Mario Nawfal

🇸🇦🇾🇪 Bab el-Mandeb handles about 12% of world trade, and the Houthis are now reported to hold Mocha and the Hanish Islands on the edge of it. Mocha is a Red Sea port, the Hanish Islands sit near the choke point between Yemen and the Horn of Africa, and together they give an Iran-backed force more say over what floats north toward Suez. Saudi Arabia cannot treat this as one threat: * Close or harass the strait, and energy and container traffic pay. * Hit Aramco sites and airbases inside the kingdom, and the export machine takes damage at the source. * Answer only with jets, and you degrade capabilities without reversing who owns the shore. Airstrikes are good at making a launch site disappear, but they are bad at evicting fighters from towns, ports, and islands. That gap is the whole strategic problem. Zoom out and the stakes leave Yemen. Continued Houthi gains tighten Iran’s hand on a waterway major economies need open, so Washington and Beijing both lose if this becomes a permanent tax on shipping. The question is simple: Can Saudi Arabia live with a hostile coast on Bab el-Mandeb... or does “containment” mean losing the strait in slow motion? Source: DW News YT / Writer: Val

🚨🇺🇸 🇮🇷 America fired 70 Patriots and a dozen THAADs to stop 20 Iranian missiles over Jordan, a week's worth of interceptors in one night U.S. and regional officials tell the Journal the barrage carried warheads that split into multiple projectiles on approach, forcing three or four shots per incoming missile. Jets were still hit. By mid-July the tally was 1,700 Patriots, 200 THAADs and 150 Standard Missiles fired, against Lockheed's record output of 620 Patriots last year. Parnell calls depletion reports completely false. Cooper isn't concerned at all. Trump forwent a two-week strike campaign in July partly over this exact debate. Do the arithmetic. Seventy Patriots at $4 million and twelve THAADs at $12 million is roughly $400 million spent in one evening against missiles Iran assembles from stockpiled parts in tunnels. Iran isn't trying to kill Americans on every salvo. It is trying to empty the magazine, and Fabian Hinz says the cluster warheads are Tehran learning what works. Here is what that does to the options after November. You cannot strike Pickaxe Mountain without absorbing the reply, and each reply costs a week of air defense. Two weeks of strikes means ten salvos means months of interceptors gone, and then bases sit exposed. Trump already blinked at that math once. The next time, the choice is troops without cover or forces pulled back out of range, which is the concession Iran already wrote into the memorandum. Source: The Wall Street Journal / Writer: Daniel

🚨🇺🇸BREAKING: An NBC Los Angeles news helicopter has crashed in Chatsworth while covering a fatal bus collision, going down between two commercial buildings and catching fire LAFD got the call at 6:57 p.m. The station's live feed showed the aircraft descending before it cut out. Anchors on air said they cannot reach their colleagues. Number aboard and conditions still unknown. Writer: Daniel t.co/BD2NWSm5qm

🇾🇪🇸🇦 Houthi political figures are claiming their air defenses downed a Saudi F-15 Hazem al-Asad of the Shura Council and others are pushing it across X. No footage, no wreckage, no statement from the military spokesman. Treat it as unconfirmed until one of those appears. Sourc: @TabzLIVE on TG Writer: Daniel

🇸🇦🇾🇪 The Houthis now hold Perim Island in the middle of Bab al-Mandab, and THAT'S the gate to the Red Sea. They took Mocha, then the western coast, then the island that splits the strait. Missiles and drones have been hitting Saudi territory, and Riyadh is answering with airstrikes. This is a fight over the waterway ships have to use. More Saudi oil has already been pushed through this route after trouble around Hormuz. A Houthi grip on the coast turns that into leverage. Reports say Mohammed bin Salman asked Washington for U.S. strikes and didn’t get them, but intel and targeting help instead. Air power can hit launchers, but it does not automatically take an island back. So what can the Houthis can do from that coast, what will Saudi Arabia try next, and if that strait becomes a weapon, who eats the cost first? Writer: Val t.co/uoDG6NeESf

🇺🇸 Seven foreign nationals were just ARRESTED in Texas for illegally voting in the 2024 election, and every one of them had told the government they were a citizen in order to get a ballot The indictments came from the U.S. Attorney's office with the FBI and HSI on the case, and the defendants hail from Mexico, Nigeria, India and the Congo. Paxton : "Foreign influence has no place in American elections" For years the line was that noncitizen voting is a myth, and now there are federal indictments with names attached to them. One state went looking for this, so imagine what the other 49 would find if they did the same. Source: @KenPaxtonTX / Writer: Daniel

🇸🇦 Brent oil prices JUMPED $3 today to $108.75/barrel after Riyadh closed a major pipeline and canceled some European deliveries. Houthi drone attacks damaged the East-West pipeline, forcing Saudi Arabia to halt operations at the export hub Yanbu. The route had allowed tankers to bypass the Strait of Hormuz. Now that shortcut is closed. Source: Reuters / Writer: Marie

🇺🇸 A reporter just cuts in during the live press conference: “They found him.” That’s how a mother found out her 16-year-old son was safe. He’d been missing since Saturday. Kid has mild autism and schizophrenia. After almost 48 hours of searching, some random person recognized his photo online and brought him inside. He’s in good health. The sheriff turns around and hugs his mother on the spot. Writer: Daniyal t.co/AP4g0BBFzd

The cow had gotten a 10 on her high school physics exam. Writer: Sol t.co/3acMoTC4NM

🇺🇸🇪🇨 Drug boats need fuel, so the U.S. went after the fuel. SOUTHCOM says forces intercepted an alleged narco refueling vessel in the Eastern Pacific, linked by intelligence to Los Choneros. The crew was removed and handed toward Ecuador, then the ship was sunk. What was left: A hole in the water where their logistics used to be. Would more of this actually slow the pipeline? Writer: Val t.co/YGibueVg6S

🇺🇸 Rep. Massie moved to impeach War Sec. Hegseth over the Iran war and told no one in leadership first. He said the last time they learned he was forcing a vote on the Epstein files, they canceled two weeks of Congress. He figured a heads-up on this one would have shut the place even longer. Writer: Sol t.co/iZUKGCfVix

The internet is losing it over Selena Gomez’s face, with people debating whether the actress went too far with Botox and cosmetic procedures at such a young age. Writer: Sol t.co/wEkth8BYfD

🇱🇾 A bunch of immigrants were headed for Italy... But they didn’t make it. Video circulating now shows what looks like the Libyan Coast Guard stopping a packed boat at sea, sinking the vessel, and sending everyone back. Writer: Val t.co/6tKrEh27ev

🇺🇸🇮🇷 The smallest American nuclear bomb is 28 times bigger than the largest conventional one, and no war game that ever used one stopped there Three hundred tons of TNT. That is the lowest setting on the B61-12, the weapon some of Washington now reportedly discusses for Iran, and Steven Starr, who has briefed the UN on these questions, says the number is the danger. It is small enough to look like a bigger bomb to a field commander, and 28 times the size of the biggest conventional weapon America owns. The Cold War knew this. In every NATO war game where tactical nuclear weapons were introduced in Germany, the exchange escalated until it became a full-scale nuclear war, which is why thousands of them were pulled out of Europe in the first place. And Pickax Mountain, under a quarter mile of granite built to survive exactly this, wouldn't even fall. The only thing a strike would destroy is the taboo that has held for eighty years. @WeTheBrandon

🇺🇲🇮🇷 Tucker thinks Trump will ACCELERATE the Iran war to save face after Republicans get crushed in the midterms. “This war is going to be repudiated at the polls… It seems certain, in fact, that the Republicans will lose control of the House and likely of the Senate… He can’t run again, and he’s 80. So what is that? What does that leave him with? Well, leaves him with one set of powers: executive war powers. … Any acceleration in this war will be a disaster for us. But I’m worried that he’ll be tempted to do that.” Even if the polls turn ugly for Trump… He can always make things uglier. Writer: Marie t.co/TAfRWfr85O

🇺🇲The U.S. has SECRET SPACE WEAPONS and they’re already ORBITING EARTH! Not much more to know at this point. But have no fear of galactic aggression... Space Force has taken up arms. They’re outta this world! Writer: Marie t.co/OClvC2pkRn

🇺🇸 A man robbed someone on Spring Mountain and took off on foot... Then a drone found him. LVMPD locked onto a guy matching the suspect’s description, walked officers straight to him, and the foot chase was over fast. Hard to hide when the sky is watching. Writer: Val t.co/0LH2is7QMD

🇻🇪 One of Maduro’s longtime allies just pleaded guilty in the U.S. and agreed to pay $195 million while cooperating with investigators. Alex Saab admitted that starting in 2015, he worked with senior Venezuelan officials in a bribery and money-laundering scheme tied to CLAP, the government program meant to provide basic food to low-income Venezuelans. Prosecutors say fake companies, false invoices and fraudulent shipping records were used to skim huge sums and move money abroad, including into the U.S. And the case may get bigger. Saab has agreed to provide truthful information that could implicate other Venezuelan officials, while investigators are also looking at money tied to PDVSA oil operations. Yes, you read that right: money was skimmed from a food program in a country that was already falling apart, and now one of Maduro’s key operators is talking. Source: AP News, Infobae / Writer: Sol

🇾🇪 A cell in Houthi territory used AI to design guided weapons and got as far as test-firing a rocket Anthropic's report says the group in northern Yemen hid the purpose of the guidance systems it was building from the system helping build them, tried for a multistage ballistic missile with 1,200 miles of range and a hypersonic glide vehicle, and had already assembled an offline simulation toolkit that didn't need the AI at all. No operational weapon was fielded. The Times puts it inside a bigger picture: missile chassis now fabricated in Yemen, one-way drones built locally, components arriving by dhow and ship-to-ship transfer off Somalia in what one analyst calls a giant game of three card monte. Timothy Lenderking, the former U.S. envoy, calls them the most lethal nonstate actor in the Middle East. Here is the trap Washington is in. Bombing Iran no longer starves the Houthis, because the factory moved. The Hormuz blockade stops tankers, not the guidance fins in a fishing boat's hold. The 2025 air campaign ended because Caine saw no exit. And the one thing that ever stopped them, Saudi money in 2022, is exactly what gave them four years to become this. Riyadh will pay again, because it has nothing else. The Houthis will build again, because that's what the last truce taught them. Source: The New York Times / Writer: Daniel

🇾🇪🇮🇷 Iran's biggest win of the war came without firing a shot Bab al-Mandab carries 8.7% of global seaborne trade, a fifth of the world's cars and containers, 13% of its crude. It is 18 miles wide, and the Houthis now hold both banks and the island in the middle. A Yemeni official told the Post that Friday was the first day Iran really started winning the war. A former head of Mossad analysis says Tehran timed the whole sequence, the coast, the pipeline strike from Iraq, for the window before November 3. Trump's response was that the Houthis phoned, prefer America stay out, and are letting most ships through. The Navy has 20 ships tied to Hormuz and six borrowed from the Pacific. There is no second fleet for a second strait, and the last Houthi campaign ended in May 2025 because Caine saw no exit. Washington will accept a Houthi-managed Red Sea as long as American hulls aren't the target. So the squeeze lands on Riyadh, and the realistic next move is Saudi Arabia paying the Houthis to stop, the way it bought the 2022 truce. Iran then holds both chokepoints as leverage and can move oil prices at will. The economic siege Washington built to break Tehran now cuts the other way, and every month of blockade costs the West more than it costs Iran. Source: The Washington Post / Writer: Daniel

🇲🇹 You pray for rain... But not THIS. First downpour in months hits Malta, and one parked car gets swallowed by the exact street that turned into a river. Writer: Val t.co/JeS8hP1hn4

🇺🇲Hegseth is sticking to his plan to rid the U.S. military of FAT GENERALS and dudes with facial hair. Servicemembers attending Pete’s “State of the Force” on Sept. 30 must meet waist-to-height requirements and have “impeccable” grooming and uniform standards. This comes a year after Hegseth told top military brass there should be “no more beardos” or “fat generals.” Welcome to dress code boot camp, soldiers! Source: WSJ / Writer: Marie

🇸🇦🇾🇪 The aftermath at Saudi Aramco’s Abha plant looks brutal New footage shows the scale of the damage left behind at the facility in southwestern Saudi Arabia following reported Houthi strikes. The video offers a striking look at what was hit... and how hard. Writer: Val t.co/RkT0dKU69v

🇮🇷🇺🇸 Iran's boats are hunting American drones in the strait now, and the Houthis have turned Red Sea islands into aircraft carriers that never sail home Axios reports US forces fired on Iranian boats trying to seize a second Navy drone in the Strait of Hormuz. The first one is already in Iranian hands, and Bobby Jones, who spent 26 years in that Navy, expects it to be reverse-engineered the way Iran has done before. His larger point is about what a shallow, hot sea does to expensive machines. The Gulf makes them easy to find. Meanwhile the simple weapons keep working, a boarding party with rifles, a mine on a hull, a mobile launcher that moves before the strike package is updated. The islands the Houthis took are, in his words, permanent aircraft carriers, and the country most likely to answer is Egypt, whose canal is now worthless. Riyadh, for its part, faces a two-front trap: attack Yemen, and Iran hits the desalination plants from the other side. @WeTheBrandon

You've gotta love Grok in Teslas Writer: Ian t.co/jUDkHYfr7D

🇲🇽 Mexico City’s Metro turned into Back to the Future for a few seconds 😂 A piece of metal hit the live rail, triggering a burst of flashes and smoke that shut down service for about an hour. Writer: Sol t.co/s2YNBRav5x

Katy Perry has jokes about Ed Sheeran that are as funny as her singing on the Blue Origin. Which is to say… they’re actually pretty damn funny. Writer: Marie t.co/CHkXrSJrdA

🚨🇺🇸 The FBI arrested a Pennsylvania man with an ISIS persona hours after he bought a rifle and 190 rounds for what he called his "mission" Jonathan Hunter Kramer, 21, took an Uber to a Walmart in Gibsonia on Saturday and came out with a semiautomatic rifle, then bought a burner phone, paid cash for a hotel room, and visited a gun store. Agents moved when he returned to the room with three 30-round magazines and five boxes of ammunition. Online as "Hamza Al Rashid," he had pledged allegiance to ISIS, offered to share explosive manuals, and allegedly discussed targeting schools, nightclubs, theaters, apartment buildings and synagogues. The FBI already knew him. In 2023 he was charged as a minor in a mass-casualty plot. A tip in March flagged mysterious packages and contact with old associates. The bureau watched him for six months and caught him the day he armed up. The part that should bother everyone is the Walmart. A person charged at 18 or younger with planning a massacre walked into a big-box store three years later and legally bought a rifle, because juvenile records don't follow you to a background check. The FBI closed the gap this time by staying on him. The next one won't have a file. Source: WTAE / Writer: Daniel

🇺🇸 "This had the feel and the look of a child fight club" That's the attorney describing a Fort Worth Montessori where video allegedly shows a teacher grabbing a 4-year-old, shaking him, then dragging him toward another kid and encouraging that child to hit him. Other caregivers watched and did nothing. The state found more than a dozen deficiencies at this place. TWELVE. Before anyone thought to shut the doors. That poor boy is four years old and in therapy already. Parents drop their kids off trusting these people... this is the nightmare every one of them has! Writer: Daniel t.co/xp6X0PNUH9

🇺🇲 Weekend at Mitch’s 😅 Writer: Marie t.co/pGwxxNwpgk