The single biggest, and most historic development out of Lebanon in recent years was the Israeli assassination of longtime Hezbollah Secretary General Hassan Nasrallah on September 27, 2024, via massive bunker-busting airstrikes on his underground location in south Beirut.

Since then, Hezbollah's leadership has been greatly degraded, also given the widescale pager explosion attacks. To fill the leadership vacuum, a co-founder of Hezbollah, and its first deputy secretary-general who had long assisted Nasrallah, Naim Qassem, stepped in as new Secretary-General.

But now, Israel is once again trying to accomplish a 'decapitation strike' - reportedly having targeted Qassem in at least two recent operations thus far

The US ambassador to Israel has previously said Israel has the right to take over 'all' of the Middle East

Mike Huckabee, the US ambassador to Israel and a passionate advocate of its wars in the region, has told the people of Lebanon to be grateful for Israeli contributions to its society.

Video of Huckabee speaking at the Atlas Awards in Tel Aviv on 12 May is being shared online after it was picked up by Chris Menahan of the news site Information Liberation.

In the speech, Huckabee extolls the various purported Israeli contributions to society, including USB drives, cherry tomatoes and seedless watermelons.

"I wonder if everyone in Lebanon understands that if there were no Israel, they wouldn't have a cell phone," Huckabee said.

Tells western diplomats to flee Ukraine' capitol city

In a turn of events that stunned the commentariat, the Russian MOD has officially announced that Russia will continue striking Kiev in a new 'systematic' campaign of hitting military-industrial enterprises and 'decision-making centers'. Russia even sent advanced warning to all Western diplomatic missions and foreign citizens to evacuate Kiev, inciting frenzies of doom-making in the pro-UA crowd.

Official account:
The problem with the announcement is that most are unduly blowing it way out of proportion owing to an exaggerated FighterBomber post which said that "Kiev will be destroyed." FighterBomber was simply being figurative — he is not speaking in any official capacity. But it has lit a firestorm of responses from both sides, with pro-Russians jubilating with glee, and pro-Ukrainians condemning Russia as genocidal barbarians.

Prague's initiative to arm Kiev has fallen short of its targets and lost half of its Western backers.

Nine countries have withdrawn from a Czech initiative aimed at jointly procuring artillery ammunition for Ukraine, according to Czech President Petr Pavel. The scheme has been plagued by underinvestment since its inception.

Some 18 countries, including Canada, Denmark, Germany, and the Netherlands, signed up to partake in the initiative when it was announced by Pavel in 2024. At the time, Western manufacturers were unable to meet Kiev's appetite for ammunition, producing 1.3 million shells in a year, while Russia was able to make 4.5 million at a quarter of the cost.

"The initiative is still working, but the new difficulty is that only about nine member states are contributing financially," Pavel told the Financial Times on Tuesday. "This initiative has been delivering up to 50% of all large caliber ammunition to the Ukrainians, so in this sense it cannot be replaced easily by anything else."

Although the initiative has managed to source around four million pieces of artillery ammunition for Kiev, it has fallen dramatically short of its targets. As of February, it has raised €1.4 billion ($1.62 billion) to purchase ammo, less than a third of the €5 billion Pavel had hoped to raise, NATO officials told Reuters.

As DNI, she brought candor and integrity to intelligence - but in a White House that prizes loyalty, facts became a liability.

Once the darling of the Democratic Party, Tulsi Gabbard had a hard-earned reputation as a no-nonsense proponent of fact-based truth, which she assiduously incorporated into her eloquent defense of Constitutional due process and moral integrity when it came to the national security of the United States.

With a resume that boasts years of honorable military service, including a tour of duty in war-torn Iraq, Gabbard was a staunch advocate of looking out for the welfare of the men and women in the US military - whom she regularly referred to as her "brothers and sisters in arms." She, as much as anyone, understood the age-old mantra, "if you lie, they die" when it came to the relationship between intelligence and troops in the field. She held herself to a high standard and applied that same standard to those she worked with.

Moscow has vowed to strike military and government sites across the Ukrainian capital in retaliation for continuing "terrorist attacks"

Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov has spoken with US Secretary of State Marco Rubio, warning him that long-range strikes against Kiev are imminent, while reiterating the "recommendation" that foreigners evacuate the Ukrainian capital immediately.

Earlier in the day, the Russian Foreign Ministry announced a shift in Moscow's strategy in the Ukraine conflict, citing the recent deadly attack on a college dorm in the Russian town of Starobelsk, which killed at least 21 people, mainly teenage girls. The incident was the "last straw" for Moscow, which will now embark on a campaign of "systematic strikes" against the Ukrainian capital, targeting military-industrial facilities, command centers, and other sites dotting Kiev.

In the first days of May 2026, the Pentagon announced the withdrawal of approximately 5,000 American troops from Germany over the next six to twelve months — with explicit threats of further cuts directed at Italy and Spain.

President Donald Trump stated the reason with characteristic bluntness: these countries had failed to provide meaningful support during the joint U.S.-Israeli war against Iran.

This is not a strategic recalibration. It is a punitive act by a declining hegemon that launched a dangerous conflict, triggered a global energy shock, and is now lashing out at Europe for refusing to bleed alongside it.

The message from the White House was unmistakable: Loyalty is no longer a relationship. It is a service to be paid for on demand.

On May 19, 2026, thirty-two million dollars bought a congressional seat in Kentucky — and with it, a glimpse of what American democracy has become.
The defeat of seven-term Congressman Thomas Massie in Kentucky's Fourth District primary on May 19, 2026, marked a watershed moment in the long history of corporate and special-interest distortion of US elections. Everyone has known for a very long time that money swings elections, but it is rare to see an example so flagrant and so provocative. This particular election made a lot of Americans and international observers realize that they are witnessing the death of democracy in real time.

The Most Expensive Primary in American History

Massie's race was officially the most expensive primary in American history with over $32 million spent and it soon became clear that this was less of a reflection of local constituent will and more a masterclass in how outside capital can subvert it. Critics have pointed to a staggering donation disparity: while Massie's campaign was sustained organically by small-dollar, low-amount individual grassroots donors, i.e. real people, with real concerns, that actually live in the state and care about its future, his opponent's war chest was heavily concentrated in a handful of ultra-wealthy megadonors and aggressive outside PACs. Chief among them, the all-powerful American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). This unprecedented influx of outside cash effectively bought the airwaves, allowing centralized national interests to completely overwhelm a local primary.

All these millions, however, did more than buy ad time to promote Massie's opponent, it was also laser-focused on smearing Massie.

The "Shami neighborhood project" will ethnically cleanse the Bedouin population of Jerusalem's eastern wilderness as part of Israel's plan to take total control over the strategic "Greater Jerusalem" corridor, which would split the West Bank in two.

Salem al-Jahalin, 73, also known as Abu Nayef, circles his home in the Jabal al-Baba Bedouin community outside the town of al-Aizariya, east of Jerusalem. His eyes scan the surrounding terrain as far as he can see, bracing for any incursion by the Israeli army. This is the fourth time the military has threatened to demolish his home, delivering, once again, a notice informing him that his land had been claimed by one of the largest settlement blocs in the West Bank: "Your home is built on the lands of Ma'ale Adumim."

Abu Nayef's cup of tea goes cold before he gets a chance to sip it, his mind occupied by the uncertain fate that stalks him, as it does all the Bedouin around Jerusalem. His fingers roll a new cigarette as he tries to light it, raindrops hitting it once, the wind extinguishing it the next. Abu Nayef says:

"Every time they demolish, we rebuild. Where would we go? They want to displace us from the land, but it's impossible — we'll die before we leave."

Salem's situation is similar to that of every Palestinian Bedouin living in the Jerusalem wilderness — locally known as the badiya of Jerusalem, a vast expanse of semi-arid plains and rolling hills that Bedouin communities have called home for generations. These communities now stand as the last barrier against the E1 settlement project, a long-halted colonization plan that aims to seize a strategic tract of land at the node separating the northern West Bank from the south, and which also encompasses the area Israel calls "Greater Jerusalem."

The difference between ideology and citizens' lived experience is becoming explosive.

Every political and social order comes in two flavors: What its small elite and the minority exploiting it to the full want everyone to believe, and the reality that most of its members actually live in. The two never match, but this mismatch need not be a big problem. However, if the difference becomes too great and too obvious for too long, no order can continue unchanged.

None of the above is news. Keen observers have long understood that things get shaky when a majority loses their belief in - or at least passive acceptance of - the prevalent ideology (in the original meaning of the term, namely, as the elite's imaginative story about reality, keeping the non-elites compliant).

In such a situation, things will change, but it is hard to predict how, exactly. An acute ideology-reality mismatch can lead to rebellion and, if the latter succeeds, revolution. Yet it can also make the elites ramp up their indoctrination or become more punitive, adding more direct compulsion to keep those below in line. There is always also the option of going to war with enemies abroad - real or, much more likely, invented - to distract from disunity at home. Finally, all of the above can happen in a messy sequence, or even at the same time.

Despite differences and tensions, the West does constitute some form of political and social order. In its elites' ideology, as spread by their compliant mainstream media, it is a fairy-tale realm of political and economic freedom, combining representative democracy with free markets, the rule of law, individualism, and superior "values" to make the best of all possible worlds. In reality, obviously, it's a dark zone of capitalist oligarchy with increasingly authoritarian tendencies. Not the Hobbits' cozy Shire; rather Sauron's domain under construction.

Markets, for one thing, are not "free," but routinely and crassly gamed by insiders. Currently for instance, both the beginning of the criminal Israeli-US war against Iran and deliberately timed, repeated rumors about peace have facilitated manipulative trades worth billions of dollars.

The September 11, 2001 attacks can be considered the evil Big Bang of our current iteration of mass manipulation, authoritarian power grabs in the name of "emergency" response, permanent warfare, and lying so intense it is sometimes hard to remember there is a truth. As the rebellious US ex-MAGA conservative Tucker Carlson has just reminded us, 9/11 was also accompanied - and preceded - by trading, for which the description "highly suspicious" is an understatement.