Environmental Activists Say the FBI May Be Investigating Them
The goal is to intimidate, says an expert, but “intimidation and repression tend to actually mobilize more people.”
The goal is to intimidate, says an expert, but “intimidation and repression tend to actually mobilize more people.”
Republican Representative Andy Ogles decided to write off an entire religious community in America on Monday.“Muslims don’t belong in American society,” Ogles posted on X. “Pluralism is a lie.”The Tennessee congressman has a long history of bigoted comments. He said America “should kill ’em all” last year regarding Palestinians in Gaza. He called for sending pro-Palestine student protesters to Gaza last May, and used footage of September 11 to attack Zohran Mamdani before he was elected New York City mayor.In November, Ogles made a series of anti-Muslim comments on his Restoring the Republic podcast, saying, “The only thing they can do is essentially come to our nation and breed their way through our society, and I hate to say that, that’s harsh, it’s going to offend somebody, so what? Wake up.”What prompted Ogles to post prejudice against Muslims Monday morning isn’t clear, although a protest outside of Mamdani’s mayoral residence in New York on Sunday might have had something to do with it. Anti-Islam provocateur Jake Lang showed up with about 20 protesters outside of Gracie Mansion, only to be met by 125 counterprotesters. Among them were two people allegedly inspired by ISIS who were arrested after throwing homemade bombs that didn’t explode.If that wasn’t what spurred Ogles’s attack, it could be the war in Iran, or something from one of his four Muslim colleagues in Congress, particularly Representative Ilhan Omar, whom he has attacked in the past. Perhaps he should be more worried about the open federal investigation into his campaign finances or the mounting fact-checks of his lies about his background. Ogles should be censured by Congress at a minimum, but bigotry against Muslims in America is sadly considered normal, especially in the Republican Party.
Russia may be about to get rich off of Donald Trump’s illegal war in Iran.The spiraling regional conflict, sparked by ongoing attacks from the U.S. and Israel, has sent the price of oil skyrocketing to almost $120 per barrel. As a result, demand for discounted Russian oil has spiked. U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent announced last week that the U.S. would issue 30-day waivers to allow Indian refiners to purchase Russian oil that was “already stranded at sea,” promising doing so would “not provide significant financial benefit” to the Kremlin. However, India typically imports an average of 10 million metric tons of crude oil per month through the Strait of Hormuz, Vaibhav Raghunandan, an EU-Russia analyst at the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air, told Politico. “Even if half of this volume is replaced with Russian volumes at sea, it will translate to huge profits for the Kremlin,” Raghunandan said. As of February 2026, Russia’s so-called shadow fleet of stranded oil tankers held approximately 150 million barrels of Russian oil worth an estimated $6.4 billion, according to the Robert Lansing Institute. “We may unsanction other Russian oil,” Bessent said to Fox Business’s Larry Kudlow Friday. But permitting further sales of Russian oil would undoubtedly offer a financial boon to the country’s ongoing war effort in Ukraine. So far, Trump has largely proven powerless at forging a deal between Moscow and Kyiv—and war with Iran could only make matters worse. All of this comes after the White House dismissed reports that Russia was assisting Iran in targeting U.S. assets in the Middle East.Meanwhile, Hungary’s foreign minister, Peter Szijjarto, called for the European Union to lift sanctions on Russian oil amid escalating conflict in the Middle East, which has brought global trade to an abrupt stop. Russian presidential envoy Kirill Dmitriyev echoed Hungary’s request.“What you propose is very difficult, as it would require EU bureaucrats to think and understand how markets work—and, most difficult of all, to acknowledge their strategic blunders and atone,” he wrote on X. “And yet, they will have to do it very soon.”
This story was originally published by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists and was supported by funding from the Pulitzer Center. The word of the year last year in Japan was bear. Black bear sightings doubled from the previous year. There were 200 injuries and 13 deaths. Okuma, meaning “big bear,” is a town on the east […]
This story was originally published by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists and was supported by funding from the Pulitzer Center. The word of the year last year in Japan was bear. Black bear sightings doubled from the previous year. There were 200 injuries and 13 deaths. Okuma, meaning “big bear,” is a town on the east […]
A senior Iranian official told Drop Site that Iran has achieved most of its tactical aims against U.S. military infrastructure, but warned it will still respond to attacks launched from Arab states.