Originally Posted By -daddy:

I go sans glove, helps with the grip strength

*and I'll stop with the drift*

Originally Posted By PeepEater:

Kushner is so skeezy even Ben Shapiro called him out for being skeezy in his business deals and his dad is a criminal that got pardoned  after he donated to Trump.

BREAKING: Tonight, the U.S. military carried out strikes against IRGC Navy targets following another deadly attack on commercial shipping in and around the Strait of Hormuz.

Earlier today, the Antigua and Barbuda-flagged bulk carrier MV Cape Dao was attacked by means of Iranian one-way attack drones while sailing toward India near the Strait of Hormuz. The attack killed Indian seafarer Suraj Yadav, a 26-year-old wiper from Deoria, Uttar Pradesh.

According to the Forward Seamen’s Union of India (FSUI), MV Cape Dao was carrying 28 crew members, including 20 Indians, when it was struck twice on its port side—one hit affecting the C-deck accommodation area and another striking the hull near the engine room.

The Indian government confirmed the death of an Indian national and condemned the continuing attacks against commercial shipping, seafarers and civilian infrastructure in the region.

The timing of tonight’s U.S. strikes follows the latest attack on commercial shipping, although an official U.S. statement establishing that the strikes were specifically ordered in retaliation for the attack on MV Cape Dao has not yet been confirmed.

Senior Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) commander Hossein Zarifi was killed during an operation in Saravan in Iran’s southeastern Sistan-Baluchistan province, the state-linked Tasnim news agency reports

Originally Posted By BM1455:

\uD83D\uDEA8 \uD83D\uDEA8???? | ???? ??????? ???? ??????  ?? ???? ????? ????? ?????? ???????? ????? «????? ???? ??????????» ?? ??????? ?????? ???????? ????????? ???? ???????? ????? ?? ??????? ?????? ?????.
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Mohamad Ahwaze  (@MohamadAhwaze) September 23, 2026

"URGENT | Killing of General Hossein Zarifi, from the Iranian Revolutionary Guard's Quds Force and commander of the "Sajjad Operational Base" in Saravan, in Iran's Balochistan region, during armed clashes with Baloch armed groups.  
The killing of a military commander at this level is considered a major development, and constitutes a notable escalation in the ongoing confrontations in Iran's Balochistan region."

Inside a warehouse in the southern Yemeni port of Aden, weapons experts worked their way through the contents of a shipping container from a commercial vessel that had been en-route to Hodeida, a Red Sea city controlled by the Houthis.

It was July, and the cargo had been sitting under guard for months. Spread before the authorities were industrial machines, chemicals and components shipped from China and bound for the Iran-backed militant group. Some looked innocuous. Others did not.

Among them were rear fins and other parts resembling components used to assemble an Iranian ballistic missile.

There was phenolic resin – a heat resistant material used in missile production – and other parts the investigators suspected could be used to manufacture drones and missiles.

“When I first saw the contents, it was clear that this shipment was different from the others we had seen,” said Fawaz Al Bsesi, Director General of Aden’s Land, Sea and Air Ports Department, a branch of the city’s Counter Terrorism Unit and part of the security apparatus set up by Yemen’s internationally-recognized government fighting the Houthis.

Once heavily reliant on Iran for finished weapons, the Houthis are now able to manufacture weapons inside Yemen, giving the group the kind of autonomy military power it’s never previously enjoyed.

Together with other seizures in the past two years, the cargo provides new evidence of how the Houthis’ military industrial complex has expanded thanks to equipment and parts from China, according to interviews with Yemeni officials, intelligence sources, shipping experts, UN reports and customs data.

The discovery in July came at a pivotal moment. As the inspection unfolded, the Houthis were being drawn deeper into the US-Iran conflict, preparing missiles and drones that would by September strike Saudi Arabia’s oil infrastructure and readying troops to advance toward coastal areas bordering and within the strategic Bab el-Mandeb Strait.

By mid-September, the Houthis had captured all of Yemen’s Red Sea coastline including islands in the middle of the Bab el-Mandeb, and Saudi Arabia had called upon the US for support.

Earlier this month, the group also claimed to have shot down a Saudi fighter jet with missiles at altitudes not previously reached by other members of Iran’s Axis of Resistance.

A Saudi government spokesman didn’t respond to a request for comment on the claim.

With Iran and the US blocking shipments through the Strait of Hormuz, a potential Houthi blockade of the Bab el-Mandeb could further slow traffic in the Red Sea, through which roughly 12% of the world’s seaborne goods pass

The July inspection, carried out at the request of the United Nations Panel of Experts, was the culmination of an investigation that had begun nine months earlier with an unusually specific tip from US intelligence.

The Americans had told Yemeni authorities to watch for a shipping container linked to Yemeni businessman Fares al-Muayyad, and look inside for phenolic resin, according to the Aden authorities.

A Saudi-led coalition has restricted goods entering Houthi-held ports since intervening in Yemen in 2015, part of an effort to prevent weapons from reaching the group.

While there is a UN arms embargo on territory controlled by the Houthis, commercial goods are still allowed to enter ports controlled by the rebel group. Al-Muayyad didn’t respond to a request for comment.

By late October last year, Yemeni counterterrorism officers knew where to find the container.

It was aboard the Zhu Cheng Xin Zhou, a commercial vessel heading toward Hodeida, according to the container’s bill of lading and interdiction data provided to Bloomberg by the Aden Counter Terrorism Unit.

But when the ship called at Aden on Oct. 28, Yemeni authorities, acting on the US tip, seized the container. The US Office of the Director of National Intelligence didn’t respond to a request for comment.

Because most of the components are dual use — meaning they have both military and civilian uses — they wouldn’t violate the UN arms embargo on the Houthis.

There’s no evidence that the Chinese companies involved knew the ultimate destination of their products.

“What we don't know is whether the engineering workshops in China are aware that they are producing missile components,” said Henry Thompson, an arms expert and former member of the UN Panel of Experts on Yemens.

The US has increasingly sanctioned China-based companies and individuals it accuses of supplying Iran’s military with sensitive dual-use goods, including last September when it targeted Chinese and other suppliers of the Houthis.

At a UN Security Council meeting on July 14, the US, citing a UN agency that monitors shipments into Yemen, said that “more than 70% of the prohibited or restricted dual-use items seized between January 2025 and April 2026 originated in China,” according to the transcript.

China’s representative said “China rejects the baseless accusations leveled by the US.”

In response to August sanctions against an East Asian procurement network the US said helped Iranian military institutions obtain missile-related technology, China said its cooperation with Iran was lawful under international law and should not be targeted by US sanctions.

Beijing has long cultivated Saudi Arabia as a key strategic partner in the region, and recently privately asked Iran to rein in the Houthis, Reuters reported last week.

A spokesperson for the Chinese Foreign Ministry didn’t directly respond to questions on commercial and dual use items being used by the Houthis for weapons.

"As a permanent member of the UN Security Council and a responsible major country, China has always earnestly implemented Security Council resolutions and shouldered its due international obligations," the spokesperson said.

The intervention in Aden ended a journey that had begun more than six months earlier in southern China.

Shipping records show the container was loaded aboard the CMA CGM Puccini in Nansha on April 11 and 15 days later reached Djibouti, where cargo bound for Hodeida undergoes UN weapons verification.

It remained there for months before being loaded onto the Zhu Cheng on Oct. 21.

The discovery led investigators to three other containers linked to al-Muayyad that had arrived in Aden months earlier aboard the CMA CGM Verdi, which left Guangzhou in March 2025.

Originally bound for Hodeida, those containers had been re-routed after Israeli strikes caused severe damage to the port.

The Yemeni forces told the US about the other containers belonging to Al-Muayyad sitting in Aden and inspected them this July.

The owner and manager of the Zhu Cheng didn’t respond to a request for comment. CMA CGM didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

“The components were deliberately split across four containers to make the shipment harder to detect,” said Al Bsesi, who has spent 15 years inspecting cargo at Yemeni ports.

Inside were suspected missile components, control systems and launch equipment that Al Bsesi said complemented what had been found in the first container.

The cargo also included computer-controlled machine tools capable of producing precision components used in drones, missiles and other weapons; two-cylinder engines of the type used in drones; and digging and ventilation equipment the Houthis could use when building underground tunnels.

“Since the vast majority of these components are intended for military purposes and manufacturing, with only a small number being dual-use — civilian and military — their trade constitutes a clear violation of the UN arms embargo imposed on the Houthis,” the Aden Counter Terrorism Unit said in a statement.

Al Bsesi wrote to his superiors that his agents had uncovered “a complete missile structure distributed among the three containers.”

A representative for the Houthis didn’t respond to a request for comment.

Given there is very little industrial capacity in Houthi territory, it was unlikely such material was being used for civilian purposes, to build factories or plants, according to experts.

“Some items are almost certainly components of missiles, others are much more ambiguous,” said Thompson, pointing to their shape, materials and what appears to be a fin for a large missile.

“However, taken as a whole, and given the sporadic series of similar shipments that included machined parts, machine tools, and what are very clearly weapons components, it is almost certain that this shipment is intended for the Houthi military industrial complex.”

Wolf-Christian Paes, Associate Fellow for Armed Conflict at the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) and another former member of the UN's Panel of Experts, added: “Had you found the exact same pieces at Hamburg port going to a legitimate address, you would have come to a different assessment.”

While most of the equipment is classified as dual-use, weapons experts and Aden’s Counter Terrorism Unit say the concentration of so many suspect items in a single shipment points to an increasingly diversified Houthi procurement network.

“Ten or fifteen years ago, good quality components for drones basically had to come from American or European manufacturers. But now, Chinese manufacturers make parts that are just as good or better than Western ones at lower cost,” said Peter Salisbury, a Columbia University adjunct professor who led a recent report on Houthi weapons manufacturing for the Century Foundation, a policy think tank.

Early in their long fight for control of Yemen, the Houthis were dismissed as a ragtag militia fighting in sandals and pickup trucks, until they took control of the Yemeni capital in 2014.

Since then, they’ve fought off a Saudi-led coalition campaign to oust them, and developed into a sophisticated military and political force with hundreds of thousands of fighters and an arsenal capable of destroying US-made MQ-9 Reaper drones.

In the past week, the Houthis have fired a barrage of missiles and drones at Saudi Arabia, targeting the capital Riyadh.

The Houthis finance their military by taxing businesses and oil imports and by smuggling. They also get telecommunications revenue and benefit from external financial networks, according to UN experts and the US Treasury, which estimates they generate hundreds of millions of dollars a year by “working with Yemeni businessmen to tax petroleum imports.”

They have received funding from Iran, too.

For the past two years, the US and Israel have operated on the assumption that weakening Iran will inevitably weaken the Houthis.

But the group could strike far beyond Yemen well before the latest regional wars, firing ballistic and cruise missiles and long-range drones at Saudi Arabia and the UAE.

Since 2024, it has turned many of those same weapons on Israel.

That growing independence is the product of years of Iranian support.

“The Houthis have their own ideology and ambitions, but without Iranian backing, they would never have become the threat to Yemen, let alone the region that they are today,” said Nadwa al Dawsari, non-resident fellow at the Middle East Institute.

“Hundreds of IRGC commanders have operated inside Yemen since 2014, some even earlier, guiding, mentoring, and supporting Houthi military operations and helping the group develop its own weapons production and manufacturing capabilities,” she added.

Today though, the Houthis are capable of carrying out their project with much more autonomy.

For decades, Yemeni merchants have traveled to Guangzhou and other Chinese trading centers in search of cheap goods to sell back home.

But ties really began to increase twelve years ago when civil war broke out in Yemen. After the Houthis seized Sana’a in 2014, China started to become more economically important to the Red Sea state.

The war devastated Yemen’s universities and thousands of Yemeni students also began studying at Chinese universities and institutes.

It was then that a generation of Yemeni traders in China emerged who knew the factories and brokers needed to move goods from China through Djibouti and into Yemen.

Those networks offered the Houthis a ready-made way to source what they needed. An engine could be bought from one Chinese supplier, electronics from another and before too long entire weapons systems were being packed alongside ordinary goods as a way to avoid sanctions.

Shipping and interdiction records provided by the Aden Counter Terrorism Unit from this year identify dozens of containers travelling under 41 bills of lading from Chinese exporters, many based in Guangzhou, that the Yemeni authorities say were part of the same network.

In 25 of the records, the Yemeni importer named on the shipping documents was changed while the cargo was in transit – a pattern the Aden Counter Terrorism Unit says was intended to obscure the Houthi-linked companies behind the cargo as shipping routes into Yemen were changing.

“This is just further evidence that the Houthis are trying every trick in the book to get around efforts to monitor and stop what they are doing,” said Salisbury.

Goods bound for Houthi-controlled Red Sea ports typically pass through Djibouti, where the UN Verification and Inspection Mechanism for Yemen screens commercial shipping.

Established in 2016 at the request of Yemen’s internationally-recognized government, UNVIM was designed to facilitate commercial imports into Houthi-controlled areas amid restrictions imposed by the Saudi-led coalition, while ensuring compliance with the UN arms embargo.

But the mechanism’s powers are limited. It can inspect cargos and report violations, but it cannot seize goods.

Asked about Chinese dual-use goods reaching the Houthis, a UN spokesperson said the issue was “outside of the UNVIM mandate.”

Two well-publicized seizures in August 2025 and July 2026 marked the first time conclusive evidence pointed to the Houthis acquiring Chinese-sourced components to make drones and missiles at home.

The August 2025 shipment included engines, machinery components and raw materials used in making and repairing drones and missiles, as well as tunneling equipment and ventilation machines, according to arms experts.

The Houthis buy in bulk via a Yemeni network, but much of what’s needed to build a Houthi Qasef 2-K drone, the Houthis’ version of Iran’s Ababil-T, can also be bought via the Chinese e-commerce conglomerate, Alibaba, in just a few clicks.

The shopping list includes engines, GPS units, antennas, flight controllers and batteries, as well as fiberglass resin and other materials used to construct the airframe — various versions of which were found in the recently seized shipments.

Type “flight controller” into Alibaba or AliExpress and the site’s algorithm suggests the many other parts used in a drone, including servos, batteries, wiring and avionics.

“As a global marketplace, Alibaba.com strictly prohibits sellers from selling military drones and dual-use items on our platform, and we actively enforce policies to prevent the misuse of civilian products for unauthorized purposes,” Alibaba.com, the B2B arm of Alibaba Group, said in a statement.

All these items have legitimate civilian uses. But their ready availability means much of the hardware needed to build an attack drone can be sourced through the same commercial marketplaces that sell ordinary industrial and electronic equipment.

This highlights both how hard it is for inspectors in Yemen to clamp down on components entering their territory that could be used for military purposes and how easy it is for importers doing business with the Houthis to help the group circumnavigate sanctions and the UN arms embargo.

“It’s just like shopping on Amazon,” said Thompson.

— With assistance from Hayley Warren

Originally Posted By brass:


He was in a firefight. Getting killed in a running gunfight and being assassinated by the Ginsu are two entirely different things.