Hegseth Accused of Exposing Troops’ Locations

Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth may have exposed U.S. troops to foreign intelligence.

The Defense Department’s Office of Inspector General issued a report Wednesday calling out the failure to protect sensitive communications and location information, saying there are major security weaknesses in the Pentagon’s $2.67 billion cell phone contracts, The Daily Beast reports.

The Pentagon didn’t check if phone companies were protecting data that could reveal soldiers’ locations and who they were speaking with, the report found. DOD officials also didn’t review the companies’ security checks before renewing contracts. The independent oversight agency concluded that hackers had the ability to “map entire communication networks within the [Department of Defense], pinpoint sensitive locations like safe houses or command posts, and expose operational vulnerabilities, significantly compromising national security.”

The office’s investigators found that DOD officials were aware of security vulnerabilities regarding text messages sent to and from military phones, and the possibility that bad actors could intercept them. Despite this, the department “had not issued policy for protecting text messages.”

In response to the report, Democrats in Congress have raised concerns about the Pentagon’s security issues with cell phones.

“I remain concerned that our servicemembers remain at risk from the military’s insecure communications and look forward to seeing what else the Inspector General finds,” Senator Ron Wyden told The Daily Beast. “I’ll continue to watchdog DOD to make sure they follow through on the Inspector General’s findings and finally secure their communications.”

The report found that the DOD has not yet addressed the security vulnerabilities, arguing internally over whose responsibility it is and failing to offer explanations about what it is doing to implement solutions. Maybe Hegseth and other top DOD officials should be focused on these security risks rather than pushing out trans service members, making bad workout videos, or obsessing over hormones.

Elon Musk has settled a class action lawsuit over allegations that his shady super PAC offered President Donald Trump’s supporters a chance to win $1 million—when the winners had already been hand-picked.

Ahead of the 2024 presidential election, Musk’s America PAC offered to “randomly” give away $1 million each day to registered voters in several battleground states if they signed an online petition to support “free speech and the right to bear arms”—and forfeited their personal information in the process.

In response to a legal challenge in Pennsylvania, Musk’s attorney Chris Gober revealed that the recipients weren’t chosen randomly at all, but were picked based on their personal story and “suitability to serve” as spokespeople for the super PAC.

Considering that the petition was not an illegal lottery scheme, the judge allowed the payments to continue. But after the elections, multiple lawsuits were filed against Musk and America PAC.

A one-page filing announced that the parties had reached a settlement agreement, HuffPost reported Thursday. The exact details of the settlement, such as how much Musk will owe the plaintiffs, was not immediately published.

Dozens of Israeli settlers beat and robbed veteran Washington Post photographer Heidi Levine Friday during an attack on an olive tree grove in the West Bank.

The Israelis, masked and dressed all in black, beat the Palestinian villagers harvesting olives while chasing out a group of journalists there to document the work. The settlers descended from a nearby hilltop settlement, hurling rocks at the gathering before setting the grove aflame.

Levine was caught in the mix. She was in a vest that read “PRESS” on the front and the back, but the attacking Israelis did not care to differentiate her. Instead, they knocked Levine to the ground, kicked and beat her, and then stole her cameras and phone, reported the Post.

The settlers also threw tear gas into the crowd, according to video footage captured by independent journalist Andrey Khrzhanovskiy. Israel’s military, the Israel Defense Forces, were nearby in vehicles but did not intervene.

Levine told the Post that she was overtaken by the settlers. “They just kept kicking me and kicking me, like probably 50 times,” she told reporters.

Khrzhanovskiy said that settlers beat Levine with sticks while the villagers retreated. Levine was taken to a nearby hospital after the incident.

“This morning, a Washington Post photographer, Heidi Levine, was attacked by Israeli settlers while reporting in the West Bank. She was wearing visible markings clearly identifying her as a journalist,” the executive editor of the paper, Matt Murray, wrote in a statement Friday morning. “While we are relieved that Heidi has received medical care and is safe, we are outraged by this unwarranted attack on a journalist doing her job and urge a thorough investigation and follow-through from authorities.”

Israel has attacked dozens of journalists throughout its assault on Palestine, violating international law in the process. The attack on Levine came less than two weeks after settlers assaulted AFP photographer Jaafar Ashtiyeh. Israel has also killed at least 247 media workers since the conflict began three years ago, according to a September report by the Committee to Protect Journalists. At least 192 of those individuals were Palestinian journalists working in Gaza.

Someone in the White House is crippling Ukraine’s access to military-grade Starlink terminals.

Leaders at the Department of Defense received an order from inside the White House to slow the Starshield satellite system that Ukraine uses for battlefield communications and drone operations, two U.S. officials and a Western official briefed on the matter told Reuters Thursday.

A Ukrainian military official claimed Wednesday that Elon Musk’s SpaceX had interrupted functioning of the country’s military-grade Starlink terminals. Presidential adviser Serhiy Beskrestnov wrote on Telegram that Ukrainian defense forces “did not receive warning about this limitation, and this led to the disruption of several missions.”

Ukrainian officials said that the Starshield receptors mounted on fast-moving drones stopped working altogether. The receptors were working again Thursday, but only at speeds of up to 100 miles per hour, Reuters reported.

At first it seemed possible that Musk was directly behind the service disruption—but he claimed on X that “any limits on speed or usage are decided by the US military and ultimately POTUS.”

A senior White House official denied that President Donald Trump was behind it, but did not respond to questions about whether another administration official might have made the order. “No such request was ever made by the president,” they told Reuters.

The disruption began just days after Trump publicly criticized Ukraine for continuing to attack Russian oil refineries after the U.S. lifted sanctions on the sale of Russian oil in a last-ditch attempt to alleviate financial strain ahead of the midterm elections. Unfortunately, Russian President Vladimir Putin’s current commitments are only a small drop in the bucket in terms of the diesel shortage that Trump’s monthslong war with Iran has created.

President Donald Trump isn’t doing a good job of explaining why he would drop one of America’s largest bombs on Iran.

In an interview with Newsmax’s Rob Finnerty Thursday, Trump was asked about reports that he was considering dropping the “mother of all bombs,” one of the largest pieces of ordinance in the military’s arsenal, on Iranian nuclear and infrastructure sites.

“Well, the mother of all bombs is not nuclear,” Trump replied. “This is just an extremely large bomb. It’s like a tiny nuclear bomb. But the mother of all bombs is one big bomb but it’s not nuclear. No, I wouldn’t use nuclear.”

Sources told CNN earlier that day that using the 21,600-pound MOAB is unlikely to be effective in destroying any nuclear sites, nor would it tip the balance in the war, which is going abysmally as Iran has taken control of the Strait of Hormuz.

As the conflict stretches on with no clear end in sight, Republican poll numbers keep going lower with the midterms less than a month away. If Trump thinks that dropping a big bomb would allow him to declare some sort of victory in a fruitless war, he is delusional, and his other recent remarks about the war seem to prove that. Meanwhile, the economy continues to flounder, and gas prices keep going up.