Hundreds have been killed as the city is battered by wave after wave of attack, according to RT's bureau chief Hami Hamedi

The city of Tehran has been subjected to heavy aerial bombardment by US and Israeli forces, with the strikes targeting multiple government and public sites across the Iranian capital, according to RT's Tehran bureau chief, Hami Hamedi.

Hamedi visited a police headquarters on a busy route running through the heart of the city that was bombed on Tuesday. The death toll from the attack remains unclear.

Footage from the scene shows the police station heavily damaged, with its upper floors caved in. Rescuers are still digging through the rubble at the site, with heavy machinery deployed to aid them.

Ofer Cassif tells RT the war is driven by personal and political agendas, not real threats.

As Israel and the United States press ahead with their sweeping military campaign against Iran, political consensus in Jerusalem appears nearly absolute.

In Israel, the war has drawn support across much of the political spectrum. Opposition leader Yair Lapid, long a fierce critic of Netanyahu, has embarked on a series of international interviews defending the campaign. Former Prime Minister Naftali Bennett, another political rival, described the offensive as an effort to weaken "the machinery of oppression" in Iran so that its people might later decide their own future.

But inside the 120-seat Knesset, one lawmaker is challenging the official narrative, arguing the war is driven less by security than by political calculation.

Ofer Cassif, the only Jewish member of the predominantly Arab Hadash party, has emerged as one of the very few lawmakers openly opposing the war. In an interview with RT, he offered a sharply critical assessment of its motives, timing and likely trajectory.

Four years on, the Special Military Operation (SMO) reads like Russia, slowly but surely, fulfilling its objectives. The key question remains: when and under what terms Russia will end the SMO.

It may not be in 2026. Especially because irrationality permeates the Euro-elites of the disjointed, collective West. They are adamant to extract some sort of "victory" out of the jaws of humiliating strategic defeat.

Cue to the Petit Roi in Paris and his faceless British sidekick in London aiming to patch up a few nuclear warheads to hand over to Kiev, then to be unleashed by British missiles against targets inside the Russian Federation.

That's the result of an SVR (Russian Foreign Intel) investigation.

Dimitri Medvedev, the number two of the Russian government, in trademark unplugged mode, noted:

"This "is not about the destruction of the NPT and other things in international law. This is a direct transfer of nuclear weapons to a warring country.

"Russia will have to use any, including non-strategic nuclear weapons, against targets in Ukraine that pose a threat to our country. And if necessary, against the supplier countries that become accomplices in a nuclear conflict with Russia."

These lines should be read with bated breath, in all seriousness. Were that to ever happen, then that's a clear path towards WWIII.

The continued fallout from the Epstein Files cover-up has apparently done little to imbue Congress with any sense of shame. The legislative branch continued to show how the upper echelon of the U.S. government is more concerned with protecting sexual predators than providing Americans with a modicum of transparency after the House of Representatives voted to block a resolution that would have forced the release of sexual harassment claims made against lawmakers dating back decades. The resolution brought to a vote by Republican South Carolina Representative Nancy Mace called for the public disclosure of all reports on file with the House Ethics Committee on investigations into members of Congress over allegations of sexual harassment or improper sexual relationships with staff members. The House cunningly maneuvered around advancing the resolution, choosing instead to take the Machiavellian tactic of passing a motion to refer it to the House Ethics Committee in an emphatic 357-65 vote.

LNG shipping rates have gone from $40,000 to $300,000 per day — a 650% vertical climb in less than a week — and the men who ordered the strikes that caused this are still strutting around the Oval Office talking about "strength." That is not strength. That is the economics of catastrophe unfolding in real time, and it will reach every kitchen table from Tokyo to Turin before anyone in the beltway finishes reading the intelligence brief they probably won't bother to read anyway.

The Strait of Hormuz — through which roughly 20 million barrels of oil per day transit, representing north of 20% of global seaborne oil trade — has effectively ceased to function as a commercial corridor, and what's doing the closing is less about Iranian missiles, and more the insurance market, the invisible hand of capital that everyone in Washington claims to worship suddenly delivering its honest verdict on Operation Epstein Epic Fury. Major commercial operators, oil companies and insurers have effectively withdrawn from the corridor, creating a de facto closure comparable in character to the Red Sea disruption — but with far larger volumes at stake. The market has spoken. The war lobby apparently has not listened.

Qatar declared force majeure on gas exports, and sources say it may take at least a month to return to normal production volumes — meaning global gas markets will experience shortages for weeks even in the unlikely scenario the conflict ends today. Read that sentence again slowly. Even if it stopped right now. Even if every bomb stopped falling this afternoon and every missile went cold, the damage is already baked in, the supply chain already severed, the cryogenic infrastructure already in shutdown sequence — because the cryogenic nature of LNG requires specialised storage maintaining temperatures of approximately -160°C, making it impossible to simply store excess production in temporary facilities, and once disruptions occur, restarting operations requires weeks of careful, sequential rehabilitation to avoid thermal shock to the entire system.

Qatar supplies 20 percent of the world's LNG — and if that's off the table, countries must scramble for what remains. Japan scrambles. South Korea scrambles. Taiwan scrambles. India, which sources nearly half of its LNG intake from Qatari supply under long-term contracts , scrambles. These are not abstract geopolitical actors — these are the factories that make your semiconductors, the power grids that keep hospitals running, the fertiliser supply chains that feed a billion people, and every one of them is now competing in a spot market that has been stripped of a fifth of its supply overnight. This is what cascading systemic failure looks like before it hits the news cycle.

The embers of resistance - in Gaza, Iraq, Lebanon, Syria, Yemen - have not been snuffed out. With the attack on Iran, they are being fanned into a fire.
It is near impossible to make sense - at least from the justifications on offer - of what US President Donald Trump really hopes to achieve with his and Israel's blatantly illegal war of aggression on Iran.

Is it to destroy an Iranian nuclear weapons programme for which there has never been any tangible evidence, and which Trump claimed just a few months ago to have "completely and totally obliterated" in an earlier lawbreaking attack?

Or is it intended to force Tehran back to negotiations on its nuclear energy enrichment programme that were brought prematurely to an end when the US launched its unprovoked attack - talks, we should note, that were made necessary because in 2018, during his first term, Trump tore up the original deal with Iran?

Or is the war supposed to browbeat Iran into greater flexibility, even though Trump blew up the talks at the very moment Oman, the chief mediator, insisted that Tehran had capitulated on almost every one of Washington's onerous demands and that a deal was "within our reach"?

Or are the air strikes designed to "liberate" Iranians, even though the early victims included at least 165 civilians in a girls' school, most of them children aged between 7 and 12?

Or is the aim to pressure Iran to give up its ballistic missiles - the only deterrence it has against attack, and which would leave it utterly defenceless against US and Israeli malevolent designs?

Or did Washington believe Tehran was about to strike first, even though Pentagon officials have confided to congressional staff that there was zero intelligence an attack was about to happen?

Or is the goal to decapitate the Iranian regime, as the strikes have already achieved with the assassination of Iran's supreme leader, Ali Khamenei? If so, to what purpose, given that Khamenei was so opposed to an Iranian nuclear bomb that he issued a religious edict, a fatwa, against its development?

Might Khamenei's successor - having seen how utterly untrustworthy the US and Israel are, how they operate as rogue states unconstrained by international law - now decide that developing a nuclear bomb is an absolute priority to protect Iran's sovereignty?

For generations, many American evangelicals — especially in conservative circles — have pinned their ultimate hope not on enduring trials or the Second Coming itself, but on a swift, secret escape: the pretribulation rapture.

Promoted by bestselling authors like Hal Lindsey and Tim LaHaye, celebrated by figures like Jerry Falwell, and echoed in megachurch pulpits, this "any-moment" removal has become a cornerstone of end-times expectation. Yet, as this exposé from back in 2005/2006, reveals, the doctrine is a surprisingly recent invention — first publicly articulated in 1830 by the followers of Edward Irving in Britain's obscure journal The Morning Watch.

Far from a timeless biblical truth, early proponents displayed an unsettling militancy: raptured saints would supposedly pour out wrath on those left behind, including Jews deemed unworthy. Tracing this history exposes not just theological novelty, but a pattern of escapism, superiority, and even vengeance that contrasts sharply with the Gospel's call to love and perseverance. Is the modern rapture obsession truly "Maranatha" — or something far more troubling?

President Donald Trump on Thursday fired his embattled Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, after mounting criticism over her leadership of the department, including the handling of the administration's immigration crackdown and disaster response.

Trump, who said he would nominate Oklahoma Republican Sen. Markwayne Mullin in her place, made the announcement on social media after Noem faced a two-day grilling on Capitol Hill this week from GOP members as well as Democrats.

Noem's departure marks a stunning turnaround for a close ally to the president who was tasked with steering his centerpiece policy of mass deportations. But she appeared to increasingly become a liability for Trump, with questions arising over her spending at her department and over her conduct in the aftermath of the shooting deaths of two protesters in Minneapolis earlier this year.

The US will "bitterly regret the precedent it has set" after an American submarine torpedoed an Iranian warship in an attack that left more than 80 sailors dead, the Islamic Republic's foreign minister warned — while an ayatollah called for President Trump's blood.

"The US has perpetrated an atrocity at sea, 2,000 miles away from Iran's shores. Frigate Dena, a guest of India's Navy carrying almost 130 sailors, was struck in international waters without warning," Abbas Aragchi wrote on X on Thursday.

"Mark my words: The US will come to bitterly regret (the) precedent it has set."

Three United States fighter jets were "mistakenly" shot down over Kuwait, the US military has said, amid Washington's joint offensive with the Israeli military against Iran.

Videos that emerged on Monday showed a US F-15E Strike Eagle fighter jet spinning and spiralling downwards with its tail on fire and smoke trailing behind it. Another video showed two pilots ejecting. They were later seen alive on the ground being helped by locals.

US Central Command (CENTCOM), a US combat command whose area of responsibility includes the Middle East, said three US F-15E Strike Eagles had "mistakenly been shot down" by Kuwaiti air defences "during active combat".