August 11, 2026

x01 Archives

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President Donald Trump said Monday that six Muslim-majority nations must join the Abraham Accords if they want to participate in an agreement currently being negotiated with Iran.

In a Memorial Day post on Truth Social, Trump said the negotiations with Iran were “proceeding nicely” but added that he had made normalization with Israel a condition for several regional governments seeking involvement in the deal.

Trump said he spoke Saturday with the leaders of Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Egypt, Pakistan, Turkey and Jordan and told them they should formally recognize Israel through the Abraham Accords framework.

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Lawmakers in the South Carolina House of Representatives have just passed a new U.S. congressional map that could eliminate the district of a powerful congressman with the only Democrat seat in the state.

The move is setting up a major political battle ahead of the 2026 midterms.

The Republican-led chamber approved the measure by a 74–37 vote after lengthy debate, sending the proposal to the GOP-controlled state Senate for further consideration.

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After Maryland announced an error within a massive shipment of more than 500,000 mail-in ballots, Rep. Greg Murphy had a one-word description.

“Oops,” the North Carolina Republican said during a hearing Wednesday of the House Administration Subcommittee on Elections.

“What’s the deal going on with Maryland?” Murphy asked Don Palmer, a former chairman of the U.S. Election Assistance Commission.

“It’s a very, it’s a huge mistake. Obviously, you can point at the vendor and say, well, the vendor made this mistake, but the buck stops with the election officials,” Palmer, now a senior legal fellow at The Heritage Foundation, told the House panel.

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President Trump scored another major primary victory as Kentucky Congressman Thomas Massie lost to Trump-backed challenger Ed Gallrein. Horrifying new details and livestream footage have emerged from the deadly San Diego mosque shooting. Investigators say the attackers were fueled by online radicalization and white supremacist ideology.

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Republican Senators called it quits Thursday over a proposal to deliver restitution to the political victims of government weaponization, instead giving themselves paid vacation after balking at the idea that Americans deserve compensation for being targeted and mistreated by the federal government.

As many as 25 Republican senators reportedly balked at the $1.776 billion Anti-Weaponization Fund designed to “to provide a systematic process to hear and redress claims of others who suffered weaponization and lawfare” during a briefing by acting Attorney General Todd Blanche.

The fund would make restitution to people like pro-life Americans targeted for praying outside abortion facilities, individuals who were unfairly or excessively prosecuted for involvement in the Jan. 6 protest, and others targeted by the Biden administration. However, the fund is open to anyone who believes he was unfairly targeted by the government, and disbursement of monies will be decided on a case-by-case basis, according to Vice President J.D. Vance, who was asked about the fund earlier this week.

“The machinery of government should never be weaponized against any American, and it is this Department’s intention to make right the wrongs that were previously done while ensuring this never happens again,” Blanche said of the fund in a press release.

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The sharper takes came from our own Rick Moran and HotAir columnist Ed Morrissey.

Every piece I’ve read, including Ed’s (which I’ll bounce off of here), circles the same two facts: The report remains unfinished, and Democrats seem about as eager to release it as a teenager is to hand over a phone during a police stop. Neither point is at all mysterious. They couldn’t bend the obvious conclusions into political cover, much less a political advantage, so now the report sits in bureaucratic purgatory while party operatives pray the news cycle develops ADHD and forgets the thing exists. Sadly and to a large part, it has, for the “reporters'” own politically motivated reasons.

Perhaps this is because they know the voting public, including members of their own party, have already come to their own less-than-complimentary conclusions.

As Ed says:

People can directly access the 192-page report, but it’s not easy to parse, thanks to the lack of effort in finishing the product. It’s unfinished in another sense, too: there is apparently no mention of Joe Biden’s cognitive decline or the effort to cover it up in the autopsy. The words “cognitive,” “dementia,” “senile,” and “mental” make no appearance in this document. The June 2024 debate barely gets a mention at all, and the report completely ignores its impact and what it revealed about Democrats’ attempts to sell a sick old man as “Sharp As A Tack”.

Ed quotes the report itself further to make his point:

Before the candidate switch, the pollsters never reviewed ad copy or content – and commented how they did not see ads until after they were airing, in some instances reading about the ads in the media. They also reported they had little insight into the data provided to leadership from the analytics team.

As the June 2024 debate neared, there were discussions about polling around the debate and after the convention. The polling team was informed the plan was for them to poll three times during the general election, and the post-convention polling would count as one of those three polling waves. They attributed this minimalist approach to research to members of the media team not believing polling data was essential to decision making.

The debate obviously changed many things. The dial-testing during the debate demonstrated the weakness of the President’s performance, and a post-debate survey was scrapped.

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Kerry Sheron, a 69-year-old Army veteran and owner of a residence in the San Diego area known locally as the “Trump House,” was critically injured in an assault near his home. His wife later told reporters that Sheron’s chances of recovery are slim to none.

Escondido police responded to reports of an assault in progress around 2:15 p.m. on Wednesday. Upon arrival, officers found Sheron suffering from severe injuries, while a utility worker who intervened kept the suspect restrained.

Sheron was transported to a trauma center, where he remained in critical condition in the ICU as of Thursday evening.

Sheron’s wife stated that her husband is not expected to survive the injuries. In a statement, she described his chances of recovering as having “no hope” following the assault, according to a report from the New York Post.

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A bid to restore funding to US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and border patrol has been derailed by rows over a $1bn proposal for security measures tied to Donald Trump’s White House ballroom and controversial plans to create a $1.8bn “anti-weaponization” fund.

The US Senate will not pass the $70bn legislation ahead of a 1 June deadline set by the US president, Republican senators told reporters on Thursday, as lawmakers leave Washington for the Memorial Day recess.

It comes amid backlash from members of Trump’s own party against an attempt to latch funding for his ballroom project on to the immigration bill.

The plan prompted intense anxiety among congressional Republicans, who feared diverting taxpayer dollars toward Trump’s “East Wing modernization project” amid mounting cost of living concerns across the US would risk alienating voters ahead of November’s midterm elections.

Some Senate Republicans have also expressed concerns about a plan, announced on Monday, to create a secretive $1.776bn fund – which critics have argued is essentially a slush fund – to compensate Trump allies as part of an agreement in which the president and his sons dropped a $10bn long-shot lawsuit against the US Internal Revenue Service.

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In a sharp rebuttal to media speculation, the Trump administration has pushed back against claims that Director of National Intelligence (DNI) Tulsi Gabbard was ousted from her position amid internal tensions.

The controversy erupted on May 22, following Gabbard’s announcement of her resignation, which she attributed entirely to a personal family crisis. Major outlets, including Reuters, highlighted both her stated reasons and anonymous sourcing suggesting deeper White House dissatisfaction.

The Reuters report detailed Gabbard’s resignation as Trump’s top intelligence official, noting her public explanation tied to her husband’s health. However, the article prominently featured an anonymous source familiar with the situation who asserted that “Gabbard had been forced out by the White House.”

The source claimed the administration had grown unhappy with Gabbard over several months, citing issues such as the activities of her Director’s Initiatives Group task force and perceived frictions on national security matters, including aspects of U.S. policy toward Iran.

Reuters noted that the White House initially did not respond to requests for comment on the forced-out narrative, fueling immediate online debate and criticism of media coverage.

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Cuba’s acquisition of more than 300 attack drones from Iran and Russia since 2023 underscores the regime’s deepening alignment with Washington’s adversaries. Cuban planners have reportedly discussed strikes against Guantanamo Bay, U.S. naval vessels, and even Key West, Florida. While these systems provide Havana with a limited harassment and asymmetric strike capability, they do nothing to narrow the overwhelming gap between Cuban and American military power.

Yet, Cuba poses a direct threat to American homeland security through migration waves, narcotics transshipment, espionage, and now drone threats. Over 600,000 Cubans have attempted or reached U.S. shores since 2021, surpassing the Mariel boatlift and the 1994 rafting crisis combined, straining resources and creating security vulnerabilities. Pentagon contingency planning intensified this month with the USS Nimitz carrier group deployed to the Caribbean, underscoring the urgency.

Cuba fields 50,000 active troops, 40,000 reserves, and approximately 1.1 million personnel in its Territorial Troops Militia. Its air force operates roughly 20 aircraft. The army possesses around 300 aging T-55 and T-62 tanks, Soviet-era artillery, and surface-to-air missile launchers upgraded by Belarus in 2025. Global Firepower ranks Cuba 65th globally, a position that conceals obsolescence and systemic decay.

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For days, officials in Garden Grove, California, have warned a chemical plant is “literally on the edge of exploding” as firefighters work to cool a tank filled with about 7,000 gallons of methyl methacrylate, a toxic chemical used in making plastics. Garden Grove is about 350 miles west of Phoenix and roughly 250 miles from Yuma.

Fire crews have been working through the weekend, using sprinklers and hose lines to cool the tank and reduce pressure. Officials said Sunday morning that an overnight operation provided new information that allowed them to adjust their strategy. Crews also identified what officials described as a potential crack that could relieve some of the pressure building inside the tank, but they said the situation still remains dangerous.

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Pope Leo XIV called Monday for robust regulation of artificial intelligence and for its developers to work for the common good rather than profit, issuing a sweeping manifesto on safeguarding humankind as the technology impacts everything from work to war.

“Magnifica Humanitas” (Magnificent Humanity), Leo’s first encyclical, has been eagerly awaited ever since history’s first U.S.-born pope announced days after his election that he considered AI to be the biggest challenge facing humanity today.

In the text, Leo denounced the “culture of power” driving the AI race, especially in developing ever more sophisticated methods of remote warfare. He declared that it was “not permissible” to entrust irreversible, lethal decisions to AI systems, setting up another flash point between the American pope and the Trump administration, which has worked aggressively to deregulate AI development.

“Artificial Intelligence now demands to be disarmed, freed from logics that turn it into an instrument of domination, exclusion and death,″ the pope told a special Vatican presentation of the encyclical, one of the most authoritative types of teaching documents a pope can issue.

Experts in the tech industry, academia and Catholic morality said the document will likely become a benchmark in the debate over AI, a point of reference for policymakers, researchers and ordinary folk alike. It comes as the near-daily developments in the technology trigger concerns over AI replacing human jobs and even human intelligence.

Taylor Black, a Microsoft AI executive and director of Catholic University of America’s AI institute, said the document would prompt people “at the forefront of these tools” to ask questions such as “What does it mean to be human?”

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Mayor Brandon Johnson decried an early Sunday morning ‘unauthorized large gathering’ apparently involving teens that ended with a car veering into five Chicago police officers, injuring them, as they were dispersing the crowd on the Near West Side.

Police have not announced any charges Monday against the driver, 18, who was arrested.

“Unauthorized large gatherings can quickly become dangerous, and early this morning, after curfew hours, we saw that firsthand,” the mayor posted on X Sunday night.

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In a post to Truth Social, Donald Trump said talks with Iran are “proceeding in an orderly and constructive manner”, adding that he has told his representatives to not “rush” into a deal because time is on their “side”.

The US president said the blockade on Iranian ports will remain in “full force” until an agreement is reached. “Both sides must take their time and get it right. There can be no mistakes!” he wrote.

Echoing the comments given to the media earlier by the secretary of state, Marco Rubio, Trump said Iran cannot “develop or procure” a nuclear weapon or bomb under any circumstances.

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Iran has agreed in principle to dispose of highly-enriched uranium in negotiations with the U.S., although a deal likely won’t be signed this weekend, a senior Trump administration official said Sunday morning.

The official said the U.S. believes Iran’s supreme leader has approved the template for a deal, but a final agreement still needs to be made before anything is signed. They said it is still an open question as to whether that will come to fruition.

Even before Operation Epic Fury, the Iranian system was “frustratingly slow and opaque,” the official said, and it has only become more so since.

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After the Southern Poverty Law Center gets the DOJ’s sham fraud indictment tossed out of court, they should sue every one of these liars for defamation. As we’ve already discussed here, Republicans hate them because they expose the white supremacists and neo-Nazis that make up so much of their base, so now they’re trying to destroy them by pretending they’re sponsoring hatred rather than going undercover to expose it.

Rep. Nancy Mace made an appearance on Fox’s Saturday in America with Kayleigh McEnany this weekend and was asked by guest host Jonathan Hunt what she thought of the accusations against the SPLC, and Mace spewed lots of lies and venom and demanded that the people running the organization be tossed in prison.

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U.S. intelligence shows that Iran’s supreme leader is effectively holed up in an undisclosed location with little access to the outside world and is only reached by a labyrinth of couriers, according to U.S. officials with knowledge of the matter.

The Iranian officials authorized to work with the Trump administration have been having a difficult time communicating inside of their own government system — and it’s a central reason why the details of a potential deal with Iran and past agreements have been slow to emerge,

When the U.S. sends proposed details, the difficulty in reaching the supreme leader means there can be a long delay before the U.S. receives a response, two of the officials said.

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Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Sunday he and US President Donald Trump had agreed that any final deal with Iran must fully end the Islamic republic’s “nuclear threat”.

Netanyahu was referring to a conversation between the two leaders on Saturday night, which Trump had earlier said “went very well”.

“President Trump and I agreed that any final agreement with Iran must eliminate the nuclear threat entirely. This means dismantling Iran’s uranium enrichment facilities and removing enriched nuclear material from its territory,” Netanyahu said in a statement.

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There is a category of production incident that engineering teams are not tracking yet — because it doesn’t fit any existing postmortem template.

The agent initiated an action. The action was technically correct given the agent’s context. The context was incomplete. The infrastructure cascaded. And, by the time the incident review happened, three teams were arguing about whether it was an agent failure or an infrastructure failure,  because the frameworks for thinking about these two things have never been connected.

The scale of this exposure is no longer theoretical. Seventy-nine percent of organizations now have some form of AI agent in production, with 96% planning expansion. Gartner predicts 33% of enterprise software will include agentic AI by 2028, but separately warns that 40% of those projects will be canceled due to poor risk controls.

What neither statistic captures is the failure mode happening between those two numbers: Agents that are running, that are not canceled, and that are quietly generating infrastructure events no one has categorized as risk.

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Chinese AI startup DeepSeek just made one of the boldest pricing moves in the artificial intelligence race so far. The company announced it is permanently slashing the cost of its flagship V4-Pro AI model by 75%, bringing prices down to just a fraction of what developers were paying only weeks ago. AI companies worldwide have been facing two major problems: high infrastructure costs and limited access to high-end AI chips. So when a company suddenly cuts prices this aggressively — and permanently — it usually signals something important is changing behind the scenes.

DeepSeek says usage costs for V4-Pro now range from 0.025 to 6 yuan per million tokens, depending on workload type, down sharply from the previous pricing range of 0.1 to 24 yuan per million tokens. For developers building AI apps, agents, and services, that kind of drop could significantly lower operating costs.

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The Israeli prime minister wrote on X: “I spoke last night with President Donald Trump about the memorandum of understanding to reopen the Straits of Hormuz and the upcoming negotiations toward a final agreement on Iran’s nuclear program.

“I expressed my deep appreciation to President Trump for his unwavering commitment to Israel’s security, including during Operation Roaring Lion and Epic Fury, when American and Israeli forces fought shoulder to shoulder against the Iranian threat.

“President Trump and I agreed that any final agreement with Iran must eliminate the nuclear danger. That means dismantling Iran’s nuclear enrichment sites and removing its enriched nuclear material from its territory.

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Microsoft AI chief executive Mustafa Suleyman is warning that artificial intelligence could soon replace large portions of the white-collar workforce, predicting that AI systems will reach human-level performance across most professional tasks within the next 18 months.

The comments mark one of the clearest timelines yet from a major tech executive about how quickly AI could disrupt office-based professions, including law, accounting, marketing, and project management.

Speaking with the Financial Times, Suleyman said that most work involving “sitting down at a computer” is now vulnerable to automation as AI capabilities rapidly advance.

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Earlier in 2026 a sub-Reddit called “r/liberalgunowners,” saw one user provide an update after describing a harrowing incident at home – but a New York Times columnist elected to leave out a large part of the story to deliver an anti-gun ownership spiel.

In the screenshot of the initial post on Reddit posted on X on March 2, according to BizPacReview, the user explained how his partner had purchased a Glock pistol “for self-defense as the federal government does fascist things in our community.” The Reddit user apparently provided additional updates later in the thread, based on another screenshot posted on X.

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FBI is on the scene and Secret Service is responding to shots near the White House grounds.

The President is currently at the White House.

I was in the middle of taping from the White House North Lawn when I heard what sounded like dozens of gunshots fired nearby.

We immediately got down then heard yelling for us to evacuate to the briefing room. All the reporters on the north lawn sprinted over

According to a Secret Service spokesperson, a suspect approached a Secret Service checkpoint near 17th and Pennsylvania, took out a weapon from a bag, and began firing at the officers there.

Agents then returned fire. They hit the suspect, who later died on the way to the hospital.