Tag: perpetual war

Ireland to offer cash to encourage Ukrainians to leave – migration minister

The Irish government is aiming to terminate government-provided accommodation for Ukrainian migrants within a year, and will offer payouts to encourage repatriation, Minister of State for Migration Colm Brophy has said.

Since the escalation of the Ukraine conflict in 2022, around 125,000 Ukrainians have received temporary protection in Ireland, according to Brophy. From July 2022 to March 2026, Dublin reportedly spent more than €438 million ($516 million) to provide half of them with housing.

Dublin has also shelled out nearly €400 million in “political, humanitarian, economic and non-lethal military aid” for Kiev, while other EU members have funneled billions of euros into the conflict. Russia has warned that the EU’s support for Ukraine has only served to prolong the hostilities.

Keep reading

The Consequences of Incompetence

For nearly 40 days, Israel and the United States carried out an extensive aerial campaign against Iran designed to topple the government and suppress Iran’s ability to defend itself. This campaign failed to achieve any of its stated objectives. Instead, it devolved into a numbers game where inflated outcomes were sold to an unquestioning public by military professionals and politicians alike. The Iranian government not only withstood the efforts at decapitation-induced regime change, but actually strengthened its hold on power when the people of Iran, instead of turning on the Islamic Republic, rallied to its cause. Moreover, rather than suppressing Iran’s ability to launch ballistic missiles and drones against US military bases, critical infrastructure in the Gulf Arab States, and Israel, Iran not only sustained its ability to strike, but deployed new generations of weapons that readily defeated all missile defense systems while, using intelligence information that permitted accurate targeting, destroyed critical military infrastructure worth tens of billions of dollars.

Regional experts had long warned about the consequences of entering an existential conflict with Iran, noting that Iran would not simply allow itself to be erased as a viable nation state without ensuring that the other nations of the region were subjected to similar existential threats to their survival, and that global energy security would be disrupted in such a manner as to trigger a world economic crisis. These assessments were backed up by a belied that Iran would not only be able to shut down shipping transiting the Strait of Hormuz, but also effectively target and destroy the major energy production potential of the Gulf Arab States.

It wasn’t that the politicians and military planners in the US and Israel doubted Iran’s ability to impact global energy markets or strike targets in Israel and the Gulf region.

They knew Iran had the potential.

They just believed that they would be able to achieve regime change in Tehran in relatively short order, thereby mooting any threat Iran might pose to energy supplies and infrastructure.

They were wrong, which is why the US was looking for an offramp from the war soon after it started.

The end result was this current ceasefire, which was ostensibly entered into to buy time for US and Iranian negotiators to hammer out a lasting peace plan.

There is a fundamental problem, however.

While Iran has approached the current negotiations from a practical, reality-based posture predicated on resolving the actual major points of difference between the US and Iran, the US is being held hostage by the politicized whim of an American President who needs to shape domestic public opinion in a way which transforms the reality of a humiliating defeat into the perception of a bold victory.

Keep reading

US Launches 56th Airstrike of the Year in Somalia

US Africa Command said in a press release on Saturday that its forces launched an airstrike in Somalia on April 17, as the pace of US bombings in the country has escalated amid the very fragile ceasefire between the US and Iran.

AFRICOM said that the strike targeted the ISIS affiliate in Somalia’s northeastern Puntland region and that it was launched in a remote mountain region about 30 miles southeast of the Gulf of Aden port city of Bosaso.

AFRICOM offered no other details about the attack, as it hasn’t been sharing casualty estimates and assessments on potential civilian harm since last year. US-backed forces in Puntland also rarely share any details about the war, and only occasionally release photos that it claims show captured ISIS fighters, who are based in caves.

“The army has captured one of the ISIS terrorists, and has also recovered livestock from the militants that they had taken from the local population,” The Puntland Counterterrorism Operations said in a post on Telegram on April 12 that included a photo of an alleged ISIS member. “The army’s operations to hunt down the militants are ongoing.”

The US has also been launching airstrikes against al-Shabaab in southern Somalia, where major battles between US-backed government forces and al-Shabaab fighters have taken place in recent weeks.

While the pace of US airstrikes in Somalia slowed slightly at the height of the US-Israeli war against Iran, AFRICOM is still on track to break its annual record of bombings in the country, which President Trump set at 124 last year, breaking a previous record of 63, which he set in 2019.

The US has been involved in Somalia for decades and has been fighting al-Shabaab since the George W. Bush administration backed an Ethiopian invasion in 2006 that ousted the Islamic Courts Union, a Muslim coalition that briefly held power in Mogadishu after taking the city from CIA-backed warlords.

Al-Shabaab was the radical offshoot of the Islamic Courts Union, and its first recorded attack was a suicide bombing in 2007 that targeted Ethiopian troops occupying Mogadishu. It wasn’t until 2012 that the group pledged loyalty to al-Qaeda. The ISIS affiliate in Puntland started as an offshoot of al-Shabaab and first emerged in 2015.

Keep reading

Zionist Doxxing Campaigns Upended Their Lives. Now They’re Suing for Damages.

Areckoning could be coming for pro-Israel groups known for doxxing Palestine advocates. In March, the Chicago chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR-Chicago) filed a class-action lawsuit in Illinois state court against the organizations Canary Mission and StopAntisemitism, as well as groups and individuals identified as their funders or board members.

“This case represents addressing a broader harm caused by organized doxxing and harassment campaigns,” Laila Ali, a Chicago-based artist and activist and one of six named plaintiffs in the lawsuit, told Truthout. “I’m hoping that it’ll establish clear consequences for those who engage in those tactics.”

StopAntisemitism and Canary Mission have histories of systematically posting the personal information of individuals (known as doxxing or doxing) who engage in pro-Palestine speech, or criticize Israel’s assaults on Palestine and the United States’ involvement, on their websites and social media channels to whip up attack campaigns. Many of those targeted have been Arab, Muslim, or Palestinian young professionals who have faced backlash on university campuses or in their workplaces, as well as online harassment and threats to their personal safety.

Alongside Ali, the named plaintiffs in the new case include two physicians, an IT professional, a former University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign student organizer, and an English lecturer at Loyola University Chicago. The class includes anyone residing in Illinois who has had their personal information shared by StopAntisemitism or Canary Mission without their consent and experienced harm as a result. CAIR-Chicago Staff Attorney Noah Halpern told Truthout his organization expects the group to include about 300 people. The organization is still soliciting outreach from Illinois residents who may be part of this class.

“The goal is to have relief for everyone and do that through this vehicle of a class action,” Halpern explained to Truthout. The lawsuit seeks injunctive and declaratory relief and damages, meaning CAIR-Chicago would like to secure a judgment prohibiting the defendants from doxxing Illinois residents, requiring the defendants to remove existing content about Illinois residents from their social media channels and websites, awarding damages to compensate for harms to the plaintiffs, and assessing punitive damages.

Keep reading

IDF Confirms Viral Photo of Soldier Smashing Jesus Statue Is Real After Swift Backlash

The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) confirmed the authenticity of a viral image showing one of its soldiers smashing the face of a Jesus statue with a sledgehammer in southern Lebanon, vowing to take “appropriate measures” against the soldier and to help locals repair the damage.

The image, which first surfaced on Sunday, appeared to show the uniformed soldier striking the fallen statue’s head in what local reports say is the Maronite Christian village of Debel, near the Israeli border, where Israel is waging a campaign against Hezbollah.

It spread rapidly online and prompted backlash from Christian communities in the region as well as prominent conservatives in the U.S., while the IDF said it was investigating.

The initial image drew rebuke from prominent conservatives in media and politics, including from Alex Bruesewitz, an adviser to President Donald Trump.

Right-wing critics of the Trump administration, recently attacked by the president for speaking against his conflict with Iran, also weighed in to slam the image, including ex-Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene and commentator Candace Owens.

Keep reading

U.S., U.K. Lawmakers Finally Scrutinize China’s Use Of ‘Cultural Associations’ As Communist Fronts 

The Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) United Front Work Department has long conducted intelligence-gathering and influence operations abroad by embedding itself in seemingly benign overseas organizations. These groups often operate in plain sight — shaping public opinion, supporting pro-Beijing policies, and sometimes interfering in election processes — while enjoying the legal protections and tax benefits afforded to nonprofit organizations in open societies.

For too long, Western governments largely ignored these activities. That may finally be changing. In recent days, bipartisan lawmakers in the United States and United Kingdom have taken concrete steps to demand greater accountability from organizations suspected of advancing Beijing’s agenda.

Hometown Associations and Marxist Groups in America

On April 8, 2026, House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party Chairman John Moolenaar, R-Mich., and House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Jason Smith, R-Mo., sent a letter to Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and IRS CEO Frank Bisignano. They urged a thorough review of U.S. tax-exempt organizations linked to the CCP’s United Front that may be violating rules against political campaign intervention.

The letter builds on a February 2026 Ways and Means hearing that exposed how foreign actors exploit America’s nonprofit sector to sow division and distort political discourse. A key figure highlighted was Neville Roy Singham, an American tech entrepreneur now based in Shanghai and married to Code Pink co-founder Jodie Evans. Fox Digital investigations show Singham has funneled more than $278 million into Marxist and far-left groups in the U.S., including The People’s Forum, to incite anti-American protests and create chaos in American cities, all while promoting pro-China propaganda.

The letter also spotlights the troubling transformation of Chinese “hometown associations.” Originally created to help immigrants from the same provinces or towns adapt to life in America, many have been co-opted by the United Front. A 2025 New York Times investigation identified more than 50 such groups in New York City alone that actively promote Beijing’s agenda — meeting regularly with Chinese consular officials, fundraising for and openly endorsing pro-Beijing candidates, and even mobilizing to unseat a New York state senator who attended a banquet with Taiwan’s president.

Many of these hometown groups operate as 501(c)(3) nonprofits, which are legally barred from significant political activity. Some leaders of hometown groups have gone even further, collaborating with Beijing’s law enforcement and intelligence agencies.

In 2023, the FBI arrested two officials from the America Changle Association in New York City for allegedly operating an illegal Chinese “police station” out of their offices to harass dissidents. Separately, former New York gubernatorial aide Linda Sun was arrested and charged with acting as an unregistered foreign agent; evidence presented in her case showed close coordination with leaders of major hometown associations in New York City, including the United Chinese Associations of the Eastern United States, which declared itself a foreign agent of China.

Highlighting these examples, Moolenaar and Smith urge both U.S. Treasury and the IRS to conduct “a thorough review of how tax-exempt organizations in the United States, which are influenced by foreign adversaries like the People’s Republic of China, are violating our laws and engaging in prohibited political campaign interventions that undermine our democracy and the integrity of the tax-exempt status for other organizations that are engaging in legitimate charitable purposes.”

Keep reading

The destruction of Gaza has not ended

As the war in Iran absorbs the world’s attention, with its images of dead school girls and flattened buildings, it may be easy to overlook Gaza. It has been a full five months since a ceasefire went into effect. It did not stop the bloodshed and intense suffering: Israeli forces have killed hundreds of Palestinians since October, and the enclave remains in dire need of food and medicine. Yet Gaza has disappeared from America’s front pages as the Trump administration’s Board of Peace, mostly bereft of Palestinian leadership, attempts to steer a peace plan to its second phase.

Moving on implies that one was once preoccupied with something. It is true that people all over the world intently watched Israel’s war of annihilation unfold on their smartphone screens. They were appalled by the indiscriminate violence that killed tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians following the Hamas atrocities of Oct. 7, 2023. Campuses erupted in protest.

Their governments, however, had abandoned Gaza long before. As Israeli bombs and missiles killed and maimed Palestinians and leveled hospitals and refugee camps, Washington kept the weapons flowing to Tel Aviv while providing an Israeli veto at the U.N. Security Council. European and Arab governments protested, some more vehemently than others, but lacked either the will or the influence to stop what a growing consensus of historians, jurists, human rights groups, and international legal bodies considered genocide.

In “A Historian in Gaza,” eminent historian Jean-Pierre Filiu shows us the consequences of this international indifference, drawing on his monthlong visit to the shattered strip in early 2025. “Gazans know the world has abandoned them,” Filiu writes. “At first they believed that images of the slaughter would so horrify the international public that they would demand action to end it. The realization that this was not going to happen compounded the wounds of the injured with its own pain.”

Filiu teaches Middle East Studies at Sciences Po in Paris. Before becoming a scholar about 20 years ago, he served as a diplomat for the French government, holding several high-level positions, including postings in Tunisia, Jordan, and Syria. He has written extensively about jihadism, authoritarianism, and the centrality of Gaza to any enduring peace agreement between Israel and the Palestinians.

If the process of forgetting has already begun, Filiu’s experience, recorded in a compact 197 pages, is meant to refocus our minds on what some might prefer to erase from memory. Hospitals under siege, patients operated on without anesthetics, infants dying of hypothermia, children mutilated by bombs and missiles, women too exhausted and malnourished to breastfeed, journalists mowed down for the crime of reporting, and entire families crushed under the weight of their collapsing apartment blocks. “Nothing had prepared me for what I saw and experienced in Gaza,” Filiu writes. “Nothing at all.”

Keep reading

Russian security chief issues drone attack warning to four NATO states

Russia has the right to retaliate if Finland and the Baltic states are found to be deliberately allowing Ukrainian drones to pass through their airspace, Security Council Secretary Sergey Shoigu warned on Thursday.

“Recently, there has been an increase in Ukrainian drone strikes against Russia via Finland, Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia,” Shoigu told journalists. “As a result, civilians are suffering and significant damage is being caused to civilian infrastructure.”

Either Western air defenses are proving ineffective, or these four countries “deliberately provide their airspace, thereby becoming open accomplices in aggression against Russia,” he added. In the latter case, Moscow has the right to self-defense in response to an “armed attack” under Article 51 of the UN Charter, the security chief stressed.

In recent weeks, Kiev has intensified drone strikes on Russia in what Moscow has characterized as “terrorist attacks,” with the Russian military regularly reporting hundreds of UAVs downed in a single night.

Late last month, Kiev attacked Russia’s Baltic Sea ports of Ust-Luga and Primorsk with swarms of UAVs. The raids resulted in fires in both towns, which house extensive petrochemical infrastructure.

Keep reading

Israel’s “Black Wednesday” Massacre Leaves Lebanese Families Giving DNA to ID Loved Ones’ Remains

Jaafar Annan has been posted up on the sidewalk outside the emergency room of Rafik Hariri University Hospital, on the southern edge of Beirut, for so long that he’s become a permanent fixture.

“The hospital has become my home,” Annan said, exhausted.

Last week, an Israeli strike leveled the building where Annan’s family lived in Kayfoun, a town in the Mount Lebanon governorate, west of the Lebanese capital.

“I buried my father,” he said, “but my mother is still missing.”

Since then, his days have become a single-minded search for any sign of his mother, Fatima, who is 56. Like several others searching for missing family members, Annan gave a sample of his blood to the hospital, hoping he can get some closure with a DNA match to unidentified remains.

“I walk through hospitals in the Mount Lebanon region. I stare at injured faces. I go to the morgues. I look for a mole, a mark,” Annan said. “Then I come back here. Waiting for the sample results.”

The cold-storage units at the Hariri hospital have been fashioned into ad hoc laboratories to identify a relentless influx of dead bodies.

The unprecedented scales of DNA identification of corpses is born of a macabre need. Last week, after Iran and the U.S. agreed to a ceasefire, Israel pressed on in its Lebanese front with a ferocious blitz of airstrikes. The toll was staggering, leaving demolished buildings and infrastructure, along with the attendant skyrocketing casualties — the violence rending people into unrecognizable forms.

“The bodies arrive completely disfigured,” said Hisham Fawwaz, director of the hospitals and dispensaries department at the Lebanese Ministry of Health, which operates the hospital. “The remains are scattered and the features obliterated. We are often not dealing with whole bodies. We are dealing with human fragments that the force of the explosions has turned into medical puzzles.”

Keep reading

Trump wages war, his sons get payoff through savvy investments

The U.S. military desperately needs drone capabilities for President Donald Trump’s war in Iran, and fast. Coincidentally, his sons Eric and Donald Trump Jr., are on the case.

Indeed, the Trump brothers are pumping money into defense-tech oriented firms that have already secured Pentagon contracts, or have already put battle-tested products to market. For example, they’ve invested in Powerus, a new drone company aiming to harness its “strong relationship with Ukraine” as a means to acquire and leverage war-tried Ukrainian drone technologies in a competitive U.S. market. Having bought out several competitors, Powerus already does business with the U.S. military.

In other words, the Trump family stands to benefit financially from the war, and already are.

Eric Trump also invests in Israeli drone firm and DoD contractor Xtend, whose “low cost-per kill” attack drones have been used by the IDF in Gaza. Expanding to the U.S., the company opened an office near Tampa last summer.

Donald Trump Jr. has a $4 million stake in, and sits on the board of Unusual Machines, a drone parts startup. In December, it secured a $620 million DoD loan — the largest loan in the history of the Pentagon’s Office of Strategic Capital — to make drone parts.

And Trump Jr. is a partner at 1789, a “patriotic capitalist” venture capital firm which backs a number of defense-tech startups. The firm, which Trump Jr. joined in November 2024 — right after his father was re-elected to the presidency — has since seen explosive growth: the assets it manages jumped in value from $150 million to more than $2 billion by the end of last year.

Suggesting the firm influences U.S. policy outright, Trump Jr. explained at a Future Investment Initiative event last year that 1789 “understand[s] what the administration wants to do, because [the firm] helped craft some of the messaging.”

Conflicts of interest percolate

As William Hartung, a Quincy Institute senior research fellow, tells RS, the Trump family’s defense-tech pursuits can be linked to a larger network of technology firms and venture capitalists that has significant influence within the Trump administration.

“The emerging military tech sector has deep ties to the administration, starting with vice-president J.D. Vance’s relationship with Palantir founder Peter Thiel, who employed Vance and helped fund his Senate run,” Hartung said. “The fact that Donald Trump Jr. — not only the president’s son but a close political advisor and unofficial spokesperson — will now profit personally from the fate of specific military tech firms adds an even more profound conflict-of-interest.”

To this end, 1789’s portfolio includes a number of defense-oriented companies, such as Anduril, Hadrian, SpaceX, and Vulcan Elements, a DOD contractor that makes rare-earth magnets, which are also backed by controversial venture capitalist Peter Thiel or his VC firm Founders Fund. A Silicon Valley kingmaker and Palantir co-founder to boot, Thiel has simultaneously worked to influence U.S. politics, bankrolling Congressional campaigns while many in his orbit now occupy major positions in the Trump administration.

Notably, Trump Jr. also sits on the advisory board of controversial prediction market Polymarket — which 1789 and Thiel’s Founders Fund also back — fostering an environment where people with insider awareness regarding the outcomes of world events could theoretically profit from that knowledge.

Hartung warns such political access — and, in the case of 1789, venture capital funding — can give certain defense-tech startups an unwarranted edge.

“Venture capital allows firms to stay in the market longer before they score their first big government contract, be it with the Pentagon, an intelligence agency, or the Department of Homeland Security,” Hartung told RS. “But once these influential firms have sunk substantial funds in a startup, they may use their influence to get that firm a contract whether or not its technology is ready for prime time, just to get a return on funds invested up to a given point in time.”

“If they can recruit the president’s son to join in boosting a particular firm, whether or not its product has been proven effective, they have a whole new level of influence, which can be wielded to serve their financial interests rather than the public interest,” Hartung said.

Keep reading