IDF Releases Photoshopped Picture to Justify Killing Journalist

After Israel’s military killed three journalists in a strike on Lebanon Saturday, they took to social media to gloat about the death of one in particular.

“ELIMINATED: For years, Ali Hassan Shaib operated as a Hezbollah Radwan Force terrorist under the guise of a journalist. Turns out the ‘press vest’ was just a cover for terror,” the official X account for the Israel Defence Forces wrote.

The post was accompanied by a collage of Shoaib (the correct spelling of his last name, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists, or CPJ), which showed him dressed half in a press vest and half in a military uniform.

When questioned about the image by Fox News’s chief foreign correspondent, Trey Yingst, the IDF admitted that the image of Shoaib in a military uniform was faked.

“Unfortunately there isn’t really a picture of it, it was photoshopped,” the IDF said.

Shoaib was a reporter for Lebanese TV station Al-Manar TV. The station is affiliated with Hezbollah, an Islamist political group that has been at war with Israel since late 2023.

Al Jazeera reported that the strike consisted of three precision missiles, which hit a “clearly marked press vehicle” that also contained siblings and media members Fatima and Mohammed Ftouni. Another precision missile later hit the same vehicle, killing a paramedic who had arrived to assist the victims.

The Israeli government admitted that it had targeted Shoaib but has not provided evidence that he was a terrorist, or even a combatant in the war, according to CPJ. Instead, the IDF said the strike that killed Shoaib “is being further investigated.”

Eleven media members have been killed in Lebanon since the Israel-Gaza war began in 2023. Two hundred fifty-nine have died in the conflict altogether, CPJ reports, of whom 256 were killed by Israeli forces.

Nebraska’s Senate primary has been thrown into chaos, all because of a 79-year-old pastor who is either an extremely bizarre Democrat or a Republican plant meant to split the vote.

William Forbes entered Nebraska’s Democratic primary in early March, just before the state’s filing deadline, CNN reported Monday. This came in defiance of state Democratic Party leadership, who are backing independent candidate Dan Osborn in the race to defeat incumbent Republican Senator Pete Ricketts. State Democrats had not submitted anyone for their own primary so Osborn could go directly to the general election without facing a Democratic challenger.

The move is an unorthodox one by state Democrats, but it could pay dividends. In 2024, Osborn, a Navy veteran and union leader, came within seven points of defeating Republican Senator Deb Fischer. It was a shocking moment: A progressive independent with zero name recognition almost defeated an establishment Republican, while President Donald Trump carried the state by 20 points. Strategists suggested at the time that Osborn was the perfect example of the kind of candidate Democrats should run to win back working-class voters.

But the Osborn plan has since been upended by Forbes. If Forbes wins the primary, he will likely take hundreds of votes away from Osborn simply because he will technically be the Democratic candidate. These votes could be crucial in such a low-population state.

Things begin to smell fishy when one looks into Forbes’s political history. According to CNN, Forbes has voted for Trump multiple times and is anti-abortion. While he told CNN he was a lifelong Democrat and not a GOP plant, he could not name a single Democrat he had voted for in the past. Instead, Forbes “grew frustrated and said the party needed to return to the ‘morality’ it represented under President John F. Kennedy.”

Forbes attended a conference in January sponsored by the Nebraska GOP. “I’m trying to get information from everybody,” he said when asked why he went to the event. “I think for myself. I’m a free thinker.”

Forbes also deleted a Facebook page containing some of his sermons, which were reviewed by CNN and contain indications that he is more conservative than he claims.

In one sermon, Forbes criticized the Black Lives Matter and Occupy Wall Street protests, as well as “cultural Marxism,” which he said was harming American institutions. In another, he referred to Joe Biden as “dementia Joe”; in a third, he thanked Florida Governor Ron DeSantis and ex-Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem for restricting abortion rights.

“He is running to trick voters,” Nebraska Democratic Party Chair Jane Kleeb said on March 3, adding that Forbes’s campaign was a “political maneuver engineered by Pete Ricketts to split the opposition vote.” Ricketts’s campaign denies this.

State Democrats are fighting back through a woman named Cindy Burbank, who filed for the Democratic primary solely to defeat Forbes and has said she plans to immediately drop out if she wins and endorse Osborn. Nebraska’s Republican secretary of state initially removed Burbank from the ballot, arguing she couldn’t run in good faith after making such statements. Burbank promptly took her case to the state Supreme Court and was reinstated.

This wacky state race will be a fascinating one to watch—the dates to remember are Nebraska’s Democratic primary, on May 12, and the state’s Senate elections, on November 3. Hopefully Democrats—through an independent—can flip the Senate through the Cornhusker State come the end of the year.

Iran’s Parliament Speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf called it: President Trump is using his war on Iran for blatant market manipulation.

“Heads-up: Pre-market so-called ‘news’ or ‘Truth’ is often just a setup for profit-taking. Basically, it’s a reverse indicator. Do the opposite: If they pump it, short it. If they dump it, go long,” Ghalibaf wrote on X Sunday afternoon. “See something tomorrow? You know the drill.”

Sure enough, Trump posted that “Great progress has been made” regarding a peace treaty with Iran at 7:26 a.m. on Monday, two hours before markets opened—and they responded accordingly.

The Kobeissi Letter documented how Ghalibaf—and Trump’s—announcements played out in the stock market. “At 4:12 PM ET on Sunday, Iran’s Speaker of the Parliament said pre-market news is a ‘reverse indicator’ and if they ‘dump’ the market, then ‘go long.’ At 6:00 PM ET, S&P 500 futures opened nearly -1% lower and fell just 30 points away from correction territory. By 11:00 PM ET, S&P 500 futures had reversed all losses and turned green,” the analysis noted. “Then, at 7:25 AM ET today, President Trump posted that ‘great progress’ is being made on Iran peace talks. Now, the S&P 500 is trading +100 points above its low seen just hours ago, adding +$900 billion in market cap. We are in the most unusual times in market history.”

Trump has also been trying to manipulate the market to drive down the price of oil, though it’s not exactly working. Last week, the S&P 500 saw a $3 trillion market cap swing in just 56 minutes after Trump announced he’d “POSTPONE ANY AND ALL MILITARY STRIKES” just hours before the market opened. Ghalibaf—a conservative who is now one of the highest-ranking leaders in Iran—just made the game clear to American investors.

Rioters who took part in the January 6, 2021, Capitol insurrection, and were then pardoned by President Trump, are now suing Capitol and D.C. Police for excessive force.

Several of the rioters filed a lawsuit in the U.S. District Court Middle District of Florida Friday alleging that U.S. Capitol Police and the Metropolitan Police of the District of Columbia fired chemicals and pepper spray into the “peaceful crowd” that day.

The lawsuit also claims that the demonstrators were hit by billy clubs and strikes to the head, which caused injuries, including “chemical burns, concussive trauma, emotional distress, and other damages.” The plaintiffs say they were “overwhelmingly peaceful” until police used force against them, and that they weren’t given warnings.

The lawsuit’s allegations are rich, considering that 140 police officers were injured as a result of the rioters, who breached the Capitol building and caused extensive damage. At least seven people died in connection with the insurrection, including Ashli Babbit, who was shot by police, and Officer Brian Sicknick, who was attacked by the mob and died the next day. Four police officers committed suicide in the days and weeks following the attack.

Just days into his presidency, Trump pardoned over 1,500 rioters convicted for their role in the insurrection, including members of the radical Oath Keepers and Proud Boys who were charged with seditious conspiracy. But being let off for their crimes on that day isn’t enough for these people, who now want a payday from the police. If anyone should be paying, it should be the man who egged the rioters on—but Trump has gotten off scot-free.

Well, that was quick. Secretary of State Marco Rubio directly contradicted Donald Trump’s claims about negotiations with Iran.

Less than an hour after Trump declared Monday that the U.S. was in talks with a “A NEW, AND MORE REASONABLE, REGIME,” Rubio presented an entirely different picture of Iran’s leadership.

“We have to see if these people end up being the ones in charge, seeing if they are the ones that have the power to deliver,” Rubio said on ABC’s Good Morning America. “We’re gonna test it. We are hopeful that that’s the case. There are clearly people there talking to us in ways that previous people in charge in Iran have not spoken to us in the past.

“We always prefer to settle things through negotiation and diplomacy. But we also have to be prepared for the fact that that effort might fail. That we are dealing with a 47-year-old regime that still has a lot of people involved in it who aren’t necessarily big fans of diplomacy or peace,” Rubio said.

So which is it, a 47-year-old regime or a brand-new one?

Iran’s regime hasn’t actually changed all that much—and it certainly hasn’t been replaced. After Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was killed earlier this month, his son Mojtaba Khamenei, a hard-line cleric, was tapped to replace him. At the same time, the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps has only further consolidated power.

Still, Trump claimed last week that regime change had already been achieved in Iran, and the White House doubled down in a similarly nonsensical fashion.

Former national security adviser John Bolton also disagreed with Trump’s assessment last week.

“The faces may change, but the ideology remains the same,” Bolton told CNN’s Anderson Cooper. “The regime will change when the ayatollahs and the Revolutionary Guard are gone, and we’re not at that point yet, quite obviously. But it’s another way for him to say that we have won the objective and therefore are victorious and can leave.”

That’s one possible explanation for Trump’s outrageous regime change claims. Another might be that the president just wanted to make a splash before the markets opened. Either that, or Trump truly has no idea who he’s dealing with.

A woman who alleged that Donald Trump sexually assaulted her when she was just 13 years old has had new details about her story verified, following work from the South Carolina–based newspaper The Post and Courier and Substack journalist Ellie Leonard.

The anonymous victim was interviewed four times by the FBI in 2019. She claimed to have been sex-trafficked by the notorious predator Jeffrey Epstein and sexually abused by a variety of Epstein’s associates during the mid-’80s.

These associates allegedly included the president. The woman claimed Trump assaulted her in Atlantic City, New Jersey, in 1984, back when Trump was a New York real estate mogul. She said she bit Trump’s penis after he unzipped his pants and forced himself on her, leading Trump to smack her in the face. This allegation was initially withheld from the Department of Justice’s Epstein files release before being quietly released on March 3 after a storm of controversy.

The woman also alleged abuse by a man named “Jim Atkins” during the same time period. Leonard identified “Jim Atkins” as Jimmy L. Atkins of Fort Mitchell, Kentucky, earlier this month. He passed away in 2003 at the age of 69.

On Sunday, The Post and Courier uncovered records that confirmed details of the woman’s testimony on Atkins. This included Atkins’s relationship with an Ohio college, his age, his hair color, his general appearance, and details about his employment in Hilton Head, South Carolina.

Of course, the validated details about Atkins do not implicate Trump in any way. The White House, and the president himself, have furiously denied the woman’s claims since her testimony was publicly released, falsely claiming that the president has been “exonerated.” But every other detail of the woman’s testimony that turns out to be true gives more credibility to the rest of her story.

The Trump administration’s mishandling and smothering of the Epstein files do not exactly give one confidence in their truthfulness. As The Post and Courier reported, 30 pages of files relating to the accuser remain missing from the public view.

Recently appointed College Republicans of America political director Kai Schwemmer—an open supporter of white supremacist commentator Nick Fuentes—can envision a world in which slavery is legal.

The Guardian discovered a paywalled video from July 2025 of Schwemmer debating on the Modern Day Debate streaming channel with another right-winger by the name of Shell Shock. They were asked whether they prefer a world where “abortion is banned and slavery is legal” or one where “slavery is banned and abortion is legal.” Shell Shock chose the former. Schwemmer agreed.

In that same call, he said that a 15-year-old who was sexually assaulted by her uncle should still deliver the baby and that he was against gay marriage, and he questioned women’s right to vote. “I believe they currently have the right to vote. But I’m in favor of probably like a family voting thing,” Schwemmer said, referring to a right-wing proposal to have male heads of households vote for the whole family.

This is just the tip of the iceberg for the current Brigham Young University student who will now potentially become the most important youth outreach operative in the country.

“Appointing Kai Schwemmer, a longtime ally of white supremacist Nick Fuentes, as political director signals the College Republicans of America is normalizing antisemitism and white supremacy, full stop,” often embattled American Defamation League CEO Jonathan Greenblatt said last week. “Schwemmer has appeared at Fuentes’ conferences, streams on his platform and has spread conspiracy theories about ‘Zionists’ in America.”

Republicans are eyeing massive cuts to health care spending in order to scrounge up $200 billion for Donald Trump’s reckless war in Iran.

Top Republicans are looking for ways to offset the massive price tag the Pentagon has requested in order to pass the additional funding for U.S. military operations in Iran through a budget reconciliation bill, Axios reported Monday.

House Budget Committee Chairman Jodey Arrington is looking to revive cost-sharing reductions, programs that can assist low-income Americans in paying high deductibles, that were passed as part of Trump’s behemoth budget bill in July.

The Congressional Budget Office previously estimated that funding these reductions would save the federal government $30 billion but would increase out-of-pocket premium costs and drive up the number of people without health insurance by 300,000 through 2034. Arrington is selling the move as “fraud prevention.”

The discussions over cuts are in the early stages, but are likely to face opposition from moderate Republicans, who won’t support health care spending cuts in an election year.

Arrington suggested that the budget reconciliation bill would target fraud across a range of means-tested programs that assist low-income families, Roll Call reported. He pointed to the earned income tax credit, a refundable tax credit that boosts the income of low-income, working parents who claim a child. Arrington claimed that one of the most popular tax credits “loses 30 cents on the dollar.”

“You’ve got low-income housing tax credits, for example, another sort of welfare program within the tax code that doesn’t prohibit illegals from siphoning money off that and jeopardizing the sustainability of that program,” he said.

The reconciliation effort should target “widespread fraud, there is a boatload of waste and fraud,” Arrington said in the House.

Republicans seemed content to make struggling Americans suffer in the service of Trump’s increasingly expensive vanity war that has no clear objectives.

The Trump administration used untested weapons in a strike in Iran that hit a school and sports hall on February 28.

The New York Times reports that the United States launched a newly designed ballistic missile at a school in the city of Lamerd on the first day of the war—the same day that the U.S. bombed a girls’ school in Minab, hundreds of miles away. The strike and others nearby in Lamerd killed 21 people, according to the Times, which cited Iranian media.

Times analysts concluded the strike involved a Precision Strike Missile, or PrSM, a short-range ballistic missile that detonates just above its target and blasts tungsten pellets outward. A local video from Lamerd showed one strike about 900 feet away from the sports hall with the weapon exploding in a midair fireball.

Another video captured from a security camera across from the school and sports hall shows the structure being hit, with an explosion directly above it. Photos from both sites after the strikes show dozens of tiny holes apparently made by the tungsten pellets. At the school and sports hall, footage shows scorch marks, a partially collapsed roof, blown-out windows, fire damage, and blood spatters.

The PrSM only completed prototype testing last year, an Army press release from July states, but had been untested in combat until the strikes. U.S. Central Command posted a video on March 1 capturing a PrSM strike from the first day of the war. The leader of CENTCOM, Admiral Brad Cooper, said days later that the PrSM was used in combat for the first time during the war, and another post from CENTCOM on March 4 touted the system.

It’s not clear whether the strike was deliberate. The school and sports hall are close to an IRGC military compound but have been walled off from the compound for at least 15 years. The sports hall is identified as a facility for civilians on public map platforms including Apple Maps, Wikimapia, and Google Maps. An Instagram account linked to the school shows children regularly using the site, and Iran’s representative to the United Nations Amir Saeid Iravani said the sports hall was being used by a women’s volleyball team at the time of the strike.

The strike occurred on the same day as a U.S. attack on a girls’ school in Minab, which killed 175 people, an apparent war crime. Using an untested weapon on an elementary school and sports hall, without clear knowledge of its effects, would seem to fit the bill of a war crime, as well. Does that matter to the Trump administration?

Donald Trump has finally come clean about his objective for Iran—and threatened to launch a series of war crimes if he doesn’t get what he wants.

“The United States of America is in serious discussions with A NEW, AND MORE REASONABLE, REGIME to end our Military Operations in Iran,” he wrote in a post on Truth Social Monday.

Perhaps the Trump administration has finally given up pushing its original war rationale, based on unsubstantiated claims that Iran had obtained the materials to make nuclear weapons. There’s just one problem: Last week, Trump claimed that regime change had already been achieved in Iran, and the White House doubled down in a similarly nonsensical fashion.

It wasn’t true. After Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was killed earlier this month, his son Mojtaba Khamenei, a hard-line cleric, was tapped to replace him. At the same time, the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps has only further consolidated power.

Trump’s supposedly “serious discussion” for a new regime may be marred by his administration’s childish tactics: Just last week, they tried to start a rumor that the new ayatollah was a closeted gay man.

Trump claimed Monday that “great progress” had already been made, but if a deal did not materialize soon to open the Strait of Hormuz, the U.S. military would attack “all of their Electric Generating Plants, Oil Wells and Kharg Island (and possibly all desalinization plants!), which we have purposefully not yet ‘touched.’”

“This will be in retribution for our many soldiers, and others, that Iran has butchered and killed over the old Regime’s 47 year ‘Reign of Terror,’” the president added. Of course, extensive destruction not justified by a military necessity is a war crime. It wouldn’t be the first the U.S. military has committed in Trump’s reckless war.

Last week, the Pentagon ordered some 2,000 troops from the 82nd Airborne division to be dispatched to aid the war effort in the Middle East. The move has driven speculation that the U.S. military intends to seize Kharg Island, which handles 90 percent of Iran’s oil exports.