Top World News

Sep 15, 2026 - World

The Pentagon's Inspector General said Operation Epic Fury has resulted in "strategic inventory shortfalls" and industrial base bottlenecks for munitions resupply.

Sep 15, 2026 - World

A lightning offensive by Iranian-backed Houthi militants along Yemen's Red Sea coast has handed Tehran fresh leverage in its economic standoff with Washington, giving Iran the ability to threaten a chokepoint even busier than the Strait of Hormuz.The Houthis swept through the towns of Mokha and Dhabab last week and seized the island of Perim, cementing control over the Bab al-Mandab Strait at the mouth of the Red Sea, known as the "Gate of Tears," and notching a stunning strategic victory, experts told the Washington Post."This is a major, almost unprecedented, strategic achievement for Iran and the Houthis," said Dennis Citrinowicz, an Iran expert at the Institute for National Security Studies in Tel Aviv and a former Israeli military intelligence analyst. "At precisely the moment when Tehran is trying to drive up the economic cost of its confrontation with the United States, the Houthi advance gives Iran enormous additional leverage."About 8.7 percent of global seaborne trade passes through the strait, according to U.N. figures, including 20 percent of container and car shipments and 15 percent of oil products. With Iran-aligned forces now near both Hormuz and Bab al-Mandab, Tehran could squeeze Washington on multiple fronts.The timing is damaging for President Donald Trump, who faces political pressure from an unpopular war with Iran and rising energy prices two months before the Nov. 3 midterms.Trump has acknowledged he does not expect to end the conflict or lower gas prices before Election Day. Oil has jumped above $100 a barrel, its highest level since May."Friday was the first day that Iran really started winning the war," one Yemeni official aligned with the Saudi-backed government told the Post, speaking anonymously.Trump struck a softer tone Saturday, telling reporters "the Houthis called us" and claiming they "don't want to fight with us," adding that "they are letting most ships go through."Yet the advance came alongside a drone strike, likely by Iran-backed Iraqi militias, on a Saudi pipeline moving 7 million barrels of oil daily toward the Red Sea — a pattern analysts see as coordination between Tehran and its proxies.Sima Shine, a former head of analysis at Mossad, said Iran is exploiting the pre-election window to drive up prices and pressure Trump on multiple fronts. Bahrain-based commentator Abdullah al-Junaid said a renewed U.S. campaign is unlikely given how thin American naval assets are.Citrinowicz said Iran is now close to choking off nearly all of Saudi Arabia's export routes. "What makes this particularly serious is that there is no obvious solution on the horizon, military or economic," he said.

Sep 15, 2026 - World

More than 130 sign letter to PM saying international law requires further measures to stop illegal settlementsMore than 130 legal experts, including 18 king’s counsel (KCs), have written to Andy Burnham saying that sanctions on Israeli settlements “fall far short” of Britain’s obligations under the international court of justice’s (ICJ’s) finding that the occupation is unlawful.The foreign secretary, Ed Miliband, last week announced an import ban on goods from illegal Israeli settlements in Palestine and other measures. Signatories to the letter to the prime minister, including the leading lawyers Michael Mansfield KC and Imran Khan KC, and the former lord justice of appeal Alan Moses, say it is not enough. Continue reading...

Sep 15, 2026 - World

Days after the State Department designated an Italian tech group as a terrorist entity, thousands of antifascist sites on its web hosting service wound up on a searchable online research tool described as an “anonymous blog network that quietly powers antifa.”Jennica Pounds, a Pentagon special government employee better known as Data Republican and the creator of the search tool, described the antifascist sites that she purported to expose as “a whole elaborate doxxing scheme that’s set to ruin people’s lives.”Unveiling the search tool last month, Pounds boasted: “DataRepublican.com strikes again.” Pounds wrote on X that “the militant far-left has spent years hiding in plain sight on Noblogs.org,” the web hosting platform of Autistici/Inventati, which was sanctioned by the State Department. “So on my own time, for free, I scraped the whole thing,” she said. “Because I kick commie *** and need no government funding or sanction for it.” But several of the sites and their associated social media accounts targeted by Pounds had unmasked violent extremists — long before the U.S. government targeted the same people for crimes ranging from doxxing and soliciting the murder of federal officials to plotting to attack the power grid and a foiled bank robbery.One of the violent extremists outed by the antifascist accounts, Terrorgram Collective co-leader Dallas Humber, is now serving a 30-year prison sentence after pleading guilty to conspiracy to provide material support for terrorists, among other crimes. Following Humber’s arrest, the State Department under former President Joe Biden named Terrorgram as a specially designated global terrorist entity. Ironically, it’s the same designation that Autistici/Inventati has now received from the Trump State Department.“I have no objection to people who accurately report on violent extremists,” Pounds told Raw Story. She added that otherwise she would be a hypocrite to call Andy Ngo, a conservative writer who focuses on “antifa” and the far left, “a good friend.”Pounds said she archived and indexed more than 40,000 NoBlogs articles and found 1,717 “quotes” with personally identifiable information, including names and addresses of parents and children of the individuals targeted in the doxxes. In one example, she said a minor child’s name, date of birth and home address were published. In total, Pounds said she redacted 1,487 names, 483 street addresses, 327 workplaces, 151 phone numbers and 37 license plates from the website contents she included in her searchable tool.Raw Story could not independently verify the numbers Pounds cited.Past reporting by Raw Story has drawn upon information uncovered by two of the antifascist sites targeted by Pounds’ online search tool: Arelephanteau and Appalachia Research Club.“You’re literally putting people’s lives at risk, because you disagree with them,” a co-host of the Patriot Source Network podcast said on a recent episode, in which Pounds appeared as a guest to provide a tutorial during the rollout of her search tool. The co-host, who goes by the handle PatriotDadEV, continued: “Because ultimately, what happens is it’s not just the people doing the doxxing on these criminal syndicate websites; then you have a bunch of crazy lunatics who are also on these sites that then take action on that…. This is literally an organized hit list, is what they’ve built.”Perusing Asheville Anti Racism, one of the sites that Pound scraped and then plugged into her database while applying the “doxxing” label, another co-host known as Nom De Plume expressed astonishment at the plethora of information on a member of Goyim Defense League, a group the Anti-Defamation League has described as engaging “in antisemitic stunts and schemes to troll and harass Jewish communities and individuals.” Nom De Plume noted that the antifascist dossier on the GDL member included their PO box, personal email, vehicle make and model, license plate number and aliases.“I mean, this is crazy,” he said.Over the years, Goyim Defense League members have been hit with littering charges for distributing propaganda, and in 2025 one member was convicted of threatening to kill the top prosecutor in Nashville, Tennessee, based on screengrabs published by a contributor to GDL Exposed, another antifascist website flagged by Pounds.The charging document against GDL member David Bloyed included two screengrabs from his Telegram account, with one post showing him warning that District Attorney Glenn Funk would be “getting the rope,” while another depicted an individual hanging from a gallows with the notation, “The ‘Rope list’ grew by a few more Nashville jews today.”The screengrabs incorporated in Bloyed’s charging document were taken from a thread posted by an X user with the screenname “Trash.City” who is identified as a contributor to the GDL Exposed site.Stephen Rowlett, a detective assigned to the Metropolitan Nashville Police Department’s Counter-Terrorism Section, testified during Bloyed’s May 2025 trial that when he saw Bloyed’s screengrabs, he viewed them as a threat to lynch the district attorney, according to a transcript reviewed by Raw Story. Rowlett testified that he didn’t know who Bloyed was until he “had seen all of these posts being put” on the Trash.City X account.Bloyed was found guilty and is currently serving a three-year prison sentence.“The goal of GDL Exposed is to push back against the neo-Nazi organization Goyim Defense League by unmasking their activists who travel around the country harassing people,” a representative of the site told Raw Story. “The GDL is led by Jon Minadeo, whose primary source of income is video chatting with children and rebroadcasting those recordings to thousands of angry neo-Nazis, without the knowledge or consent of the children or their parents.“These videos have included support for mass shooters such as the Antioch High School shooter in Nashville, who was found to have shared a GDL flyer. Data Republican is right. We do hope to ruin these people’s lives. They are predators who would kill every non-white and Jewish person on earth if they could.”The unmasking of one of the most significant figures in the neo-Nazi accelerationist movement in the past five years was a collaborative effort by four anonymous antifascist research accounts, according to a report on Dallas Humber by HuffPost published in March 2023. Two of the accounts, SoCal Research Club and Fash Free NW, are targeted in Pounds’ NoBlogs search tool. A separate article about Humber that was published by the outlet Left Coast Right Watch a day earlier lists SoCal Research Club as a co-author.The article co-authored by SoCal Research Club describes Humber as being “deeply involved with the online network of violent, militant bigots known as Terrorgram.” The article goes on to note that following a 2023 mass shooting that took the lives of two people at a LGBTQ+ bar in Slovakia, Humber exploited the murder spree for propaganda purposes by recording an audiobook of the killer’s manifesto.Eighteen months later, the government unveiled an indictment against Humber and co-defendant Matthew Robert Allison by charging them with a slew of felonies, including solicitation of hate crimes, solicitation of the murder of federal officials, doxing of federal officials, interstate threatening communications, distribution of information relating to explosives and conspiracy to provide material support to terrorists, while identifying her as a leader of a transnational terrorist group.“I am left with the troubling knowledge that me and my family were unprotected and completely exposed while there was literally a target with my name on it circulating among white supremacist groups on the internet,” a former U.S. attorney who is a Black woman told the court during Humber’s sentencing in December 2025, describing a kill list distributed by Terrorgram. “Thank God my family and I were not hurt or killed during this time. This knowledge has turned to near constant fear and anxiety.”Before Humber received her sentence of 30 years in prison, federal prosecutor Christopher Perras told the court: “She was responsible for inciting a mass shooting in Bratislava, Slovakia at an LGBT bar, a mass stabbing outside a mosque in Turkey, and a school shooting in Aracruz, Brazil that left teachers and children dead. Because of this defendant, innocent men, women, and children around the world are dead.”The first site listed on the dashboard for Pounds’ NoBlogs search tool is CV Antifa. In November 2022, the site identified two men, Michael Brown Jr. and Luke Kenna, while linking them to a Telegram channel called Aryan Compartmented Elements that posted photos of a technical institute and community college in Pennsylvania as seen through gunsights. The antifascist site assessed: “It seems clear that they intend to commit acts of mass violence.”The following month, Brown and Kenna were charged by the FBI with conspiracy to commit bank robbery. Both men, described by the government as having “a professed allegiance to white supremacist and Nazi ideologies,” ultimately pleaded guilty and received sentences of 37 and 41 years in prison, respectively.Following Brown and Kenna’s arrests, a bulletin by the South Dakota Office of Homeland Security Fusion Center flagged a Telegram post demanding the release of the two men, while warning that “failure to do so will result in more attacks on infrastructure.” The charges against the two men came less than two weeks after an attack on two electrical substations in North Carolina that left much of Moore County in darkness for four days.In January 2024, the anonymous researchers published an article on SoCal Research Club’s NoBlogs site that identified a “3-D printing gunsmith” named Skyler Philippi as one of the men who had posted the demand for Brown and Kenna’s release. The other was Brian Tierney, who had been charged with conspiracy to commit bank robbery alongside Brown and Kenna at the time the article was published.The article, which also credits Fash Free NW, along with two outfits that are not included in Pounds’ online research tool, cites Telegram posts by Philippi bragging that he left 80 pounds of the explosive Tannerite in the walls of a house in New Hampshire “as a last resort option in case of capture or kill.” The article warned that Philippi and Tierney “genuinely appear to be nihilistic, full-fledged believers in the need for accelerationist tactics to bring about societal collapse.”Ten months after Philippi was unmasked by antifascist researchers, law enforcement arrested him as he was preparing to attach explosives to a drone and fly it into an electrical substation outside of Nashville.Philippi ultimately pleaded guilty to attempting to use a weapon of mass destruction and attempting to destroy an energy facility. He is currently awaiting sentencing.“Your three examples establish that NoBlogs doxxed some people who later committed serious crimes,” Pounds told Raw Story. “In my opinion, these three examples do not justify the existence of a full-blown doxxing global platform publishing the names and addresses and employers of thousands of people, many of them innocent.”Pounds recently wrote on X recently that she “went out of my way to redact personally identifying information “in far-left doxxing of Patriot Front,” a white nationalist group. Patriot Front members were sued for defacing a mural of the Black tennis player Arthur Ashe, based on information uncovered by an antifascist infiltrator. The FBI declined to comment in response to a query from Raw Story about whether federal investigators relied on any of the information published by antifascist researchers to build cases against Humber, Brown, Kenna and Philippi. But a statement of facts by an FBI task force officer with a background in counterterrorism investigations cites research by Atlanta Antifascists to support charges against a Jan. 6 defendant. The group’s site was hosted by NoBlogs, but is not included in Pounds’ online search tool.With Autistici/Inventati shutting down in response to the State Department sanctions, the antifascist sites in the U.S. and elsewhere will need to find new hosting services, but those that spoke to Raw Story indicated they have no intention of quitting. In the meantime, volunteers are uploading the contents of some 60 antifascist sites to the Internet Archive.“My goals are to make people aware of white supremacists, fascists and bigots who mean them harm, and to disrupt organized fascism and white supremacy,” “Arel,” the owner of the North Carolina-based Arelephanteau site, told Raw Story. “It sucks that those goals are not aligned with whatever this person [Pounds] thinks our world should look like. I am choosing to hope that they have not actually immersed themselves in the worldview of the people they are trying to protect. Antifascism is creative, resilient, and community-oriented, so while this repression tactic is annoying and politically dark, it isn’t insurmountable.”In her post announcing the NoBlogs search tool, Pounds hinted that there may be a grander design to her project than publicly embarrassing antifascist researchers.“In the course of building this website, a number of antifascists were identified,” she wrote. “I disclosed them — but not on the website. Directly to the USA government.”

Sep 15, 2026 - World

A cycle of frescoes by Italian 14th-century master Giotto, depicting key moments in the life of St. Francis of Assisi, has been unveiled after a four-year restoration.