Trump Administration Reinstates Iran Oil Sanctions
Posted By: Mercedes44, 7/8/2026 5:43:22 AM
The Treasury Department revoked a sanctions waiver issued on June 21 that had temporarily allowed transactions involving Iranian crude oil, petroleum products, and petrochemicals. Under the new guidance, companies have until July 17 to wind down transactions previously authorized under the waiver. The original authorization had been set to remain in effect through Aug. 21. The waiver was issued as part of a ceasefire memorandum of understanding (MOU) reached between the United States and Iran following months of conflict. A U.S. official said the agreement was always contingent on Iran’s behavior.
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Mercedes44"
Federal judge hands Trump big win, directs
DHS to restore voter verification features
of SAVE system 0 replies
DHS to restore voter verification features
of SAVE system 0 replies
federal judge in Florida on Tuesday ordered the Department of Homeland Security to restore some of the key features of its Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements system, which states use to verify citizenship and immigration status for voter rolls.
The ruling overturns a D.C. judge's ruling, who determined that the SAVE system's features, including a feature that allowed workers to verify citizenship status through a resident's social security number, violated the Social Security Act and Privacy Act by improperly aggregating and using Americans’ personal data.
The SAVE system was enhanced under the Trump administration to better support state election integrity efforts, including maintenance of state voter rolls.
Far-left Muslim Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed is facing renewed scrutiny after newly surfaced audio revealed him explicitly supporting efforts to defund police departments. In his previous interviews, El-Sayed has denied ever calling to defund the police, arguing that his old social media posts were misrepresented after being taken out of context. But recordings from 2020 tell a different story. In one interview from June 2020, El-Sayed said he believed police funding should be reduced while more taxpayer dollars should be directed toward schools, mental health services, and anti-poverty programs.
CENTCOM said the strikes were intended to impose “heavy costs” on Iran for targeting civilian-crewed commercial shipping in an international waterway, describing the attacks as “unwarranted” and “dangerous.” The operation came as Washington and Tehran were implementing a memorandum of understanding aimed at ending months of regional conflict and restoring safe navigation through the strategic waterway. The escalation followed a series of Iranian attacks on commercial vessels transiting the Strait of Hormuz over Monday and Tuesday, including a Qatari liquefied natural gas tanker and a Saudi tanker, prompting condemnations from Gulf states,
The Treasury Department revoked a sanctions waiver issued on June 21 that had temporarily allowed transactions involving Iranian crude oil, petroleum products, and petrochemicals. Under the new guidance, companies have until July 17 to wind down transactions previously authorized under the waiver. The original authorization had been set to remain in effect through Aug. 21.
The waiver was issued as part of a ceasefire memorandum of understanding (MOU) reached between the United States and Iran following months of conflict. A U.S. official said the agreement was always contingent on Iran’s behavior.
Embattled Senate Candidate Graham Platner
Won’t Drop Out Unless He Can Choose
His Replacement 0 replies
Won’t Drop Out Unless He Can Choose
His Replacement 0 replies
Maine Democrat candidate Graham Platner is refusing to drop out of the Senate race after being accused of rape unless he gets to approve his successor, the New York Post reported Tuesday.
The political winds shifted decidedly against the Maine Democrat Monday, after the latest sexual abuse allegations dropped in POLITICO.
A woman who once dated Platner, a fellow Democrat, told the outlet that he broke into her house and “forced her to have sex with him nearly five years ago despite her repeated objections.”
Platner called the allegations “categorically false,” but stated he would be pausing his campaign nonetheless.
California Democrats spent years trying to strangle ICE detention in their state. Trump's DHS just spent $1.5 billion to make sure that doesn't work.
President Donald Trump's Department of Homeland Security has purchased two of the largest ICE detention facilities in California, securing more than 4,500 detention beds in a state where Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) has made blocking immigration enforcement a signature political cause. CoreCivic, the nation's largest private prison and detention operator, announced Monday that DHS completed the purchase on July 2 of the 2,560-bed California City Detention Facility and the 1,994-bed Otay Mesa Detention Center in San Diego,
I fell asleep every summer night to the wobbling sound of a window fan — and I still do.
I grew up in a modest two-story home typical of the 1960s and 1970s — red brick on the bottom, white aluminum siding on the top. There were four bedrooms upstairs and a master bedroom downstairs (my parents’ bedroom, which they added onto the back of our house in 1972). Only one house in our neighborhood had air conditioning back then. It was locked up tighter than Fort Knox.
As I explain in my book “Misadventures of a 1970s Childhood,” most houses were wide open all summer.
What a difference political affiliation makes. Democrat Graham Platner is now on the outs with the party, not because of assaulting women, but because he is accused of assaulting a fellow Democrat. That party has lost its soul, as has the media. When Platner was accused of assaulting and abusing a conservative woman he dated, none of these people cared. “She can’t be trusted, she’s a conservative activist,” they said. The devotion to victims, the currency of victimhood, disappeared when it wasn’t one of “their team.”
Ro Khana,
Oxford Study Finds Leftist Bias in AI
5 replies
Artificial intelligence--or, more accurately, what we call artificial intelligence today versus actual intelligence--is practically a buzzword these days. Numerous businesses claim to use it for whatever the hell they're doing, and it's been applied in a number of unique and beneficial ways. I like to use it to help parse data or collect resources from multiple searches at once and present it as a semi-coherent whole. I just double-check everything it says, because when I asked it to rank influential writers in a certain subject, it completely made up someone who never existed and ranked them eighth, and it's not the first bit of stupid I've seen.
As the Department of Government Efficiency, OR DOGE, officially sunsets and federal hiring accelerates, with targeted surges at critical agencies and a push to insource work, the real story may be simpler than partisan theater: Sometimes you have to cut before you can right-size and the resulting criticism from Democrats and others didn’t change the underlying need for functional government operations.
Democrats in the modern era have been proponents of a large federal workforce they say is essential to delivering government services. They decried President Donald Trump’s DOGE cuts as reckless and harmful.
Finally, the truth is coming out.
The Washington, DC, Metropolitan Police Department released over 1,000 hours of body-worn camera footage from the January 6, 2021 protests at the US Capitol — a whopping 1,630 videos in all.
And it didn’t happen because the government suddenly decided to be transparent. It happened because Judicial Watch dragged them into court and won.
According to Judicial Watch, the videos were released because of an April 2026 court ruling in a DC Freedom of Information Act case.
Critics were skeptical of President Donald Trump’s implementation of tariffs on a variety of imported products from countries like China, but the results are speaking for themselves. U.S. manufacturing reached its highest growth in four years in May and companies are promising multi-billion-dollar investments to develop critical pharmaceuticals, semiconductors, safe electrical equipment, and many more products in the United States.
According to the Institute for Supply Management’s Purchasing Managers’ Index (PMI), U.S. manufacturing rose 1.3 percentage points in May, marking the fifth consecutive month of growth and the highest recording of the index since May 2022. This is a significant healthy signal that U.S. companies are beginning to compete once again.
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'Overturn this' - Belgium mock US President
Donald Trump and FIFA after USA World
Cup exit 32 replies
Donald Trump and FIFA after USA World
Cup exit 32 replies
The USA's World Cup dream came to an end in Seattle as Belgium cruised into the last eight with a 4-1 victory; Charles De Ketelaere scored twice in the first half, while Hans Vanaken and Romelu Lukaku added further goals after the break to book a quarter-final meeting with Spain. The PR circus surrounding FIFA's decision to rescind Folarin Balogun's red card and Donald Trump's involvement in the supposedly independent process had dominated the headlines ahead of the last-16 clash in Seattle. However, it appeared only to galvanise Belgium as they thrashed USA 4-1 to book a quarter-final with Spain.
BANGOR, Maine — Maine author Stephen King appears to be standing behind Graham Platner, even as the Senate candidate faces allegations of sexual assault and growing calls to end his campaign. Posting on 'X' shortly after POLITICO published testimony from a Maine woman who accused Platner of assaulting her in 2021, the prolific horror writer wrote "Graham Platner may drop out. I hope he doesn't, but." King then went on to reference President Donald Trump, and the numerous sexual misconduct allegations he has faced over the years, calling him the "Abuser in Chief." President Trump has consistently denied several public allegations
Report: Mitch McConnell Speaking to Others
by Phone, Discussing Iran, Platner Scandal
in Maine 17 replies
by Phone, Discussing Iran, Platner Scandal
in Maine 17 replies
Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY) is alert and has taken phone calls, discussing a variety of topics, according to reports.
CNN’s Scott Jennings said he spoke with his “old friend” McConnell on Tuesday morning, asserting that they discussed a variety of topics for nearly 20 minutes.
He wrote, “I spoke to my old friend Mitch McConnell this morning, the senior Senator from Kentucky. He’s still recovering in the hospital. We talked for just shy of 20 minutes … about IRAN, UKRAINE, the unfolding situation in MAINE, my visit to the TR Presidential Library, and even a little bit of Senate history.”
There aren’t many political mysteries from 2016 that still have the power to set the internet on fire like the unsolved murder of DNC staffer Seth Rich.The official theory is that the 27-year-old was shot near his D.C. home during a botched robbery. His family has rejected all claims that he was somehow connected to WikiLeaks or murdered because of his work at the DNC, and they’ve asked people not to politicize their son’s death.
But the questions never went away, mostly because so many details surrounding the case are
But then Julian Assange entered the chat, and things got a lot more curious…
An Inspector General audit of the Minority Business Development Agency’s flagship program found that 96 percent of the reviewed transactions should not have been approved, revealing a stunning lack of oversight at the now-defunct agency and raising questions about what will happen if Democrats revive the program.
The November 2025 audit, which has not been previously reported, reviewed $16 billion in transactions approved by the MBDA business center program, a network of federally funded consultancies, public and private, aimed at supporting minority-owned businesses, which had to be at least 51 percent minority-owned to qualify for services. The audit found that $15.4 billion of the $16 billion in transactions reviewed
Two structural support beams on the 21st floor of a 38-story under-construction building in Manhattan started buckling Tuesday morning, triggering a mass evacuation, street closures and a large emergency response, officials say.
The FDNY said it got a call around 8 a.m. about bricks falling from the building at 235 East 42nd Street, between Second and Third avenues. The NYPD says it got a 911 call about the incident less than 15 minutes later.
[snip]
Raw footage from inside, taken by a construction worker, showed crumbling steel beams on the 21st floor.
President Trump has reacted to the rise of the Democratic Socialists of America by sounding the alarm about communism, which greatly upset Associated Press fact-checker Melissa Goldin on Thursday because, according to her, only card-carrying members of the Communist Party USA can be called communists.
Goldin cited two Trump quotes. The first was, “It’s the biggest threat to our country, including World War I, World War II, Pearl Harbor, September 11th.” The second was referring to Democrats as “hard core, godless communists.”
She also lamented, “But experts say
Platner Accuser: ‘I Really Agree with
His Politics’, That’s One Reason ‘I
Didn’t Come Out’ 10 replies
His Politics’, That’s One Reason ‘I
Didn’t Come Out’ 10 replies
During an interview aired on Monday’s broadcast of CNN’s “The Lead,” Jenny Racicot, who is accusing Democratic U.S. Senate candidate Graham Platner of rape, said that “I really agree with his politics. I think we need somebody with those political stances and who are willing to do the work. And I see his political videos. They get me fired up as well. I understand why people want someone like him in office.” And that is one reason she was reluctant to come forward.
Host Jake Tapper asked, “There are going to be people, maybe even his campaign, certainly his supporters, who say this is politically motivated. What would you say to
The Smithsonian's Patriotism Problem
9 replies
"Warning: The exhibits in this museum were prepared by people who don't want you to love your country." (snip) Yet Anthea Hartig, director of the museum today, has other priorities, including using history as a "prime tool of social justice."
Hartig is white, but rather than punishing herself for her "privilege," she's trying to lay a guilt trip on the whole country, using taxpayer dollars to "problematize" the history she's supposed to preserve.
(snip) can the public trust that responsibility to someone like Hartig, who claims to have been "propped up ... by the cushions of whiteness and the pillows of the bourgeoisie"?
Iran’s Revolutionary Guards fired at least two missiles at commercial ships transiting through the Strait of Hormuz on Monday night, Axios reported, citing two US officials.
Two commercial ships suffered significant damage but had no casualties, the report said, citing a US official.
Separately, Britain’s maritime security agency said a tanker caught fire after being hit by an unknown projectile east of Oman’s Limah early on Tuesday.
Disgraced former politician Andrew Gillum, a one-time Democratic Party rising star and CNN political commentator, has been arrested in Alabama for allegedly having drugs, according to records.
Gillum – who narrowly lost to Ron DeSantis in the 2018 gubernatorial election – was arrested Thursday in Daphne before being booked for possession of dangerous drugs, [snip]
His run-in with the law comes six years after he was found inebriated inside Miami Beach’s Mondrian hotel room alongside a male escort and three bags of suspected crystal meth.
In 2022, Gillum was accused of conspiring with his mentor, Sharon Lettman-Hicks, to divert campaign contributions for personal use.
A Midtown high-rise was evacuated Tuesday morning after massive beams inside the under-construction building started buckling — sending some floors caving in and bricks raining down under the crushing strain.
The 38-story commercial building at 235 East 42nd Street was cleared around 8:11 a.m. after construction workers spotted two faulty support beams bending and starting to give way on the 21st and 22nd floors, according to the NYPD and FDNY.
Fire officials said floors between the 21st and 26th floors were sagging from the pressure.