🇺🇸🇮🇷⚡️ — Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer:

Trump dragged America into a war—an illegal, costly war without any goals or without any endgame—and has the nerve to call it a “mini-war”

The best way to lower costs and end this chaos is to end this illegal war: Democrats are forcing a seventh vote on our War Powers Resolution this week to withdraw U.S. troops from hostilities with Iran

If Republicans vote against our resolution, they will continue to bear the blame for Trump’s war

🇱🇧⚔️🇮🇱 Hezbollah released footage showing an FPV drone strike on an Israeli Merkava tank in the town of Al-Bayada, southern Lebanon. The drone struck the closed rear hatch of the tank.

Notably, Hezbollah drone operators are getting more and more accurate with their strikes. Some of the first videos showed missed hits, however almost all of the new ones show impacts, including on moving targets (soldiers).

🔗 AMK Mapping 🇳🇿 (@AMK_Mapping_)

🇮🇱❌🇵🇸 The Silence That Meets the Rape of Palestinians

Male and female Palestinians describe brutal sexual abuse at the hands of Israel’s prison guards, soldiers, settlers and interrogators.

There is no evidence that Israeli leaders order rapes. But in recent years they have built a security apparatus where sexual violence has become, as a United Nations report put it last year, one of Israel’s “standard operating procedures” and “a major element in the ill treatment of Palestinians.” A report out last month, from the Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor, a Geneva-based advocacy group often critical of Israel, concludes that Israel employs “systematic sexual violence” that is “widely practiced as part of an organized state policy.”

What does this standard operating procedure look like? Sami al-Sai, 46, a freelance journalist, says that as he was being taken to a prison cell after his detention in 2024, a group of guards threw him to the ground.

“They were all hitting me, and one stepped on my head and neck,” he said. “Someone pulled my pants down. They pulled down my boxers.” And then one of the guards pulled out a rubber baton used to beat prisoners.

“They were trying to force it into my rectum, and I was bracing myself to prevent it, but I couldn’t,” he said, speaking with increasing anxiety. “It was so painful.” The guards were laughing at him, he said. “Then I heard someone say, ‘Give me the carrots,’” he recalled, adding that they then used a carrot. “It was extremely painful,” he said. “I was praying for death.”

After he was dumped into his cell, he concluded that the spot where he had been raped had been used before, for he found other people’s vomit, blood and broken teeth crushed into his skin.

By one count, Israel has detained 20,000 people in the West Bank alone since the Oct. 7 attacks, and more than 9,000 Palestinians were still being held as of this month. Many have not been charged but were detained under ill-defined security grounds, and since 2023, most have been denied visits from the Red Cross and lawyers.

“Israeli forces systematically employ rape and sexual torture to humiliate Palestinian female detainees,” the Euro-Med report said. It cited a 42-year-old woman who said she had been shackled naked to a metal table as Israeli soldiers forcibly had sex with her over two days while other soldiers filmed the attacks. Afterward, she said, she was shown photos of her being raped and told they would be published if she did not cooperate with Israeli intelligence.

It’s impossible to know how common sexual assaults against Palestinians are. My reporting for this article is based on conversations with 14 men and women who said they had been sexually assaulted by Israeli settlers or members of the security forces. I also spoke to family members, investigators, officials and others.

I found these victims by asking around among lawyers, human rights groups, aid workers and ordinary Palestinians themselves. In many cases it was possible to corroborate the victims’ stories in part by talking to witnesses or, more commonly, to those whom the victims had confided in, such as family members, lawyers and social workers; in other cases it was not possible, perhaps because shame left people reluctant to acknowledge abuse even to loved ones.

Save the Children commissioned a survey last year of children ages 12 to 17 who had been in Israeli detention; more than half reported witnessing or experiencing sexual violence. Save the Children said that the true figure was probably higher because stigma left some unwilling to acknowledge what had happened to them.

🔗 https://archive.ph/wCOUZ

🇺🇦⚔️🇷🇺 Western Zaporozhye ORBAT

Despite Russian successes earlier this year in deeply infiltrating toward Veselyanka and Novoyakovlevka, Ukrainian counterattacks continue to roll back previous advances.

Ukraine reinforced the line with the 🇺🇦153rd Mechanized Brigade, redeployed from Kherson to support the 🇺🇦128th Mountain Assault Brigade along the Stepovaya - Mali Shcherbaky axis, while the main counterattacks toward Stepnogorsk are being conducted by an assortment of HUR special forces units (Tymur & the International Legion).

Russia, meanwhile, seeking to consolidate its gains, deployed the two reserve regiments of the 🇷🇺7th Air Assault Division (387th and 1445th Regiments) alongside the 108th and 247th Air Assault Regiments. Furthermore, around the March–April timeframe, additional elements of the 🇷🇺299th Airborne Regiment (98th Airborne Division) arrived from Kherson.

Despite this, elements of the 7th, 104th, and 98th VDV Divisions, as well as the 11th VDV Brigade, now operating in the area alongside various regiments of the 19th and 42nd Motor Rifle Divisions (58th Combined Arms Army), remain unable to regain significant initiative, as the battle for Stepnogorsk enters its seventh month.

🔗 Unit Observer

🇺🇸🔥 Intense heat from this large wildfire in Broward County, Florida is rising so rapidly that it’s cooling and condensing onto smoke particles, creating these towering pyrocumulus clouds. Ash was even found on cars in Pembroke Pines. More than 11,000 acres burned so far.

🔗 Brandon Orr (@BrandonOrrWPLG)

🇺🇸🚱⚠️ 2026 brought the worst drought in the U.S. since records began in 1895.

The southern half of the U.S. is confronted with a severe shortage of groundwater and unusually warm weather for this time of the year

@CIG_telegram

🇺🇸🚱⚠️ The Worst Spring Drought on Record Is Putting U.S. Crops at Risk

The United States experienced its worst spring drought on record last month, with more than 60% of land in the lower 48 states experiencing moderate drought or worse.

The drought has sparked alarm among farmers and environmentalists across the country, who warn that food supplies may be impacted and wildfires may blight areas where they are not usually seen.

The dry conditions are concentrated in the southeast, where moderate to exceptional drought covered 99.81% of the region at its peak in April, according to the U.S. Drought Monitor. Severe to exceptional drought covered more than 80% of the region, the highest level in April since the monitor began collecting data in 2000. 

The drought has been building for some time. Georgia, North Carolina and South Carolina experienced record dry conditions between September 2025 and March 2026, with records dating back to 1895.

While heavy rainfall in the South last week eased conditions in the Deep South and Texas, the U.S. Drought Monitor said that “drought conditions remained mostly unchanged across southeastern Alabama, Georgia and northwestern Florida, where soil moisture and streamflows remain extremely low.”

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) found that January through March was the driest on record for the continental U.S., with precipitation overall less than 70% of average, and these dry conditions have expanded to nearly the largest extent of drought since November 2022.

The drought is threatening to have a severe impact on major agricultural crops, from wheat farmers in Kansas to vegetable farmers in Georgia.

The poor conditions and low yields come at a time when farmers are already struggling due to tariffs and the rising cost of fertilizer resulting from the war in Iran.

The dry conditions have also fueled wildfires, even in wetland environments like the South Florida Everglades. These wildfires have already burned 120,000 acres of land in Florida this year, and according to NASA, the “current drought is the most widespread and severe to affect the state since 2012.”

🔗 https://time.com/article/2026/05/10/drought-US-farmers-crops-climate-change/

🇺🇸🚫❄️ As drought worsens, Western states brace for wildfires, water shortages

From the Rockies to the Cascades to the Sierra Nevada, mountainsides across the West are sparsely covered by the snow that usually blankets the high country well into the summer.

That snowpack is like a savings account that the West draws on when the hot, dry months arrive. It moistens the landscape as it melts, lessening the risk of severe wildfire. The runoff feeds into river basins, and the swelling waterways provide power to hydroelectric dams, irrigation to farmers and drinking water to cities.

This year, Western states are heading into the summer with a desperately low balance — threatening wildfires, drinking water, crops, electricity and more.

“This has been an extremely poor year,” said Sharon Megdal, director of the Water Resources Research Center, a research unit at the University of Arizona. “This has gotten a lot of people concerned and alarmed.”

While a late-season storm brought heavy snow to parts of the Rockies this month, the region remains in a deep snowpack deficit.

As warmer weather arrives, states are preparing for a dangerous wildfire season across the drought-stricken West. Farmers and cities are bracing for potential cutbacks in their water allocations from rivers that have less to give. Fisheries managers are watching for low river flows that could threaten vital salmon runs. And worsening conditions could threaten the supply of hydropower that provides cheap, clean electricity to many Western states.

Across nearly the entire West, states spent the winter waiting for snow that rarely arrived. Ski resorts lost millions of visitors as they struggled to stay open. Then in March, a record-breaking heat wave settled across the region, shrinking the already paltry snowpack.

“It’s unheard of,” Megdal said. “Things were already looking bad in January, but if you follow the projections, they had to keep revising the numbers downward because the snow just never came and we had this hugely hot period in March.”

🔗 https://sourcenm.com/2026/05/08/repub/as-drought-worsens-western-states-brace-for-wildfires-water-shortages/

🇦🇪🇮🇷⚡️ — NEW: A major gas processing plant in the UAE damaged as a result of Iranian attacks during the war is not expected to be fully repaired before 2027, according to FT.

➡️ The Habshan facility, operated by ADNOC Gas and the country’s largest gas processing plant, is currently operating at about 60% capacity.

➡️ The company expects to restore 80% of operations by the end of the year, with full recovery targeted for 2027.

🇯🇵 Japanese government bond yields are surging to historic levels:

The 30-year JGB yield is up to 3.835%, the 2nd-highest on record and on track for the highest weekly close since the bond was introduced in 1999.

This comes as the Bank of Japan is widely expected to raise its benchmark interest rate at its June 16 meeting, with traders pricing in a 77% probability of a hike.

At least one BoJ board member stated it is "quite possible" the bank will raise rates at the next meeting, even if the Middle East conflict remains unresolved, according to a summary of opinions from the April meeting released Tuesday.

Furthermore, Japan's real policy interest rate remains the lowest among all major economies at 0.75%, meaning the BoJ has significant room to tighten further.

Japan's debt-to-GDP ratio stands at over 220%, the highest among developed economies, and rising yields mean the cost of servicing that debt is getting worse.

The Bank of Japan is losing control of its own bond market.

🔗 Global Markets Investor

🇺🇸⚔️🇮🇷 US nuclear-powered ballistic missile submarine docks in Gibraltar

The US Navy announced that the Ohio-class ballistic missile submarine USS Alaska docked in Gibraltar on Sunday, in a rare public disclosure of the location of one of Washington’s nuclear-powered submarines.

The Navy’s Sixth Fleet said the visit was intended to demonstrate US military capabilities, operational flexibility, and its commitment to NATO allies.

The announcement came after President Donald Trump rejected Iran’s response to a proposed ceasefire as “totally unacceptable” and said the truce was on “life support.”

The US military buildup continues as tensions with Iran remain high.

🔗 The Cradle

🇮🇱⚡️ — Israel’s ultra-Orthodox parties are threatening to dissolve the Knesset and potentially trigger new elections after Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told them there is currently no majority for a law exempting many religious students from military service, according to Kan News.

➡️ A political crisis is unfolding between Netanyahu’s office and Moshe Gafni, chairman of the Degel Hatorah party, who is refusing calls from the prime minister. The ultra-Orthodox parties are threatening to move to dissolve parliament “immediately.”

➡️ The dispute comes after Israel’s High Court ordered the state to prepare sanctions against ultra-Orthodox men who refuse military service, following petitions accusing the government of failing to enforce conscription in the absence of a new exemption law.

🇬🇧 Home Office Under-secretary of State, Jess Phillips, has resigned from her post, the 9th member of UK PM, Keir Starmer's cabinet.

Phillips joins 8 other lower-ranking government members who resigned in the past days as a way to pressure Starmer to resign following the Labour Party's defeat in the 2026 local elections.

Meanwhile, the number of Labour MPs calling on Starmer to resign has grown to 81.

🔗 https://news.sky.com/story/politics-latest-local-elections-england-scotland-wales-2026-starmer-12593360