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US soldier killed and one injured after Iranian attack in Iraq

7 days agoCenter

The US military reports another death a day after two of its soldiers were killed in Jordan.

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Mamdani’s one-word border answer said it all

Blaze Media

7 hours ago

Mamdani’s one-word border answer said it all

"Have you ever been to the U.S.-Mexico border?” “No.”One word. That may have been the most revealing moment of New York City Democratic Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s recent interview with the New York Times.Sanctuary policies are easy to defend from a podium at New York City Hall. They are much harder to defend before communities that have already paid the price.Mamdani defended his city’s sanctuary policies, which he reinforced after taking office by signing an executive order reaffirming them.The problem is not so much that Mamdani has never visited the border. It is that he seems unwilling to understand why communities that lived through the border crisis reached a very different conclusion.That lesson is visible far beyond the Rio Grande.Consider Goliad County in South Texas. The rural county has about 7,000 residents and sits roughly 160 miles from the U.S.-Mexico border.Testifying before the Senate Judiciary Committee last year, Sheriff Roy Boyd described how the crisis transformed the community he serves.Boyd’s office averaged 77 arrests a year during the five years before 2021. From 2021 through 2024, that average jumped to 413. Deputies discovered 16 cartel stash houses, and pursuits involving suspected human smugglers became routine.Residents began hearing voices and movement on remote properties after dark. Many no longer felt safe alone in their own homes.Those facts expose what Mamdani’s answer overlooks. The border crisis did not remain at the border. Cartel activity and illegal immigration reached inland communities that lacked the personnel and equipment to confront them. Former Border Patrol agent and Texas Public Policy Foundation senior fellow Ammon Blair calls cartels “hybrid threats.”As Blair puts it, “Cartels don’t just smuggle. They destabilize.” Boyd has described them as “contractors and subcontractors” in a network moving migrants and drugs from the border into Texas’ largest cities.That reality changed Texas’ response. In 2021, as illegal crossings surged under President Joe Biden, Goliad became one of the first inland counties to declare a local disaster. Boyd suggested giving local law-enforcement agencies flexible grants for overtime, new officers, patrol vehicles, and other equipment.Those grants became part of Operation Lone Star.According to Texas Republican Gov. Greg Abbott’s office, Operation Lone Star has produced more than 535,700 apprehensions and referrals, 57,400 criminal arrests, and 47,500 felony charges. Texas law enforcement has also intercepted more than 779 million lethal doses of fentanyl.RELATED: The revolution will not be televised — it will be livestreamed in 4K Andrew Lichtenstein/Corbis/Getty ImagesBoyd later launched the Operation Lone Star Task Force, which allows local agencies to share deputies, intelligence, and resources across jurisdictional lines while targeting human smuggling, cartel activity, and organized crime.New York has felt the downstream effects too. Former Mayor Eric Adams warned that the migrant crisis would “destroy New York City.” Mamdani nevertheless continues to defend sanctuary policies that impede cooperation with federal immigration authorities.Goliad’s experience carries a national lesson. Criminal organizations do not recognize state boundaries. The same networks that move people across the border traffic drugs, weapons, and money into communities nationwide. They exploit ports of entry, the northern border, and weaknesses far from either frontier.The farther those networks spread, the more Americans discover that border security is not someone else’s problem.Mamdani may be proud of New York City’s sanctuary stance.His one-word answer showed more than where he has never been. It revealed what he refuses to see.Sanctuary policies are easy to defend from a podium at city hall. They are much harder to defend before communities that have already paid the price.

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12-year-old killed, two men wounded in NYC shooting

New York Post

8 hours ago

12-year-old killed, two men wounded in NYC shooting

Three people were shot-- including a 12-year-old boy who died -- when bullets flew in the Bronx Saturday, cops said.

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Terrorist Attack at Berlin Gay Pride Event

The Last Refuge

10 hours ago

Terrorist Attack at Berlin Gay Pride Event

A white van drove into a crowd of the alphabet supporters at the big gay pride event in Berlin, Germany. At least one person is killed with many more reported as injured. Police are looking for the suspect who drove away. Berlin AP — A van slammed into people gathered for Berlin’s famed LGBTQ+ event […] The post Terrorist Attack at Berlin Gay Pride Event appeared first on The Last Refuge.

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Onlookers rejoice as federal court slaps down Trump’s attack on mail-in ballots

Raw Story

10 hours ago

Onlookers rejoice as federal court slaps down Trump’s attack on mail-in ballots

A federal court dealt a major blow to President Donald Trump’s efforts to limit the use of mail-in ballots for the upcoming midterm elections, sparking a chorus of celebration among Trump administration critics.On Saturday, The U.S. First Circuit Court of Appeals rejected the Trump administration’s attempt to block a lower court order that prohibited the U.S. Postal Service (USPS) from carrying out the president’s executive order on mail-in ballots. Signed in March, Trump’s executive order would require states to send the federal government a list of all its voters it plans on sending absentee ballots. The USPS could then refuse to deliver mail-in ballots to any voters not on the list, essentially forcing states to fork over private and detailed voter information to the executive branch.With Trump’s efforts to restrict mail-in ballots hitting another hurdle on Saturday, a number of onlookers celebrated, including Kristen McKnight, an advocate for survivors of abuse and a retired clinical psychologist.“Good news,” McKnight wrote Saturday in a social media post on X.Craig Goedecke, an amateur weather observer and retired photojournalist, not only celebrated the federal court’s decision Saturday, but argued that the ruling boded poorly for Trump’s other top priority, the SAVE Act, his controversial voter ID bill.“Back the F off from our mail ballots. Your SAVE Act crap is over. The First [Circuit] Court denied your request to allow the USPS to move forward,” Goedecke wrote Saturday in a social media post on X.“It’s illegal. Our election. Our votes. Our mail-in ballots. Not yours. You are not rigging our election… and the Senate is not passing it.”Good news.👇 https://t.co/zRdfxQkw8I— Kristen McKnight (@kristenmcknight) July 25, 2026

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Pentagon ignores widow after dropping husband’s name from soldier casualty list

Alternet.org

11 hours ago

Pentagon ignores widow after dropping husband’s name from soldier casualty list

A bereaved new widow could not gather the will to respond to news that the Pentagon had still not replaced the names of her husband and three other soldiers to the public casualty count of soldiers killed during President Donald Trump’s Iran war last weekend.The Pentagon’s official online list of service member casualties did not include the four soldiers despite the fact that their names were included in a Pentagon press release on the formal transfer of their remains back to the United States on Wednesday. CNN anchor Erin Burnett reported on Friday that a day after the Pentagon suddenly changed its casualty count in the Iraq war, the websites that tracks war casualties still had the wrong number posted with just 14 fatalities listed, despite 18 service members being killed in the Iraq war since Operation Epic. Fury began.Jamiah Gonzalez-Swinton, wife of Sgt. Michael Swinton, could barely offer reactions to the news, however, on CNN’s “Erin Burnett Out Front.”“Now, the Pentagon does say it's a glitch,” Burnett told Swinton. “Has anyone spoken to you about this or told you anything about it?”After a long pause while gathering her nerve, Swinton replied: Um, nobody. Nobody has reached out yet.”“Um. Wow. Um. I kind of don't have words for that,” Swinton added after another visible effort.Earlier in the interview, before collapsing into emotion, Swinton described Sgt. Michael Swinton as “a big mush ball” for his new daughter. “It was beautiful to see their bond. Their bond was so strong,” she said, adding that her last video with her husband was three days before his death, but that the conference “felt different.”“He just sounded different,” she told Burnett. “Like, I don't want to say he sounded scared, but the way he spoke, he, you know, he said that he loved me. He wanted to talk to our daughter, and he was asking me if I was okay. And the conversation didn't even last a minute. And I just I was like, man, even the time of day that he called was really early in the morning for him. And it wasn't like him to call at that time. So, it just, the whole thing just felt off.”“I know that you said in those final days he sounded exhausted. Do you think that that he knew that things really had just become so much more dangerous in these past days,” Burnett pressed.“Um, I didn't share this yet, but he had sent me a message and he said, ‘you know, if I die, just make sure that my kids know that I love them.’ And that was maybe a month before this happened. So, I think we all knew that things were getting pretty serious. I just didn't think this would be the outcome. I don't think any of us did,” Swinton said.Trump, who unilaterally started the war with Iran, has himself ducked the draft and military combat during the Vietnam War through numerous educational and then medical deferments. After graduation in 1968, he avoided military service with a 1-Y medical deferment, which he said was due to a problem with his foot, earning him the name “Captain Bone Spurs” among critics. - YouTube youtu.be

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Mother Jones

15 hours ago

How Fossil Fuel Companies Made Us Believe Gas Was Clean

About half of Americans think natural gas—a methane-based, planet-warming fuel—is a “clean” energy source, according to a recent poll. And a long-running fossil fuel industry marketing campaign might be to blame. The “clean natural gas” label is a myth. Methane, the primary component of natural gas fuel, is a far more potent greenhouse gas than […]

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Trump hits Gavin Newsom, Kamala Harris with brutal one-two punch at White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner

New York Post

15 hours ago

Trump hits Gavin Newsom, Kamala Harris with brutal one-two punch at White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner

"If Kamala is smarter than someone, you don't want that person to be President of the United States of America."

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Experts dump cold water on 'massive' Trump attack rumors

Alternet.org

15 hours ago

Experts dump cold water on 'massive' Trump attack rumors

Amid swirling rumors that President Donald Trump and his administration are plotting a "massive" renewed military assault on Iran, experts who spoke with The Hill dumped cold water on the idea, warning that such a thing likely would not be enough to subdue Iran.In a report published Saturday morning, The Hill cited conversations with various foreign affairs and defense experts who warned about the efficacy of "an intensified air strike campaign" against Iran, even one that might, as Trump has threatened repeatedly, target "bridges, water facilities and electricity plants." They warned that even this sort of plan would not be enough to extract major concessions from Iran in the ongoing peace talks.“I don’t think it will change Iran’s calculation in any way, because from Iran’s perspective, this is when they said it publicly, that this is a war of survival for them. So bombing from the air is not going to change Iran’s calculation, even if the U.S. intensifies it,” Sina Azodi, director of the Middle East Studies Program at George Washington University, told the outlet. “The only thing that will happen is that, first of all, the entire region is going to suffer more. The Iranians have made it very clear. I think it destroys any chance of diplomacy.” He added: "You can’t just do a ceasefire. You need a comprehensive agreement that it’s language is no longer open to interpretation. And quite frankly, U.S. has to, when it makes a commitment, it needs to abide by it."Another source, described as an anonymous "former senior U.S. defense official, told The Hill that airstrikes are unlikely to yield any meaningful progress, and argued that it would be impossible "without collectively enforcing the naval blockade, securing to some degree the traffic going through the Strait of Hormuz and absorbing some of the international economic cost as a long-term strategy.""But you’re not going to bomb yourself into a ceasefire," they said. "I think you’ve got to be able to put the economic instrument of power just as make it just as significant as what you’re doing [militarily]."Michael “Mick” Mulroy, a former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for the Middle East, also cast doubt on the efficacy of heavy airstrikes, but also noted that the options left to the U.S. at this point "aren’t good.""If we allow them to sell their oil, if we unfreeze assets, they’re going to use it to rebuild those capacities potentially faster than we really rebuild the precision munitions and interceptors that we use during a conflict, and we have to get into a new nuclear agreement," Mulroy explained. "If we don’t, then this, at least from the nuclear side, would be a perpetual conflict, because the other way of preventing them from ever getting a nuclear weapon is to periodically target the facilities that are making the potential nuclear weapon. So the options are not good.”

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US soldier killed and one injured after Iranian attack in Iraq

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US soldier killed and one injured after Iranian attack in Iraq

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