The US May Have Shot Down a Small Hobby Balloon With a Sidewinder Missile

From Leverage To Liability: The Hormuz Strait Is Now Iran's Biggest Weakness Authored by Daniel Lacalle, For half a century, the Strait of Hormuz was Iran’s weapon. Today, it is its noose. The mathematics of energy have flipped, and with them the balance of coercive power in the Persian Gulf. Iran’s implicit deterrent was geographic, spanning from the tanker wars of the 1980s to the sanctions standoffs of the 2010s. Almost 20% of global seaborne oil, and a similar share of liquefied natural gas, passes through the Strait. The formula was simple:...

President Trump said on Sunday that any decision to end the war with Iran would be a “mutual” one made with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Approaching the one year anniversary of the massacre of Alawite civilians by a faction including government forces, more details are emerging about what happened to civilians, particularly women, caught up in this violence. An investigation by the BBC looked into reports of Alawite women who were abducted from the Alawite homelands in Syria’s coastal northwest […]