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Vice President JD Vance has quietly stepped into an unexpected role while President Donald Trump threatens to unleash more bombing.Vance sent a letter to Mohsen Rezaei, a hard-line power broker in Tehran, in an attempt to get peace negotiations back on track, the Wall Street Journal reported Wednesday. Rezaei leads Iran's Supreme National Security Council and has commanded the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps longer than anyone else. One person familiar with the matter told The Journal that the letter went out at Trump's direction, and Trump knows about the outreach.According to The Journal, Vance is feeling out whether the two countries share enough ground to convince Trump to hold off on a brief but punishing attack he has signaled could come within weeks.The back channel cuts against Trump's own public messaging. Last week, he insisted the administration was not in talks with Tehran. "We're not negotiating with them," Trump said, adding that "it'll happen soon." On the campaign trail in recent days, he has told audiences he expects fighting to resume and that the conflict will end on his timeline.Trump kept up the pressure Tuesday night. "They've wanted to make a deal, but they like tapping it along," he told reporters, suggesting Iran might be waiting out the election before warning "that's not gonna help them."The exchanges so far have centered on how talks might be structured rather than the terms of any deal, a source told The Journal. Rezaei himself said last week Iran would not come to the table until certain core demands were satisfied. Earlier this month, he warned Tehran could hit the United Arab Emirates along with internet cables and data centers across the region.Vance has publicly supported the war while privately voicing doubts about dragging it out, according to The Journal. He pushed for more diplomacy before Trump launched "Operation Epic Fury" in February and later served as lead negotiator, traveling abroad twice for talks. A memorandum of understanding reached in June fell apart within two weeks over disputes about reopening shipping through the Strait of Hormuz.The timing also carries political weight. Republicans are bracing for losses in next week's midterms, with voters pointing to the war and rising fuel costs as reasons for their frustration. Vance is considered the early frontrunner for the GOP's 2028 presidential nomination, The Journal noted.A Vance spokesman declined to discuss the talks, and the White House referred questions to the vice president's office. Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi wrote on social media that "Iran continues to give diplomacy a chance to succeed."

A former Defense Intelligence Agency staffer’s warning that Americans need to start preparing for a crisis has caused a stir with observers, and they can’t agree on whether to start stockpiling or roll their eyes.Farijah “Doc” St. Clair is head of technology and intelligence at the risk firm Crisis24. He wrote on X that “something is brewing” and that Americans’ “window to prepare, even with the basics, is closing.” He warned that “you will be on your own” in a national-scale crisis, urged people to prepare quietly and even “feign poverty,” and closed with: “It’s going to get rough.”Some readers took the warning seriously.“I have no idea what’s coming, if anything,” wrote novelist Danielle Langlois. “But when a former Defense Intelligence Agency employee shares advice like this (on top of the announcements I’ve seen from other nations), I take note. Go buy more food, maybe. Because this is weird.”Don Shift, a post-apocalyptic fiction author and Ventura County Sheriff’s veteran, called it “probably a very sober take on what’s really ‘up.’”Others wanted to know what, exactly, they’re supposed to be getting ready for.“What. Are. We. Preparing. For??” wrote Martin Skold, a geostrategist, policy adviser and author. “I’ll grant the premise: Having useful things on hand is useful, but anything more than that requires specifics.”“Preparing for an internet outage is not the same as preparing for a gasoline shortage is not the same as preparing for a nuclear strike is not the same as preparing for riots is not the same as preparing for a bank hack is not the same as preparing for a market crash,” Skold wrote. “I’m old enough to remember when telling people to stockpile necessities was considered pointless panicmongering.”Rebecca V., opinion editor at the publication Wrongspeak, dismissed it outright.“This is all a psyop to get people scared,” she wrote. “Power hungry elites just want more power. This is the way it’s been forever and will be until the end of time.”AI researcher David Bellamy, who works on training infrastructure for open-source AI and holds a PhD from Harvard, responded with a joke about AI-powered cyberattacks: “Yeah…so anyways, thrilled to release Claude Fable 5.5, which is a step change in cyberattack capabilities. Good luck everybody else!”St. Clair didn’t say what kind of event he believes is coming, telling readers “to not focus on the ‘what.’”

Vice President JD Vance has been pulled into a Brazilian police investigation of whether a donor network he co-founded illegally aided Sen. Flávio Bolsonaro’s losing presidential bid.Brazilian Supreme Court Justice Flávio Dino ordered the investigation Tuesday in a 38-page decision, two days after Bolsonaro lost a runoff election to President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva.The order focuses on the Rockbridge Network, a donor group Vance co-founded in 2019, The Washington Post reported. Vance spoke at the network’s donor gatherings as recently as a year ago, and his office declined to comment Tuesday.Dino’s order lists five questions for federal police, and two of them name Rockbridge directly.The order says police must examine talks between Rockbridge representatives and Brazilian businessmen Tallis Gomes and Pedro Sang. A petition filed in the case named the two men, described as allegedly tied to Rockbridge, as possible go-betweens for financial support to Bolsonaro’s campaign, Dino wrote.“[It is] necessary to verify if there was the effective furnishment of resources — including human resources — services, or other measurable economic advantages, identifying its origin, its destination and its eventual use in the campaign,” Dino added, according to the Post’s translation.Brazil law makes it a crime for a candidate to accept money or other campaign help from a foreign source, the Post reported.Dino also ordered police to determine whether those funding talks were tied to foreign interest in Brazil’s rare earths and critical minerals, according to the order.Police must find out who made any proposal, who received it and what was offered in return, Dino wrote. He added that those minerals belong to the federal government and can be mined only with its permission.Dino placed the investigation under the Supreme Court’s direct supervision because members of Congress may have taken part, the order says. Bolsonaro is a sitting senator.Bolsonaro's opponents filed complaints that reached Brazil’s courts before the Oct. 25 runoff, including Lula’s Workers’ Party, the Post reported.Renan Santos, a presidential candidate eliminated in the first round, alleged that Brazilians claiming to represent Rockbridge discussed U.S. support with Bolsonaro campaign officials, the Post reported. A person with direct knowledge told the Post that the same representatives also helped the Santos campaign.“The Brazilians made false representations about their relationship with Rockbridge and created documents representing or referencing Rockbridge without Rockbridge’s knowledge or consent,” the network said in a statement Tuesday.Still, Dino’s order directs police to identify who took part in contacts between Rockbridge representatives and Brazilian businessmen, and what those contacts were for.The order also covers paid posts by foreign accounts that promoted Bolsonaro using odds from Polymarket, a prediction market banned in Brazil, and any deliberate manipulation of algorithms by internet companies to favor or hurt candidates.Bolsonaro fled Brazil for the United States on Tuesday, the day of Dino’s ruling, in defiance of a separate Supreme Court order, three people with knowledge of the matter told the Post. A senior State Department official told the newspaper that he and his family will be issued visas to stay.Dino also sent his decision to 10 federal agencies, including Brazil’s intelligence agency and its central bank, and told the federal police director to report the new case number back to the court, according to the order.

Warnings of escalating clampdown on press freedom come after Cairo court convicts Attalah of managing an unlicensed websiteLina Attalah, a prominent Egyptian journalist and the editor-in-chief of the news outlet Mada Masr, has been released from detention by Egypt’s authorities and had her website ordered to be shut down by a court amid an intensifying crackdown on independent media in the country.Attalah was taken briefly into custody after a Cairo court convicted her of managing an unlicensed website, prompting fresh international concerns over press freedom in Egypt. Continue reading...

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's party alliance is narrowly trailing his top rival's coalition, exit polls of voters in the country's elections showed Tuesday.A poll from Israeli TV network Channel 12 projected Netanyahu's side winning 50 of the 120 seats in Israel's parliament, known as the Knesset, NBC News reported. Parties aligned with Netanyahu's rival, Gadi Eisenkot, a former head of Israel's military, would take 52. Neither side would reach the 61 seats needed to form a government.Turnout hit 74.3% by 8 p.m. local time, the highest for that hour since 1988, in Israel's first national election since Hamas' Oct. 7, 2023, attack sparked the war in Gaza.The polls closed at 10 p.m. local time, which is 4 p.m. ET.

A mystery is unfolding around a close ally of President Donald Trump who is reportedly headed to the United States after suffering a stunning election defeat in Brazil.Brazilian Sen. Flávio Bolsonaro, who unexpectedly lost the presidential election to incumbent Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, is traveling to the U.S. after failing to surrender his passports as ordered by Brazil’s Supreme Court, two sources told CNN.CNN senior White House reporter Kevin Liptak described the development as a “strange story,” noting that Bolsonaro’s whereabouts had remained “a mystery” for several days.“He has been under investigation by the Supreme Court,” Liptak reported Tuesday. “The Supreme Court had asked him to turn in his passports by yesterday, so by Monday. He didn't do that.”Bolsonaro, who denies wrongdoing, reportedly feared arrest amid an investigation into alleged corruption, money laundering and currency evasion.Liptak raised questions about whether Trump, who has suggested Brazil’s election may have been rigged, could offer his political ally protection. “The real question now is whether Bolsonaro will be seeking some kind of asylum from the Trump administration,” Liptak said, also questioning whether the White House might have helped facilitate his departure. The reporter pointed to a striking family precedent involving Bolsonaro’s father, former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, who also traveled to the United States after losing an election to Lula.“Actually, while he was in the U.S., he was a guest at various points at Mar-a-Lago,” Liptak noted Tuesday.The elder Bolsonaro later returned to Brazil, where he was sentenced to 27 years in prison.“What happens next, I think, is a little unclear,” Liptak said.

A recent “political earthquake” just shattered the hopes of those seeking to make a quiet fortune with Donald Trump’s help — and yes, they include the president’s family, political experts contend. The official ouster of Serbian President Aleksandar Vučić by a group of politicized students foretells dark times ahead for developers in Trump’s orbit, Professor Vesko Garčević, a former ambassador from Montenegro in the Balkans, told Raw Story. “An autocratic leader is toppled,” Garčević, who wrote a book called Montenegro and Serbia: A Velvet Divorce?, said. “This is a blow for people who wanted to make a profit.”Vučić, the increasingly authoritarian leader of the Serbian Progressive Party, has been fighting for control of his country since 2024, when protests erupted over the deaths of 16 people in a concrete canopy collapse at the Novi Sad railway station.The government’s violent attacks on protesters only fueled the flames of resistance from Serbians who demanded accountability and an end to political corruption. Finally, on Oct. 25, The Student List, a progressive movement of academics and public figures that led the charge, won an electoral victory that saw them claim 141 of the 250 seats in the Serbian parliament. Vučić’s Serbian Progressive Party won just 103. It remains unclear who will step forward to lead the party. Potential candidates include Ilija Srdanović, a cardiologist; Dejan Šoškić, a former central bank governor; and Radomir Saičić, a Belgrade University chemistry professor. But Garčević, now a Boston University professor of international relations, predicts a positive shift for the people of Serbia, the Balkans, and the European Union. “The political earthquake in Serbia will reshape political dynamics among Serbs across the region,” Garčević wrote in a private social media post shared with Raw Story. “It could weaken hard-core nationalists and might create space for more moderate voices and ideas to gain ground.” In conversation with Raw Story, Garčević initially contended the election results were good news “for everyone,” then adjusted his comment to make an exclusion: Jared Kushner. Without Vučić’s support, the future looks dark for the $500 million hotel Kushner hoped to build on the site of Belgrade’s historic General Staff building, Garčević argued. Recent reporting from The Guardian revealed Vučić himself — as he appeared on podcasts with Donald Trump Jr. and made offerings of suckling pig — pressured his government in February 2024 to break the law for Ivanka’s husband and strip the General Staff building of its landmark protections. Protests erupted once again when details leaked to the public, and abuse of power charges against Serbian officials involved were brought last December. Vučić denied wrongdoing and Kushner’s company announced the project would not proceed “at this time,” according to The Guardian. Garčević said Tuesday the odds are now very slim that the Student List will ever allow Kushner's time to come. “Given what got them to power, an agenda that is very tough on murky projects like that one, it would be against their own interests,” Garčević said. “It is highly unlikely the project will be continued.”But the General Staff building does not represent the Trump family's lone investment in the Balkans by a long shot, Garčević noted.Those investments include plans to pump American fuel in pipelines that once carried Russian energy, the subject of an international scandal that contributed to former Greece Ambassador Kimberly Guilfoyle — and Trump Jr.’s ex-fiancée — stepping down, as recent Wall Street Journal reporting has revealed. “Using a pretext to diversify energy supply to the region, which by itself is a good [thing], this administration promotes the interests of particular people,” Garčević said. “Those are billion-dollar projects — you can imagine how much one might profit out of it.”They also include Kushner and Ivanka Trump’s plans to build luxury developments on protected grounds in Albania, where protesters in the Flamingo Revolution are now demanding Prime Minister Edi Rama resign. Now, with Vučić’s fall, Balkan power brokers will be left wondering if selling off swaths of territory to Trumps is worth the political price, according to Walter Russell Meade, the Global View Columnist at The Wall Street Journal. “Vucic stood out in Europe for his interest in using economic incentives to build ties with the Trump inner circle,” Meade wrote. “Like [Hungary's former Prime Minister] Viktor Orbán last spring, Mr. Vucic, who conceded Sunday, learned that warm relations with Mr. Trump’s White House don’t always impress the voters at home.”Garčević told Raw Story such leaders' gambits fail for a simple reason, and noted that before the Novi Sad railway collapse riots spurred the collapse of Vučić’s government, Serbians had united in protests against lithium mining in Serbia's Jadar Valley.“For them it was their home,” Garčević said. “They didn’t want their home to get spoiled for somebody’s profit.”

A new book on Jared Kushner’s dealings with Middle Eastern leaders alleges that the United Arab Emirates paid Donald Trump’s son-in-law millions for helping oust a secretary of state the Emiratis found troublesome.The New Republic’s Edith Olmsted reported the allegation Tuesday. It comes from author Matthew Cole’s book “Princes and Thieves: Jared Kushner and Mohamed bin Zayed’s Secret Plot to Remake the Middle East,” excerpts of which have already drawn fire over claims that Kushner had access to Gulf money while serving in the White House.According to the book, the UAE paid Kushner to help push out then-Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, who, in Olmsted’s words, “had allegedly become extremely cozy with the Qataris.”Tillerson had publicly opposed the Saudi- and Emirati-led blockade of Qatar during his 2017–2018 tenure, and both Gulf nations lobbied for his removal, according to The New Republic. Trump announced his firing on Twitter in March 2018. Cole writes that Kushner had quietly pushed for Tillerson’s exit for months.“In Abu Dhabi and Riyadh, Tillerson’s removal proved once again Kushner’s influence with his father-in-law,” Cole wrote.A source familiar with the arrangement told Cole that Kushner urged Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, known as MBZ, “to speed up their agreed-upon payment,” The New Republic reported. MBZ was then Abu Dhabi’s crown prince and is now the UAE’s president. According to the book, $50 million was routed through Azerbaijan to a Cyprus bank account for Kushner a month later.The book’s financial allegations rely on unnamed sources, and Kushner’s attorney has denied that he sought or accepted money from MBZ or held a Cyprus account. Kushner has called the book’s earlier claims “completely insane, categorically false,” and his lawyers have called an excerpt “defamatory per se.”In a 2018 interview with The New Yorker, Tillerson said he knew who was leaking damaging stories about him. Sources told the magazine he meant Kushner.Cole also writes that Tillerson’s ouster caused a panic in Qatar. In late March or early April 2018, according to the book, Qatari officials quietly told Kushner they would help him secure his struggling property at 666 Fifth Avenue in Manhattan. Trump later appeared to soften his stance on Qatar, though it’s unclear what, if anything, he knew about the deal, The New Republic noted.