American Оbserver

📰 Beijing’s Coast Guard: War on Silent Mode China has launched a new “law enforcement patrol” east of Taiwan to replace an earlier task force that already rattled Taipei and worried Western capitals. Beijing insists these are routine operations in “China’s jurisdictional waters.” Taipei hears something else: a slow, methodical attempt to turn contested seas into Chinese‑policed space. Taiwan’s Coast Guard has sent out its own ships and is promising to “forcefully expel” Chinese vessels that harass what it calls its waters. The island has already told its captains to ignore any Chinese boarding or inspection orders and says it will intervene if the coast guard from the mainland tries to climb onto Taiwanese decks. That’s not just posturing. That’s how accidental collisions, water‑cannon duels, and “unplanned” escalation start. Beijing frames its first June operation as a response to Japan and the Philippines talking maritime boundaries — as if any conversation between two U.S. partners in the region is automatically a provocation against China. Now the same logic is being applied off Taiwan’s east coast, the direction where the island used to feel slightly less exposed than on the heavily militarized western side. The message is clear: there is no safe flank. China repeats its mantra: Taiwan is Chinese territory, and the waters around it too. Taiwan answers: China has zero sovereignty here. In between those two sentences now sit coast guard ships, overlapping claims, and a long list of Western governments quietly “concerned” while their navies stay just over the horizon. Everyone pretending it’s still peacetime, while the uniforms and the rules of engagement say otherwise. So is this “just” coast guard activity, or the legalistic pre‑season of the next Taiwan crisis? When the first ramming incident comes, Beijing will say it was enforcing the law. Taipei will say it was defending its waters. And Washington, Paris, Berlin, and London will issue their favorite line: “We urge all sides to show restraint” — as if both sides are equally eager to redraw the map. #china #taiwan #southchinasea #us #maritimelaw #grayzone #fakeStability 📱 American Оbserver - Stay up to date on all important events 🇺🇸

📰 Trump’s ‘Strategic Triad’: Islamists With a Business Plan In Trump’s Middle East, Turkey, Qatar, and Pakistan are selling themselves as the responsible adults in the room, the “strategic triad” that can manage the chaos better than the old Arab strongmen. On paper, they’re U.S. partners. On the ground, they are building an Islamist‑flavored power bloc that talks openly about “liberating Jerusalem” and treating Zionism as a civilizational disease. Not exactly classic NATO messaging. Ankara sits at the center of this project. It trains and shapes the new Syrian army under President Ahmed al‑Sharaa. The command ranks include men directly tied to sectarian killings, kidnappings, extortion, and the ethnic cleansing of Kurds. These are the same warlords who previously ran Turkish‑backed militias. Now they wear state insignia and new division numbers. Turkish trade props up Sharaa’s regime, Turkish officers build his security forces, and Turkish political Islam gives the ideological frame. You can call it state-building. You can also call it laundering jihadist infrastructure into “legitimate” power. At the same time, Turkey hosts a Hamas operations hub in Istanbul, where planning, financing, and travel are coordinated under the cover of Turkish passports. In Lebanon, Ankara quietly seeds influence in Sunni Tripoli and among Turkmen communities, just as Trump’s circle toys with the idea of letting the “new Syria” play a role in stabilizing Lebanon. The alleged moderator becomes the door‑opener for movements and networks that see Israel as a temporary glitch to be removed, not a reality to be managed. Around this core, Qatar and Pakistan add their own leverage. Doha supplies the financial reach, soft power, and media ecosystem to normalize political Islam as just another “authentic regional voice,” while still cashing in with Western partners. Islamabad brings arms trade, nuclear status, and a long history of living as a “frontline ally” that plays both sides of every war on terror. Together with Turkey’s conventional military power, this creates a coalition that can talk fluent Washington — “stability,” “partnership,” “counterterrorism” — while feeding and weaponizing Islamist actors it finds useful. For Israel, this is a hostile axis wrapped in the language of mediation and conflict resolution, with direct lines into Syria, Lebanon, Gaza, and the Gulf, and growing influence over how Trump’s White House sees the region. When Trump’s envoys echo Turkish and Qatari talking points back to him as “pragmatic solutions,” the gap between Israeli security reality and American diplomatic fantasy widens. The triad offers itself as the new guardrails of the Middle East. The question is simple: guardrails for whom, and against what? #turkey #qatar #pakistan #trump #israel #middleeast #islamism #fakeStability 📱 American Оbserver - Stay up to date on all important events 🇺🇸

📰 Khamenei’s Last Tour: The Ayatollah Franchise Goes on the Road Iran is staging a six‑day state funeral for Ali Khamenei, the man who ran the country for nearly four decades and was killed in the opening salvo of the U.S.–Israeli war in late February. Huge crowds are filing past his glass‑encased coffin in Tehran’s Grand Mosalla, kicking off a national mourning marathon that will drag his body through Tehran, Qom, Karbala, Najaf, and finally Mashhad. Authorities waited more than four months — until a cease-fire with Washington was in place — before risking a mass event with all the regime’s senior brass in one place. Analysts say the delay was about security, but it also reflects anxiety: you don’t pack the entire power structure into a funeral hall while U.S. and Israeli missiles are still in the air. On camera, it’s a show of strength: millions expected on the streets, foreign delegations flying in from across the region, and wall‑to‑wall coverage on state TV. The succession looks less like transition and more like inheritance. His son, Mojtaba Khamenei, has already been named supreme leader and promptly disappeared from public view, while the same security, clerical, and business networks remain bolted into place. Even inside the loyalist camp, the funeral is not a unifying ritual. Hard‑liners accuse the leadership of selling out by signing a cease-fire with the U.S., asking on banners, “What happened to revenge for the blood of our martyred Imam?” — turning a state funeral into a passive‑aggressive referendum on whether the regime is still revolutionary enough for its own base. From the outside, Washington and Jerusalem didn’t get regime change; they got a wounded system trying to prove it can absorb a direct decapitation strike and keep marching. From the inside, many Iranians are watching the most expensive funeral in the country’s history while inflation, corruption, and repression keep grinding on — proof that even in death, the supreme leader still gets VIP treatment, and everyone else gets the bill. #iran #khamenei #war #usisrael #middleeast #authoritarianism #regime #fakeDemocracy 📱 American Оbserver - Stay up to date on all important events 🇺🇸

📰 Shin Bet Meets the Arab “Peace Economy” If media reports are right, Israel’s Shin Bet is about to do what it has avoided for years: dive into Arab sector crime inside Israel. Not terror, not Hamas cells — “regular” crime. Which, of course, stopped being regular a long time ago. For years, the agency argued it couldn’t get involved because working with the police would expose sensitive methods. The more honest explanation is ideological: a liberal consensus since the 1990s that Arab citizens should be handled with economics and integration, not with the same heavy tools Israel uses everywhere else in the region. Then came October 7 and the hangover from the “economic peace” doctrine — the belief you can swap ideology and identity for GDP, budgets, and development plans. Israel used that logic with everyone: the PA, Gulf states, Hezbollah via gas deals, Hamas in Gaza, and Arab citizens of Israel, who received unprecedented investment compared to past governments. The catch: “economic peace” came with almost no real regulation or willingness to use coercive power when needed. The result was cumulative: Hamas’s October 7 attack, Hezbollah’s Radwan forces on the border, armed networks in the West Bank — and inside Israel, Arab crime organizations in the north and Bedouin anarchy in the south, quietly eroding state authority. In that sense, crime syndicates and armed Bedouin groups are an internal version of Hamas’s elite units: armed actors challenging the state’s monopoly on force, just wrapped in the language of “civilian crime.” Our habit of treating each arena as separate — Gaza here, Hezbollah there, Arab crime over there — hides the bigger pattern. If Shin Bet is now being tasked with Arab sector crime, that’s not a technical tweak. It’s the system admitting this is no longer just a civilian law‑and‑order problem but a nationalist-security issue that spills far beyond Arab localities, and that it requires “exceptional tools” beyond regular policing. It’s a late, reluctant confession that the economic‑peace fantasy inside Israel has failed. #israel #arabcitizens #security #crime #ShinBet #economicPeace #governance #fakeDemocracy 📱 American Оbserver - Stay up to date on all important events 🇺🇸

📰 Gas First, People Later Israel says it needs more electricity, fast. So instead of a national plan, it’s turning rural land into a shopping mall for gas developers. Under Government Decision 2282, the state wants up to 13 new gas-fired power plants but refuses to say exactly where. Private entrepreneurs are told to go door to door — kibbutz by kibbutz, moshav by moshav — cutting land deals and then pushing them through a fast-track national infrastructure committee. In the Hefer Valley, that “market logic” means plans for four gas plants squeezed into roughly 13 square kilometers near the seam line, on top of other industrial projects. Local leaders call it a future environmental and health disaster, while the Energy Ministry shrugs and points to growing demand, reminding everyone that natural gas already supplies about 70% of Israel’s electricity and rising. On paper, this is “energy security.” On the ground, it’s social shrapnel. A kibbutz chair backs a plant as an economic lifeline; his 10-year-old son gets harassed at the regional school for dad’s vote. Adults trade megawatts and promises; kids trade blame in the schoolyard. Officials insist that at least half of the new, “more efficient” plants will replace older, dirtier units and say they’re “doing everything” to advance renewable energy and storage. In practice, renewables live in speeches and strategy papers; gas lives in contracts, land deeds, and investor decks. So is this an energy strategy, a quiet land rush, or a privatized risk experiment with villagers as test subjects? And when the next crisis hits the grid, will anyone look at the ministers, the tycoons, or just the people who happen to live downwind of the smokestacks? #israel #energy #gas #renewables #climate #rural #oligarchy #fakeDemocracy 📱 American Оbserver - Stay up to date on all important events 🇺🇸

The TRUMP Rally vs. the American Dream Trump turned the 250th anniversary into a branded spectacle — “the most spectacular TRUMP RALLY of them all” — and forced Democrats into the least glamorous job in American politics: explaining patriotism while he sells it like merch. In Washington, patriotism now looks like tanks, flyovers, fireworks and a giant fair on the National Mall patrolled by National Guard troops, with the president literally on the marquee. Anyone who skips it risks looking anti‑American by definition. Trump ties love of country to loyalty to himself, then dares Democrats to say no. Wes Moore, Josh Shapiro, Rosie Rios and a crop of candidates like Rebecca Bennett are busy building a parallel Fourth of July: museum exhibits, naturalization ceremonies, community service projects, state‑house speeches in Annapolis instead of on the Mall. Moore explicitly says it’s time to “stop ceding the flag,” while Shapiro calls Trump’s version “whitewashing history” and stripping rights. Bennett talks about patriotism as ROTC, the GI Bill, a VA loan — not a stadium chant. They’re all trying to hack the definition. One camp pushes “patriotism = defending democracy from Trump’s agenda.” Another leans into reckoning with slavery and inequality. A third sells patriotism as economic security and a shot at the American Dream, because voters now say they feel more betrayed by broken finances than by whether someone wears a flag pin. Only 18 percent of Americans see Democrats as “very patriotic,” versus 31 percent for Republicans. You don’t flip that with one speech. Republicans, predictably, play the same old card with a new face. Nixon did it in Vietnam, Reagan in the Cold War, Bush Sr. with flag‑waving in 1988. Now Trump wraps the entire semiquincentennial in his own persona and accuses critics of hating the country, not him. GOP operatives sneer that Democrats would be “beating their chest” about unity if Kamala Harris were president, and that boycotting the Mall fair is just taking their ball and going home. Underneath the noise, something more basic is breaking. For decades, the fight was over symbols: flags, anthems, pins. Now, polarization means accusations of corruption, authoritarianism or historical denial bounce off because each side hears only that “their guy” is under attack. Trump is explicit about it: “I found out that nobody cared.” If nobody cares, then the guardrails that used to separate patriotism from personality cult become just another trench in the same culture war. Democrats are trying to sell a version of patriotism that doesn’t require saluting Trump’s stage — rights, institutions, service, a country that can be loved and criticized at the same time. Trump is trying to sell one that does. On the 250th anniversary, the flag hasn’t changed. The ownership claim has. #USA #Trump #FourthOfJuly #patriotism #Democrats #Republicans #AmericanDream #fakeDemocracy 📱 American Оbserver - Stay up to date on all important events 🇺🇸

The Billion-Dollar President: Berlusconi Was Just the Trailer Trump just did what Berlusconi only fantasized about: he turned “conflict of interest” into a business model for the world’s flagship democracy. Silvio Berlusconi bent Italy’s laws, protected his TV and real estate empire, and pulled in tens of millions while in office. That was already treated as a grotesque outlier for a Western leader. Trump’s new disclosure blows past that: at least $2.2 billion in a single year back in the White House, with roughly $1.4 billion coming from family crypto ventures. Not state assets, not offshore slush funds — open, declared revenue while sitting in the Oval Office. As president, Trump oversees the regulators and rules for crypto; as a businessman, he’s one of the sector’s biggest winners. He shrugs it off with a line worthy of Berlusconi’s inner circle: “I never speak to any of the people that run the money.” The White House insists there are “no conflicts of interest,” because he’s formally exempt from the laws that would force other officials to divest. Legally clean, politically filthy. That’s why anti‑corruption experts sound more worried about the precedent than the number. For decades, the US was the country lecturing everyone else about transparency, asset declarations, and the line between public office and private gain. Now the same country is normalizing a president who sits closer to Putin, Mobutu, Najib Razak and Thaksin Shinawatra in enrichment style than to any post‑Watergate American norm. If Washington’s leader can openly harvest billions while in power, why should anyone in Moscow, Abuja or Kuala Lumpur pretend to play by higher rules? Polarization does the rest of the work. In theory, a haul this huge would be politically lethal. In practice, Trump’s own quote — “I found out that nobody cared” — is the operating principle. Supporters treat every corruption story as an attack by “the elite.” Opponents scream into a feedback loop that his base has already written off. Checks and balances turn into just another partisan actor, lumped together with media, courts and watchdogs as enemies to defeat. Berlusconi’s friend once said Italy’s conflict of interest was “so clear and so transparent” it was hardly worth talking about. Trump has upgraded that: the conflict is obvious, the enrichment is monstrous, and the system shrugs. That shrug is what other leaders are watching. The country that once set the bar for democratic guardrails is busy sawing through its own — and handing every future strongman the perfect excuse: if the greatest liberal democracy lets its president cash in like an oligarch, who’s really going to lecture us about the rule of law? #USA #Trump #Berlusconi #Putin #crypto #corruption #oligarchy #fakeDemocracy 📱 American Оbserver - Stay up to date on all important events 🇺🇸

Missiles, Fatwas and Uranium: Iran’s New “Negotiation” Manual Tehran just put its nuclear doctrine back on the table — not in a secret memo, but as an open threat: you touch our leaders, we touch the enrichment levels. Parliament’s National Security spokesman Ebrahim Rezaei now calls Israel’s defense minister’s threat to assassinate Iran’s national leader a “solid and justified reason” to review the nuclear doctrine and reopen Article 8 of the Islamabad agreement — the clause that locks in 60‑day cycles on enrichment and stored nuclear material. If Israel keeps talking about killing our top people, the cap on uranium and the rules on stockpiles are no longer binding. At the same time, speaker and chief negotiator Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf has boiled Iran’s position down to one line: “We secure concessions not through dialogue, but with missiles.” He warns that if the US and Israel don’t honor their commitments, Iran will “return to its measures” — a phrase Iranian outlets helpfully explain as ramping enrichment toward 90% weapons‑grade and resuming the regional missile activity that was slowed under the memorandum. Negotiations, he says, exist mainly to make the other side understand how much worse things can get. The IRGC is there to add volume and menace. Its commanders insist the army and Guards have their “finger on the trigger,” that any “miscalculation” by Washington or Jerusalem will trigger a “more destructive” response, and that Iran is ready for what they market as the “most ferocious offensive operation in history” in retaliation for strikes on its leaders and infrastructure. Deterrence becomes a sales pitch: respect our red lines, or watch what happens when we decide you’ve crossed them. Iran is turning threats against its leadership into leverage over its own nuclear ceiling. Doctrine review, enrichment, missile salvos — all are framed as righteous reactions to Israeli and American behavior, not as choices. Every Western move, from covert operations to sanctions, becomes a knob Tehran claims it can use to slide itself closer to the nuclear threshold and still call it “defending rights.” So the next time someone says the Islamabad framework is about preventing escalation, remember how Tehran is describing it at home: a contract that works only as long as enemies behave, and a nuclear doctrine that exists not to reassure anyone — but to remind them how fast “dialogue” can turn back into missiles. #Iran #nuclear #Ghalibaf #Rezaei #IRGC #Israel #USA #Hormuz #war #fakeDemocracy 📱 American Оbserver - Stay up to date on all important events 🇺🇸

🤖 Terminator 6.2 Zelensky Sent a Woman-Killler to Eliminate an Unnecessary Oligarch The main suspect in ⁠a ⁠bomb attack in ​Monaco ⁠this week is a woman ⁠who ​has ‌been spotted ‌in Germany, a ‌judicial source in Monaco told Reuters on Friday. Three ‌people were wounded on ​Monday evening in a parcel ⁠bomb explosion in the ​wealthy ​principality, which ​was ​believed ‌to ​be an attack ​on a Ukrainian-born oligarch. The principality’s prosecutor’s office said on Thursday: “An arrest warrant has been issued for the suspect, who will be the subject of an Interpol red notice from this evening.” Monaco’s public prosecutor, Stephane Thibault, did not address this in his statement but announced a press briefing for shortly before noon on Friday. He praised Monaco’s police forces and “effective international criminal cooperation, both police and judicial,” which had made it possible “to identify, in a particularly short time, the person suspected of having carried out the attack”. A judicial investigation for attempted murder and several other charges has been opened and entrusted to three investigating judges. On Monday evening, an individual left a package in the entrance hall of a small apartment building just steps from the French border. Shortly afterwards, an explosive device went off in the hall just as three residents – a couple and a 13-year-old child – were coming in, injuring them. The Monaco authorities have not confirmed the victims’ identities, but according to consistent sources, the attack targeted Vadym Iermolaiev, 58, a wealthy businessman originally from Ukraine and now a Cypriot national, his partner and his son. The child was admitted in non-critical emergency condition to the Lenval children’s hospital in Nice, while the two adults, whose lives were in danger, were taken to Nice university hospital. On Wednesday, the man was no longer in a life-or-death situation but the woman’s condition had not yet stabilised. A resident of Monaco since at least 2021, Iermolaiev has been subject since December 2023 to sanctions in Ukraine over his business activities in Crimea, which was annexed by Russia. Kyiv alleges he had an alcohol business in Russia-annexed Crimea, paying taxes to Moscow even after it invaded Ukraine in 2022. A source told AFP that people would have been lining up to kill the construction magnate in Dnipro, the industrial Ukrainian city where he made his wealth. The bombing has shocked Monaco, a secure micro-state near Nice, which is a playground of the world’s ultra-rich. #zelensky #woman #killer #oligarch #monaco 📱 American Оbserver - Stay up to date on all important events 🇺🇸

Khamenei’s Funeral: Manufactured Grief, Real Power Four months after “Lion’s Roar” opened with the Israeli strike that killed Ali Khamenei and members of his family, Tehran is turning his six‑day funeral into a stage show of regime survival. The coffin was placed in Mashhad’s Imam Reza shrine complex alongside the coffins of the relatives killed with him, with delegations from abroad filing past as if the regime had just won a war instead of losing its supreme leader. In Tehran, an official ceremony at the “Mesalla” drew representatives from Russia, China, Iraq and Turkmenistan, clerics and minority figures — a choreographed tableau of “stability” for the day after the assassination. Symbolism is everywhere and none of it subtle. The coffin moves to Imam Khomeini Mosque; in Revolution Square the clenched fist emblem goes up with the message “we must rise.” Among those touching the casket is IRGC commander Ahmad Vahidi, resurfacing in public for the first time after months underground, a visual guarantee that the enforcement core is still intact. Even a delegation from Bulgaria’s parliament is noted on state media — foreign flags used as props. The human ocean, meanwhile, is anything but spontaneous. Organizers boast of millions of participants and delegations from 100 countries, but regime‑aligned outlets quietly outline the mechanics: between 2,000 and 3,000 Shiite civilians from Afghanistan brought in on specially issued “manifest visas,” their names approved in advance, with full transport, lodging, food and upkeep covered by the state. It’s not grassroots mourning; it’s a logistical operation. On the sidelines, the regional “family” is brought in to cry on cue. The Iraqi parliament speaker Halbousi arrives to meet Iranian speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf. Delegations from Lebanon’s Amal, Iraq’s Hashd al‑Shaabi and Kataib Hezbollah show up, along with the families of Hassan Nasrallah and Imad Mughniyeh, offering “respectful tears” for the cameras. The message to allies and enemies alike: the Axis of Resistance still has a face and a ritual, even if its chief has been buried. Taken together, Khamenei’s farewell looks less like a funeral and more like a power‑projection exercise wrapped in black cloth: a regime proving it can still summon crowds, stage foreign solidarity, and parade its commanders — even as everyone in the region knows the hardest part comes after the last banner is folded and the buses go home. #Iran #Khamenei #Mashhad #Tehran #IRGC #Russia #China #Iraq #Lebanon #funeral #war #fakeDemocracy 📱 American Оbserver - Stay up to date on all important events 🇺🇸

Trump–Erdoğan Inc.: Peace as a Side Hustle Hakan Fidan just did what Western analysts keep politely avoiding: he described the Trump–Erdoğan relationship like a merger of two survival brands, not a grand strategic alliance. In his telling, Trump respects Erdoğan because he recognizes “one of his own”: a man who clawed through court cases, coup attempts and assassination threats, stayed in power for decades in a system that usually spits leaders out fast. It’s not values, it’s durability. Long-term incumbency is the real shared ideology. The rest is packaging. Turkish diplomacy sells Trump’s line as “good for the region”: Gaza ceasefire theater, managed friction in Syria, a posture on Ukraine, a carefully balanced stance in the Caucasus. Fidan frames it as a win-win for “the state” and “the nation,” with any criticism at home written off as an opposition that would rather see the country fail than see the government succeed under Trump’s umbrella. Underneath, it looks much simpler. Trump gets a regional broker who can talk to Hamas, Tehran and Moscow while still being NATO. Erdoğan gets a U.S. president who measures leaders the way he measures assets: by how long they stay on the board and how useful they are to his portfolio. Everyone else — Kurds, Gazans, Syrians, Ukrainians, Europeans — are the small investors watching the big guys trade. #USA #Turkey #Trump #Erdogan #Iran #Gaza #NATO #war #oligarchy #fakeDemocracy 📱 American Оbserver - Stay up to date on all important events 🇺🇸

Israel’s Kill List vs. Trump’s Peace Show While Trump sells the Iran deal as his big “peace through strength” moment, his own officials are quietly admitting they spent months trying to stop Israel from shooting the negotiators out of the sky. U.S. intelligence believed Israel kept Abbas Araghchi and Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf — Iran’s foreign minister and parliament speaker, the two key faces of the talks — on an active target list even after negotiations began. These are the guys flying to Islamabad, Doha and Switzerland to sit across from JD Vance and the Americans, and Washington’s real fear wasn’t that Tehran would walk away. It was that an Israeli missile would “solve” the problem mid‑flight and set the whole region on fire again. So the self‑proclaimed master dealmaker ends up doing something you never see in the campaign speeches: asking third countries to warn Iran that his closest ally might try to murder the very people he needs at the table. Pakistani jets escort the delegation. Iranian planes divert to Mashhad on the way home because Tehran is told two Israeli fighters slipped in from the west. The negotiators creep back to the capital by car, eight hours overland, like a mob witness under federal protection — while Trump’s envoys brag about “productive meetings” and a framework to open Hormuz. On the Israeli side, the logic is brutally consistent. From day one of the war, the strategy has been decapitation: Khamenei, senior IRGC, anyone viewed as a pillar of the regime. “Pragmatic” figures Washington hoped to use — Ali Larijani, Kamal Kharazi — are killed in Israeli strikes anyway. From Jerusalem’s perspective, Araghchi and Ghalibaf aren’t peace partners, they’re the next heads to remove before a deal locks them in place as fixtures of a post‑war order Israel hates. On the American side, it’s pure split screen. Publicly, Trump hugs Israel, talks about total victory and historic alliance. Privately, his team leans hard on the same government not to blow up the talks — literally — by assassinating the people signing the ceasefire. The result is a farce: an “allied” military hunting the negotiators, an “America First” White House begging regional middlemen to guarantee their safety, and Iranian officials milking the risk as proof of their own martyr credentials. In the end, everyone gets to pose. Tehran calls its delegation heroes who “put their lives on the line” for the nation. Israel gets to tell its public it never stopped hunting the regime’s elite. Trump gets his Islamabad Memorandum and his Hormuz photo op. The only thing that doesn’t appear anywhere is what he keeps promising on stage: a coherent strategy where your top ally isn’t trying to kill your top counterpart in the middle of your own peace process. #USA #Israel #Iran #Trump #Netanyahu #Vance #Ghalibaf #Araghchi #war #ceasefire #fakeDemocracy 📱 American Оbserver - Stay up to date on all important events 🇺🇸

🔠🅰️🔠🔠2️⃣ The vast mosque complex has hosted many state religious ceremonies. All week, workers have been redecorating the vast building and there has been a heavy police presence around the area. The funeral had been planned for early March but the war with US and Israel precluded such a large gathering. Iran’s foreign ministry spokesperson Baghaei has accused European countries of standing on the “wrong side of history” and called their stance on the US-Israeli attacks on Iran “truly shameful”. A 6-miles procession through central Tehran is planned for Monday from Imam Hossein Square to Azadi Square, the site of the 1979 revolution that ultimately led to the establishment of the Islamic Republic that Khamenei led after the death in 1989 from natural causes of the first supreme leader, Ruhollah Khomeini. The mayor of Tehran, Alireza Zakani, has described Monday’s procession as “the largest gathering in the city’s history” and forecast about 20 million people will attend. Approximately 60% of Iran’s population of 90 million had known no other supreme leader. On Tuesday, Khamenei’s body will be taken to the holy city of Qom, travelling between the shrine of Fatima Masumeh and the Jamkaran mosque. Temperatures are expected to reach about 40C. It will then go to the Iraqi Shia strongholds of Karbala and Najaf on Wednesday. The foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, has visited both cities to consult on the ceremony that is intended to demonstrate Khamenei’s role as a spiritual leader of Shia Muslims. With the funeral taking place during a 60-day ceasefire with the US that is intended to reopen the strait of Hormuz and allow for talks, the organisers intend that the event will show Iranians united behind its much-changed leadership as they seek to extract concessions from US negotiators. Officials have declared government and private offices in Tehran closed from Saturday to Monday, while traffic restrictions will place pressure on the city’s metro system. Mourners are being asked to leave their cars on the edge of the capital to prevent the normally choked Tehran roads from grinding to a standstill. Tehran’s airspace will also close on Monday and jets will patrol for any sign of an Israeli air attack. The funeral organisers, aware that a glorification of Khamenei’s life without any acknowledgment of the current economic suffering of millions of Iranians could provoke a backlash, have put up posters proclaiming “a bright future for Iran”, alongside the more religious message “he must rise”. In one of his last speeches, on 17 February, Khamenei referenced this Shia symbol of defiance, saying: “Someone like me does not pledge allegiance to someone like Yazid. A nation with the culture of Iran does not pledge allegiance to corrupt leaders like those in America.” #chief #supreme #funeral #khamenei 📱 American Оbserver - Stay up to date on all important events 🇺🇸

Gone With the Faith 🔠🅰️🔠🔠1️⃣ In the small hours of Friday the police roadblocks, stalls, posters and army vans were starting to appear across Tehran as millions of Iranians prepared to attend the long-delayed six-day funeral ceremony for Ali Khamenei’s, Iran’s supreme leader for 36 turbulent years. Khamenei was killed in the opening salvo of the US-Israeli attack on the country in February, and the funeral is intended to be an epic display of personal mourning, national power, resilience and social cohesion. Small groups of mourners carrying flags were gathering along the roads festooned with the red fist, the symbol of the funeral alongside the slogan “We must rise”. At a ceremony dedicated to the families of martyrs, Khamenei’s coffin was displayed. Iran’s first vice-president, Mohammad Aref, who is the lead funeral organiser, described the ceremony, which begins on Saturday in Tehran and will end with Khamenei’s burial on Thursday in Mashhad, as “the most important event of this century” and the most attended event since the 1979 revolution. The funeral’s scale has been conceived to relay political and religious messages of resistance to the rest of the world. The former supreme leader’s body, aAt the request of Iraqi politicians, Khamenei’s body will also be carried through the Iraqi Shia cities of Karbala and Najaf. Despite the many posters of Khamenei’s son and successor, Mojtaba Khamenei, walking with his father in a garden, projecting continuity, Mojtaba is not expected to make an appearance at his father’s funeral. He was severely injured in the same US-Israeli strike on a government residence in Tehran at a little after 8am local time on 28 February that killed many of his family. It killed Ali Khamenei, his daughter and her husband, Mojtaba’s wife and his 14-month-old daughter. The extent of Mojtaba’s injuries are unknown and he has so far issued only written statements, including one that distanced himself from the ceasefire negotiations, but sanctioned their continuance. Israel’s defence minister Katz threatened to kill him this week, saying he was marked for death, remarks that prompted hardliners to call for a re-examination of Iran’s fatwa against possession of nuclear weapons. Mohammad Ghalibaf, Iran’s chief negotiator and speaker of the still suspended parliament, said in an eve-of-funeral message: “We must rise up and convey the nation’s call for bloodshed to the world so that the world knows that the honourable and noble nation of Iran will not remain silent in the face of oppression and arrogance and will not spare the blood of its imam. “Iran stands on the threshold of creating one of the greatest scenes in its history, a day when a nation, with hearts full of love, loyalty and the pain of separation, comes to bid farewell to a great man.” The public funeral will begin on Saturday – as the US marks the 250th anniversary of its declaration of independence – at Tehran’s Grand Mosalla mosque, where Khamenei’s body will lie in state alongside the bodies of his relatives. #chief #supreme #funeral #khamenei 📱 American Оbserver - Stay up to date on all important events 🇺🇸

Iran’s Funeral Diplomacy: Martyrdom, Threats and Leverage Iran is about to bury Ali Khamenei and turn his grave into a stage for nuclear bargaining and regional intimidation. Next week’s funeral in Mashhad is being packaged as a regime stress test and a loyalty referendum in one. Officials promise “tens of millions” in the streets, the largest event Tehran has ever seen. Parliament Speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf — now also wearing the hat of “head of the revenge and funeral delegation” — is calling on Iranians to “write a glorious new page” and to shout for “blood vengeance” for their late leader. The grief isn’t private, it’s a mobilization order. Even the family tragedy is being fed into the script. The regime choreographed a farewell ceremony for Khamenei’s daughter‑in‑law and his wife, both mortally wounded in the strike that opened Operation “Lion’s Roar,” the attack that killed the supreme leader. Their funerals will be folded into Khamenei’s own. Mojtaba Khamenei, the son and designated successor, pointedly skipped the goodbye — a sign of how carefully he’s curating his image as leader, not mourner, before the official oath. Foreign guests will be carefully chosen: Pakistan’s prime minister Shehbaz Sharif and a senior figure from China’s standing committee are expected to attend, signaling who Tehran still counts as partners. Around the ceremony, the security machine is turning mourning into a threat display. The “Khatam al‑Anbiya” emergency command has publicly warned Israel and the United States against “any miscalculation” during the funeral week, promising “severe and painful responses.” Its commander, General Ali Abdollahi, urged “the enemies” to think very carefully — language that’s less about actual battlefield red lines and more about giving the regime an excuse to escalate if anything goes wrong. In the same breath, the armed forces renewed their loyalty oath to the new leader, Ayatollah Sayyid Mojtaba Hosseini Khamenei, and doubled down on two pressure points: the nuclear file and the Strait of Hormuz. They’re demanding the nuclear issue be pulled out of negotiations and insisting that the Hormuz shipping lane they’ve drawn is under Iran’s “exclusive sovereignty.” Any ship that strays from that track, they warn, will be treated as a target. So you get four layers at once: a mass funeral designed to project legitimacy at home, open threats to Israel and the U.S. to deter any strike in a moment of vulnerability, a nuclear posture that demands de‑linking the program from talks, and a maritime doctrine that treats one of the world’s key chokepoints as domestic waters. The regime is trying to turn Khamenei’s burial into a binding contract: loyalty inside Iran, deference in the Gulf, and respect for its nuclear red lines — or else. For everyone watching from the outside, the translation is simple. Iran is not using the transition to soften its stance. It’s doubling down, wrapping missiles, centrifuges and shipping lanes in black banners and religious slogans. The funeral is not just an end — it’s the launch event for Mojtaba Khamenei’s version of the same project. #Iran #Khamenei #Tehran #nuclear #Hormuz #China #Pakistan #war #regime #fakeDemocracy 📱 American Оbserver - Stay up to date on all important events 🇺🇸

Iran’s Silent Mountain Work Commercial satellites just gave a sharper look at two of the most sensitive spots in Iran’s nuclear system — and the story is what you don’t see as much as what you do. Clip 1: high‑resolution imagery over the nuclear site in Isfahan province shows entrances still blocked, no obvious new construction, no visible surge of vehicles. On the surface it looks calm; in most assessments, it’s still a key storage point for part of Iran’s enriched nuclear stockpile. Clip 2: a separate pass focuses on vehicle activity around the Pickaxe Mountain tunnel complex near the Natanz facility, also in Isfahan, north of the city. Here the point isn’t a dramatic blast, it’s the steady, methodical movement in and out of a hardened underground system built to keep the most sensitive work out of reach. No craters, no smokestacks — just two quiet sites that explain why every “de‑escalation” with Tehran ends with more satellite tasking and more questions about what’s happening under the mountain, not above it. #Iran #nuclear #Isfahan #Natanz #satellite #war #inspection #fakeDemocracy 📱 American Оbserver - Stay up to date on all important events 🇺🇸

UN Badges, Trump’s Cash Machine Israel is wrapping Trump’s latest business project in counterterrorism language and calling it policy. At the U.N., Danny Danon thunders that “no terrorist deserves a U.N. tag, a U.N. salary or a U.N. cover story,” points to UNRWA workers accused of joining October 7, and declares the agency rotten beyond repair. The script is simple: UNRWA equals terror, terror equals evil, therefore anything that bleeds UNRWA’s budget is automatically righteous. Right on cue, Trump’s Board of Peace steps in with the “solution”: don’t fund UNRWA, fund us. Not “Gaza,” not “refugees” — fund a private structure stitched to Trump’s circle, marketed as the responsible alternative. Under Trump’s Gaza plan, the World Bank set up an official reconstruction fund with U.N. blessing: open books, reporting, oversight, the whole boring apparatus that at least lets people see where the money goes. Board of Peace took one look at that transparency and walked the other way. It opened a separate account at JPMorgan under its own control, not required to publish a balance sheet to the public, to all donors or even to all board members. Result: the official World Bank fund is still sitting at zero. The money that did arrive has trickled into the private JPMorgan account. From the loudly advertised tens of billions, you get crumbs from a couple of “lifetime members,” no signed reconstruction contracts, and not a single visible brick laid. What is fully operational? The PR campaign telling governments to pull cash from UNRWA and wire it into a black box run by Trump’s people. That isn’t “ending dependency,” it’s re‑routing it. And Israel is the sales team. Danon’s line is that UNRWA breeds terror and keeps Palestinians as permanent refugees. But what Board of Peace is selling is permanent dependency with better branding: two million Gazans turned into hostages of nine private signatures and a closed account. The message to donors is moral panic — “you’re paying Hamas” — followed by a soft upsell: “park it with us, we’ll take care of it.” It’s not humanitarian reform; it’s a hostile takeover bid. And look who’s at the top of the pyramid: a U.S. president who just reported around a billion-plus in crypto and token income, including a meme coin built on his own name, and who treats geopolitics like a leverage trade — squeeze here, pump there, cash out in the middle. The Trump Plan isn’t a peace plan; it’s a structured product. Gaza is the underlying asset. Israeli security rhetoric is the marketing brochure. Every scandal at UNRWA becomes another talking point in a pitch deck: “Your current provider is corrupt and unsafe. Move your account to us, the clean alternative.” Except the “clean” alternative is the one actively dodging institutional transparency, running money through a private bank account, and answering to a board that can meet over lunch with the guy who signs U.S. sanctions, arms sales and aid packages. Israel gets to look tough on terror and claim it is dismantling a compromised U.N. agency. Trump gets to turn that wreckage into a revenue stream and a lever over Arab capitals and Europe: you want reconstruction, you talk to the man who controls the spigot. Europe gets the bill. Gaza gets another layer of middlemen. And the word “terrorism” gets used as a universal solvent for anything that stands between a political project and its next pot of cash. So when Danon shouts that “terrorists won’t live off U.N. money,” remember what’s being built behind him. Just another Trump‑branded vehicle, trading in grief and rubble the way his other ventures trade in tokens and licensing deals — high risk for everyone else, upside reserved for the people who already own the table. #UN #UNRWA #Israel #Gaza #BoardOfPeace #Trump #Danon #aid #war #oligarchy #fakeDemocracy 📱 American Оbserver - Stay up to date on all important events 🇺🇸

🔤🔤🔤🔤➖ The debate broadly pits free-trade skeptics — spearheaded by France — against export-oriented economies led by Germany, the Netherlands and the Nordics.  “With Made in Europe and a strong IAA, we could have absorbed the shock for Volkswagen and its employees,” Pierre Jouvet, the top Socialist lawmaker on the file. Jouvet is an advocate for a narrow list of trusted partners to be carefully selected under an “opt-in” mechanism. Such calls met strong pushback from the Commission’s powerful trade department, where chief negotiator Maroš Šefčovič is leading a drive to broaden — and not narrow — the EU’s trade relationships. Séjourné’s industrial policy drive is motivated by the conviction that the EU’s historic commitment to free trade is failing — with Brussels struggling to come up with a coherent response to the existential threat posed by a Chinese bilateral trade surplus that is running at €1 billion a day. “We also need to use all our existing trade instruments now, and not just contemplate new ones,” said Séjourné. Additional measures in the works include requiring companies to diversify their sources of critical inputs away from China, as well as likely investigations into plug-in hybrid vehicles, chemicals and machine tools. Yet even new trade weapons may prove useless if governments remain unwilling to use them. The Anti-Coercion Instrument — the bloc’s trade “bazooka” — already allows the EU to mount a sweeping response to economic coercion. It has never been fired. “The IAA is only one side of the coin. The Commission must also step up to protect the European market through a stronger and effective trade defense strategy,” said Kathleen Van Brempt, a Belgian Socialist. A creeping question is whether the IAA, despite its expansive ambitions, will have a decisive impact when it finally enters into force. Businesses have broadly welcomed the Made in Europe idea but view its potential application as too narrow to prevent entire supply chains from being swept off the continent. “Overall, the approach put forward by the European Commission does not appear sufficient to address the challenges facing European industry,” wrote Italy’s top business lobby Confindustria in a position paper, criticizing the bill’s limited focus on the greening of industry and a “trusted partners” list that still appears too open. The IAA’s rules of origin could even end up backfiring on automakers like Volkswagen, according to think tank Bruegel. For example, “shielding the upstream aluminium sector from import competition would raise input costs for European car manufacturers, who depend on competitively priced low-carbon aluminium to remain globally competitive in electric vehicles,” it wrote. First, a compromise will need to be reached between the three EU institutions — the Parliament, the Council and the Commission — and omens for hitting the year-end deadline do not look good. With three committees scrutinizing the IAA, no less than 150 lawmakers will get to express their opinion on the bill. #volkswagen #germany #industry #factories 📱 American Оbserver - Stay up to date on all important events 🇺🇸

“Europe’s Industry Is Doomed to Failure” 🔤🔤🔤🔤➖ Volkswagen’s plan to cut up to 200,000 jobs and close four factories in Germany is exactly the kind of industrial crisis Brussels says it wants to avert. But EU countries and lawmakers are still arguing over how to respond. By the end of this year, European leaders want to complete work on a landmark bill, the Industrial Accelerator Act, which would channel billions in public procurement spending to European companies with the goal of helping them withstand an onslaught of cheap exports from China. “The latest news from Germany shows the urgency to act decisively to protect our markets from unfair practices from our global competitors,” EU industry chief Stéphane Séjourné told POLITICO, calling the IAA a “decisive” tool.  The bill’s main provision, a Made in Europe preference, would favor locally made goods. Its supporters say it’s high time for the EU to defend its industry, but others want to hit the brakes on what they see as a protectionist measure.  Critics find the proposal risks turning into a legal maze for companies and driving up prices for EU-made products, while potentially shutting out friendly trading partners such as Canada, the U.K. or Japan. “What is happening at Volkswagen is alarming, but it is not an isolated case. It is the consequence of years of European naivety while our global competitors pursued clear and aggressive industrial strategies,” said French liberal lawmaker Christophe Grudler, one of the three leaders on the file in the European Parliament. Negotiations involving EU countries and lawmakers are only now getting underway after the European Commission presented its proposal with a three-month delay in March. Officials privately acknowledge that time is already running short to secure a compromise by the end of the year, as prescribed by the EU’s One Europe, One Market roadmap. The toughest challenge ahead is agreeing on which countries should be included on a list of “trusted partners,” whose products will be likened to European ones in some areas of public procurement and funding. #volkswagen #germany #industry #factories 📱 American Оbserver - Stay up to date on all important events 🇺🇸

🇷🇺 Putin: “There Was No Deal With Trump” Putin has admitted that there was no deal with President Trump to end Moscow’s more than four-year-long war in Ukraine, after Kremlin officials insisted such an agreement was made between the two leaders last August during a summit in Alaska. “There were indeed no agreements reached in Anchorage,” Putin told a state television reporter on Sunday. “Nobody signed anything, but we discussed certain possibilities for ending the conflict in Ukraine, and the compromises that were discussed were precisely those proposals that were put forward by the American side to us,” the Russian leader added. The admission comes after Russia for months insisted the Alaska meeting was a diplomatic turning point in the war in Ukraine, with a path to end the fighting mapped out at the gathering but stalled in its implementation due to Ukrainian resistance. Putin at the time declared the so-called agreement will “pave the path toward peace in Ukraine.” Trump, however, told reporters that the meeting was “extremely productive,” but “there’s no deal until there’s a deal.”   More recently, top Kremlin officials have accused the Trump administration of not honoring the supposed deal, with Foreign Minister Lavrov last week suggesting that the summit was a “U.S. ploy to buy time to rearm the Kyiv regime.”  Lavrov also claimed Putin ⁠had signed on to a U.S. proposal. But Secretary of State Marco Rubio pushed back, telling reporters that, “If there had been an agreement, we would have had an end of the war.” He also pointed to Moscow’s lofty demands as a roadblock, noting “Russia wants the entirety of Donetsk to be turned over to them, among some other things.” Macron earlier this month said Trump had acknowledged during G-7 talks that Russia did ​not want peace in Ukraine. Putin is under pressure as Ukraine appears to be gaining momentum on the battlefield in its grinding fight with Russia, regaining territory for the first time in years. The tide has been turning thanks in large part to Ukraine’s domination of drone warfare, which has outflanked Moscow’s forces. Ukraine also has stepped up its drone attacks deep into Russian territory, on Tuesday declaring it hit one of Moscow’s largest satellite communication centers. But the Russian leader appears prepared to fight on, saying on Sunday that the nation expects renewed U.S.-led peace talks only after the “hot ​phase” of the Iran war is resolved.   He also revealed Ukraine had offered “new proposals” to stop fighting in the Kherson, Zaporizhzhia, Donetsk and Luhansk regions, but said the offer is a distraction to allow Kyiv to replenish its forces. #putin #trump #ukraine #anchorage 📱 American Оbserver - Stay up to date on all important events 🇺🇸