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After a plane journey in shackles, an Iranian woman found herself in the middle of Africa in a country she did not know existed. She is one of thousands deported from the US on the back of shadowy deals made with dozens of countries. An in-depth investigation reveals the ‘show of force’ costing American taxpayers millionsNo one would tell the shackled detainees onboard the US immigration plane where they were going. The officers in charge would taunt them when they asked, they said. It was only when the seat-back video screens finally showed a map that the 18 migrants worked it out. Continue reading...

President Donald Trump is failing to meet many of the most consequential challenges of his presidency, and those failures have left the world feeling like it is "coming apart," according to one political strategist. Trump faces multiple crises ranging from the wars in Ukraine and Iran, the rapid advancement of dangerous artificial intelligence technology, and domestic issues like stubborn inflation. Those issues will all be present when world leaders gather at the United Nations this week, which political strategist Simon Rosenberg argued in a new Substack essay will serve as a display of the U.S.'s shortcomings under the Trump administration. "Absence, madness, and a world that feels like it is coming apart due to it all," Rosenberg wrote. "That is what global leaders will find when they come to the United States this week." Rosenberg pointed to the recent story from The Washington Post about the Trump family's massive investments in AI companies. Those investments were made at a time when the president has resisted calls to regulate AI, which has raised questions about whether the president is self-dealing. "I am angry this morning that it has come this far," Rosenberg wrote. "That Trump and his ridiculous enablers have refused to take responsibility for the damage they’ve caused and found a way to course-correct. The scale of their idiocy and betrayal remains breathtaking, staggering, world-altering."

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton (R) just announced he'll campaign for the U.S. Senate on island in the Mediterranean Sea, according to the gleeful opponent who caught him in serious political blunder.State Rep. James Talarico (D) — the Republican's opponent in the race to claim Sen. John Cornyn's soon-to-be-vacant seat — took to X on Sunday to correct a campaign announcement that Paxton would join Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) for a campaign event in "Cyprus.""It’s Cypress," Talarico explained, naming a small community in Harris County. "But for all the time you spend on luxury vacations in Europe, it's no surprise you don't know Texas."Paxton quickly deleted the post, but not before Talarico's team could grab a screenshot of the exchange."This campaign continues to grow every day," Paxton appears to have written. "Next stop: Cyprus with the great @TedCruz. We will keep Texas, Texas."This isn't the first time Paxton — whose net worth Forbes estimates to be $13 million — has run into problems relating to European vacations.Earlier this week, a tourist reportedly said he filmed Paxton this summer walking near the London Eye with his alleged mistress Tracy Duhan — and the candidate flew into a rage when he realized it.Paxton bumped the tourist's shoulder and demanded to know whether he had been filmed, the tourist said.“You're a public figure in a public place, and I can film you all I want," the tourist said he replied.According to the Daily Mail, first to report on the exchange, Paxton demanded to see the video, twice lunged for the man’s phone, and claimed he had a right to have it.“He's yelling at me, and I'm telling him to back off,” the man reportedly said.Paxton reportedly walked away only after the tourist’s wife pulled out her own phone to record the confrontation.

Yet another Republican lawmaker has condemned President Donald Trump's son for allowing a Russian oligarch to contribute a quarter of a million dollars to his Bahamas wedding blowout.Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-LA) spoke out against Don Trump Jr. during an interview on "Face the Nation" Sunday morning."Anytime someone gives a $250,000 gift, and they have ties to the Kremlin, that's wrong," Cassidy said. "With that proximity to power, being the president's son, you've got to give faith to the American people that Washington is not a swamp."Cassidy was responding to the bombshell ProPublica report on Trump Jr.'s lavish, three-day wedding party on a pair of exclusive private islands, which appears to have been "heavily funded" by Umar Kremlev, the International Boxing Association chief with close ties to President Vladimir Putin.Democrats on the House Oversight Committee have since launched an investigation and even Trump has tried to backtrack, claiming his son paid the oligarch back.On Sunday, Cassidy expressed relief on the latter point — but suggested he wasn't 100 percent convinced it was true. "It would be nice to have that kind of verified," said Cassidy. "And no, it shouldn't have been done in the first place."The Republican senator addressed Trump Jr. directly as he explained his logic. "Even though in your mind it might be a gift," Cassidy said, "the appearance of it is really bad!"Other Republican lawmakers who have heaped scorn on Trump Jr. include Sen. John Curtis (R-UT), who in a video address to his constituents, said he was outraged. "It just stinks," Curtis said. "It's corruption, I don't like it.... this is a big deal."Sen. Thom Tillis (R-NC) agreed, telling Washington Sun reporter Igor Bobic he felt the gift was "beyond bad."“Don Jr. is worth somewhere between 300 million and 400 million dollars," Tillis reportedly said. "Unless he has a cash flow problem, why on earth would you accept money from a Russian oligarch who's actually gone on delegation meetings with Xi Jinping in China?”

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth helped "set the stage" for a U.S. strike that killed at least 123 children by slashing former President Joe Biden's civilian protection teams, officials said.The officials, who are involved in the Pentagon's internal investigation of the Feb. 28 strike on an elementary school in Minab, Iran, described their findings in a Bloomberg report published Friday. They said the investigation's report has been "all-but-complete for several months" but has not been released. The United States has not publicly accepted responsibility for the strike, Bloomberg reported.Two Tomahawk missiles struck the Shajarah Tayyebeh Elementary School on the first day of the U.S. attack on Iran, killing more than 150 people, including at least 123 children, according to the report.Bloomberg called it the deadliest U.S. military targeting error of the 21st century in terms of child deaths.Teachers had moved children from the playground into a prayer room for cover after the first missile hit, according to an account Bloomberg drew from rights advocates and the watchdog group Airwars. Within minutes, a second missile struck, and part of the roof collapsed, and only a few children in the prayer room survived, the account said.President Donald Trump's administration demanded an overwhelming air assault in the final days of February, and the officials said that order squeezed the time available to finalize targets.That urgency, combined with gaps in information about the site, "cuts in civilian-protection personnel" and an overreliance on artificial intelligence, "set the stage for the deadly error," they told Bloomberg.Officials involved in the probe pointed to "gaps … left after Hegseth dismantled" most of the Pentagon's civilian harm mitigation units, Bloomberg reported.Staffing across those teams fell roughly 90% to fewer than 20 people, and the team at U.S. Central Command, which carried out the strike, shrank from 10 people to one, people with direct knowledge told Bloomberg. No member of those teams reviewed the Minab site before the strike, the officials said, partly because of the staffing cuts and partly because of a decision to leave the group out of planning. Those reviews map civilians near a target and look for lower-risk ways to strike it, according to the report, though Bloomberg said it is unclear whether one would have raised questions about the school.The Biden administration had built up the civilian protection efforts after an August 2021 drone strike in Kabul, Afghanistan, killed 10 civilians when U.S. forces mistook an aid worker for a threat, the outlet reported.Hegseth announced a shift in Pentagon spending in a February 2025 video on X, saying $50 billion would be redirected toward new priorities, Agence France-Presse reported."We will move away from woke, Biden-era, non-lethal programs, and instead spend that money on President Trump's America First, peace through strength, priorities," Hegseth said.The Pentagon's civilian harm mitigation plan and its Civilian Protection Center of Excellence were tagged for elimination under that push, the national security publication War on the Rocks reported the following month. Bloomberg reported that Hegseth has described his cuts to those efforts in the same terms.In past conflicts, preparing lists of proposed targets "had taken hours for staffers to complete," according to the report.Before the Iran attack, much of that work was "condensed into several minutes" using Maven Smart System, an artificial intelligence tool made by Palantir Technologies, people involved in the review told Bloomberg.A Palantir spokesperson told Bloomberg there is no evidence the company's software was at fault in the Minab strike."America, regardless of what so-called international institutions say, is unleashing the most lethal and precise air power campaign in history," Hegseth told reporters on March 2, two days after the strike. "All on our terms with maximum authorities. No stupid rules of engagement, no nation-building quagmire, no democracy building exercise, no politically correct wars."On Thursday, United Nations investigators said there were reasonable grounds to conclude that the Minab strike and another U.S. attack that day amounted to war crimes, Bloomberg reported.The Pentagon declined to comment beyond saying the incident remains under investigation, and a senior administration official also cited the probe, according to the report."The United States does not target civilians," the official added.Rep. Thomas Massie, a Kentucky Republican, cited the Minab strike on Tuesday when he filed eight articles of impeachment against Hegseth, accusing him of "ignoring laws that minimize civilian casualties," Truthout reported."By directing the Department of Defense in a manner that foreseeably dismantled the safeguards necessary to distinguish civilian objects from military objectives, Secretary Hegseth thereby effected the murder of civilians," one article says.House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) sent members home early on Wednesday for a seven-week campaign recess before the midterm elections, CNN reported. Massie's resolution had started a clock requiring a vote within days, but the early exit pushes that vote to November.Johnson said the early exit had nothing to do with Hegseth, according to CNN."It is a publicity stunt by someone who wants attention. It will immediately be tabled of course," the speaker said, referring to a procedural vote that would set the articles aside without debate. "But we probably won't do that today, we will do it when we come back.""We should not be playing games with national security," Johnson added.

Group trapped at Hotel Bamy after US removal as rights groups sound alarm over poor conditions and violenceTwo men that the Trump administration expelled to Equatorial Guinea were bound, fitted with bags over their heads, beaten and pushed down a flight of stairs, all in plain view of other US deportees, according to witnesses and human rights lawyers.The men – one from Egypt and one from Eritrea – were then taken to a prison. About 30 detainees from the US remain trapped at a hotel in the outskirts of the coastal city of Malabo after being deported from the US. Detainees have said they believe the men were beaten for telling the press and human rights advocates about the poor conditions and violence inside the hotel, and that they are haunted by flashbacks and terrified they will be retaliated against next. Continue reading...

A chatbot's bad guess about a cargo ship nearly dragged the U.S. into a shooting war with China this spring, CNN exclusively reported on Friday.A U.S. Special Operations Command Pacific analyst asked an AI chatbot to analyze a Chinese vessel's manifest in the Middle East amid the war with Iran, four sources familiar with the episode told CNN's Katie Bo Lillis and Zachary Cohen, who added the bot "fused together open-source intelligence with secret signals intelligence in government holdings" to wrongly conclude the ship was "hauling components" for a nuclear weapons program. The analyst then used AI again to package the finding into "a standard intelligence report" that was sent up the chain of command.According to the report, "The US military swung into action with plans to intercept the vessel, according to four sources familiar with the episode. According to two of the sources, armed members of the US military were preparing to board the ship. Military planes were in the air, one of those sources and another source familiar with the incident said. It was only just before the planned operation that officials dug deeper into the report put together by a special operations command analyst and found it had been generated with the help of artificial intelligence (AI).""Entirely false," one source called it before admitting to CNN that it "almost started a war," since any U.S. assault on a Chinese ship carried the possibility of retaliation. The scare comes as the Pentagon races to embed AI into everything from targeting to logistics, following Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth's January push to "unleash experimentation" and arm three million personnel with AI tools. Critics say the technology remains dangerously unready, with a top Army cyber general recently warning AI has caused a "tenfold" spike in vulnerabilities across the Pentagon's aging networks. Insiders have described a Pentagon under Hegseth already gripped by dysfunction. Special Operations Command Pacific and the Pentagon declined to comment when pressed by CNN.

Congressional investigators are scrambling to explain how F-35 jet parts loaded with classified stealth tech vanished into Hong Kong on Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth's watch.The parts have been missing since June, Politico reported on Friday. A shipment of F-35 components headed from Australia to the U.S. for repairs was mysteriously "rerouted mid-Pacific" and turned up in Hong Kong instead, three people familiar with the matter said. It's reportedly still not clear "who has possession of it now.""The shipment included one of the jet’s canopies, which covers the cockpit and contains stealth technology that only the U.S. and its allies have access to," sources told Politico. "An adversary could study the parts and potentially reverse-engineer the prized technology if it had one of the canopies."The mess triggered closed-door briefings for congressional staff starting in June, with more expected. The Pentagon's F-35 Joint Program Office would only confirm it is "aware of a shipment issue of unserviceable F-35 Lightning II components" and said it's working "to retrieve these components, investigate the incident, and place safeguards to avoid a future occurrence."Hong Kong is a Chinese special administrative region, and Beijing has a long, documented history of hacking its way to F-35 secrets, Politico reported. J.J. Gertler, a former House Armed Services Committee staffer, told Politico's Audrey Decker and Mark Satter, "It's no secret that China has been aggressively trying to get F-35 data through electronic espionage, among other means. But even if they already had specifications or other data about the part, possessing a real one can give them even more to go on and can verify or refine whatever they already had learned."Lockheed insisted it "handles every shipment with the utmost diligence," while the State Department declined comment and China's embassy claims "ignorance." The blunder lands amid mounting turmoil inside Hegseth's Pentagon, where whistleblowers describe chaos.