal remained on the table and, if Washington accepts Tehran’s conditions, the strait could reopen within six days, with talks resuming the following day.

At the same time, Araghchi, in a post on X on Sunday night, accused Netanyahu of wanting to restart attacks on Iran with the US to “stay out of jail”.

“Last time you wanted to ‘finish the job’, Iran emerged even stronger. Want to try your luck again? Be our guest. But be careful; we have unfinished jobs too,” he wrote.

“Netanyahu is driving America into another war to stay out of jail, whatever the consequences for Israel – let alone POTUS,” he added.

Krieg said Trump was prioritising the use of “coercive leverage” through his endorsement of Netanyahu but not necessarily “war over diplomacy”. 

“The naval blockade is hurting Iran considerably and Washington believes time is working in its favour. Trump’s calculation is that Iran will eventually accept nuclear concessions and reopen Hormuz, without Washington having to offer significant concessions first,” he argued.

“His endorsement reinforces the military threat underpinning that strategy. But it does not mean diplomacy is finished. Trump still wants a deal he can present as a victory. The danger is that Tehran increasingly believes it must escalate to improve its bargaining position.”

What is next?

Vakil explained that, while Trump’s declaration of support for Netanyahu had signalled renewed political alignment with Israel and left the door open for future joint military action, it also makes it “harder for Trump to distance himself from the war or portray the US as having been reluctantly drawn into it”.

“He is explicitly taking ownership of the partnership and its military campaign against Iran. However, the endorsement does not necessarily mean that the two leaders have agreed on another operation, nor does it settle the question of who initially pushed hardest for war,” she said.

Vakil added that for Tehran, the statement will reinforce the belief of Iranian leaders that there is “little meaningful distinction between US and Israeli objectives.”

“At the same time, Trump’s suggestion that he is reluctant to confront Iran without Netanyahu could be interpreted as evidence of the limits of Washington’s appetite for another war.”

Meanwhile, while Trump has said that he would not attack Iran before the November midterms, several US media outlets have reported that the Pentagon has drawn up plans to relaunch attacks before voters head to the polls.

Last week, US news outlet Axios reported, citing both US and Israeli officials, that both Trump and Netanyahu had spoken about launching a major new operation against Iran ahead of the elections in both countries.

For Krieg, the likelihood that the US and Israel launch an attack on Iran remains low, assuming there is no Iranian strike that forces a response.

“The more dangerous window opens after November 3 [US midterms], when those electoral constraints disappear. Both militaries are preparing for that possibility. The greatest immediate risk is an uncontrolled escalation in Hormuz that forces Washington’s hand before either leader is politically ready,” he said.