News & views related to the war on Iran …

News & views related to the war in Ukraine …

News & views not related to the wars in Ukraine and Iran …

When scanning U.S.news I once a while stumble upon items that escape my understanding:

Tyler Boebert, 21, son of Rep. Lauren Boebert, R-Colorado, is facing five new felony charges ranging from sexual exploitation of a child to sexual exploitation of a child with enticement that also included a video.
…
Tyler Boebert is accused of producing, possessing and distributing sexually exploitative material of him having intercourse with a girl who was under 18. The affidavit states Tyler Boebert “caused, induced and enticed a child to be used in explicit sexual conduct for the making of sexually exploitative material.”

Sounds bad. One wonders what pictures people make up in their heads after reading those parts.

But it turns out that the ‘child’ in this ‘child abuse’ case wasn’t a child at all – that the sex two teens had in this case was consensual –  and that the video thereof, which a length of only 43 seconds, was never publicized:

Tyler Boebert is facing five felony charges for allegedly filming a 43-second video of himself and an underage female which local authorities have deemed to be child sexual abuse material (CSAM), according to a copy of a criminal affidavit obtained by PEOPLE.

The affidavit says the CSAM was filmed on Feb. 1, 2024, when Tyler was 18 and the female was 17, two weeks before she turned 18.

Unlike much of the material detailed in the affidavit, the video of Tyler and his then-girlfriend was never shared online or posted to social media.

The female in the video — whose face is never seen but could be identified by her hair and an injury she had suffered in a car accident — reported the existence of the CSAM to police after her ex-boyfriend received a copy of the video, according to the affidavit.

She made that report on Feb. 2, 2024, just one day after the video was allegedly filmed.

The affidavit also alleges that the reporting party failed to communicate to local police that she had sent the video to other individuals.

It seems obvious that this is a case of teenage stupidity which has nothing to do with child exploitation.

Cont. reading: Sex Between Teens Should Not Be A Child Abuse Issue

The Ukrainian Ministry of Defense has for years bragged about its interception rate of Russian drones and missiles. Each day it published how many drones and missiles the Russian side had fired, and how many of those the Ukrainian side had wiped off the skies.

The Ukrainian ‘success’ rate was far above of what any others country’s air defense would hope to achieve. A typical example of that from July 9:

Ukrainian air defense intercepted nearly 90% of aerial threats during large-scale attacks in June

Throughout June, Ukraine’s air defense intercepted nearly 5,300 aerial threats.

Specifically, it shot down 90% of Shahed, Gerbera, Italmas, and other drones, 40% of ballistic missiles, and 89.4% of other missile types.

The overall interception rate for aerial threats during large-scale enemy attacks reached 89%.

During the hours-long attack overnight into June 2, the enemy launched eight Zircon anti-ship missiles, 33 Iskander-M ballistic missiles, 32 Kh-101 and Kalibr cruise missiles, and more than 650 attack drones.

The enemy sought to overwhelm Ukraine’s air defense, but Ukrainian forces responded effectively, intercepting 92% of drones and 90% of cruise missiles. Among the most challenging targets to intercept—ballistic missiles — 11 out of 41 were shot down.

A similarly large-scale attack took place overnight into June 15: the enemy launched six Zircon anti-ship missiles, 34 Iskander-M ballistic missiles, 30 Kh-101 and Iskander-K cruise missiles, and 611 attack drones.

Despite the complexity of the large-scale aerial attack, Ukrainian air defense intercepted half of the ballistic missiles, 95% of the drones, and all cruise missiles launched against Ukraine.

I am not aware of anyone who did believe those numbers. The news items did however contribute to the western media narrative of “Ukraine is winning“.

It did not take long for that delusion to evaporate. Ukraine, and more or less all of NATO, has run out of air-defense missiles. It no longer has the capability to even touch low-and-slow flying cruise missiles.

The Ukrainian defense ministry thus stopped to report how many missiles the Russians fire:

The Ukrainian Air Force on Tuesday said that its forces downed 98 of 120 Russian drones launched overnight but did not disclose how many missiles were fired or intercepted, even though Zaporizhzhia, the Dnipropetrovsk region, and Kyiv were targeted by more than a dozen ballistic missiles, including North Korean-made KN-23s, killing nine people.

The change follows a decision days earlier to stop reporting interceptions of Russian ballistic missiles. That came after a major attack last week in which Ukraine was unable to intercept any of 28 ballistic missiles fired at the country.

A person familiar with the matter told Bloomberg that the air force changed its reporting format as a security measure in response to Russia’s attacks.

How not reporting an enemy’s action is supposed to provide more security has yet be found out.

U.S. media claim that Iran has set out new conditions to solve the conflict with the U.S. But the new text it has published is just a repetition of  clauses the U.S. had already signed on to.

On Saturday Iran published ‘new’ demands for the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz:

[Secretary of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council Mohammad Baqer Zolqadr] said the US should observe the six following conditions:

“1. Never, and in no language, threaten Iran or insult the sanctities of this nation.

2. Permanently end the war and aggression against Iran and Iran’s allies in Lebanon, Palestine, Yemen and Iraq.

3. Lift the naval blockade and withdraw its military forces (naval and air) from around Iran.

4. Pay in full, without any reduction, the damages caused to Iran by the two wars of aggression and imposition.

5. Lift the unjust and illegal sanctions against the Iranian nation.

6. Unconditionally release the blocked and stolen assets of the Iranian people.”

These demands seem to have confused U.S. observers. The Wall Street Journal claimed (archived) that these were somehow more harsh than those which had been previously issued:

[..] Iran insisted Saturday on its highest price yet for permitting the free flow of traffic in the waterway, seeking billions of dollars in U.S. payments, the removal of American troops from the region and an end of the U.S. naval blockade, among other things.
…
“Iran’s recent hardline demands for reopening the strait make it increasingly difficult for the president to manufacture a face-saving off-ramp from the conflict,” said Mona Yacoubian, director of the Middle East program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington think tank.

The WSJ author and his ‘expert’ are mistaken. There is nothing new in the Iranian demands. They are direct repetitions of clauses laid down in Memorandum of Understanding which the White House had negotiated and President Trump had publicly signed.

Point 1 of the MoU notes that the parties “undertake .. to refrain from the threat or use of force against each other” which is similar to point 1 of the ‘new’ conditions.

Cont. reading: War On Iran: – ‘New’ Iran Demands Repeat MoU Conditions

News & views related to the war on Iran …

News & views related to the war in Ukraine …

Last week’s posts on Moon of Alabama:

• Aug 3 – War On Iran: – Another TACO – Iran’s Need To Escalate
  Related:
  – Iran Top Security Official Sets Conditions for Hormuz Reopening – Tasnim
  – Trump’s top general is ‘looking for an off-ramp’ from Iran war as US military options remain limited, sources say – CNN
  – Oil Analysts Stumped by the Case of the Missing Barrels – WSJ via MSN

• Aug 4 – It’s The Math – How China Is Avoiding The AI Bubble
  Related:
  – America’s Cosmic Bet on AI – Foreign Policy
  – What Are Companies Getting for All That A.I. Spending? (archived) – NY Times
  – US AI leaders turn to Chinese open-weight models, challenging closed-source safety claims – SCMP
  – Samsung, SK Hynix test Chinese chip tools as hedge against US risks – Reuters

• Aug 5 – Blinding Morality In International Relations
  – The American Believability Crisis – American Conservative
  – A Brief History of How Countries Sleepwalk Into War – Naked Capitalism
  – Greenland issues ‘strong warning’ as Trump-linked oil firm prepares to drill – Guardian
  – After Blocking Fuel, the US Turns to Cuba’s Food Supply – Jacobin

• Aug 7 – The Odd Defense Agreement Between Saudi Arabia, Pakistan And Turkey
  Related:
  – Unpacking the Saudi Arabia-Pakistan-Turkey defense pact – Asia Times
  – How leaving Opec unleashed Adnoc’s global ambitions (archived) – FT
  – Leaked Saudi Cables Reveal the Shadowy Committee That Oversees the Kingdom’s Policy on Yemen – Dropsite News

• Aug 8 – Zionist Disinformation Circles the Globe
  Related:
  – After Trump’s Board of Peace Made a Plan for Gaza, the Bombings Grew Worse – NY Times
  – Spitting Attacks Show Rise of Anti-Christian Hate in Israel (archived) – WSJ

—
Other issues:
Cont. reading: The MoA Week In Review – OT 2026-169

‘News isn’t truth’ is an obvious statement. It, unfortunately, is often ignored.

‘News’ can be made from whole cloth. Invented quotes, passed along multiple stations, can turn into ‘facts’.

The Israeli journalist Ronen Bergman uncovered the trail (in Hebrew) of one such item (machine translation):

On August 5, Wednesday of this week, a very dramatic piece of news made a miraculous journey. In about 15 and a half hours, it left a dubious Indian X account, passed through an account that proudly bears the word Mossad in its name, even though it is not the Mossad, received a kosher certificate from Channel 14, was embraced by Yair Netanyahu, ascended to a state stage on the Prime Minister’s behalf, landed with the US ambassador to the UN and on Fox News, and then returned respectfully to India, where it had already been reported as news originating from the “Israeli media”.

Shaiel Ben-Ephraim summarized the piece.

• A very pro-Israeli Hindu-fascist account on Twitter/X cited (in Hindi) a fabricated quote to claim that Ahmad Vahidi, the commander of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corp, had admitted that Iran was developing nuclear weapons.
• Later the same account published another fake quote, again in Hindi, in which Vahedi allegedly said that Iran will keep developing nuclear weapons as long as the US and Israel have them.
• A Twitter/X account named Mossad Commentary posts the alleged quote in English language.
• Half an hour later the English version of the Israeli (pro-government) Channel 14 picked up on that quote and claimed that it was the first time Iran admitted to building a nuke.

bigger

A new NATO like agreement between three major Sunni states throws up various questions:

Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan sign defence pact – MEE

Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan signed a joint defence agreement on Friday, connecting the three largest Muslim countries in the world under one security umbrella for the first time.

The deal, which has been under negotiation since last year, creates a significant new trilateral framework amid a deepening regional crisis following Israeli and US attacks on Iran.
…
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman and Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif signed the deal in Mecca in a joint ceremony.
…
“The Agreement aims to bolster collective deterrence against all forms of aggression and stipulates that an armed attack carried out against any one of the three states shall be considered an attack against all of them,” the joint statement said. “The Agreement also provides for the development of defense cooperation among the three states in all its dimensions.”

The phrase “shall be considered an attack against all of them” is copied from Article 5 of the NATO Treaty:

an armed attack against one or more of them … shall be considered an attack against them all …

But the following parts of Article 5 spell out rather vague consequences:

… they agree that … each of them … will assist the Party or Parties so attacked by taking … such action as it deems necessary …

In contrast to popular believe Article 5 does not stipulate that all NATO would go to war because of an attack on one of its member countries. If a protest letter is ‘deemed necessary …’ to assist – that may well be it.

We do not know what consequences of an attack on one member are spelled in the new Turkish-Saudi-Pakistani agreement. I suspect that any of them will be even more vague than those in the NATO treaty.

I find it hard to understand how this new agreement could possibly have more than symbolic value.

Cont. reading: The Odd Defense Agreement Between Saudi Arabia, Pakistan And Turkey

News & views related to the war on Iran …

News & views related to the war in Ukraine …

News & views not related to the wars in Ukraine and Iran …

Some years ago Paul Robinson, a Canadian scholar of Russian history, wrote about two different views of international political rules:

I pointed out that both Russia and the West claimed to be in favour of a ‘rules-based order’ and that each accused the other of breaking that order. The problem, I conjectured, derives from differing understanding of what the rules are and how they should be applied.

Russia believes in a traditional, Westphalian, order in which states are equal sovereign entities. The rules apply equally to all of them, regardless of who they are or what they do. States may only take action against other states with the permission of a superior court, in other words the United Nations Security Council. Of course, Russia doesn’t 100% abide by the rules of its own model, but its preferred option remains one of legal symmetry – the same rules apply to all.

By contrast, human rights reasoning has pushed the West in an opposite direction, towards a preference for legal asymmetry. In this model, the just and the unjust, those who respect and those who don’t respect human rights, are not legally or morally equal.

In a recent piece another Canadian Russia scholar, Patrick Armstrong, expands on this. Recent Russian policy has taken the Westphalian view of things because it has learned from its past where it had tried to make international policies based on moral reasoning and largely failed:

Moscow had spent seven decades pushing an exceptionalist/moralist view – the world’s first socialist state, the bright future of mankind and all that stuff – and had found it to be a complete failure. It had learned the hard way that countries are as they are and have to be dealt with as they are. Moralistic posturing leads to failure.

The West has, in contrast, no yet learned that lesson. It insists on a (very subjective) ‘moral’ view of things:

The first problem with the moralistic worldview is that one soon becomes very restricted on whom one can talk with. After all, the Good cannot acknowledge the Bad. Especially after all the carefully constructed war words have been deployed: the “regime’s” “claims” are “unverified”, they’re “disinformation” spread by “state media; they’re “talking points” from the “playbook”. The Good, The Just, by contrast, have democratic governments, speak the truth and have a free media. The more the Good stresses the evil of the other, the less it can know or understand. And certainly can never pollute its purity by meeting with The Bad.

Adhering to such moralistic views makes one incapable of dialog and sound judgment:

When moral superiority becomes entrenched, other superiorities soon take root. We’re morally better and everything we do is better too. Evil fails across the board, in war and in peace. Our tools work better and we use them better. The morally inferior are worse at war too. And so we come, to quote a certain Austrian watercolourist, to the expectation that “one good kick at the door and the whole rotten edifice will collapse”.

But the USSR did not collapse in 1941 and neither did Iran in 2026.

It is astonishing that nearly 25 years after George W. Bush declared some countries to be an ‘axis of evil’ the West is still holds to this Manichean or Zoroastrian view of ‘good’ versus ‘evil’.

Related: Rush: By-tor And The Snow Dog (vid)

The Artificial Intelligence bubble in the United States is still growing. It is consuming a large share of the available financial resources. But its output, in form of real products, is so far rather meager.

There are some code generation tools which are, at times, helpful, but, unless subsidized, very expensive. There is ChatGTP and other squawk boxes which in the end are just new forms of inherently unreliable web search tools.

What is missing are useful mass applications billions of people are willing to pay for.

Still – a large number of ‘very important people’ believe that the Large Language Models, which are at the core of OpenAI’s and Anthropic products, will one day reach the capabilities of sentient beings. That is, in my view, utter bullshit, but who am I to tell you.

The NY Times has a long write up (archived) about Oracle founder Larry Ellison and his bet of nearly everything he owns on the A.I. bubble. It states:

The story of A.I. has been as much a financial story as a technological one, a question of how to structure the mind-boggling investments required to train and run the models. Few people doubt that this technology is going to change everything. What’s less clear is when the profits are going to start rolling in and how big they are going to be. “To me, it’s a math problem,” says Asad Ramzanali, the director of A.I. at a policy center at Vanderbilt University. “We are making trillions of dollars in investments on the back of tens of billions of dollars in revenues.”

That is why Ed Zitron and others will rightly tell you that the huge investments spent on AI are making no sense at all.

Where are the products and the customers that will allow to recuperate the hundreds of billions of shady dollars spent on data centers for AI?

The financial structure of the data center build-out makes it especially vulnerable to a crash. The deals themselves are built on enormously complicated debt and equity schemes that involve circular financing. The hyperscalers are investing heavily in the same companies they are counting on to buy their computing power. It’s what economists call an interlocking liability structure. If their customers struggle to monetize their products, they will be hit extra hard — and so will their investors, which include a lot of everyday Americans. And these are just the U.S. companies. The A.I. boom has been a global phenomenon; an A.I. collapse would be as well.

The NY Times presume that everything the U.S. does is copied throughout the world. If the bubble burst in the U.S. it will, in consequence, also burst in other places – especially in China.

This is a misunderstanding of what the Chinese AI models are, and what Chinese AI companies are doing.

Throughout the last year several Chinese companies have surprised the public by offering AI models that are nearly as capable as the best ones U.S. companies produce, but are offered at a price that just a tenth of the cost of the (heavily subsidized) U.S. models.

Moreover Chinese companies have published the weights and source code of their models and allow anyone with the adequate hardware to run them on their own premises.

The Economist has made an attempt to understand this:

How China gets better bang for its buck than America in AI (archived)
Its investment lags far behind America’s. Its models do not

The American AI splurge looks especially profligate compared with Chinese parsimony. In 2026 Chinese tech titans are forecast to invest less than a tenth as much in data centres as their American counterparts (see chart).

Their models appear only fractionally less powerful owing to this frugality. K3, an advanced model launched last month by Moonshot AI, a Beijing-based startup, is 95% as clever (on widely used benchmarks) as Fable 5, a frontier model from Anthropic, another top American lab. It is also 70% cheaper to use. On August 3rd Alibaba, a Chinese tech giant, released a model which reportedly scored among the world’s best by some measures.

The authors at the Economist go on to muse about cheaper data center costs in China. The country, they say, has also less chances to invest in overpriced U.S. hardware. It’s buyers are more stingy and the search for real applications is more important for China than the quest for a ‘singularity’ or some ‘general artificial intelligence’, which U.S. companies pursue.

This is all, like in the NY Times piece quote, mostly bullshit.

The real discriminator between U.S. and Chinese AI companies is the math they use.

U.S. models run on algorithms that are computationally wasteful, while Chinese models use smarter methods, which need less compute, to achieve a similar quality.

Language models, which, given some text input, produce a related text output, are nothing new.

Most are based on so called neural network algorithms which are a simulation of a rudimentary function of the human brain. Neural networks can be trained to recognize an input to then produce a related output.

The problem with neural networks and their early variants is that the training is very time consuming which limits the size of the models.

In 2018 researchers at Google found an elegant way to circumvent these restriction:

The dominant sequence transduction models are based on complex recurrent or convolutional neural networks in an encoder-decoder configuration. The best performing models also connect the encoder and decoder through an attention mechanism. We propose a new simple network architecture, the Transformer, based solely on attention mechanisms, dispensing with recurrence and convolutions entirely. Experiments on two machine translation tasks show these models to be superior in quality while being more parallelizable and requiring significantly less time to train.

U.S. companies jumped onto the Transformer model. It was seen as a chance to create ever bigger and better models with the hope that a huge sized model would eventually reach or exceed the capabilities of a human brain.

The advantage of the Transformer model is that the math necessary to train it can be parallelized. Computer chips built to produce graphics have special hardware to process pixels. Instead of one pixel at a time they compute complete pictures by computing the (color) value of thousands of pixels at the same time. The use of Graphic Processing Units (GPUs) allows for parallelized (matrix) operations on thousands of parameters. (A video by Grant Sanderson, Large Language Models explained briefly (vid), gives a good introduction to this.)

The disadvantage of the Transformer model is the exponential behavior of its attention mechanism. To digest one sentence of input the model has to process each element therein against all other elements held in the same context. That is an exponential operation. For a context of 500,000 input words (i.e to summarize a book of that length) the model will require 250 billion operations. OpenAI, Anthropic and others use a lot of tricks to optimize their computing but they can not escape the basic exponential constrain of the algorithm they use.

This is the reason why the input of current Transformer models is limited and why these models need huge data centers with millions of GPUs to respond to users questions.

For lack of compute capacity the Chinese model developers had to take different routes. They use recurrent neural networks and the so called Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) algorithms. These have been known since the late 1990s and are the basis for most machine language translations. Apple’s SIRI is using of a LSTM model.

The LSTM algorithm has disadvantages. In its original form its training can not be parallelized. But it is able to ‘forget’ unnecessary context and its compute of an answer is (mostly) linear, not exponential.

The more recent extended LSTM algorithms allow for parallelizing the training of such models while keeping the advantage of a (nearly) linear response algorithm.

The recently revealed Kimi model of the Chinese company Moonshot.ai is based on a (modified) xLSTM algorithm, called Kimi Delta Attention. It also splits the model into a network of 800 ‘experts’ only a few of which are activated to answer a users specific question (see Kimi K3 Explained in 13 minutes (vid)).

While Kimi has yet to reach the parameter size of the newest U.S. model it has nearly the same capabilities while using much less compute than is needed to run an equivalent OpenAI model.

Other Chinese AI providers are also using similar algorithms which need much less compute than the U.S. preferred Transformer models.

The U.S. AI model providers, OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Meta and SpaceX, are all stuck with the Transformer model algorithms they use to build their models. It is what they have been building on for years and it is what their engineers are experts in. They have promised to build or buy a huge amount of computing capacity because that is what their models need.

It is this choice of an algorithm that has created the U.S. AI bubble.

The Chinese modelers, for lack of unlimited venture capital, have had to find better ways to solve the problems. Their use of different algorithms allows them to deliver nearly similar results for much less money.

There is also a difference in attitude. Where U.S. financiers like Larry Ellison are striving for some god-like general artificial intelligence, the Chinese (and some European) developers and financiers are much more interested in solving real world (industry) problems.

A robot to fill the dish washer can operate sufficiently without being able to solve mathematical conjectures. Moreover its internal AI model will have to run on a local GPU and not inside some far away data center.

An abundance of resources has allowed U.S. model developers to build huge, very capable, but enormously expensive general AI models. Those companies have yet to find use cases that will pay for the cost of running these models.

Instead of reaching for the stars, like U.S. companies do, the Chinese are out to solve down-to-earth problems.

Restricted resources have forced the Chinese developers to find better algorithms. Their primary orientation is on useful applications that will generate appropriate returns for their costs.

At some point the AI bubble in the U.S. will blow up. There will be a lot of collateral damage. Many people will lose their money. There will be a number of useless empty data centers up for rent.

The NY Times and the Economist presume that this will cause China to have similar problems.

That is unlikely to be the case as Chinese AI is based on a different math, and different economic models.

Once again the U.S. president threatened to bomb Iran to smithereens. Once again he pulled back, while, once again, claiming that Iran was begging for negotiations, which, once again, Iran denied.

Welcome to Monday.

It is the fifth time Trump TACOed on bombing Iran.

Last Saturday, while the U.S. military was getting ready to (again) bomb Iran. Abbas Araghchi, the foreign minister of Iran, picked up the phone and called up his colleagues in the Arab Gulf states. He read them lists of the individual targets in their countries which Iran would destroy should Trump, for once, do what he promised.

The Gulf countries consulted each other. Mohammad bin Sultan, the Saudi ruler, was chosen to tell Trump – in diplomatese – to shut the fuck up:

HRH the Crown Prince stressed the need to prioritize dialogue to reduce escalation and the importance of making every possible effort to achieve calm that paves the way for diplomatic solutions, preserves the region’s security and stability, and prevents a wider conflict whose repercussions would affect regional and international security and stability.

Without exporting oil Saudi Arabia would not be able to import U.S. weapons. It would have to sell treasuries to finance its living.

Explaining such second order effects might well have been what moved Trump:

The crown prince also asked for clarity over U.S. strategy on Iran and the planned strikes, the officials familiar with the matter said.

Behind the scenes, Gulf countries are frustrated with what they see as a lack of a clear strategy from the U.S. as the war drags on, subjecting their territories to frequent Iranian attacks, people familiar with the matter said.

Not everyone has yet come to their senses:

Not all Gulf countries are pushing for de-escalation. Some, such as the United Arab Emirates, have lobbied Trump in recent days to take more decisive action against Iran, according to senior Gulf officials familiar with the discussion. The officials have suggested Iran’s powerful Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps won’t compromise until the U.S. escalates, takes control over the strait and perhaps considers ground operations.

The UAE itself, despite having bought a bunch of Israeli weapons, is unable to defend itself. Its rulers seem to be in need of some serious whacking.

The U.S. can not take control of the Strait. It does not have the manpower needed for the necessary ground operation. Its military is out of ideas:

Cont. reading: War On Iran: – Another TACO – Iran’s Need To Escalate

News & views related to the war on Iran …

News & views related to the war in Ukraine …

Last week’s posts on Moon of Alabama:

• Jul 25 – War On Iran: – Silence Before The Storm Or Ongoing Negotiations?
• Jul 29 – War On Iran: – U.S.’ Missile Defense Stock Is Severely Depleted
• Jul 31 – War On Iran: – U.S. (Again) Blocks Strait Traffic
  Related:
  – Trump TACOed again … after the U.S. military and various allies intervened …
  – U.S. general warns Pentagon he lacks sufficient forces to protect Israel (archived) – Washington Post
  – In Iran, the U.S. Appears Headed for a Strategic Defeat, Allies Fear – NY Times/I>
  – Visuals Suggest U.S. Dropped 2,000-Pound Bomb on Home in Iran, Killing 3 – NY Times
  – Regime change? Inside Reza Pahlavi’s faltering bid to lead Iran – Reuters

• Jul 28 – Ukraine: Long-range Campaign Fails As Russia Hits Back
  Related:
  – The media and the bloodbath – Western responsibility for the assault units – Events in Ukraine
  – General Staff Suspends Recruitment to Assault Regiments Amid Personnel Review – Military Land
  – Russian forces strike targets in Ukraine’s Odesa, Mykolaiv ports – France24
  – Russia targets hundreds of Ukrainian petrol stations (archived) – FT

• Aug 1 – English Outsider – Procurement And Corruption
  Related:
  – ‘The Boss Wants This Money’: Inside Trump’s Unprecedented Fundraising Operation (archived) – WSJ
  Meredith O’Rourke, nicknamed ‘princess of darkness,’ carries out president’s desire to wring hundreds of millions from companies for his projects
  – Trump’s Fixation on Arctic Ships Led to Billions in No-Bid Contracts (archived) – NY Times

—
Other issues:
Cont. reading: The MoA Week In Review – OT 2026-163