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PAKISTAN moved ahead with preparations today for a new round of talks between the US and Iran, two days before a tenuous ceasefire is set to expire, and as renewed conflict around the Strait of Hormuz raised questions about whether the meeting would take place.

Over the weekend, the US attacked and seized an Iranian-flagged cargo vessel that it said had tried to evade its blockade of Iranian ports.

From Morning Star via This RSS Feed.

Push it to the limit.

Bonus high-er thinking:

TNG s1e6 "Lonely Among Us"

PUTTING trade unions back at the heart of communities is key to tackling far-right misinformation, an STUC fringe heard today.

Trade councils have in recent years played a key in repelling far-right activity at hotels used to house people seeking asylum.

But after a similar stand-off in Falkirk, activists in the Forth Valley have built on the example of Edinburgh’s Trade Unions into Communities hub, opening their own.

From Morning Star via This RSS Feed.

In the days since Pam Bondi’s exit from Donald Trump’s justice department, Jeffrey Epstein survivors and transparency advocates have been confronted by mixed messaging, prompting questions about whether a full accounting of his crimes would ever be revealed.

Legal veterans told the Guardian that authorities’ decisions – such as Bondi’s failure to appear for a congressional subpoena about her handling of Epstein investigative files – portend poorly for accountability. Moreover, her replacement’s comments about the status of Epstein investigations has been perceived by some as an effort to acknowledge prior missteps without presenting definitive solutions.

Trump’s Department of Justice, now helmed temporarily by his former criminal defense attorney Todd Blanche, had told the House oversight committee that Bondi would not appear for the 14 April hearing. Committee members said they were told this non-appearance was because Bondi “is no longer attorney general and was subpoenaed in her capacity as attorney general”.

A committee spokesperson said: “Since Pam Bondi is no longer attorney general, Chairman Comer will speak with Republican members and the Department of Justice about the status of the deposition subpoena and confer on next steps.”

Comer also reportedly engaged in behind-the-scenes efforts to avoid Bondi’s deposition prior to her removal, according to the New York Times.

Despite securing a narrow victory in last month’s general election, the liberal Freedom Movement (Gibanje Svoboda) announced it is “looking forward to working from the opposition” during consultations with Slovenian President Nataša Pirc Musar on April 20. The party’s representatives, including current Prime Minister Robert Golob, said they were unable to secure the necessary majority during negotiations and would not do so by agreeing to political trade or blackmail.

The Freedom Movement’s announcement signals that far-right leader Janez Janša might be building his own majority composed of right-wing and self-declared anti-establishment parties. The likelihood of this scenario has grown since Zoran Stevanović, leader of the Resnica party, was confirmed National Assembly speaker earlier this month, drawing criticism from progressive political circles.

While Janša denied the Slovenian Democratic Party (SDS) is actively negotiating to form an administration at the moment, he also stated they are prepared for any upcoming role: government, opposition, or early elections. With other right-wing parties eager to avoid another election, some analysts believe an agreement with the SDS is likely to follow soon.

Read more: Orbán defeated, but right still victorious in Hungarian elections

The post-election process has been heavily criticized by progressive parties, in part because conservative and self-proclaimed anti-establishment parties are believed to have thrown their weight behind Janša – though quietly– thus betraying their electoral promises. “As the new government takes shape, we are witnessing messy political horse-trading that has, among other things, led to a person with no experience and a history of breaking the law being appointed to a leading position in the legislative branch,” the progressive party Levica wrote on Monday. “In doing so, Resnica has betrayed its own voters, broken a (notarized) promise, and struck a deal with those who, just a few years ago, were repressing the people of Slovenia and firing tear gas in Ljubljana.”

During the COVID-19 pandemic, Resnica promoted anti-vaccination mobilizations and theories. This overlapped with a period when Janša’s previous administration deployed extremely repressive measures against the population. During this election campaign, Janša was implicated in an espionage case against Golob’s government, reported to European Union bodies and involving Israeli mercenary company Black Cube. Most recently, in discussing policies he would implement if he became prime minister again, the far-right leader referred to uncontrolled public expenditure and debt – signaling cuts to public services – and potential changes to electoral law, a pet project of many of Europe’s far-right parties.

Read more: Antifascism is anti-militarism: socialist industrial legacy at risk of becoming motor of EU armament

While the government outlook remains uncertain, Slovenia’s public took to the streets last week, reaffirming demands for the direction they want the country to take, most notably taking a decisive stand against war and genocide. During an April 14 protest, demonstrators demanded all ties with Israel be cut – going beyond Golob’s government stance in international fora during the Gaza genocide – as well as an end to purchases of US-made weapons and an exit from NATO. Unlike what might be expected from another Janša administration, protesters insisted the new government should: “Reduce defense spending and instead allocate funds to strengthening public health, education, and culture in Slovenia.”

The post Right wing could build a majority despite narrow liberal election win in Slovenia appeared first on Peoples Dispatch.

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Parents of children killed in the US bombing of an elementary school in southern Iran released a letter on Sunday applauding Pope Leo XIV for speaking out against war and urging him to "continue to be the voice of the voiceless children."

"We write this letter to you with trembling hands and a heart full of pain, from amidst the ashes and ruins of the schools of the city of Minab," reads the letter, first reported by Iran's PressTV. "We are the fathers and mothers of 168 children who, these days, instead of embracing the warm bodies of our children, press their burned bags and bloody notebooks to our chests; innocent children whose only crime was smiling in the classroom, but this crime, through the instigation and support of illogical warmongers, crashed down upon the heads of our innocent children."

More than 100 children were killed in the February 28 strike on Shajarah Tayyebeh elementary school in Minab, along with teachers and parents. Preliminary findings from the Pentagon indicate that the US was responsible for the strike, though the Trump administration has not formally admitted fault or apologized for the deadly attack, which came on the first day of the illegal US-Israeli war on Iran. Human rights groups have said the bombing should be investigated as a war crime.

In recent weeks, Trump administration officials and US President Donald Trump himself have lashed out at Pope Leo for condemning the Iran war and the president's genocidal threat to wipe out Iranian civilization, which the pope called "truly unacceptable."

The pontiff has not backed down, saying last week that he "will continue to speak out strongly against war, seeking to promote peace, promoting dialogue and multilateralism among states to find solutions to problems."

In their letter on Sunday, the parents of children killed in the Minab school bombing wrote to Pope Leo that "you, with an aching heart and a divine perspective, warned the awakened consciences of the world that 'hate is increasing, violence is worsening, and many have lost their lives.'"

"Today, the empty chairs of the classrooms in Minab are bitter testaments to this very truth; a truth brought about by the making of American bombs directed by illogical warmongers," they continued. "We thank you that amidst the tumult of war, you became the voice of righteousness and reminded everyone that lasting peace and tranquility are achieved 'not through force and weapons, but through the path of dialogue and the genuine search for a solution for all.'"

NEW: The families of more than 100 school children killed in the U.S. bombing of an Iranian school have written a letter of gratitude to Pope Leo XIV.

In it, they thank him for being a champion of peace and a voice for their deceased children.

The White House has yet to… pic.twitter.com/KZKmNoYwwu
— Christopher Hale (@ChristopherHale) April 19, 2026

The letter came as Trump issued fresh threats to indiscriminately bomb Iran's civilian infrastructure, further endangering a fragile ceasefire and the prospect of a lasting diplomatic resolution to the conflict.

According to Iranian authorities, the US-Israeli war has killed more than 3,300 people in Iran—including hundreds of children. Abbas Masjedi, the head of the Iranian Legal Medicine Organization, told PressTV that 40% of the bodies of Iranian victims were "initially unidentifiable due to the type of bombs and missiles" used by the US and Israeli militaries.

From Common Dreams via This RSS Feed.

With a promise to spend at least 30% of the state’s budget on health and education, the Left Front is seeking to revive welfarism in the electoral discourse in the Indian state of West Bengal.

The Left Front has vowed to provide more employment opportunities to the rural poor in the state if elected to power. The rural poor in West Bengal are largely forced to migrate to urban areas or to other states in search of jobs.

The left is also promising a greater focus on providing expanded and cheaper access to all basic amenities to the millions in the state still forced to live without running water, electricity or access to health care.

West Bengal is one of India’s largest states. It shares a long international border with Bangladesh and is mostly agricultural. It has a population of around 100 million with the majority living in poor or very poor conditions.

The state legislative elections are scheduled to be held later this month in two phases; April 23 and 29. Around 70 million voters will cast their ballots to elect 294 representatives to the state legislature.

Whichever party or coalition wins the majority of the seats in the state legislature will form the government for next five years.

The Left Front

There are four major parties or coalitions competing to gain the attention of voters in the state, the ruling centrist Trinamool Congress (TMC), led by current chief minister Mamata Banerjee, the main opposition ultra-right-wing and Hindu supremacist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), the Left Front, and the Indian National Congress (INC).

The Left Front is a broad electoral coalition of India’s major left parties, including the Communist Party of India (Marxist), the Communist Party of India (CPI), the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist) Liberation, the Revolutionary Socialist Party (RSP), and Forward Block.

All except the CPI (ML) Liberation have been part of the electoral coalition since the 1970s and have jointly ruled the state between 1977 and 2011.

The many years of Left Front rule was marked by high growth in the state’s agricultural output and extensive land reforms. The left governments were also credited to strengthening democracy by empowering the local self government bodies called Panchayats.

Ever since it lost power in the state to the centrist TMC, the overall development indicators of the state have largely stagnated. TMC rule has also seen a strong rise in the ultra right wing in the state’s politics, led by the BJP.

The rise of the BJP has led to the domination of issues related to religious and ethnic identities with development and welfare of the people getting almost negligible attention.

The divisive politics of the BJP, which portrays the substantial Muslim population in the state (around 27% of the population) as “infiltrators” has led to the strong polarization of the electorate, forcing minority communities to give priority to survival over livelihoods and better living conditions and voting in mass to the TMC.

Revival of the secular, development-oriented discourse

In a press conference on Wednesday, Mohammad Salim, one of CPI (M)’s national leaders and secretary of the state unit, dismissed the attempts of the BJP to further push sectarian discourse in the state elections. He claimed that West Bengal has largely been a secular and harmonious society and the left will make sure that it continues to remain so.

Salim also underlined the Left Front’s slogan of Bangla Bachao! Desh Bechao! (Save Bengal, Save the nation) in this election. He called the slogan an attempt to revive the livelihood issues faced by the people to counter the divisive politics of the BJP.

The Left Front which had its electoral base in the state among its landless poor and socially deprived sections of the society in the past is seeking to revive it in this election by pointing out how the 15 years of the TMC rule in the state has failed to tackle the issues of poverty, forced migration and access to basic amenities.

Months before the elections were announced, the left held statewide marches to meet millions of people with the Bangla Bachao slogan, in its attempt to revive its core constituencies.

CPI (M) has put forward a large number of mostly young candidates, in an attempt to attract young and first-time voters in the state.

Its campaign, both on social media and in person, canvassing by candidates, has focused on issues of unemployment and lack of livelihood among the youth, which is forcing a large number of them to migrate to other states in search of jobs.

The candidates have also focused on the failure of the government to maintain law and order, particularly affecting the women, who have been on the receiving end in various cases in the last few years in the state.

In 2024 the brutal rape and murder of one woman doctor in the capital Kolkata led to large-scale public outrage.

The left has also questioned the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of the electoral rolls in the state conducted by the Election Commission of India (ECI) just before the elections.

It has termed the SIR process because of which more than 9 million voters, mostly from socially deprived sections of the society and Muslim minorities, have lost their right to vote in the elections, an attack on one of the most fundamental rights of the poor in a democracy

The post Left Front advances people-centric agenda to regain ground in West Bengal elections appeared first on Peoples Dispatch.

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Al-Fassel and Pishtaz News look like typical news websites. They have neatly designed homepages and active social media accounts, where they share reporting and videos on Middle Eastern geopolitics in Arabic and Farsi, respectively, as well as English. Al-Fassel’s X account states the publication’s mission is “to investigate events of great significance that are often overlooked by local and regional media, and to shed light on them.” The Pishtaz News X account says it was established “to investigate and expand upon important news that local and regional media often overlook.”

These overlooked stories share the same ideological slant and editorial voice: that of the White House. Al-Fassel’s YouTube account, for instance, has racked up millions of views on Arabic-language videos praising the Trump administration’s Gaza policy and exhorting Hamas to cease “taking orders from the Iranian regime” and release Israeli prisoners. On Pishtaz News, a poll on the homepage recently asked: “[H]ow would you describe your belief about the Supreme Leader’s current health status and whereabouts?” Possible answers range from “In good health but hiding” to “Disfigured” or “Dead.” The excellence of Saudi and Emirati leadership, both close military partners of the U.S., is a recurring theme.

There’s a reason this coverage echoes American foreign policy talking points. Al-Fassel and Pishtaz News are, in fact, part of network of websites and social media accounts purporting to be legitimate Middle Eastern news outlets that are in fact propaganda mills funded by the United States government, The Intercept has found.

Disclosed only at the bottom of both sites behind an “About” link that is easily missed by casual readers, the outlets note that they are “a product of an international media organization publicly funded from the budget of the United States Government.” The government affiliation remains undisclosed on social media platforms including Instagram, despite a platform policy requiring the labeling of state-backed media outlet to prevent the unwitting consumption of government propaganda.

The sites’ recent fixation on crushing Iran is unlikely to be a coincidence: Both publications share numerous connections with a portfolio of fake newsrooms that originated as a military psychological operations campaign against foreign internet users.

Al-Fassel and Pishtaz News did not respond to requests for comment, nor did CENTCOM or the Department of Defense.

Adm. Charles Bradford “Brad” Cooper, commander of U.S. Central Command, arrives for a joint press conference with Pete Hegseth at CENTCOM headquarters at MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa, Fla., on March 5, 2026. Photo: Octavio Jones/AFP via Getty Images

In 2008, U.S. Special Operations Command put out a call for contractors to help operate what it called the Trans-Regional Web Initiative, a project that would provide “rapid, on-order global dissemination of web-based influence products and tools in support of strategic and long-term U.S. Government goals and objectives.” In other words, state propaganda pushed by Pentagon.

Masquerading as independent online newsrooms, the TRWI sites hired “indigenous content stringers” to produce articles “which Combatant Commands (COCOMs) can use as necessary in support of the Global War on Terror.” The contract, awarded to General Dynamics Information Technology, spawned 10 websites that funneled U.S. foreign policy talking points to audiences across the Middle East and South Asia, running everything from banal essays about inter-faith coexistence to, as reported by Foreign Policy in 2011, articles intended to “whitewash the image of Central Asian dictatorships.” By 2014, the sites were deemed a failure by Congress and de-funded.

Eight years later, a team of researchers published an unusual report. Following the 2016 election, the bulk of the Western media’s interest in online propagandizing had focused on influence campaigns attributed to Russia, China, and other American geopolitical rivals. But the 2022 report from the Stanford Internet Observatory and Graphika, a commercial internet analysis firm and Pentagon information warfare contractor, uncovered a network of phony “pro-Western” Twitter and Facebook accounts that pushed articles from pseudo-news websites. The report stopped short of formally attributing the campaign to the U.S., but noted that both Meta and Twitter had done so. The researchers concluded that the accounts in question attempted the coordinated spread of articles from a network of sham news websites established by U.S. Special Operations Command.

[

Related

Twitter Aided the Pentagon in Its Covert Online Propaganda Campaign](https://theintercept.com/2022/12/20/twitter-dod-us-military-accounts/)

The report found that just a few years after TRWI’s ostensible death, many of the sites had simply rebranded, now carrying hard-to-find disclosures mentioning they were run by U.S. Central Command. Following Stanford and Graphika’s findings, some of the sites shut down; others continued. Subsequent reporting by the Washington Post found that the embarrassing revelations spurred the Pentagon to conduct “a sweeping audit of how it conducts clandestine information warfare.”

A review of the Internet Archive shows that in the aftermath of the Stanford report, TRWI sites that remained in operation changed their disclosure language. Rather than citing CENTCOM sponsorship, these sites shifted to state that they are “publicly funded from the budget of the United States Government.” The disclosure language used by the remaining network of CENTCOM propaganda sites is a word-for-word copy of the phrasing The Intercept found tucked away on the About pages of Pishtaz News and Al-Fassel.

That’s not the only evidence suggesting a link to this network of military propaganda sites.

Since they began publishing in 2023, Al-Fassel and Pishtaz News have regularly quoted or summarized CENTCOM press releases touting regional operations and battlefield successes, as did the outlets mentioned in the Stanford/Graphika report. The reliance on combatant command press releases in particular is an editorial strategy that dates back to the original SOCOM-run TRWI network.

On X, Pishtaz News follows only three other users; two are the official CENTCOM accounts for Farsi and Arabic audiences. The Pishtaz News Instagram account, which carries no disclosure of the account’s governmental nature, follows only one other user: “US CENTCOM FARSI.”

Intentionally or otherwise, Al-Fassel’s posts to X are often geotagged as having been sent from Lutz, Florida, a stone’s throw from the headquarters of CENTCOM and SOCOM in Tampa, as well as myriad military contractors that service both.

Both sites also share common design elements with the TRWI-associated publications that suggest they were created or operated by the same contractor: All posts conclude with a poll asking “Do you like this article?” using the same thumbs-up and thumbs-down icons. URLs are structured identically for Al-Fassel, Pishtaz News, and Salaam Times — an Afghanistan-focused site launched under the TRWI that continues today under a different name — suggesting they were coded using the same tools. The three sites use an identical 404 error graphic to alert users when they’ve clicked on a broken link, as well.

The web design of Al-Fassel and Pishtaz News — including page layout, URL structure, 404 error graphic, and much of the legal verbiage in the About sections — closely mirrors that of CENTCOMcitadel.com, a publication with similar content that carries an overt disclosure of Pentagon sponsorship at the bottom of its homepage.

“These sites are similar in style to the overt messaging efforts we saw from the Department of Defense previously.”

“These sites are similar in style to the overt messaging efforts we saw from the Department of Defense previously,” Renée DiResta, a former Stanford researcher and co-author of the 2022 report, told The Intercept. “We previously saw this pattern of clearer U.S. affiliation language in the About page of the domain, then minimal to no acknowledgement on the social media profiles.”

There are other subtle nods to the sites’ true purpose: URLs for the English language versions of each site are denoted “en_GB,” for Great Britain. In a comprehensive 2015 analysis of the TRWI network, University of Bath doctoral student Roy Revie observed that the network of American military propaganda sites explicitly marked their English versions as British because “SOCOM seeks to avoid any suggestion its sites are aimed at US audiences.”

In the parlance of information warfare, these propaganda shops are considered “overt” rather than “covert,” because their state ownership is technically disclosed. But in his 2015 paper, Revie argued that these psyop sites still engage in deception. They use online journalism as a form of camouflage, he wrote, because most readers won’t seek out a publication’s About page to learn about its funding. The design of these sites “allows the DOD to credibly claim full transparency and maintain legitimacy, putting the onus onto the user to inform themselves about the source,” Revie wrote.

The output of both sites consistently lionizes the U.S. and Israel, along with America’s Gulf allies. They regularly demean the Iranian state, presenting a wholly lopsided and misleading account in a time of war. “The US says it does not seek open conflict with Tehran,” reads a March 2 article in Al-Fassel. Both sites have repeatedly cited reporting by Iran International — a Saudi-funded, pro-Israel, Iranian monarchist publication with a long record of journalistic misrepresentation. A March 31 Pishtaz News article, for instance, based on an entirely anonymously sourced Iran International post, alleged that Iranian security forces gang-raped nurses in Tehran.

Recent coverage depicts Iran as up against the ropes. A March 22 article in Pishtaz News exclaimed, “The Islamic Republic’s regular army, known as the Artesh, is increasingly described by informed observers as a force under severe strain and institutional neglect.” Another anonymously authored piece from March 25, headlined “Artesh would be better off without its main rival,” seems intended to stoke tensions between Iran’s regular army and its Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. “Without the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), resources could flow directly to the regular army, known as the Artesh, enabling meaningful modernization,” the story claimed, a talking point ripped straight from the mouths of right-wing Iran hawks in the U.S. In a March 18 Fox News segment, for example, retired Gen. Jack Keane suggested that an Artesh–IRGC rivalry could be exploited to accomplish regime change.

Experts told The Intercept the newscaster was likely a product of generative AI and not genuine footage.

It’s unclear who exactly writes what appears on these sites. Most articles run without any byline, while other stories are published under names that are difficult to find any mention of anywhere else on the internet. Some of the personnel may not be real at all. A January Al-Fassel YouTube overview of recent regional headlines was narrated by an Arabic-speaking man in a sharp blue blazer. Experts told The Intercept the newscaster was likely a product of generative AI and not genuine footage. “The strongest indicator is an almost complete absence of eye blinks,” Georgetown University professor and deepfake researcher Sejin Paik told The Intercept. Zuzanna Wojciak, a synthetic media researcher with the human rights organization Witness, reached the same conclusion, citing strange anomalies with his skin, hands, and teeth.

[

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Pentagon Document: U.S. Wants to “Suppress Dissenting Arguments” Using AI Propaganda](https://theintercept.com/2025/08/25/pentagon-military-ai-propaganda-influence/)

Some articles deeply misstate or misrepresent the facts. An April 15 Al-Fassel article about Iran’s “war crime threats” against the American University of Beirut omitted the fact that these threats came in response to repeated U.S.–Israel airstrikes against Iranian schools. The day after an Al-Fassel article described the Houthis as “crippled” and “largely disintegrated,” capable of offering only “verbal support” for Iran, the Yemeni militant group launched cruise missiles at Israel.

The outlets also illustrate the extent of deceptive messaging radiating from the Pentagon and White House: A March 5 post to the Pishtaz News Instagram account boasted, “The Iranian regime’s ability to strike US forces and regional partners is rapidly eroding, while US combat power continues to grow.” Four weeks later, Iran was continuing to lob missiles at U.S. bases as well as its regional partners, and succeeded in downing an American F-15 and A-10 Warthog. An April 4 Al-Fassel Instagram post claimed, citing Secretary of State Marco Rubio, that “Iran is not satisfied with a peaceful nuclear program, but seeking to enhance its military capabilities,” even though a 2025 assessment from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence concluded the opposite.

“You will be systematically annihilated.”

Other articles dispense with masquerading as journalism, reading more as warnings straight from Washington: “United States is fully prepared to protect its forces in Middle East,” read a June 2025 headline on Pishtaz News. “With advanced technological capabilities and highly-trained personnel, the United States maintains one of the world’s most capable military forces, continuously adapting to evolving security challenges to maintain order and stability.” A March 27 Pishtaz News tweet was more straightforward. “You will be systematically annihilated,” it threatens in Farsi. “Your commanders are hiding in bunkers. They have sent their families and wealth abroad—why are you still fighting for them?”

Some articles purport to include comments from genuine expert sources. In at least one case, this happened without the knowledge of the source. A July 2025 article in Al-Fassel predicted that a future closure of the Strait of Hormuz “would harm China and Russia more than other nations.” The article quoted Umud Shokri, an energy analyst affiliated with George Mason University, the State Department, and the Middle East Institute. “I would like to clarify that I was not aware of any affiliation between alfasselnews.com and the U.S. government,” Shokri told The Intercept. “I also did not have any direct interview with the platform, nor was I contacted by them directly. To the best of my knowledge, any quotation attributed to me appears to have been drawn from prior public commentary or other media appearances.”

Prior to the war on Iran, a top priority on both sites was marketing the U.S.–Israeli plans for the future of Gaza. The message is essentially a distillation of the U.S.–Israel–Gulf State consensus: That all Palestinian suffering is brought on by Hamas rather than the past three years of Israeli bombardment, and that the Trump-sponsored “Board of Peace” augurs an unprecedented era of prosperity for Palestinians.

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“The incoming Board of Peace,” a December 2025 Al-Fassel piece claimed, “is expected to foster conditions for democratic representation and meaningful civic participation.” A December 12 Al-Fassel YouTube video similarly blamed Hamas and Iran, rather than Israel, for the blockade of humanitarian aid into Gaza, followed by an AI-generated image of a science fiction city overlaid with Arabic captions promising billions in foreign investment and economic revitalization for Gaza. The video currently has nearly 1.7 million views.

Other items around Gaza further invert reality. Since October 2025, Gaza has been bifurcated by the so-called “Yellow Line,” an arbitrary boundary behind which Israeli forces nominally withdrew last year. Palestinians on the Israeli side of the line face harsh occupying military governance, while those on the other side risk being killed.

Despite claims by Al-Fassel’s video team that Trump’s Gaza policy will herald the ability for countless Palestinians to return home, Israeli forces routinely fire at civilians approaching this buffer zone.

“Incidents of gunfire, shelling, and limited incursions have continued near the ‘Yellow Line,’ the separation zone near the border with Israel, keeping any return highly dangerous,” according to a United Nations video report. “With the amount of available space shrinking, thousands of families have been forced to return to the edges of their destroyed neighborhoods near the ‘Yellow Line,’ despite what residents say is the continued risk of injury or death from intermittent fire.”

Not so, says Al-Fassel: “The Yellow Line is more than a boundary; it is a lifeline designed to keep Gaza’s families safe and informed during the ceasefire,” claimed a November article. “The Yellow Line is not a symbol of division — it is a lifeline.”

A yellow block demarcating the “Yellow Line,” which has separated the Gaza Strip’s Israeli-occupied and Palestinian zones since the October ceasefire, is visible in Khan Younis, southern Gaza Strip, on Jan. 22, 2026. Photo: Abdel Kareem Hana/AP

Following the 2016 election and the panic surrounding Russian covert propaganda efforts, major American social media platforms began adding labels to the accounts of government-controlled media properties. Videos from Al Jazeera English’s YouTube account, for instance, come with a disclaimer that “Al Jazeera is funded in whole or in part by the Qatari government.” Although X abandoned this policy in 2023, it is still nominally on the books for both Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, and YouTube.

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There is no disclosure, however, in the Instagram posts or accounts of Al-Fassel or Pishtaz News. YouTube videos from both accounts do not include a disclaimer about U.S. funding; however, a brief disclosure can be found on their main account pages, tucked into an About section that must be expanded to be read.

Neither site appears to have a particularly large audience on social media. Both have paltry followings on X — about 2,400 for Al-Fassel, and only 132 following Pishtaz News — with many appearing to be spam-based accounts with names followed by a long string of numbers that engage in posting behavior common to spam networks. Al-Fassel has found modest engagement on Instagram, where it has over 7,700 followers. Though Pishtaz News has only 475 followers on Instagram, its posts sometimes break through; a March 18 post of CENTCOM footage from the deck of an aircraft carrier, for example, racked up more than 1,100 likes.

At times, the content published by the propaganda sites may have reached American audiences. A March 27 Al-Fassel story alleging the total collapse of the Iranian-led “Axis of Resistance” was shared that same day to FreeRepublic, the conservative American message board, by user MeanWestTexan. Federal law forbids Pentagon propaganda aimed at Americans, though a similar prohibition aimed at the State Department was overturned in 2013.

Sometimes their stories reach other Western readers. An Al-Fassel article on the Houthis made its way into the citations of a 2024 article in the academic journal Survival: Global Politics and Strategy by University of Ottawa professor Thomas Juneau. (Juneau did not respond to a request for comment.) A submission to the U.N.’s Committee on Enforced Disappearances from Justice for All International, a Swiss-based nonprofit, similarly cited an Al-Fassel post on the IRGC, while an annual report by the state-operated Swedish Defence Research Agency relied in part on an Al-Fassel article on ISIS. The Intercept reviewed multiple entries on Grokipedia, X’s Wikipedia clone, citing Al-Fassel articles as well.

[

Read Our Complete Coverage

Targeting Iran --------------](/collections/targeting-iran/)

Emerson Brooking, a fellow with the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab and former Pentagon cyber policy adviser, believes CENTCOM is most likely behind the sites and considers their overall reach lackluster. When it comes to online propaganda, he said, the U.S. “could learn some lessons from Iran.” Iranian propaganda efforts — mostly quickly produced AI slop — have captured the attention of the internet in a way that the U.S. ersatz newsrooms have not.

But the sites’ limited reach is unlikely to bring them to a halt anytime soon. Even as the Trump administration has gutted Voice of America and other long-standing tools of U.S. soft power, these sites have continued publishing. If their similarities to the long-running American military psyops are more than coincidental, that says more about a culture of inertia at the Pentagon than its success in winning hearts and minds. Brooking told The Intercept that because operating blogs amounts to a “rounding error” within the broader defense budget, such projects can continue with little scrutiny.

A seldom-read network of propaganda sites might seem to have little purpose. But it’s the kind of thing authorities can gesture toward, Brooking said, when pressed about their efforts to combat Iran in the “information space.” “Successive SOCOM or CENTCOM or other senior leaders could point to the fact that they’re maintaining this network of websites,” he said.

The post These Middle Eastern News Sites Are Actually U.S. Government Propaganda Operations appeared first on The Intercept.

From The Intercept via This RSS Feed.

In what is to be the biggest repayment programme in history, companies can apply online for money they were charged under the so-called "Liberation Day" tariffs - plus interest - to be returned.

The US Court of International Trade in March ordered customs officials to refund the more than $160bn (£121bn) the government had collected, putting roughly 330,000 importers in a position to potentially win back some money.

But some individual consumers, who were hit by the tariffs indirectly through higher prices, are not expected to be compensated.

IAN SINCLAIR recommends a documentary that highlights the multifarious benefits of legalising access to land throughout England

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FBI director Kash Patel has sued The Atlantic and reporter Sarah Fitzpatrick over a story that alleged Patel has “alarmed colleagues with episodes of excessive drinking and unexplained absences.”

The defamation suit, filed Monday morning in US District Court in the District of Columbia, seeks $250 million in damages.

The Atlantic called the suit “meritless.”

“We stand by our reporting on Kash Patel, and we will vigorously defend The Atlantic and our journalists against this meritless lawsuit,” a spokesperson told CNN.