🇺🇸🇮🇷⚡️- "The main loading facility for Iranian oil, Kharg island, we've seen there has been no loading in three days, we believe there storage is full, none of the ships are getting out, none are coming in, so they're not able to store oil on the water.

They're gonna start shutting down their production, we can see that that's happening from satellite." - Scott Bessent, US Treasury Secretary.

🇺🇸🇮🇷⚡️- “US Central Command was created in direct response to the threats posed by the Islamic Republic of Iran.

For 47 years, the Iranian regime has terrorized the region and made hostility to the U.S. a core tenet of its rule.

Their hostile, lethal track record against the U.S. is well documented.

In just the last 30 months prior to the commencement of Epic Fury, Iranian-supported terror groups have attacked U.S. troops and diplomats more than 350 times —the equivalent of an attack more than every third day— killing four U.S. servicemembers and wounding nearly 200 more.

In less than 40 days, CENTCOM forces achieved our military objectives. With 90% of its defense industrial base destroyed, Iran won't be able to reconstitute those weapons for years.” - Admiral Brad Cooper, CENTCOM Commander.

🇺🇸⚡️- Border Patrol Chief Michael Banks has resigned after 37 years of public service. Thus marking the second major immigration official to resign this month, along with ICE Director Todd Lyons.

📢 🇺🇸 🐸 Take your own side - Nick Fuentes

📎 Grimaldus

🗳 🇺🇸 ✅️ The Louisiana State Senate has passed the new Redistricted Map

Final Vote:
🟢 Yes: 27
🔴 No: 10

Current Map:
🔴 Republicans: 4
🔵 Democrats: 2

New Map:
🔴 Republicans: 5 (+1)
🔵 Democrats: 1 (-1)

📎 OpenSourceZone

🇺🇲🇨🇺⚡️- CIA Director J. Radcliffe met with members of the Cuban government in Havana.

☢️ 🇺🇸 🇻🇪 U.S. removes highly enriched uranium from Venezuela in ‘accelerated’ secret mission

📎 Alex Raufoglu

🇾🇪🇸🇦⚡️- The internationally recognised and Saudi backed Yemeni government and the Iran-aligned Houthi group will exchange more than 1,600 prisoners, the office of the U.N. special ​envoy for Yemen said on Thursday, marking the largest release ‌of detainees since the outbreak of the war in Yemen.

Under the agreement, the Houthis will ​release 580 prisoners, including seven Saudis and 20 Sudanese, while the ⁠government will release 1,100 Houthi prisoners.

🇺🇸🇨🇳⚡️- President Donald Trump defends Chinese President Xi Jinping for referring to the United States as a “declining nation” and also said that the “decimation of Iran” is “to be continued.”

📝 🇨🇳 🇺🇸 China Increasingly Views Trump’s America as an Empire in Decline

China increasingly casts itself not as a fading civilization trying to catch up to the West but as a superpower poised to surpass it. Chinese nationalists and state-linked commentators say they have Mr. Trump to thank. America under his rule, they say, validates Mr. Xi’s worldview centered on “the rise of the East and decline of the West.”

In January, a nationalistic Beijing think tank affiliated with Renmin University published a triumphant report about Mr. Trump’s first year back in office. The report argued that his tariffs, attacks on allies, anti-immigration policies and assaults on the American political establishment had inadvertently strengthened China while weakening the United States. Its title: “Thank Trump.”

The report called Mr. Trump an “accelerator of American political decay,” with the United States sliding toward polarization, institutional dysfunction and even “Latin American-style instability.” His hostility toward China, the authors argued, was a “reverse booster” that unified the country and helped bring about its strategic self-reliance.

“At this turning point in history,” the authors wrote, “what we hear is the heavy and haunting toll of an empire’s evening bell.”

Such language, once confined largely to nationalist corners of the Chinese internet, has increasingly entered mainstream political discourse.

Evidence of this shift is measurable: The use of terms related to “American decline” in official Chinese sources nearly doubled in 2025, according to a study by two Brookings Institution researchers.

The narrative of American decline did not begin with Mr. Trump. For years, Chinese state media and nationalist pundits have highlighted mass shootings, homelessness, political polarization and economic inequality in the United States as evidence of the failures of Western democracy. More recently, official outlets embraced the viral phrase “kill line,” borrowed from video game culture, to describe what they portrayed as the irreversible downward spiral facing America’s working poor. It’s a familiar tactic of the Communist Party to distract the Chinese public from the country’s own issues.

A 31-year-old education consultant in northern China who advises families on overseas study told me that parents who had once aspired to Ivy League degrees for their children now saw America as “too chaotic.” A decade ago, more than 80 percent of his students considered the United States for study abroad, said the consultant, who asked me to use only his family name, Wang, for fear of government retribution. Now, he estimated, the figure has fallen to 45 percent.

“The America that represented wealth, freedom and institutional confidence feels like it belonged to a different era,” Mr. Wang said.

Among China’s foreign policy analysts, the conversation has turned to what Beijing can gain from the bilateral relationship, which has become more transactional under Mr. Trump than under President Joseph R. Biden Jr.

“Only China can save Trump,” said Huang Jing, a professor at Shanghai International Studies University, during a media event that was livestreamed in late 2025. With the U.S. midterm elections approaching, he argued, Mr. Trump needed visible wins such as Chinese purchases of American soybeans, corn and natural gas that could play well in swing states.

“Since Trump,” Mr. Huang said at the event, “the United States has become increasingly prone to compromise.”

Wu Xinbo, a leading American studies scholar at Fudan University, offered a similar assessment. If Republicans lose control of the House this fall, he said at the same event, Mr. Trump is likely to pivot toward his foreign policy legacy, creating space for a larger accommodation with Beijing.

The war in Iran has reinforced the view that China has the upper hand with Mr. Trump. At a conference in late April, Mr. Wu argued that the war reduced Washington’s leverage against China while increasing Beijing’s by consuming American military and diplomatic attention in the Middle East.

Beijing’s export-dependent economy needs a stable international order to function. An erratic United States threatens that stability in ways a confident, predictable America never did, Zongyuan Zoe Liu, an economist at the Council for Foreign Relations, told me.

Mr. Xi “is getting the United States he always wanted,” she said, “and the America he most feared at the same time.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/12/business/china-trump-xi-decline.html

🇺🇸⚡️- On this day we remember the beginning of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, when Capt. Meriwether Lewis and Lt. William Clark led the Corps of Discovery into the vast unknown. Two of the Republic’s earliest legendary Army officers, they were defined by duty to country, courage in the face of hardship, and a loyal friendship that became one of the great bonds in American history. Their expedition helped unite a continent and shape a nation from ocean to ocean.

— 🇺🇸/🇨🇳/🇮🇷 Reporter: ‘What exactly did President Trump ask President Xi for when it comes to Iran?’

Secretary of State Marco Rubio: ‘He didn’t ask him for anything. We’re not asking for China’s help, we don’t need their help. What matters is Iran cannot have a nuclear weapon.’

@Middle_East_Spectator