[Daily Mail, where America gets its news] Donald Trump was shocked to hear that China is reportedly supplying weapons to Iran, responding with some consternation.
China and Iran struck a deal for Beijing to send up to 400 Chinese-made shoulder-fired air defense launchers to the Islamic Republic, three sources familiar with the matter told Reuters.
The deal will enable Tehran's fighters to more readily defend themselves against US air assets as American forces enjoy air superiority over Iran.
Trump has repeatedly said that he's spoken to Chinese President Xi Jinping, and that the foreign leader 'agreed not to send weapons to Iran.'
The president even threatened China over the weekend, saying it would 'be very bad for them' if they did.
But the President was seemingly caught off guard by the latest Reuters report.
'That would be surprising,' Trump responded to a question about the report. 'I mean, things like that happen.'
'He (Xi) told me very strongly he wouldn't partake, and he knows I'd be quite disappointed.'
But the Chinese Foreign Ministry flatly denied the reporting about the arms sale.
'The relevant reports are completely groundless. China has consistently played a role in promoting peace and ending the conflict.'
The sources who spoke with Reuters cautioned that though the arms deal had been signed, details of the agreement, like delivery schedules and quantities, may still be changed.
They shared that under the agreement, shipments of the air defense systems will depart from the western Chinese city of Urumqi before traveling to Pakistan and then on to Iran.
'Speculations of Pakistan being involved in supply of Air Defence weapons to Iran from China are absolutely concocted and false,' Pakistan's military media, ISPR, said in a statement.
Yes at #8 and Abu's cmt below. OBTW don't forget to hit the OFF switch on your Chinese GPS targeting satellite and don't even think about hand-help AAA rockets.
Posted by: Skidmark ||
07/30/2026 00:00 ||
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[422 views]
Top|| File under: Govt of Iran
#8
IIUC, the Chinese need the Hormuz Strait to be opened a lot more than we do. Trump could keep that sucker closed for an indefinte period and let Chinese gas pumps run dry. That'd be fun to watch.
Posted by: Abu Uluque ||
07/30/2026 12:19 Comments ||
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Former Trump campaign manager Brad Parscale is overseeing an operation posting hundreds of blog posts on behalf of Israel, with the goal of infiltrating artificial intelligence.
Since October, former Trump campaign manager Brad Parscale has been quietly overseeing an operation posting hundreds of blog posts on behalf of Israel. One article, titled “The Reality Behind Gaza’s ‘Journalists’: Terror Ties, Propaganda, and the Laws of War,” asserts that a majority of journalists in Gaza were linked to terrorist organizations. Another casts doubt on the killing of Hind Rajab, a five-year-old Palestinian girl killed by the Israeli military in 2024.
The key intended audience of these sites is not concerned Americans, it’s not even humans—most of the sites average a few hundred unique visitors each month. Instead, Parscale and his firm, Clock Tower X, created them as part of a $46.5 million contract with the Israeli government to try and influence artificial intelligence-powered chatbots, tools like Claude or ChatGPT.
Parscale has made his goal of influencing artificial intelligence—often referred to as “LLM poisoning”—explicit. In his initial agreement with Israel, Parscale said that he would deploy “websites and content to deliver GPT framing results on GPT conversations” as part of the contract. More recently, his team even told Axios they are “seeing success” at getting popular AI systems to incorporate information from their sites, though they declined to provide data.
And it is working, according to disinformation experts who reviewed a Drop Site analysis of chatbot queries and training data, meaning tens of millions of Americans who use chatbots are increasingly likely to receive answers manipulated by Parscale on behalf of the Israeli government.
When Drop Site asked Perplexity “Is it beneficial for the US to enhance military cooperation with Israel?” the chatbot responded with a one-word answer: “Yes.” The top source listed was Allyvia.org, a Parscale-created website dedicated to promoting the U.S.-Israel military relationship. Microsoft Copilot similarly cited Parscale’s websites.
Allyvia is one of 10 different websites created by Clock Tower X, a boutique digital influence company owned by Parscale. Each website is dedicated to promoting a different Israeli narrative. FactSignal.org, for instance, fashions itself as fact-checking website tackling anti-Israel information, containing articles discrediting slain journalists as Hamas terrorists and rejecting the notion that Israel’s military actions in Gaza constitute a genocide. Paxpoint.org, meanwhile, promotes the narrative that Israel is a nation of peace.
All of Parscale’s websites contain a statement at the bottom which states “this material is distributed by Clock Tower X LLC on behalf of the State of Israel.” This statement is a mandatory disclosure requirement under the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA). Despite this, when Drop Site asked prominent chatbots about the latest news from Paxpoint.org, Perplexity and Copilot did not flag that the site was created as part of an Israeli influence operation. Claude, ChatGPT, and Gemini did flag the caveat.
#1
I'm all in favor of what Parscale is alleged to be doing here. It goes to show what I've been saying about AI all along is true: Garbage in. Garbage out.
Posted by: Abu Uluque ||
07/30/2026 12:28 Comments ||
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#2
And if it pisses off the Gazooks, so much the better.
Posted by: Abu Uluque ||
07/30/2026 12:32 Comments ||
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[Rudaw] Iraq on Wednesday denounced the US-Saudi targeting of Popular Mobilization Forces (PMF)
…local Shiite militias wholly owned by Iran, despite being on the Iraqi payroll…
positions across the country, noting the strikes coincided with its communication with “concerned parties" to verify Saudi claims of an attack on its oil facilities launched from Iraqi territory.
Baghdad also announced an "integrated security plan" to confront violations of its sovereignty and prevent any side from using Iraqi soil to attack neighboring countries as well.
Iraq's National Security Council convened an "emergency meeting" chaired by Prime Minister Ali al-Zaidi "to discuss the developments of the security situation and the attack launched by the American and Saudi air forces this morning, which resulted in a group of innocent martyrs and wounded," government spokesperson Sabah al-Numan said in a statement.
The Council condemned the targeting, "which came at a time when the Iraqi government was communicating with the concerned parties to verify and address" Riyadh's claims "regarding the targeting of Saudi territories [from Iraq]," Numan said, reaffirmed Iraq's "firm rejection of all hostile acts, regardless of the executing entity or the justifications relied upon.”
Earlier on Wednesday, the PMF said "at least 20" of its members were killed and "32 others were injured” as a result of the joint American-Saudi strikes "which targeted a number of official headquarters of the Popular Mobilization Forces” in the Iraqi capital Baghdad and five other provinces.
Good. They’d been attacking American bases for the better part of a decade, and Saudi Arabia since this war started.
“The announced numbers of martyrs and wounded are considered a preliminary toll subject to increase or update,” the PMF said.
Politics in Israel is a brutal exercise with no holds barred, though they generally don’t engage in actual fisticuffs or pistols at dawn. Quite a few of the participants are more or less brilliant idiots, except for those who are pure idiots with great hair.
הכותרת בטלגרף הבריטי מצטטת היום את דבריו של יאיר גולן, שותפו של איזנקוט: ״ישראל הורגת ילדים כתחביב״.
איזה שקר מוחלט. איזה נזק נורא למאבקנו הצודק וללוחמינו הגיבורים.
— Benjamin Netanyahu - בנימין נתניהו (@netanyahu) July 29, 2026
Translated from Hebrew
The headline in the British Telegraph today quotes the words of Yair Golan, Eisenkot's partner: "Israel kills children as a hobby."
What an absolute lie. What terrible damage to our just struggle and to our heroic fighters.
#4
Activist sanctioned by Biden completes IDF officers' training Shlomo Sarid, one of the founders of the Tzav 9 movement, which works to prevent aid trucks from reaching Hamas in Gaza, completed infantry reservist officers' training on Thursday.
Sarid, who fought for months in Gaza, joined the movement after he was exposed during his service to aid trucks reaching Hamas terrorists.
Approximately two years ago, the Biden administration imposed personal sanctions on Sarid and his fellow founder, Reut Ben Haim, for their actions blocking the aid trucks. President Donald Trump later lifted the sanctions upon taking office.
[FoxNews] CENTCOM's Adm. Brad Cooper warned that online posts give Tehran near-real-time battle-damage assessments
Loose lips sink ships. The IDF has the same problem. Stop being selfish idiots, guys — your Mom, your girlfriend, and your 47 followers can live without that geotagged image of an interesting bird that happens to show your tank unit insignia in the background. Then there is the insecure site where your smart watch’s daily jogging path data is stored…
Some U.S. troops deployed to the Middle East may soon be ordered to surrender their cellphones as military leaders warn that Iran is using photos and videos posted online to assess where its strikes landed and potentially improve follow-up attacks, Reuters first reported Wednesday.
Some service members stationed in Jordan have been told their phones will be confiscated in the coming days, two sources familiar with the matter told the outlet. A third source said cellphone restrictions were being considered more broadly across the region because of operational security concerns but did not describe the move as certain.
We’ve been reading about security breaches back home with phones and wearable devices for a couple of years. It’s long past time to take this stuff seriously.
Any crackdown would force U.S. military commanders to balance operational security against troops’ reliance on cellphones to communicate with their families during wartime.
Posted by: Skidmark ||
07/30/2026 00:00 ||
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[264 views]
Top|| File under: Govt of Iran
#1
Given the widely known traceability of IMEI codes using apps like SPOKEO or Mspy.
I would hope pilots leave their cellphones off and back at base, in a EMI/RFI type locker.
#2
And here I thought they learned the lesson of the foreign volunteers in the Ukraine not to have those around. Russia used them for targeting information.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
